Cinco de Rails
By Steph Skardal
May 6, 2009
Today was my first day of sessions at @railsconf. In fact, it was my first time at a technical conference and RailsConf. And because I am a relatively new to Rails development, I took away a plethora of information. I wrote down some notes on things I want to read, investigate, and research more about after the conference.
1) History of Rails Critics
David Heinemeier Hansson’s keynote touched on how it’s interesting to look back at some of the initial and ongoing rails critiques, such as “Ruby/Rails isn’t scalable”, “Rails isn’t enterprise-ready”, etc. and how arguments in support of Rails have grown stronger over time with the maturity of the platform. I’d like to spend some more time looking into some of these comments to be more aware of these issues.
2) Rails 3 Release
Anticipation builds in the Rails community for the announcement of Rails 3. I just recently joined the Rails development community in January and hadn’t heard of the Rails vs. Merb debate until recently. I am interested in learning more about Merb and the background of the Rails/Merb merge.
3) PostRank
Appealing to my search engine optimization background, “social media measuring” offered at PostRank essentially …
conference rails spree
Stuff you can do with the PageRank algorithm
By Sonny Cook
May 6, 2009
I’ve attended several interesting talks so far on my first day of RailsConf, but the one that got me the most excited to go out and start trying to shoehorn it into my projects was Building Mini Google in Ruby by Ilya Grigorik.
In terms of doing Google-like stuff (which I’m not especially interested in doing), there are three steps, which occur in order of increasing level of interestingness. They are:
- Crawling (mundane)
- Indexing (sort of interesting)
- Rank (neato)
Passing over crawling, Indexing is sort of interesting. You can do it yourself if you care about the problem, or you can hand it over to something like ferret or sphinx. I expect it’s probably time for me to invest some time investigating the use of one or more of these, since I’ve already gone up and down the do it yourself road.
The interesting bit, and the fascinating focus of Ilya’s presentation were the explanation of the PageRank algorithm and the implementation details as well as some application ideas. Hopefully I don’t mess this up too badly, but as I understand it, it simplifies down to something like this.
A page is ranked to some degree by how many other pages link to it. This is a bit too simple, though, …
conference rails spree
Announcing SpreeCamps.com hosting
By Jon Jensen
May 5, 2009
On day two of RailsConf 2009, we are pleased to announce our new SpreeCamps.com hosting service. SpreeCamps is the quickest way to get started developing your new e-commerce website with Ruby on Rails and Spree and easily deploy it into production.
You get the latest Spree 0.8.0 that was just released yesterday, as part of a fully configured environment built on the best industry-standard open-source software: CentOS, Ruby on Rails, your choice of PostgreSQL or MySQL, Apache, Passenger, Git, and DevCamps. Your system is harmonized and pre-installed on high-performance hardware, so you can simply sign up and start coding today.
SpreeCamps gives you a 64-bit virtual private server and include backups, your own preconfigured iptables firewall, ping and ssh monitoring, and DNS. We also include a benefit unheard of in the virtual private server space: Out of the box we enforce an SELinux security policy that protects you against many types of unforeseen security vulnerabilities, and is configured to work with Passenger, Rails, and Spree.
SpreeCamps’ built-in DevCamps system gives you development and staging environments that make it easy to work together in teams, show others your work …
ecommerce hosting rails spree
Rails Conf Kicking Off in Less Than 24 Hours
By Sean Schofield
May 3, 2009
Less then 24 hours until RailsConf kicks off. End Point is going to be there in force this year with three of its Spree contributors attending (myself included.) Looking forward to seeing everyone out there. We’ll also be making a few big Spree related announcements so stay tuned!
If you’re a twitter user, follow me @railsdog. Follow Spree @spreecommerce. I’ll also be blogging the conference on railsdog as well as here at the End Point blog. Finally, the SpreeCommerce site will be updated with various Spree related announcements.
conference spree
Being at the MySQL User Conference: how Postgres fits in
By Selena Deckelmann
April 30, 2009
I spent last week in Santa Clara attending the MySQL User Conference. Friends had clued me in that the conference was going to be a riot—with developers from the many forks of MySQL in attendance, all vying for spotlight, and to differentiate themselves from the MySQL core code.
