Lucky-dip Blog - Lucky-dip atom feed

Dynamic Sites on Nginx With Passenger

2013-05-04T14:26:22+10:00

If you are using passenger with nginx, it's possible to set nginx up in a way that allows new apps (or branches of the same app) to be deployed with no change to the server config.

Step 1

Add this config to your nginx.conf. Edit the hostname to match your server, and the root to match your deploy directory

server {
   server_name ~^([-\w]+)\.yourdomain.com;
   root /var/www/$1/current/public;
   passenger_enabled on;
}

Step 2

Deploy your rails app to /var/www/whatever/current. The app will then be available at http://whatever.yourdomain.com.

Similarly, deploying to /var/www/some-internal-app/current means the app will be available at http://some-internal-app.yourdomain.com

Notes

This technique probably isn't ideal for production sites, but for internal and or temporary sites it is quite useful. Passenger takes care of spinning up apps as they are requested, so if one app is getting lots of requests, passenger will naturally spin up more app servers for that one, potentially spinning down unused apps. Providing all apps aren't being constantly accessed, this acts as a kind of resource balancing allowing an underpowered internal server to serve a lot of apps.

Webby on Heroku

2010-06-11T17:48:47+10:00

The $20 a month more for beer dream

I've been hosting this blog on Slicehost for a while now. They have been a good host, but a full slice is more than I need these days.

The plan

After a bit of thinking, I realised I could pretty easily move this blog across to Heroku. It's just a bunch of static files created by Webby, so I figured a tiny Sinatra app would be just the trick.

The problem

Sinatra is perfect for these kind of tiny jobs, and ended up working without too much effort. I had a bit of a wrestle with Heroku initially. I couldn't seem to get heroku to read my articles. They were stored in a directory called "output".

The solution

After a while, I tried tried renaming the directory to "public". That seemed to do the trick. Heroku mentions that you can read the filesystem but I couldn't find too much mention of exactly what you can read. A directory called "public" seems like a pretty safe bet to be readable forever though. I told Webby to start buiding to the public directory instead. Here's my SiteFile:

SITE.blog_dir = "articles"
SITE.output_dir = "public"

The app

After getting that working, the script worked on Heroku. It's just as simple as I'd hoped it would be.

require "rubygems"
require "sinatra"

DIR = 'public'
set :public, DIR

get '/' do
  read('index.html')
end

get '/articles/*' do
  read('articles', params["splat"], 'index.html')
end

def read(*parts)
  File.read(File.join([ DIR ] + parts))
end

Not much to it - read index.html for the root path, or read the article page for any article. It'd probably be possible to merge these into a single route, but it seems like that would just complicate things unecessarily.

The source

http://github.com/bradx3/blog

Fundation

2009-09-07T13:40:10+10:00

I've kept my saving in a single, high interest account for a while now. It works particularly well as a contractor in that I can put aside tax and GST and earn interest on that before I have to pay it to the government.

It has been a bit difficult to keep track of how much money was saving, and how much was tax/GST though, so I've written a simple app to keep track.

Fundation lets you set up funds to manage your saving. Each paycheck can be automatically divided up into the different funds in ratios you specify.

Anyway, Fundation is free to use, so if you're having trouble remembering how much money you've got to spend, give it a try here.

If you have any errors in Fundation, or any suggestions for improvements, please use the comments of this post to provide them.

Restart Passenger From Emacs Using Rinari

2009-08-06T14:27:33+10:00

Being able to completely re-program your editor is fun. I feel like I've got a long way to go before I'm an Emacs Guru (if anybody *ever* becomes a true Emacs Guru), but it's nice being able to easily automate things I do in my editor.

I've been experimenting with using Passenger in development instead of script/server. It's not too bad. It's nice to have a server always ready to go, but it does make dropping down to the debugger difficult.

Anyway, here is a small snippet of emacs lisp to easily restart the Passenger server for the project you are currently working on. It assumes you have Rinari installed.

The function:

(defun restart-passenger ()
  "Restart passenger using the current rinari root" (interactive)
  (shell-command (concat "touch " (rinari-root) "tmp/restart.txt")))

And to bind it to a key

(global-set-key (kbd "C-c ' p") 'restart-passenger)

My Backup Script

2009-07-24T08:25:51+10:00

This is my simple backup script. It keeps everything I don't already have backed up in version control safe and sound from hardware failure. Not from me though - if I delete a file accidentally, that file is really gone (unless you act fast before the next backup runs!). If I make a bad edit, that file is busted.

