Thu
Aug
12
I have changed my preferred way of delivering Rails (and other web content) from my own servers.
First change is from lighttpd to nginx. While lighttpd was a massive boost coming from Apache, especially in lower memory environments, it’s development didn’t seem to be continuing at a reasonable pace. Nginx, by contrast appears to be under active development and to have a lot of nice features - especially a much nicer configuration file format. Nginx continues the trend of lower ram usage for the same number of connections, and also far fewer processes.
Of course nothing is without a trade off. Nginx has traditionally been plagued by poor documentation in English, although this has improved a lot in the last year. It also doesn’t do traditional cgi. At all. Fortunately it does have very good reverse proxy support.
Next big change is from mongrel (and mongrel_cluster) to thin. Thin has excellent performance (and is also very predictable), nifty support for creating it’s own init.d script and a useful CLI tool for generating its config files (which are just yml files). Thin also provides excellent support for any rack app, not just rails ones. (coincidentally passenger now supports both nginx and rack apps).
Thin also solves the lack of CGI - my non rails scripts have been ruby scripts, so it was a simple matter of wrapping it in a little bit of rack and letting thin take care of running things.
Tue
Feb
16
It’s been a year since I last posted here. To say a lot has happened would probably be too much of an understatement. Perhaps the easiest way is to go with the big events and work on the rest afterwards.
As you may have been aware, in March of 2008 my Mum was diagnosed with liver, bowel and lung cancer. After seeming to be fairly good during my two week holiday at the end of August, two weeks after getting back to Canada she was back in hospital and didn’t come home. On September 27th I said goodbye for the last time. She was given 18 months, and managed it almost to the day. I still don’t have the words to say everything I’d like to say on this. It’s been 5 months. It feels like less.
On the way home for the August holiday I had a weekend in Sydney, with the wonderful @limburger2001, who is quite simply the highlight of 2009 for me. In December a job offer came for a Ruby on Rails development role in Sydney (the home of @limburger2001), 4 short weeks later I was here. Four weeks on and I’m loving it. Sydney is the fifth city I have lived in, and Australia the fourth country. I’m getting used to the whole “move whole life to another place” thing. Though I’m planning on Sydney being my home for beyond the foreseeable future.
Short summary of other things since my last post:
- My Aunty Jill came to Vancouver to visit
- I visited a Canadian ER 4 times in week, saw two neurologists, diagnosed with (a thank god) short lived case of trigemenal neuralgia. Thanks to same neurologists a new prescription drug means I no longer suffer from constant daily headaches (and consequently no longer need to take tramadol two-three times a day).
- Taken citalopram, tramacet, hydromorphone, carbomazapine, nortriptyline, codeine, lorazepam, and at least two other prescription drugs I don’t recall. (Not all at once.)
- Thanks to the above collection actually hit the ceiling and so my last two months of prescriptions in Canada were totally free. (Ignore the hundreds of dollars I spent before that. Whoever said drugs were cheap in Canada is deluded.)
- I built a PVR in Objective-C for Mac owners who have a Motorola HD cable box (with firewire output), commonly found on Shaw cable.
- I uploaded 175 photos to flickr
- My boyfriend got me a lava lamp. (Notable not least of all because I started looking for one not long after I made my last post.)
Fri
Feb
13
As a computer geek I’ve always loved hosting everything myself. My website. My email. My blog. I’m a developer, so of course I like to tinker. The more I think about this the less it makes sense - all the time I spend mucking around keeping my basic things running could be time better spent building fun new things.
So, last year, when google made IMAP available, I moved my email there. I make use of appengine for hosting toy projects rather than having to set up and maintain additional apps on my own servers. I use twitter, because, well, what’s the point of it without the direct connections? Also I’m not sure I’d worry too much about the data loss if it disappeared (the contacts yes, but I’m sure we’d all find a way around that.)
So now begins an attempt at trusting someone else with my blog content. Something I care a lot more about preserving. I’ll see how well I get on here, and then export everything from my SimpleLog blog as HTML and have one less application to worry about.
Sat
Oct
4
I thought I’d be homeless, or at least living under a bridge somewhere. How wrong was I?
Having spent the last 18 months living in London, in what can best be described as a small shoe box and with a commute of 45 minutes each way, and £150/month, I decided some changes were in order here.
First was to live by myself. I quite like having “me” space at the end of a day at work, being able to watch what I want when I want without someone wanting to watch sports. That kind of thing. Second was to live closer to work, within walking distance was an absolute must.
I’ve achieved both - I have a short, 15 minute, moderately flat walk to the office. It’s a studio apartment, a block away from Robson, a couple of blocks away from Davie (and Stephos, home of the best Lamb in Vancouver, possibly the whole wide world). Photos coming soon.
With one visit to IKEA down, and another to go I should have the place reasonably furnished as well. Ready for people from far away to pop by and visit for a cup of tea*.
Perfect.
* actually tea would be a bad idea, as I only have one mug (I generally only drink coffee when out of the house), and no kettle.
Mon
Sep
22
Driving on the right side of the road? What craziness will be next?
As per the previous post I have returned to the crazy land of Vancouver. Where prices shown on labels bear little to no resemblance to the price you actually pay, where cars drive on the wrong side of the road, and everything seems extremely spacious.
In just two weeks I have managed to secure an apartment, and discover the joys of signing up for power (easy, online) and cable (not quite as easy, because online just makes them call you, which they don’t, so you end up phoning them and waiting on hold for 20 minutes). Miraculously, despite only having been in the country for less than a month there was no problem getting any of these sorted.
Next weekend will involve a fun filled trip to Ikea to obtain necessary essentials (like a bed). Ah Ikea. No laminated book of dreams, but none the less plenty of fun things to buy.
