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Virtual servers and false alarms
When you start looking after virtual machines instead of buying shared hosting, you very quickly realise how important RAM is to making a server run properly.
I’m using a machine with a fairly heft chunk of free memory, but recently when shelling into the box to check memory usage I’ve have some pretty scary stats that [...]
Setting environments with Rails: how Rake and Capistrano differ
Annoyingly, Capistrano and Rake do similar jobs, and have similar syntax, but have different ways of declaring the environment they should be working in. Her
Setting up wordpress to update itself
Wordpress’s auto update feature is incredibly handy.
However, not every webhost automatically has accounts setup to allow for this, and if click the promising looking auto-upgrade icon, you’ll often be face with this screen here:
You get this screen when the folder containing wordpress belongs to the user, instead of the apache daemon; this is normally either [...]
Fixing old gits
How to stop git whining too much when you commit to an old repo.
Posted in Coding Leave a comment
Money is fertilizer, companies are soil
I spent a fair chunk of yesterday working on a redesign of the new ORG website, with Felix, Chris, Mike, Harry, and after we had finished for the talking with Felix about the recession and worthwhile work. We both have friends who work in the financial sector, we both get nerdily angry about bad design, [...]
Looking for a green host – concluding the search
I think I can finally stop searching for a good, green virtual private hosting company in the UK.
Posted in Journal 12 Comments
On the new Star Trek movie
I chuffing loved it.
Clever, funny, well paced, and brilliantly shot. If you take the film as a typical summer blockbuster it delivers; it's immensely entertaining, the cast unformily photogenic, and the special effects are thrilling.
If you have any knowledge of the previous series though, there's a whole extra layer of in-jokes and references to the [...]
Posted in Journal 2 Comments
How to set up a debugger with mod_rails/Passenger
Anyone who's worked on the web will know easy it is to end up constantly refreshing pages to see if the content delivered from say, a database driven site is the indeed content you want to show.
This is one approach, and while simple to understand, there are often other approaches available to this.
One example is using the ruby debugger, and break points in your code to inspect and control what is happening at each step, to see what variables are available.
This, combined with the more traditional tools for debugging a view using @object.inspect or debug(@object) methods make fixing bugs less of a pain.
As many of us transition from using Mongrel as our server to Passenger, we find ourselves missing this useful tool. This post outlines one way to setup a debugger for Passenger.
Posted in Journal Leave a comment
Trying a month of 8hrs sleep a night