But I can live with that.

backup.rb

Backup.rb uses rsync over ssh to backup a number of different server. Rsync is good because it only sends what changed, so we're not transferring gigs every night.

You'll have to make some changes to the SSH_USER, REMOTE_DIR and HOSTS constants. You could also add any file types you want to ignore to the EXCLUDES list.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

NAME = %x{ hostname }.strip
SSH_USER = "brad"
REMOTE_DIR = "/home/brad/Backups/#{ NAME }"

HOSTS = [ "clamps", "hubert.lucky-dip.net" ]
DIRS = [
        "~/Library", 
        "~/Documents",
        "~/Pictures"
]
EXCLUDES = [
            "*Cache*",
            "*NewsFire*",
            "*Cookies*",
            "*.log",
            "HistoryIndex.ox*",
            "*Virtual Machines*",
            "*.resume",
            "*.ipsw",
            "*.dmg",
            "*.corrupt"
]

HOSTS.each do |host|
  DIRS.each do |dir|
    puts "--------------------------------------------"
    excludes = EXCLUDES.map { |e| "--exclude \"#{ e }\"" }.join(' ')
    cmd = "rsync -av --delete --delete-excluded "
    cmd += " --rsh=\"ssh -l #{ SSH_USER }\" "
    cmd += " #{ dir } #{ host }:#{ REMOTE_DIR } #{ excludes }"
    puts cmd
    system(cmd)
  end
end

Crontab

With the crontab below, a backup will be run every night at 10pm

    0 22 * * * /Users/brad/projects/scripts/backup.rb

Redish Greenish for ZenTest

2007-09-29T13:39:00+10:00

ZenTest is a great tool. I use it and its redgreen plugin a lot to easily keep an eye on my tests.

I use a green terminal background though, so when my tests pass, rather than a green line, I have to rely on a lack of a red line. This isn't so bad, but I thought it could be improved with a little effort.

Redish greenish is an extension of redgreen that allows you to specify the colours used for tests passing and/or failing.

To use it, save this file into your autotest lib directory. (Mine is GEM_PATH/1.8/gems/ZenTest-3.6.1/lib/autotest/). To enable redishgreenish, you'll need to modify your autotest config file. Open "~/.autotest" and change the line:

require 'autotest/redgreen'

require 'autotest/redishgreenish'

At this point, autotest will behave exactly the same as if redgreen was used. To change the colour of the lines used to signify tests passing and failing, your autotest config file should look like

PASSED = :blue
FAILED = :yellow
require 'autotest/redishgreenish'

Valid values for colours are

:black, :red, :green, :yellow, :blue, :magenta, :cyan, :white

Using Javascript Code for RJS Instead of IDs

2007-11-05T12:33:06+11:00

Some info on how to make RJS output code like:

new Insertion.Bottom($$('p.welcome b').first(), "Some item"

http://sentia.com.au/2008/03/using-javascript-code-for-rjs.html

Named SQL Server Instances with FreeTDS

2008-03-10T19:33:57+11:00

A helpful post on accessing named sql server instances using freetds

I was having a lot of trouble doing that. Turns out the 'instance' key exists. As far as I could find it wasn't in the doc anywhere, so this is just a post in the hope that it'll save somebody else some time in the future.

From the post:

[def]
host = abc
instance = def
port = 1433
client charset = UTF-8
tds version = 8.0

Read table row-by-row in ruby

2008-03-12T12:05:15+11:00

I needed to export some data from a huge data table. Iterating through MyModel.find took too long and too much ram, so I went straight to the db instead.

Example code was tough to find, so here's an example:

sql = "select * from #{ MyModel.table_name }"
MyModel.connection.execute(sql) do |handle|
  handle.fetch do |row|
    # row is an array of values
    ... export row ...
  end
end

performSelector in RubyCocoa

2008-04-22T15:04:21+10:00

I had a lot of trouble finding documentation for this. If you want to make a call on the main thread in RubyCocoa, the format is something like:

performSelectorOnMainThread_withObject_waitUntilDone('method_name:', object, true)

So two things that took me a while:

method_name has a trailing colon.
The object the has the method you want to call should be the second argument. I got it in my head it should be the first for some reason.

Random wallpaper from socwall.com

2008-09-01T18:14:30+10:00

I quite like http://socwall.com. They have a rss feed for recent posts, but I wrote a small script to download a random selection instead.

