I recently moved a long running request in my application to delayed job (the collectiveidea fork) and it went really well. However, after some time the delayed job process died and my users couldn’t use an essential part of the application. I knew it was time for a process monitor. I probably should have put one in to begin with, but I was new to delayed job (really to background processing in general) and the though hadn’t crossed my mind.

Recently I’ve been trying to get my new unibody macbook pro connecting to SQL Server 2005 with FreeTDS. I was following the great guide from Ken Collins, author of the rails-sqlserver activerecord adapter that I use but no matter what configuration settings I edited I couldn’t get my machine to connect to the SQL Server.

Most anytime I develop a web application I need to deploy to multiple server environments. For me this used to mean maintaining two separate deploy.rb scripts, and I would rename one while deploying to staging, and then rename the other when I needed to deploy to production. After about three deploys I said, the hell with this! And I figured out how to allow the specification of your deployment at the command line during the cap deploy task.

I am running a VPS over at SilverRack.com and I love it. Dave (the owner) has been very helpful and responsive anytime I’ve had questions or issues, and I highly recommend their service. Also if you’re a member of a local Ruby user group then you can get $10 off the standard 256mb slice making it extremely affordable to have your very own server! I also have an unlimited Dreamhost account, but I like having root access and full reign of my server.

Enable the cron.log for Ubuntu

By default, Ubuntu disables the cron log, so you need to turn it on, and additionally create the log file before you can start tailing that log.

Recently Inacom had the privilege of hosting the Madison Web Design & Development Meetup. The topic for this meeting was Advanced CSS. I put together a sideshow to try to keep the presentation more guided, but because of the depth of the topic we wound up going quite a bit over our loose 1 hour time slot. I just wanted to thank everyone for sticking around and seeming quite interested! I had a great time presenting and I hope that you all enjoyed our discussions. If you’re looking for the demo files and the presentation check them out in the full article.

The first website that I built for Inacom using ruby on rails in 2006 was deployed to Ubuntu 6.06 LTS server and I hand rolled my own install for everything (it was painful). We had MySQL on the same 256 MB VM as the rails code was running from, and we setup a proxy with Apache and Mongrel. Deploying from Capistrano 1.4 made things a bit easier once everything was setup, but the initial build was not an easy task. It was also my first time doing what some would consider fairly heavy Linux command line system administration, so that didn’t speed up the process either.