The Oracle announcement of acquiring Sun cast an uncertain and uncomfortable light over the talks about forks, community and the future of MySQL. Many people wondered aloud what development on the core of MySQL’s code would be like now, and what would become of the remaining MySQL engineers.
Would the engineers defect to Monty’s new company? Will Oracle end support of MySQL development? How would MySQL end users feel about the changes? Would there be a surge in interest in Postgres, my favorite open source database?
Of course, it’s a bit early to tell. So, I’ve really got two posts about the trip, and this first one is about PostgreSQL, aka Postgres.
There’s a huge opportunity right now for Postgres to tell its story. Not because of a specific failure on the part of MySQL, but because the Oracle acquisition has raised the consciousness of all of mainstream tech. Developers and IT managers are taking a …
conference database open-source postgres
End Point speakers at PGCon 2009
By Jon Jensen
April 28, 2009
PGCon is the annual conference for PostgreSQL users and developers, and PGCon 2009 in Ottawa, Canada, is now only about 3 weeks away. The schedule of presentations looks excellent, and I’m excited to have three of my co-workers presenting talks there. Here’s a quick rundown of those talks.
Power psql by Greg Sabino Mullane: The psql command-line interface to PostgreSQL is extremely powerful and versatile. While it’s easy to get started with, investing a little time in learning its many features really pays off in improved productivity. Greg will explore some corners and features you might not have known about, and also delve a little into its history and, more importantly, its future.
VACUUM Strategy by Selena Deckelmann: VACUUM is an important topic for both new and seasoned users of Postgres. Selena’s talk will focus on changes in Postgres from version 8.0 on, tuning configuration parameters related to VACUUM for best performance, autovacuum, the updated Free Space Map in 8.4, and the brand new Visibility Map.
Writing a Procedural Language by Josh Tolley: Stored procedures and user-defined functions offer a lot of power, and PostgreSQL already allows developing such code in many …
conference postgres
Inside PostgreSQL - Data Types and Operator Classes
By Josh Tolley
April 28, 2009
Two separate posts taken from two separate mailing lists I’m on have gotten me thinking about PostgreSQL data types and operator classes today. The first spoke of a table where the poster had noticed that there was no entry in the pg_stats table for a particular column using the point data type. The second talks about Bucardo failing when trying to select DISTINCT values from a polygon type column. I’ll only talk about the first, here, but both of these behaviors stem from the fact that the data types in question lack a few things more common types always have.
The first stems from the point type’s lack of a default b-tree operator class and lack of an explicitly-declared analyze function. What are those, you ask? In the pg_type table, the column typanalyze contains the OID of a function that will analyze the data type in question, so when you call ANALYZE on a table containing that data type, that function will be run. In a default installation of PostgreSQL, all rows contain 0 in this column, meaning use the default analyze function.
This default analyze function tries, among other things, to build a histogram of the data in the column. Histograms depend on the values in a table …
postgres bucardo
Why OpenAFS?
By Steven Jenkins
April 24, 2009
Once you’ve understood what OpenAFS is, you might ask “Why use OpenAFS?” There are several very good reasons to consider OpenAFS.
First, if you need a cross-platform network filesystem, OpenAFS is a solid choice. While CIFS is the natural choice on Windows, and NFS is a natural choice on Unix, OpenAFS gives a hetergeneous choice (and it works on Mac OS X, too).
Setting aside which filesystem is natural for a given platform, though, OpenAFS has a strong advantage with respect to remote access. While it’s common to access systems remotely via a Virtual Private Network (VPN), Secure Shell (SSH), or Remote Desktop, OpenAFS allows the actual files themselves to be shared across a WAN, a dialup link, or a mobile device (and since OpenAFS is cross platform, the issue of which remote sets of remote access software to support is lessened). Having files appear to be local to the device reduces the need for remote access systems and simplifies access. The big win, though, is that OpenAFS’ file caching helps performance and lessens bandwidth requirements.
Another reason to use OpenAFS is if you need your network filesystem to be secure. While both CIFS and NFS have secure versions, in …
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