It's easier because you can replace a mongrel cluster with mod_passenger which dynamically configures the cluster size. Kind of like you configure an Apache web server - you don't set it to have 10 instances running all the time, instead you set it to never exceed 100 process and let Apache manage how many processes it needs under that maximum threshold.
But you're right - the actual deployment is still done with Capistrano, albeit with some minor tweaks to the deployment tasks.
> the backend functionality works pretty well considering the time invested.
So true. I think Rails (especially when combined with Passenger) really lowers the bar for getting a dynamic web site with readable URLs (e.g.,/captions/public/posts/4/entries/new) up and running. It opens a lot of doors; good times indeed!
...Mastering Regular Expressions. Now in it's third edition and a great read for really understanding how regexes work. What I liked about it was the explanation of how various regex engines optimize the expressions... who knew that Tcl has a super-advanced regex processor?
Cool, that sounds good. I started using some of the DocBook XSLT scripts to do just that, but I needed some weird behavior for some of the imported listings - e.g., I only needed to show lines 10-20 of a particular listing - and ended up rolling my own.
> you could write it in Notepad or vi for all that it matters
Yup. I wrote my JavaCC book using vi + dbhelper.vim, DocBook, and a few little Ruby scripts to run all the example code. It's nice to be able to regenerate all the examples with a nicer format in 3-4 minutes or so. Good stuff.
> Would a Linux installation run slower or faster than the current Windows 98 setup?
Hm, not sure... probably kind of depends on what stuff you want do with Linux. You might want to turn off all the eye candy and whatnot... it might be usable then...
Whatever you've got, consider replacing it with Sphinx, which is awesome. I'm using it with Rails and the Ultrasphinx plugin and it's been great - doing excerpts (for example, notice the highlighted results from a search for 'combat') - was a piece of cake.
I heard Rich Kilmer talk about the various Ruby implementations once; his take on them were that each would be used to leverage the underlying platform. In other words, if you want to use Java libraries, you'll use JRuby. If you want to use the Mac libraries (e.g., via Hot Cocoa), you'll use MacRuby. And if you want to use C extensions like RMagick and libxml2, you'll use MRI.
I thought that was an interesting way of looking at the various implementations... each one would be appropriate for a different scenario.
> the U.S. government often takes a surprisingly passive role > when China acts aggressively towards it.
Looks like the Navy, at least, is keeping an eye on China. Note that one of the selections in the "senior leaders" section of the Navy reading list is "The Great Wall at Sea: China's Navy Enters the Twenty-First Century". Nothing about cyber-warfare there, though.
Indeed it is. Here are the RubyForge DenyHosts settings. The comments on that post have a good suggestion about DENY_THRESHOLD_ROOT; makes sense to have that at 2 vs 1 to avoid blocking someone who accidentally hits the wrong box.
> "You get the feeling the developer are trying very hard, though. When I see a > dark shape in the distance, which turns and disappears, I don't get scared."
I thought the F.E.A.R. developers did this very well... when Alma would scuttle by in my peripheral vision it was almost always good for a start of surprise. Now if only my laptop had been able to play it with all the dials turned up...
> That is, if one country can afford killer robots and another can't, > then the former has no deterrent to invading the latter.
Hm, although, that assumes that the killer robots are perfectly efficient and the country being invaded has no method of striking back "out of band", e.g., with Tomahawks or something similar.
Also, for understanding what today's senior military leadership thinks is important, check out the selections on the various military reading lists (site contains affiliate links, copy/paste the title links and search on Amazon if you prefer). "Recognizing Islam: Religion and Society in the Modern Middle East", "On the Origins of War: And the Preservation of Peace", and more. Thoughtful stuff.
From that same Wikipedia article, it looks like the Coast Guard Academy has a SIPRNET node... kind of surprising... but the cadets might as well get used to working with classified materials. CMS officer on a ship, there's a job with court martial potential!
If you do go the VM route, consider using puppet to define your machine configurations. That'll make it much easier to build out more than one of each machine.
Along the same lines, if you don't want to run a bunch of machines or VMs yourself you could spin up new EC2 instances as needed, point them to your Puppet server, and have them built out - consistently and correctly - in short order. Good times.
You can _write_ whole applications, but running them will be painful. Try instantiating a few hundred objects in the Flash VM... in my experience, you'll see why people are still reserving Flash for little widgets and animations.
> I bought it out of guilt, but I doubt I have gotten my moneys worth.
I usually figure if I get _anything_ at all out of a book than it's worth the price. I just bought a Puppet book and just having it around for occasional skimming has gotten me familiar enough with Puppet that I'm willing to give it a whirl. And for $17.99, meh, good enough.
Slashdot Mirror
> is Passenger easier to deploy?
It's easier because you can replace a mongrel cluster with mod_passenger which dynamically configures the cluster size. Kind of like you configure an Apache web server - you don't set it to have 10 instances running all the time, instead you set it to never exceed 100 process and let Apache manage how many processes it needs under that maximum threshold.
But you're right - the actual deployment is still done with Capistrano, albeit with some minor tweaks to the deployment tasks.
> the backend functionality works pretty well considering the time invested.
So true. I think Rails (especially when combined with Passenger) really lowers the bar for getting a dynamic web site with readable URLs (e.g., /captions/public/posts/4/entries/new) up and running. It opens a lot of doors; good times indeed!