On OSX I could then set my desktop background to be a random picture from a folder. In my case that folder was /Users/brad/Pictures/Wallpapers/ but that could be easily changed.

#!/usr/bin/ruby

require 'rubygems'
require 'hpricot'
require 'open-uri'
require 'Pathname'
 
URL = 'http://socwall.com/browse/index.php?wpSortby=8'
DEST = "/Users/brad/Pictures/Wallpapers/"


def clear_old_images
  Pathname.new(DEST).children.each { |f| f.delete }
end

def download_images(count)
  count = count.to_i
  
  while count > 0
    doc = Hpricot(open(URL))
    
    doc.search("div.wpThumbnail").each do |thumb|
      next if count == 0
      
      thumbnail = thumb.at("img")['src']
      image = thumbnail.gsub(/\/tb_/, '/')
      image = image.gsub(" ", "%20")
      
      remote_image = open(image, 
                          "User-Agent" => "Ruby/#{RUBY_VERSION}")
      local_image = open("#{ DEST }/#{ count }.png", 'w')
      local_image.write(remote_image.read)
      
      remote_image.close
      local_image.close
      
      count -= 1
    end
  end
end

count = ARGV[0] || 10

clear_old_images
download_images(count)

Element.insert, Prototype and named anchors

2008-11-25T11:46:11+11:00

This was a strange one.

HTML:

<a name="questions">
<div class="questions">
</div>

JS:

Element.insert("questions", { bottom : "<div>Test</div>" })

With that setup, IE compains and says "Invalid source HTML for this operation". It turns out that prototype was trying to put the div into the a tag. I guess I can see how it happened, but I sure didn't expect it.

Anyway I removed the a tag completely and everything works fine. Weird.

Kill All Rinari Buffers in Emacs

2009-03-30T16:33:54+11:00

I've been using Emacs for development for a few months now and am pretty happy with it.

I use the Rinari mode to provide some help when I'm working on Rails projects. Once I'm finished for the day (or changing to another project, I used to use the kill-some-buffers command and go through them one by one.

Here's some elisp that I've written and put in my .emacs file that just kills all buffers that link to files that are in the current rinari-root. It's probably not perfect, but it seems to work most of the time.

;; some rinari helpers
(defun kill-buffers-in-subdir (subdir buffer)
  "Kills the given buffer if it is linked to a file in the current rinari project."
  (if (buffer-in-subdir-p subdir buffer)
     (kill-buffer buffer)))

(defun buffer-in-subdir-p (subdir buffer) 
  "Returns true if buffer belongs to the current rinari project"
  (and (buffer-file-name buffer)
       (string-match subdir (buffer-file-name buffer))))

(defun kill-all-rinari-buffers ()
  "Kills all buffers linked to the current rinari project"
  (interactive)
  (let ((path (rinari-root)))
    (if path
	(dolist (buffer (buffer-list))
	  (kill-buffers-in-subdir path buffer)))))

Creating a jruby rails project

2009-07-10T08:08:26+10:00

For some reason, this command:

jruby -S gem install mongrel activerecord-jdbcmysql-adapter rails

didn't install all the required gems I needed.

Manually listing all the basic rails gems needed fixed the problem for me though. Working command:

jruby -S gem install mongrel activerecord-jdbcmysql-adapter rails \
activesupport actionmailer activerecord actionpack activeresource

Omniweb Using Webkit From Safari 4

2009-03-12T11:47:21+11:00

I'm a big fan of the Omniweb web browser. I've had some problems with it being a bit slow in the past, but that seems to have been fixed with the latest Nightly Builds. The latest build has brought in the same Webkit as used by Safari 4, so it's fast. Really fast.

Add that to all the features I like, and I'm a happy web browser. Things I miss when I'm not using Omniweb.

Vertical Tab Bar - I have a wide screen, and a lot of tabs open
Workspaces - I can put my house hunting links in one workspace, then keep them handy, but hide them while I work
Mac (?) font rendering. Something about Firefox's font just looks wrong
Built in ad-blocking. It's no Adblock Plus, but I don't mind seeing ads. It's just the flashing ones I hate
Location bar hides, shows when I hit Apple-L, then hides again. I don't know what I'm doing wrong on other browsers, but I can never get this to work reliably.
And heaps more...

It's a good browser. It's good enough I paid for it, but it's free now. Nice one OmniGroup.

