Ruby Users of Minnesota - February 2007 Meeting notes

Posted by Tom Brice on February 28, 2007

Another meeting of the rosy dynamic language lovers of Minnesota was held tonight at the Loring Park Dunn Bros.. This time out we had, 30, quite a few Rubyists in attendance. I forgot to count heads but I believe it may have been a few more than last month. A good turn out!

Three excellent presenters made the trip worth it. First, Chris Carter gave a great overview of Ruport. He has two great articles on his website. Tonight’s presentation summarized them for those of you that missed ‘em. Go, check them out, they’re short (but very informative), I’ll wait…

Ah, now then. Ross Niemi gave a presentation on Continuous Integration and its effects on marine plantlife. Not really, but it was about Continuous Integration (CI for those of us in the know). Pretty cool. I’ve never seen it so Ross’ live demos were pretty impressive. Head on over to his blog for more info; he promised to post his material. (for a quick sneak peek, have a look at the live demo of CruiseControl.rb).

Finally, Jon Dahl’s presentation entitled “Mortgage Driven Development” was pretty funny. Jon started by showing us examples from Dan’s code repository. Ha. What’s a dev to do when her web framework makes her too efficient? Nice tips on how to “speed up” you web app when your client complains. Actually this talk sparked a great discussion on how to market yourself a a Rails/Ruby contractor or consultant. Good stuff.

You should really join us next month.

Rotating Logs on OS X

Posted by Tom Brice on February 16, 2007

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.

Ruby Users of Minnesota - January 2007 Meeting notes

Posted by Tom Brice on January 31, 2007

The temperatures were hovering around zero last night but we still had 28 (by my count) hearty Ruby enthusiasts descend upon the Loring Park Dunn Bros to discuss all things red and glittery.

Here’s a summary:

Nate Yourchuck gave a very nice overview of the use of irb (the Ruby console). He demonstrated many cool features that were new to me. And he did most of it “live” with very few slides (yay). Nate: let us know were the slides are.

Tony Collen gave a talk about GIS on Ruby. The information about shapefiles was pretty interesting. I’ve done a little bit with the YM4R he used for his Rails demo. Go check out that code it’s amazing how easy it it to do cool stuff with Google Maps. The library and plugin are nicely implemented.

Finally, I gave a cursory overview of the changes Rails 1.2 brings us. The biggies (which have been covered in detail elsewhere) are RESTful routing and Multibyte support . Charles Nutter was able to explain the multibyte features to the rest of us. He pointed out that, until Ruby itself supports Unicode, you can simply require activesupport to leverage the work done on this in a plain Ruby application. I didn’t think of that. More discussion ensued. Here are a few choice links(re: Rails 1.2) that I have found useful: