> the power cable had fallen out of the adapter.
A good way to overcome this is to say "sometimes some junk gets in the plugs... unplug your adapter and then plug it in again." That way if the adapter is indeed unplugged, the person doesn't have to admit it - they can just plug it in and save face by saying "oh yes, it must have gotten loose or dirty or something". Seems like a good strategy.
And speaking of Rails, check out this job posting. Requirements are TS/SCI, Lotus Notes, and... Ruby on Rails experience. Seems like some high security clearance government folks may be converting some things from Notes to Rails.
> I much prefer a pure-Ruby solution
> which I can throw behind any old load-balancer
Right on, yup, that sounds better to me too. But, for now, Passenger is a vast improvement over mongrel_cluster.yml and all that.
> 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.,
> 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.
A penny saved is a penny to squander. -- Ambrose Bierce