> Either the taggers got up on the wrong side of bed today,
> or my general impression of Ruby is horribly wrong.
Quite so. For my military reading list site, Rails is awesome. Plus Sphinx for searching, of course.
...Mastering Regular Expressions. Now in it's third edition and a great read for really understanding how regexes work. What I liked about it was the explanation of how various regex engines optimize the expressions... who knew that Tcl has a super-advanced regex processor?
Cool, that sounds good. I started using some of the DocBook XSLT scripts to do just that, but I needed some weird behavior for some of the imported listings - e.g., I only needed to show lines 10-20 of a particular listing - and ended up rolling my own.
> you could write it in Notepad or vi for all that it matters
Yup. I wrote my JavaCC book using vi + dbhelper.vim, DocBook, and a few little Ruby scripts to run all the example code. It's nice to be able to regenerate all the examples with a nicer format in 3-4 minutes or so. Good stuff.
> have a look at Thinking Sphinx
Cool, I'll do that, thanks!
> Would a Linux installation run slower or faster than the current Windows 98 setup?
Hm, not sure... probably kind of depends on what stuff you want do with Linux. You might want to turn off all the eye candy and whatnot... it might be usable then...
Whatever you've got, consider replacing it with Sphinx, which is awesome. I'm using it with Rails and the Ultrasphinx plugin and it's been great - doing excerpts (for example, notice the highlighted results from a search for 'combat') - was a piece of cake.
..is here.
> a different version of a language for whatever platform I want.
Hm, the language would be the same, but the libraries that you would have available or leveraging would change.
I heard Rich Kilmer talk about the various Ruby implementations once; his take on them were that each would be used to leverage the underlying platform. In other words, if you want to use Java libraries, you'll use JRuby. If you want to use the Mac libraries (e.g., via Hot Cocoa), you'll use MacRuby. And if you want to use C extensions like RMagick and libxml2, you'll use MRI.
I thought that was an interesting way of looking at the various implementations... each one would be appropriate for a different scenario.
> the U.S. government often takes a surprisingly passive role
> when China acts aggressively towards it.
Looks like the Navy, at least, is keeping an eye on China. Note that one of the selections in the "senior leaders" section of the Navy reading list is "The Great Wall at Sea: China's Navy Enters the Twenty-First Century". Nothing about cyber-warfare there, though.
> I run a hosting company flogging unfashionable servers
And you provide a RubyForge mirror - many thanks for that!
> Denyhosts is fantastic, though.
Indeed it is. Here are the RubyForge DenyHosts settings. The comments on that post have a good suggestion about DENY_THRESHOLD_ROOT; makes sense to have that at 2 vs 1 to avoid blocking someone who accidentally hits the wrong box.
From the article:
> "You get the feeling the developer are trying very hard, though. When I see a
> dark shape in the distance, which turns and disappears, I don't get scared."
I thought the F.E.A.R. developers did this very well... when Alma would scuttle by in my peripheral vision it was almost always good for a start of surprise. Now if only my laptop had been able to play it with all the dials turned up...
> most things that are designed to make people forget about their problems do
> very well indeed during periods of economic downturn
Not to pile on, but yup, here's still more supporting evidence of that in reference to the movie industry.
> That is, if one country can afford killer robots and another can't,
> then the former has no deterrent to invading the latter.
Hm, although, that assumes that the killer robots are perfectly efficient and the country being invaded has no method of striking back "out of band", e.g., with Tomahawks or something similar.
Also, for understanding what today's senior military leadership thinks is important, check out the selections on the various military reading lists (site contains affiliate links, copy/paste the title links and search on Amazon if you prefer). "Recognizing Islam: Religion and Society in the Modern Middle East", "On the Origins of War: And the Preservation of Peace", and more. Thoughtful stuff.
> After all, the CG is primarily a law enforcement and safety entity these days.
Perhaps... but they still carry all the comms gear and COMSEC and whatnot so's they can do joint ops.
> I'm told that organizations like the DoD that have
> separate networks with no physical connection to the Internet
Yup, it's the SIPRNET as opposed to the NIPRNET.
From that same Wikipedia article, it looks like the Coast Guard Academy has a SIPRNET node... kind of surprising... but the cadets might as well get used to working with classified materials. CMS officer on a ship, there's a job with court martial potential!
If you do go the VM route, consider using puppet to define your machine configurations. That'll make it much easier to build out more than one of each machine.
Along the same lines, if you don't want to run a bunch of machines or VMs yourself you could spin up new EC2 instances as needed, point them to your Puppet server, and have them built out - consistently and correctly - in short order. Good times.
> With Flash you can write whole applications
You can _write_ whole applications, but running them will be painful. Try instantiating a few hundred objects in the Flash VM... in my experience, you'll see why people are still reserving Flash for little widgets and animations.
> Slashdot readership plummets to an all-time low as programmers actually have to work.
Not at Sun, though... yikes.
> I bought it out of guilt, but I doubt I have gotten my moneys worth.
I usually figure if I get _anything_ at all out of a book than it's worth the price. I just bought a Puppet book and just having it around for occasional skimming has gotten me familiar enough with Puppet that I'm willing to give it a whirl. And for $17.99, meh, good enough.
> Open source software has been used to develop military
> systems for many years now on the contractor side.
Right on. Just as an example, we set up CougaarForge for a DARPA project back in 2003. 'Twas good times.