Blog Running on Webby

2009-02-19T14:25:12+11:00

The server this blog runs on hosts a few things for - email, a few sites and some git repositories. It's got 512mb or ram, but rubygems and even git can get pretty greedy at times. I finally had enough.

Typo and mysql were only being used for the blog and were taking up a heap or ram. I looked around and Webby seemed a good fit.

I've managed to convert the old articles and comments to Webby and Disqus format. There's currently some problems with the comments not displaying, so I'll have to fix that, but I can live with that for now.

Anyway if anybody notices any problems, please leave a comment and I'll get it fixed up. Unless it's a problem posting comments.

Update: Comments are display fine now. Wooh.

Haml & Sass Editors 0.5.4

2007-07-06T14:25:41+10:00

These editors have been merged into the Aptana project. Please don't post any error reports here.

Last release didn't go so well. For some reason I figured other people had tried to install Aptana, had it fail and then given up on it like me. Turns out I was alone haha.

So I spent a bit of time figuring out what changed in RDT and fixed things up. I've tested this with a straight out of the box install of Aptana m8, so hopefully it'll work for others too.

If anybody does try it, please let me know if it works or not. I'm going to use this blog post as a bit of a test before I post to the Haml mail list. Thanks in advance to anyone who replies!

(Oh yeah, the update site is still http://haml.lucky-dip.net/).

Haml & Sass Editor For Eclipse

2007-06-21T18:58:45+10:00

These editors have been merged into the Aptana project. Please don't post any error reports here.

I did some very basic editors for Haml and Sass a while back. At the time I was interested in Haml. It's elegant to write, and the automatically formatted html it outputs just made it a match made in heaven.

Fast forward a few months and now I'm actually using Haml and Sass. It's as good as I ever hoped it would be. With Haml and a little bit of FormBuilder magic I'm making useful forms in four short lines. Too good.

Anyway coming with using it is the chance to see some shortcomings in my own editors, so I've spent a bit of time updating them. I've set up a proper Eclipse update site, so you can just add 'http://haml.lucky-dip.net' via the 'Help - Software Updates - Find and Install' menu option. That should help minimize a few errors with the various versions of Eclipse and RDT around. All references to the RadRails plugins have been removed. There was a bit of code that I pulled into my plugin, but with RadRails/Aptana in heavy dev it's easier for me to forget about trying to keep up for a while.

Also added is code folding. There's a bit of work still to do on this one. You can currently only fold top level elements. This can be a pain when you've got all your code in one file, but if you're using layouts and partial in a sensible way it should hopefully be of some use.

One thing I found a bit tricky was figuring out which element I was under when I was editing. Some people might like turning on space markers (can you actually do that in Eclipse?), but I figured a character matcher would do the trick. So now as you move around in the editors there'll be a blue box around the element you are currently in. At the moment it just highlights the first letter of the element. I'm going to see if I can get the whole element happening for the next release.

So I hope it works well for people. Set up an Eclipse update site of 'http://haml.lucky-dip.net' and that should keep you informed as new versions come out.

Time To Go

2009-02-10T08:56:05+11:00

I've just released my first iPhone application.

Time To Go is designed to be the quickest way to tell when the train you need to catch leaves. I use it just before I leave work to know whether I need to run to the station to catch the next train.

There'll be a dedicated page up to log any timetable errors soon, but for now please leave any errors or suggestions in the comments for this blog post.

iTunes Store URL

Screenshot:

Badged Dock Icon for IPhone XCode development

2009-01-21T11:20:27+11:00

Dr Nic made a good suggestion on Twitter for a way to badge the XCode icon with the one currently in use.

Here's my attempt: http://gist.github.com/49767

It relies on ImageMagick being installed (port install ImageMagick) and should be run from the project's directorin in the terminal.

ZSH

2008-06-27T14:06:20+10:00

I've been zsh lately. I get the feeling most shells have similar features, but somehow I stumbled across a good config file for this one. It's so good I think it is worth sharing.

Features that I like in zsh:

Standard aliases, reverse search, history work as normal
Typos in command names and directories are fixed automatically
Auto 'cd' if you just type the directory name.
Completion of command options (so the - and -- options!)
Copletion of rake task names. This might the same as above, but it's still handy.
Completion of remote paths over scp. It's a bit slow for regular use, but can be good if you've forgotten the name of one dir.

My zshrc is available here on github: http://github.com/bradx3/dotfiles/tree/master/.zshrc