Blag o' dkam

They sell Beached As stuff at CafePress.

I’ve tried quite a few ways to deploy Ruby on Rails apps for Booko:

• Apache with mod_proxy and mongrel cluster
• Apache with mod_proxy and thin
• Nginx with thin

I only gave nginx a small run – I needed PHP for the blog (I’ve since moved Booko to it’s own host, so this wouldn’t be a problem) and it seemed great – but so far, I think REE + mod_rails is the best. It’s the most convenient to install/setup, it seems to be very fast, and it is quite nice to manage.  You can restart your Rails application with a touch tmp/restart.txt – you know it’s restarted because the file disappears - that’s pretty nice. Naturally, you can restart Apache too.

So, this is a post on how to install Ruby Enterprise Edition and Phusion Passenger (aka: mod_rails) on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS in a VPS, specifically, Slicehost. It’s not hard, but this should make it even faster.  You can read all about Ruby Enterprise Edition, but basically it’s a version of Ruby tuned to be fast and lean. It’s made by the guys who’ve created Phusion Passenger, or mod_rails and they work well together.  I’ll be assuming that you want to use this version of Ruby for everything (ie – command line work as well as for mod_rails). IE, when you call irb or ruby or rake from the command line, you want to use REE. 

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I’m at the protest of the clean feed system at the library in central Melbourne. I don’t think I’ve seen a weirder mix of people. Nerds, gamers and civil rights type groups like the EFA with left wing Socialists Party sprukers everwhere. And Raelians! 
The Greens and Amnesty International both had speakers which were pretty good.  Melbourne Wireless are here also – not a bad talk either.

Piwik advertises itself as Open Source Web Analytics – and it seems to be on the right track.  It even has an advantage over Google Analytics – live stats! Because having to wait until the end of the day until Google updates Analytics is such a drag

I just got it running on Gentoo to have a look, tracking stats on Booko.  There’s a zip file you can down load and install, but I like the convenience of upgrading in place with SCM:

svn co http://dev.piwik.org/svn/tags/0.2.28/  /var/www/stats.mydomain.com/htdocs/

In Gentoo, you’ll need to add the following to your /etc/portage/package.use file:

dev-lang/php pdo ctype xml

Then rebuild and give it a day in court.

Just the other day I was trying to figure out how to get a video converted into the right format so I could chuck it onto my iPhone.
“If only Handbrake would read normal video files as well as DVDs” I was thinking.
Well turns out, it does with the latest version. Just point it at the video file (I’m trying it with an MP4), select the iPhone preset and away you go.

Works on Windoze and Linux too – check it out: http://handbrake.fr/