April 18, 2008 @ 03:52 PM by nap · 2 comments
There’s a good thread going on over at Hacker News today regarding music for coding sprints. It’s interesting to see that a number of people, like me, have trouble concentrating when listening to music with prominent lyrics, whereas others thrive on it.
A lot of people also seem to really dig electronica. I guess that’s no big surprise. It’s never done much for me, personally, although there are a few electronic pieces I do really like (NIN’s Ghosts being a recent example). Being an ex-hc/metalhead I gravitate more towards melodic post-rock stuff and the occasional poppy masterpiece.
Here’s some stuff in my current work playlist:
- Explosions in the Sky
- Mogwai
- Castor
- My Bloody Valentine
- Elliott
- Pinback
- Isis
- On The Might of Princes
- Jesu
- Portishead
- Dredg
- National Skyline
- Pelican
- Low Frequency In Stereo
- Radiohead
- There Were Wires
- Godspeed You! Black Emperor
- Mouth of the Architect
Yes I know some of these bands have lyrics. But they’re so fuzzed up or unintelligible that my brain doesn’t seem to process them while working, so all is good. And in the case of bands like Elliott and Pinback and Dredg, the vocals are prominent but somehow almost feel like more of an instrument. Also seems to work. Kind of strange, I guess.
April 14, 2008 @ 01:16 AM by nap · 0 comments
Yep, that's right. Hackfest tomorrow night in Portsmouth. Bring any code you're having issues with. Failing that, I've got a couple project tickets (DataMapper, Radiant) that we can dig into. We'll spend 30 minutes or so on a quickie mod_rails demo while we're there too.
In other local news, John Herman has been swell enough to put together an NH Media Makers group. The first get-together is May 11th at Crackskulls in Newmarket. Rock out.
April 12, 2008 @ 04:00 PM by nap · 3 comments
The hardworking hackers over at Phusion finally unveiled Passenger (mod_rails) earlier today. I just moved one of our staging servers over to it and will be playing around with it a bit more over the weekend. So far I'm happy to report that, as advertised, it's dead easy to use... and the performance seems solid.
I'd write up a tutorial but honestly it's so simple that it's completely unnecessary (imagine that!). Check out the updated screencast for all you need to know to get up and running and make sure to dig into the provided docs if you need more. They're very thorough.
In summary, it's great to see more Rails deployment options emerging, and it'll be interesting to see viable shared hosting options for the low-end market too. Although I'm a strong believer in the app server + frontend web server pairing, there are a whole class of applications for which it just seems like overkill.
A hearty 'nice work' to everyone involved! Now where's my mod_rack? :-)
UPDATED 4/12: this blog is now running on mod_rails and Mephisto 0.8!
April 10, 2008 @ 02:24 PM by nap · 0 comments
Just to clear up any possible confusion on that matter: Yes. There will be a 2008 Rails Rumble. And no. It will not be in May. Probably September or October.
We have a lot of great ideas (thanks to everyone that participated and commented) that will improve on last year’s experience dramatically and the whole team is looking forward to it, in a big way. More information coming soon, I promise, as well as an announcement, new blog, and specific details prior to Railsconf.
Oh, and speaking of Railsconf… Josh Owens, of TastyPlanner fame (last year’s grand prize winner), is giving what looks to be a fun talk about their experience building a kickass app in a 48 hour timeframe. If you’re going to be there, you ought to check it out. Especially if you’re interested in participating this year. If you haven’t yet registered for the conference, you’re running out of time, so get to it.
See you there!
April 03, 2008 @ 03:22 PM by nap · 5 comments
Here at Ubikorp we've used Radiant as the basis for a number of client projects who needed core CMS-like functionality. As anyone who's played with it knows, Radiant is very barebones; this is intentional and a welcome change from most packages, which attempt to throw the kitchen sink of clutter at each and every problem. Fortunately, it's easy to build on top of the basics by using a well thought-out extensions system -- there are a large number of stock extensions available (and it's also really easy to roll your own for custom app logic).
One of the more interesting extensions is the multi-site extension. To be honest, multi-site capability is something I really feel should be a core feature, but since it's not, this approach works surprisingly well (at least until you start adding other extensions that would ideally be multi-site-aware). Radiant school headmaster Sean Cribbs wrote an initial version of the extension back in November, but it didn't quite work for us on a particular project -- we needed to be able to scope individual user-level access to particular sites. So we extended it, and thus the scoped multi-site extension was born.
Well, actually, it's just a fork of the multi-site plugin. For now.
Features:
- scopes user level access to individual sites (admins and developers still have access to all sites)
- regular users can't see, edit, or access other user sites that they don't own
- optionally scopes layouts to sites
- snippets usable everywhere, but display and editing of snippets limited to admins/developers
Anyway, if you're interested in seeing our changes you can check it out on github in my fork of Sean's Radiant repo. Is this a candidate for integration into the existing extension, or should we spin it out as a separate extension? Let me know what you think.
UPDATED 6/24: The URL is out of date. See this blog post for more details and updates (the latest version requires Radiant 0.6.7 or later).
April 02, 2008 @ 12:11 AM by nap · 0 comments
I've been bitten by the Twitter bug. I know, I'm a little late to the party. But being late is fashionable. And I sure like the fashion.
Anyway, go ahead and stalk me. If you dare. Or check out the status updates in the blog sidebar if that's what you're into. I've also added my DDJ blog feed to the sidebar. A couple of my recent articles:
More soon. Promise.
