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Typo -> Mephisto -> WordPress

andy — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 16:19:01 +0000

First I tried Typo, then Mephisto and now this blog is running WordPress. As a Ruby fan I really wanted to use Ruby everywhere, 2 years ago. I’m now at the point where I just want working stuff (kids will do that to you I guess). The migration from Mephisto to WordPress was very very smooth, thanks to this excellent article. The Mephisto version I was running was producing a Rails error based on some spam message which was posted. I really didn’t want to dig into the error and upgrading to the latest Mephisto was going to be quite a bit of work. All in all the switch to WordPress took about 2 hours in total, including customizing the theme a bit and making sure the old permalinks kept working. Cool!

Passenger with RACK apps

andy — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 18:16:42 +0000

I started converting various apps running on mongrel clusters over to Apache + Passenger. One component of our production system is implemented as as mongrel plugin so it kind of sucks tot keep mongrel around just for this part. The reason I’m looking to abandon mongrel is because it requires all sorts of crappy monitoring tools to keep working properly. Luckily Passenger implements a RACK adapter so converting the mongrel plugin to a full blown RACK app should allow us to host it righ inside Passenger as well.

Sold!

andy — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 09:50:00 +0000

We sold our apartment a few weeks before the credit crunch hit hard, phew! We already purchased a new house (new construction) last year. Last week we had to move out of apartment. Unfortunately the new house is not yet finished. Well it is, but the utility companies still need to their stuff and the municipality needs to finish the roads, in that order. the new location is just 1 block away because we really like Osdorp and wanted to stay in or around Amsterdam.

In the meantime we’ll be moving between my sis and brother-in-law. c’mon waternet, move!

Getting rid of KPN

andy — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 11:40:00 +0000

So, we moved and I canceled all our subscriptions at the old address. So I thought, it turns out KPN has /dev/null’d my cancellation request for the fixed line twice in a row. Each time customer relations assured me it would take 5 working days for the request to be processed. I just called them a third time now, because the line was active. The kind lady gave me a reference number for the cancellation order. So, whenever you deal with KPN I think it’s a good idea to ask for the reference number of the case or order.

Moving in 3 weeks!

andy — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 18:16:42 +0000

Earlier in the year we sold our appartement and bought a new house. With 2 kids it was simply not fun anymore in our cosy appartement on the 4th floor. We won’t get the keys of our new house, which is in the final stages of construction, for another month or two. In the meantime we have to make room for the new owners so the next couple of weeks are gonna be extra hectic and very interesting to say the least.

Passenger makes Apache relevant again

andy — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 07:28:00 +0000

After stearing clear of Apache2 for the last year for all production servers I’m now ready to give it another try, thanks to Phusion’s Passenger. I’ve grown really tired of setting up god scripts for all environments and fighting mongrel’s pidfile suckage.

Far too many times have things failed because of a dead worker in the cluster or some stale or (even worse!) non-existent pidfiles on the system. Mongrel has served well, but it’s time to look for something better.

A typical setup I use is nginx as the front-end server doing all static content while a pack of mongrels is handling the Rails requests through reverse proxy. nginx is also very important for reproxying requests, where content is streamed from another internal server over the front facing servers. In most of the Rails app I’m writing I have to deal with very large files (audio, video) so reproxy is essential if you want to have any sort of performance on a reasonable budget. Since Apache2 lacks reproxy support (AFAIK, please prove me wrong!) I really want to keep nginx as the front-end server and then do the Rails handling with Apache2 + Passenger through reverse proxy.

I’ve come a cross a couple of posts on this very topic.

I’ll be doing some heavy development and testing over the next couple of days with this setup, will post my findings…

iPhone 3G secured.. the wait starts

andy — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:51:00 +0000

After reading about all the trouble folks went through in getting an iPhone I felt super lucky!! Yesterday I phoned the local BelCompany store to see if they were getting any delivered. There seems to be a reservation list so I asked the guy if it still made sense to sign up. He said sure.. I was number 20 on the list (what, only 20 ppl??). Early this morning I got a call saying I was the last one to secure a phone in the from first batch!! Woaw! The T-Mobile activation system was severely overloaded so the only thing I could do is sign a pre-agreement and wait untill tomorrow (12th) to pick it up. If only I was so lucky playing the lotto!. More as soon as I actually have it in physical possession!

