Articles

Twitter me this

If a tweet is uttered with no followers, does it make a peep? I'm getting going with Twitter on http://twitter.com/d2h.

67. Rush - The Ruby Shell

rush is a replacement for the unix shell (bash, zsh, etc) which uses pure Ruby syntax.

It combines the power of unix with the elegance of Ruby.  

Simple Expense Tracking with Google Docs

As my family prepares for our pending Disney trip, I’m thinking about clever ways to take advantage of my wife’s iPhone. One of the things we’ve done is budget the trip based on a few simple categories of expenses. There’s a lot of ways to track expenses to budgets, but I’m particularly happy with how this worked out using Google Documents and the iPhone.

RTeX 2 Preview 1 Released

I’m happy to release RTeX 2 Preview 1 (v1.99.0), now available as a gem from RubyForge. RTeX can be used as a plugin with Rails 2.0.1+.

History

In 2006 I released a Rails plugin, Rtex, used to generate PDFs via the LaTeX typesetting system. It became a popular choice for people looking for a more advanced alternative to PDF::Writer, especially for larger documents.

Wiebe Cazemier joined the project in 2007, helping to improve the plugin and fielding patches and bug reports.

The Paris Project

One of the nice things about the last two and a half years has been working from home. You avoid 90% of the dilbert-style office drama, and the commute is hard to beat. But the nicest thing about working from home is that, strictly speaking, I can work from any home, not just our little place.

So from July the 4th till the end of the year Anika and I will be living in Paris. You know, this paris:

Now running on Passenger

Today I had a few hours to spare and decided to try out Passenger. This blog is hardly a high traffic website, but it has some crazy RewriteRules that I figured would test the limits of the module.

Everything appears to be working perfectly, and it took less than 5 minutes to set everything up. I’m seriously impressed at how simple this was. I’ll confess to being skeptical at first, but so far the package lives up to the promises on its website.

Rails Chops: Layouts and Flash notices

Please view in full screen:

The silent majority

I had a great time on the West coast recently with stops in Santa Barbara and Palo Alto. What always surprises me at events like these is the huge number of people I meet that are doing cool things with Rails that I've never heard of. The kind of people who are just really happy to be using Rails and happy to build businesses with it.

Tropa Da Elite Trailer


Shutting Down Windows from Ruby Code

Someone recently asked how to shut down or restart Windows from their Ruby code. Windows provides an executable, "shutdown.exe", to accomplish this. Execute this command from your script with the appropriate parameters and you can log off, shutdown, or restart the OS.

Parameters accepted include, but are not limited to:


-l        Log off (cannot be used with -m option)
-s        Shutdown the computer
-r        Shutdown and restart the computer
-t xx     Set timeout for shutdown to xx seconds
New: announcing the Brightbox SLA | Rails Fire

New: announcing the Brightbox SLA

Over the last few months, we’ve been seeing increasing number of requests about our SLA (Service Level Agreement) – do we have one? if not then why not? and so on.

We’ve been reasonably resistant to publishing an SLA until now, not because of doubts over our infrastructure or ability to deliver, but because of the minimal value we felt it would add for customers in the event of actual downtime. We’re a pragmatic bunch at Brightbox and like to avoid adding things just for the sake of it or “because everyone else does” :)

However, and it’s a pretty big “however”, we understand that for many people an SLA or “uptime guarantee” is a useful gauge of whether a provider is actually willing to “put their money where their mouth is” and make a financial commitment to meeting a specific minimum target.

So, I’m pleased to announce that from 1 Jan 2010 (backdated) Brightbox offers a 99.95% SLA on virtual machine and load balancing products (see Terms and Conditions for details). We’ll likely expand the SLA soon to also cover our MySQL products and other products currently in the pipeline, but we’ll need a different method of assessing “availability” for these products.