Here we go again: WordPress 2.5
Okay, here we go then. I’ve managed to drop Mephisto after only a few weeks of service.
As a Rails developer, I liked the idea of running my own blog on something Rails. However, Mephisto was a big disappointment. Especially compared to WordPress 2.5. Mephisto has been on life support for quite a while now, and it’s just too complex to be easy to hack. Now, don’t get me wrong. I love hacking Ruby, but not too much on my blog. It “should just work”.
The reason I skipped to Mephisto in the first place was that my Wordpress 2.3 blog was very slow. I managed to track down the problem to the Twitter plugin, which was next to useless anyway.
Now, with all the new funky stuff in 2.5, I switched back. I haven’t managed to write anything substantial in the past weeks anyway, so it wasn’t a problem to loose one post.
There are many reasons for my not posting substantial stuff lately. One of them being my new hobby: photography (link). Check out my Flickr page and let me know what you think of my more recent photos.
So long for now. Expect more from me soon.
Ruby on Rails plugin: Throttler
For those of you who have missed it: I’ve released a plugin yesterday that allows you to throttle your Rails app.
Read the original announcement and installation/usage instructions
Read how you can put Throttler to good use in your app
The Presidents of the United States of America Live
Yeah! I got myself some tickets to The Presidents of the United States of America, live at Effenaar, Eindhoven.
To be honest with you, I’ve never been to a real concert before, so this is going to be *very* much fun for me! Among the few albums I bought back in the year 1995 was PUSA.
Your help is needed! - Railsjobs.nl
Since I started Railsjobs.nl some time ago, I’d like to ask you a simple question. Thanks for putting in your $0.02 :)
Roles: Admins pretending to be users!
Most applications have some sort of role system. You have administrators, who can do basically everything, semi-administrators and “regular Joe” users.
Now, sometimes you want, as an administrator, be able to login as a user to solve some problem, or manage settings for a user, or whatever.
Harm did a very nice write-up on how we did this in a Rails project of ours. You can read the article here.
Attack of the Killer Bunnies
Well, here they go then! Just swooping in, eating all the green stuff from your garden!! Someone stop them!
This was taken in the back-yard at Laura’s parents house. The neighbours have about a dozen rabbits, but they are allowed to walk around as they wish, occasionally finding their way into other people’s gardens.
Kabisa Blog
Well, we’ve got our blog up and running at Kabisa now! Our entire team will be posting interesting Ruby, Rails, Java and Subversion articles that may be of very good use to you.
Check out the blog now on http://blog.kabisa.nl or grab the RSS Feed to stay up-to-date.
Thin: A Ruby HTTP Daemon That’s Faster Than Mongrel
Thin is a new Web server / daemon written in Ruby by Marc-André Cournoyer that uses the EventMachine, Rack, and Mongrel libraries. EventMachine makes it super fast at processing network I/O, Rack makes it easy to integrate with existing Ruby Web app frameworks, and Mongrel helps it parse HTTP. So, yes, the title is slightly misleading. Thin actually relies on Mongrel, but is ultimately faster than it, even against Mongrel’s EventMachine-enhanced guise.
You can get started with Thin with a simple sudo gem install thin and then you can use it with any Rack supporting Web app / framework. With a Rails app, for example, a simple thin start in the base directory will get things moving.
Write a DVD-Video from the Linux console
This is probably my last post for this year, and it’s not about Ruby on Rails! Or web development! It’s about how to burn a DVD-Video from the Linux console.
I know, there are tons of fancy apps (with a decent GUI) that allow you to create DVD-Video disks from Gnome or KDE. But, my Linux machine has no monitor attached and I don’t care for hogging up resources by running X.
All you really need to burn a DVD-Video is one packages: dvd+rw-tools. If you’re on Debian or Ubuntu, just run this:
apt-get install dvd+rw-toolsSo, I have this VIDEO_TS folder and a blank DVD in my DVD driver (which is known to my system as /dev/sr0). To make a correct DVD, you’ll also need an AUDIO_TS folder. It doesn’t matter if it’s empty, it should be there.
I’m assuming you’re all doing this as root. If not, just add ’sudo’ in front of every command you perform
mkdir AUDIO_TSNext, we need to set the correct permissions on the VIDEO_TS, AUDIO_TS and the files contained in these directories.
chmod -R root:root VIDEO_TS AUDIO_TS chmod 500 VIDEO_TS AUDIO_TS chmod 400 VIDEO_TS/*
Well, you already have all your files prepped, and you’re good to go.
The following command will burn you a nice video DVD. Make sure a blank DVD is inserted into your drive. As I said before, my drive is located at /dev/sr0. You system is probably different. Check your boot log (dmesg) for messages of a dvd driver.
growisofs -dvd-compat -Z /dev/sr0 -dvd-video .
It’s very important not to forget the tailing dot, it tells growisofs that you want to use the current directory as the source for your DVD. Depending on the speed of your burner, you’ll have a new DVD to watch in a few minutes. Enjoy! And a happy 2008!
For You: Merry Christmas and a Happy 2008!!!
We (Laura and I) wish you a very merry Christmas and a happy 2008!
I hope to welcome you back on Ariejan.net in 2008. Happy Holidays!
