onidle(…)

I innocently decided to upgrade my rubygems after reading Scott Boms’ blog. I wanted the gems outdated fu. Now typically one can simply gem update --system

I use MacPorts, so I decided to do a quick sudo port upgrade rb-rubygems and it starts installing Perl. Huh? It’s rubygems!? That left me scratching my head…

Turns out that the portfile now has a dependency on autoconf which, in turn, depends on Perl. Wow. I hope it’s worth it. Last time I built rubygems by hand it wasn’t that tough…

So now I have perl 5.8.8. What can you do with that?[me: ducks]

I have a couple of rails sites running on an Xserve at work. There are ways to rotate rails logs using Logger. While it would be nice to just let rails take care of it, it seems that that technique will fail when you’re running a cluster of mongrels. Those puppies write to the same log, so if you pull it out from under them it will surely result in dreaded 500 errors. That’s embarrassing.

Mongrel FAQ advises us to use something like logrotate. That’s a Debian package and it does not come with OS X. I spent way too much time looking for a binary to use. If you’re not a sysadmin this dark art of rotating logs can be deucedly tricky to nail down. In the end, MacPorts to the rescue (again). I <heart> MacPorts. BONUS: I can use it to rotate my Apache logs too.