A few weeks ago Chris Chandler and I started a podcast. Almost every Wednesday at hacknight we were having interesting conversations ranging over a wide variety of topics. After listening to Evo Terra give a presentation on podcasting we decided to start recording these conversations and publish them for the benefit of humanity.

The name we chose for this project is Personality Flatline and you can subscribe via RSS or subscribe via iTunes. Of course, you can always visit the site and catch up on recent episodes.

After the first recording session, which consisted of us talking about random stuff, we ran an experiment for two weeks where we talk about topics suggested by people attending hacknight. We’ll be releasing those episodes over the next few weeks. We’re interested in hearing your feedback on the show, so don’t forget to leave us comments.

Chris Irish and I have been hard at work making another release of Freebootr. We released it in mid-December with improved search and speed as well as a redesigned look and feel. Shortly after this release, we got a write up in the Phoenix Business Journal.

To date we have over 23,000 listings in 17 states. We’re excited about the progress made on Freebootr and hope that 2009 continues the progress we’ve made in waste reduction. We hope you’re excited too! We’d love to hear your thoughts or ideas about Freebootr, so please send us your feedback.

Matt Gist tagged me as part of “The 6th Meme” and challenged me to post the 6th photo of the 6th page of my Flickr. So, here it is:

Over the summer, my dad (the big guy pictured) and I did some work on my backyard. In this picture, we’re laying the header for the brick patio. Where I’m mixing the concrete in the wheelbarrow became the patio and where my dad is walking became grass. Now that the patio is done, the kids have a great time riding their bikes on the patio, drawing all over the bricks with chalk and playing soccer in the grass.

Now I’m supposed to tag 6 other people… who will I tag?

• Erica Lucci
• Jason Newlin
• James Archer
• Tyson Crosbie
• Remi Taylor
• Chris Chandler

We’ve been using God to monitor our Thin processes on Freebootr and set it up to notify us through our Google Apps account. Thought our God config file might be useful to anyone trying to use God with Thin and Google Apps.

Thin configuration

# == God config file
# http://god.rubyforge.org/
# Authors: Gump and michael@glauche.de
#
# Config file for god that configures watches for each instance of a thin server for
# each thin configuration file found in /etc/thin.
# In order to get it working on Ubuntu, I had to make a change to god as noted at
# the following blog:
# http://blog.alexgirard.com/2007/10/25/ruby-one-line-to-save-god/
#
require 'yaml'
config_path = "/etc/thin" 

Dir[config_path + "/*.yml"].each do |file|
  config = YAML.load_file(file)
  num_servers = config["servers"] ||= 1

  (0...num_servers).each do |i|
    # UNIX socket cluster use number 0 to 2 (for 3 servers)
    # and tcp cluster use port number 3000 to 3002.
    number = config['socket'] ? i : (config['port'] + i)

    God.watch do |w|
      w.group = "thin-" + File.basename(file, ".yml")
      w.name = w.group + "-#{number}" 

      w.interval = 30.seconds

      w.uid = config["user"]
      w.gid = config["group"]

      w.start = "thin start -C #{file} -o #{number}" 
      w.start_grace = 10.seconds

      w.stop = "thin stop -C #{file} -o #{number}" 
      w.stop_grace = 10.seconds

      w.restart = "thin restart -C #{file} -o #{number}" 

      pid_path = config["pid"]
      ext = File.extname(pid_path)

      w.pid_file = pid_path.gsub(/#{ext}$/, ".#{number}#{ext}")

      w.behavior(:clean_pid_file)

      w.start_if do |start|
        start.condition(:process_running) do |c|
          c.interval = 5.seconds
          c.running  = false
          c.notify   = 'developers'
        end
      end

      w.restart_if do |restart|
        restart.condition(:memory_usage) do |c|
          c.above  = 150.megabytes
          c.times  = [3,5] # 3 out of 5 intervals
          c.notify = 'developers'
        end

        restart.condition(:cpu_usage) do |c|
          c.above  = 50.percent
          c.times  = 5
          c.notify = 'developers'
        end
      end

      w.lifecycle do |on|
        on.condition(:flapping) do |c|
          c.to_state     = [:start, :restart]
          c.times        = 5
          c.within       = 5.minutes
          c.transition   = :unmonitored
          c.retry_in     = 10.minutes
          c.retry_times  = 5
          c.retry_within = 2.hours
          c.notify       = 'developers'
        end
      end

      w.transition(:up, :start) do |on|
        on.condition(:process_exits) do |c|
          c.notify = 'developers'
        end
      end
    end
  end
end

Email through Google Apps configuration

require 'tlsmail'
Net::SMTP.enable_tls(OpenSSL::SSL::VERIFY_NONE)

