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I’ve watched quite a few Google tech talks in the last few months. There are lots available. Here are some of the ones I found interesting (If you have recommendations for good talks that I haven’t listed below please leave a comment).  read more »

I started on a project for the Rails Rumble over the weekend but I didn’t get anything worth deploying done. In the end I only managed to spend about 7 hours on Saturday and no hours on Sunday working on it. I did get some good feedback on the actual idea though so I’m planning on building it anyway in the next couple of weeks - It’s just a matter finding the time.  read more »

The Rails Rumble is on today and tomorrow. This a competition to build a web application using Ruby on Rails in 48 hours. Teams can consist of 1 to 4 people and all development and deployment must take place within this 48 hour time period. See the rules and FAQ for a full description.  read more »

Capistrano is a tool for automating tasks on remote machines. Think of it as being like make, ant or rake but targeted for remote tasks. You can use it to automate deployment and management of your remote machines.  read more »

I love cheat sheets. I print them out and stick them on the wall in my workspace. They help me to memorize and discover methods and commands and they reduce the amount of time I spend looking stuff up. Here is a list of the ruby and rails related cheat sheets that I’ve found useful. Links are to PDFs where available.  read more »

Over the weekend I moved some of my rails applications to yet another rails deployment option (See my previous posts on deploying rails with apache, mongrel and mod_proxy_balancer or pound, lighttptd and mongrel).

I replaced apache with nginx, a small fast webserver with good proxying and rewriting capabilities. Nginx is extremely fast, a lot easier to configure than apache and uses much less memory. The process was remarkably painless.  read more »

Apress sent me out some ruby and rails books for Ruby Ireland. See the post at rubyireland.com and the thread on the mailing list for more details. Thanks Apress!

Patchwork builds web applications.

Watch this space.

I’ve updated the code for the rails basic auth generator. This generator is for my tutorial on Basic User Authentication in Rails (This has been bookmarked by over 1100 people on del.icio.us which is pretty cool:)). I wrote the tutorial using rails 1.0. Using the code from the tutorial with rails 1.2 will generate a list of deprecation warnings. The updated generator has some minor changes to the code to avoid these deprecation warnings. They mainly involved changing start_form_tag to form_for :x do |form| and updating deprecated assertions in the unit tests.

I got a new 1GB slicehost vps yesterday. Up to now my preferred rails deployment was to use pound to proxy dynamic requests to a cluster of mongrels and static requests to lighttpd. Previously I had used lighttpd with fast-cgi but since mongrel was released I have avoided fast-cgi solutions. I also played around with using nginx with mongrel. For my new vps I decided to move from my previous deployment configuration of pound, lighttpd and mongrel to apache 2.2 with mod_proxy_balance and mongrel.  read more »