Update: Well got the iPhone 2 months ago. Apart from the terrible battery life, dropped calls, horrible 3G reception and Apple’s draconian developer restrictions, a wonderful phone! Time to jailbreak it…

Rails’ end_of_month fixed

andy — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 12:26:00 +0000

In Rails 2.0.x the end_of_month now properly gives you the end of month e.g. Mon Jun 30 23:59:59 +0200 2008, instead of Mon Jun 30 00:00:00 +0200 2008, which was the case in Rails 1.2.x (see this previous post). Good thing I caught this, since it used to inside the Nota module of Beldienst. We would be paying out the first of each month twice otherwise

Getting XS4ALL HSDPA/UMTS working on OS X Leopard

andy — Sat, 31 May 2008 08:46:00 +0000

Article was updated. See below, the Option software should work out-of-the-box for Leopard 10.5.5 or higher!

Last week I received my HSDPA/UMTS/GPRS card from XS4ALL. After the major ADSL outtage fiasco It really dawned on me that not having net access for a day actually costs more than the whole wireless plan per month! Think about it, as I telecommute 4 days in the week I would actually have to drive to the office to get work done (luckily our offices were spared from the outtage!), the parking money alone is almost more than the whole plan (go Amsterdam!). Enough justification for the new toy. It arrrived, weeh!

The specs clearly state it should work fine an OS X 10.3.x or later. Unfortunatly the instructions from XS4ALL are completely useless when you are running on Leopard. It probably has more to do with Option and their drivers or OS X and its (shoddy) support for the hardware which is the Globetrotter Express 7.2 card btw.

After 2 hours of fiddling with various releases of drivers and trying all the the blog tricks from people around the world with the same card I was almost ready to give up when I stumbled upon this HOWTO for Linux. As always Linux to the rescue. It turns out the card is basically just a glorified modem and you just need the right AT commands and some pppd magic to get things going.. Grrrreat, familiar territory! (I have to confess, OS X dumbs you down, so having things breaking once in a while is gooooood!!)

After some searching I found the following devices:

Cool, connecting to the cu.GT HSDPA Modem tty device should work:

$ screen /dev/cu.GT\ HSDPA\ Modem

Yes! The device is alive. Now, to find out if there is some combination of settings in the Network Preferences that actually make it work. Some further blogging shows that the Option » GSM configurations comes closest to what this cards expects.

Wow, 5 entries for the card. Just pick one which gives you a modem icon. Then choose “Advanced…” and pick model “Option” and then choose “GSM” (should be the only option anyway). In the “APN” field you should fill in “umts.xs4all.nl”.

Back to the connection setup screen. Fill in “*99***1#” in the Telephone number field, although this is not strictly needed I think. Fill in your XS4ALL username and password in the field. Note: even though XS4ALL states you don’t need your account password to connect at least I had to fill in the correct password. The pppd connection would immediately be dropped otherwise. Also, select the “Show modem status in menu bar” for convenience.

Now it’s time to connect. Select the “Connect Globetrotter HSDPA Modem” from the dropdown modem menu bar. You should see the modem connecting..

You can open up the console and monitor “system.log” and also filter on “pppd” to see the relevant lines

If everything went well you should now be connected to the Internet and have an IP address in the mobile.xs4all.nl range. Enjoy! I have the Mobile start plan which currently gives you 768/128 and I’m happy to say that from all the locations I’ve tried so far in and around Amsterdam I always get the full bandwidth. Ping times are also quite reasonable, most of the time around 90ms, sometimes in the 300ms range (perhaps when it drops back to GPRS?). Anyway, SSH and web browsing are perfectly doable. Next up.. OpenVPN setup… another day..

Update: Forgot to mention this, but you need to disable the PIN on your SIM card for all of this to work. You can do this by putting it in your mobile phone and disable it using the phone’s config menus.

Update 2: After upgrading Leopard to 10.5.5 the above instructions were completely invalidated for me. However!!! The GT Mac Connect 1.3d0-164 software (downloadable from Option worked for me out of the box, where previously it failed mysteriously!! Try it!!

Massive memory leak in ruby-gettext 1.90.0

andy — Thu, 08 May 2008 20:38:00 +0000

Just found out there’s a massive memory leak in ruby gettext 1.90.0, one of our applications started eating GBs of RAM after a couple of days in use. So If you’re using gettext for translating your Rails app take note! You can grab the current trunk which has a fix for this.