God::Contacts::Email.message_settings = {
  :from => 'user@domain.com'
}

God::Contacts::Email.server_settings = {
  :address        => 'smtp.gmail.com',
  :tls            => 'true',
  :port           => 587,
  :domain         => 'domain.com',
  :user_name      => 'user@domain.com',
  :password       => '******',
  :authentication => :plain
}

God.contact(:email) do |c|
  c.name  = 'Dev 1'
  c.email = 'dev1@domain.com'
  c.group = 'developers'
end

God.contact(:email) do |c|
  c.name  = 'Dev 2'
  c.email = 'dev2@domain.com'
  c.group = 'developers'
end

References

• God
• A Thin God
• A Gmail God

The transition team for Obama is doing a pretty good job keeping things transparent and open, but they need your input to truly effect change. I submitted on Change.gov a while ago, but kept the transcript of what I submitted:

As a software engineer, I appreciate your focus on technology and how it has helped shaped your campaign (and hopefully your administration). I believe that focus on technology combined with your America Serves initiative could provide a great opportunity for Americans to give back to their country.

Specifically, I would like to see a national challenge of volunteerism communicated through a variety of mediums including a website, social networks, mass messaging (e.g., Twitter), blogs, etc. This message would be constantly and consistently communicated and the website would allow Americans to track their individual, local, city, state and nationwide participation metrics (e.g., # of hours volunteered, $ saved, people helped, jobs created).

Of course, this could be broken into individual and corporate programs. There might also be incentives/rewards to encourage participation (e.g., national recognition award, visit to the white house).

If you ask Americans to volunteer in the same way you asked them to vote for you they will listen and act because they believe in you. I believe in you. Thank you.

Now, it’s time to submit your input to the Obama transition team!

I received a wrong number text message today that stated

U arent going to give up on
me n stop talking to me bc
things r complicated on my
end, r u?

This person was trying to make a connection with someone who might not be talking with them anymore. They’re having some difficulties in their relationship that I know nothing about, but if I didn’t answer their fear/suspicion becomes reality. In essence, by not answering, the person they were trying to reach decided not to answer them. So I jotted off a quick reply

Sorry, I think you have the wrong number.

Then added

Good luck. I hope it works out.

I’ve often wondered if sometimes people just need to know that someone cares, even if it’s anonymous, as in this case. It’s easy to get wrapped up in ourselves and forget that other people need encouragement and support, too. There are little moments like these everyday that are easy to miss or ignore but that might have an impact in someone’s life. Don’t let those opportunities pass you by.

We’ve been playing around with the Sphinx full-text search engine and Ultrasphinx, the Ruby on Rails configurator and client to the Sphinx full text search engine. Sadly, it was giving us a warning about spell checking:

This is pretty easy to get rid of, though. You just need to install the aspell, spell checking library and raspell, the Ruby interface to aspell. The raspell README has instructions for installing aspell and raspell on both Mac and Ubuntu.

After we did this, we got one additional error:

Follow the instructions for setting up the custom wordlist needed by Ultrasphinx and you should be good to go.

Good luck and happy searching!

If you happen to see this error after upgrading your SliceHost account, be calm.

ActionView::TemplateError (Define INLINEDIR or HOME in your environment and try again)

The simple solution is to add an environment declaration to your environment/production.rb file:

ENV['INLINEDIR'] = '/path/to/.ruby_inline'

Once that was set, we were in business again… whew!

References

Here’s a relevant reference that took a while to find:

• Problems with God, RubyInline and Rails

I recently noticed a lot of rejected emails coming from a production app that had just switched to send mail through Google Apps. For some reason Google felt we might be spammers, so it began rejecting our emails out-of-hand. We would continuously get the following error message:

Technical details of permanent failure:
Message rejected.  See http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=69585 for more information.

That wasn’t very helpful, but with a little digging it led me to find out about something called an SPF and convinced me that I should set this up. It was really easy and I suggest you do it if you’re sending mail from your Ruby on Rails application through Google Apps (or some other means).

When using Google Apps, simply add a TXT record to your DNS settings with the following value:

v=spf1 mx include:aspmx.googlemail.com ~all

Note also that Google wants you to use include and specify all with a tilde(~), not a plus(+) or minus(-).

Publishing an SPF record that lacks include:aspmx.googlemail.com or specifying -all instead of ~all may result in delivery problems.

I also contacted Google to let them know of the error and if you start seeing this, be sure to let them know, too. Either that or setting the SPF record corrected our problem and we no longer get the rejected emails…

References

• Setting a sender policy framework (SPF) record
• How do I set my SPF record?

