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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 [...]
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 [...]
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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.
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Letter loungin’
Yesterday, I put on an event with Claire Medcalf from Glovepuppet, and a few friends, called the letter lounge. As you'd expect from the name, we started it to help people get round to actually writing more letters to distant friends and relatives, and take the time to reflect and generally slow down somewhat, as [...]
Tea, Arduino and Dynamic Demand
It’s the next HomeCamp tomorrow. And in a spectacular feat of bad calendaring, I’ve managed to organise the Letter Lounge to take place on the day I’ve been looking forward to for the last few months are coming away from the initial HomeCamp, utterly inspired by what I saw there.
So to make up for not [...]
Posted in Journal Tagged arduino, carbon, code, dynamic demand, hacking, load balancing, tealight Leave a comment
Happy Ada Day!
I read about Ada Lovelace while at uni, studying the cultural roots of digital media, so I'm really happy to see Suw working to give this woman the recognition she deserves.
She's generally seen as the first person to write about the idea of using computation machines for creative purposes, like creating music, and she was [...]
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Trying a month of 8hrs sleep a night