mikes new blog

mike.bailey.net.au/blog

I've setup my own website with my own blog. This blogger one is now discontinued.

railsconfau.com validity questioned

Update Thu 26 Apr 2007
The website went down a while ago. Draw your own conclusions...

Update Wed 31 Jan 2007
The site now has a new logo.
The main sponsor "HeraHelios" now has it's first result in google. This page!

Update Tue 30 Jan 2007
The site was updated to say tickets will be on sale in late Feb.
The person behind the site wrote that it was a miscommunication within the company. What company and how many staff they have has is not known.


A website appeared two days ago announcing that tickets are on sale for a rails conference in Sydney this May. It looks like a total scam and the worst bit is they are
accepting payment for registrations!

• The advertised sponsor 'HeraHelios' doesn't turn up any results in Google.
• There are no speakers listed (in fact the site calls for speakers).
• They state they do not have a venue secured.

Yet the site suggests "Be sure to register soon as capacity is strictly limited."

It seems the organizers are not known to either Melbourne or Sydney's Rails user groups.

So railsconfau has many of the appearances of a scam. A scamming scam scam. Hope google picks up on this post. scam.

to look at the site, go to www . railsconfau . com

using edge capistrano [from the list]

Anyone wanting to play with edge capistrano, you can check it out via svn at:

http://dev.rubyonrails.org/svn/rails/tools/capistrano

You can build an edge gem by cd'ing to that directory and doing:

1. svn info. Find the line that says "Revision:" and mark the revision number.

2. rake PKG_BUILD= gem. Replace with the revision number.

3. Look in the pkg subdirectory. Install that gem file via "gem install pkg/"

- Jamis

Parallels Beta recovery

Smart Mark wrote the following to me and it worked.

"You installed parallels and it reminded you to
install the parallels tools and that the guest os
must be running. You start up the guest os
and proceed with the install. Windows pops up
a message saying it's detected new hardware and
you assume this is normal. Windows finds a video
driver and installs it and then says it has to reboot.
It reboots and you have a blank screen, you assume
it's hung and reset the virtual machine a couple of
times and eventually figure out that it's booting ok
it's just the video driver is foobar.

The fix is to boot windows in safe mode (with networking
enabled, not sure if that's necessary, it's just what I did)
and reinstall the parallels tools. This now installs the
real parallels video driver and when you reboot the guest
os everything is back to normal."

Parallels Beta ate my homework

WARNING! Back up your VM before trying Parallels Beta!!! It killed mine.

I just discovered that Parallels has a public Beta program.

"The latest development versions of Parallels Desktop for Mac introduced support for USB 2.0 devices, better support for Boot Camp partitions and Coherence mode, which lets you run Windows applications without “seeing” the Windows interface."
- MacWorld.com

VMware Virtualization for Mac Beta released!

I've been waiting for the ability to use the same VMware guest images on my linux servers as my MacBook Pro. This means I can replicate my production servers on my laptop, removing the need to have direct access to any other computer. Just in time for India!



I was able to point it at copy of an ubuntu image currently running in production and it booted without a problem. Nice! Not all the options for creating a new image are available in this release.

Download it here.

Setting environment variables for mongrel

We were going to use Verisign's PayFlowPro merchant facilities and implemented a solution based around a ruby library called pfpro4r. A problem came up though. We needed to have a shell environment variable set in order for this to work. This was fine when I started mongrel manually but when started via Capistrano the environment variable wasn't being set by the mongrel start script.

You can't seem to set environment variables in the shell Capistrano uses so I simply added a couple of tasks to deploy.rb. These override the tasks that come with mongrel_cluster and set the required variables.

I think it's great that you can add or override tasks on a project by project basis.
I guess someone distributing their app could include a library like deprec and include it from their deploy.rb to make deployment that much easier.

desc <<-DESC Start Mongrel processes on the app server. This uses the :use_sudo variable to determine whether to use sudo or not. By default, :use_sudo is set to true. DESC task :start_mongrel_cluster , :roles => :app do
 set_mongrel_conf
 send(run_method, "sh -c '
 LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/var/www/apps/example_app/current/vendor/libs/pfpro4r/verisign/payflowpro/linux/lib;
 export LD_LIBRARY_PATH;
 PFPRO_CERT_PATH=/var/www/apps/example_app/current/vendor/libs/pfpro4r/verisign/payflowpro/linux/certs;
 export PFPRO_CERT_PATH;
 mongrel_rails cluster::start -C #{mongrel_conf}
 '
 ")
end

desc <<-DESC
Restart the Mongrel processes on the app server by starting and stopping the cluster. This uses the :use_sudo variable to determine whether to use sudo or not. By default, :use_sudo is set to true.
DESC
task :restart_mongrel_cluster , :roles => :app do
  set_mongrel_conf

  send(run_method, "sh -c '
  LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/var/www/apps/example_app/current/vendor/libs/pfpro4r/verisign/payflowpro/linux/lib;
  export LD_LIBRARY_PATH;
  PFPRO_CERT_PATH=/var/www/apps/example_app/current/vendor/libs/pfpro4r/verisign/payflowpro/linux/certs;
  export PFPRO_CERT_PATH;
  mongrel_rails cluster::restart -C #{mongrel_conf}
  '
  ")
end