I wrote recently about Phoenix Hacknight (that happens every Wednesday) because I want people to know that there is a vibrant, active community in Phoenix centered around technology. Hacknight has become a place where people meet consistently to network with each other and hack on various projects. I have attended every single Hacknight and closed shop on most of them, but besides the amazing 6 hour hacknight website, I’ve yet to really release a new idea to the public.

That’s why I’m happy to announce the launch of

The Idea

Freebootr is an idea hatched at Hacknight by Chris Irish and me. It provides a place for people to easily and quickly find free items in their area as well as post free items they no longer want or need. We hope that this will result in less landfill waste and reduced cost to consumers. We believe this type of service should be free and open to the public and that’s exactly what we’ve done. What’s more, we believe it should be fun to use, which is why the site is pirate themed! Why, you ask?

freebooter |ˈfrēˌboōtər|

noun

a pirate or lawless adventurer.

That’s right, a freebooter is a pirate, so naturally we themed the site after these denizens of the sea. Arrr!

The Journey

Freebootr has been in the works for about 8 weeks at Hacknight. Chris and I have put in about 40 hours each throughout that time and set a goal to release the first version of the product today, on International Talk Like a Pirate Day. We also took a 2 week hiatus to implement the Hacknight website. It has been a fun, and somewhat bumpy, ride to get here, but we did it.

The Rest

Now the real work begins, for us and for you. We want… nay, need your feedback to make Freebootr.com a great, useful site. So check it out and be sure to call us out when we suck (and occasionally when we kick ass).

Now go out there, me hearty, and become a Freebootr!

About 24 weeks ago, we started hosting a regular Wednesday night gathering at our Chandler, Arizona office called hacknight (originally hack-a-mania). We open our office to the public from 6pm until whenever to allow people in the Phoenix area to meet, network, play, eat, have fun and, of course, hack on projects. After almost 6 months, hacknight is still going strong!

Check out this hacknight video

Also check out the people and projects at hacknight, on the new site devoted to everyone who makes these wonderful events happen! If you’re interested in what hacknights are doing for the Phoenix community, be sure to come by the office located at

290 E. El Prado Ct., Chandler, AZ 85225

We’re there every Wednesday night, hacking away… you should be too!

I need some new music to add to my collection. I’ve been listening to the same couple of CDs for the last 4 months. Please help me by recommending your current favorite!

Leave your suggestions in the comments, I’ll post my purchases here afterward.

The Purchase

So after much time spent listening to samples from the recommendations I received, I settled on five albums. Three came from suggestions, one I’ve been wanting for a long time and one is the soundtrack of a movie my wife and I saw recently and loved. For better or worse, here they are:

• Arcade Fire: Funeral
• The Decemberists: Picaresque
• Feist: The Reminder
• Okkervil River: Black Sheep Boy
• Once: Soundtrack

Recommendations

Here is the list of all recommendations (that I didn’t purchase, but maybe you will?):

• Atmosphere
• Page France
• The Mountain Goats
• Bowerbirds
• The National
• The Hold Steady
• Sufjan Stevens
• Rodrigo y Gabriela: Rodrigo y Gabriela
• José González: Veneer
• Kimya Dawson
• Mirah
• Brooke Fraser
• Portishead
• Abandoned Pools
• The Spill Canvas
• SoftLightes
• Leslie Hall

A big thank you to everyone who gave their 2¢ and feel free to keep the suggestions coming… I may buy more soon!

My last quick tip involved setting your time zone in Ubuntu Hardy, so now, how do you set your time zone in a Ruby on Rails application? Rails 2.1 makes it much easier to manage time zone settings than it was previously.

Add the following to your environment configuration file:

config/environment.rb

config.time_zone = 'Arizona'

Replace Arizona with your own time zone. You can find a list of valid values by running any of the following rake tasks:

rake time:zones:all
rake time:zones:local
rake time:zones:us

Your data will still be stored in UTC time, but it will be converted into the specified time zone when it is type cast on retrieval.

Update: If you set both your server’s time zone and your applications time zone then you may see some incorrect times. I believe this is because you’ll be storing local times and the Rails app will be trying to convert them to local – a double conversion. So be careful.

References

• What’s New in Edge Rails: Easier Timezones
• Rails 2.1 Time Zone Support: An Overview
• Updating MySQL DATETIMEs for Rails 2.1 Time Zones

I’ve been pretty enamored with SliceHost recently. They make it very easy to setup a slice, configure it and get your product deployed quickly (I’m down to 30 min). I hadn’t noticed until just recently that I’ve never set a time zone on any slice I’ve configured. So, here’s how you do it, simple and easy.

1. SSH into your slice
2. Run this command: sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
3. Select your geographic area and location

That’s it, hope it helps!

If you want your own slice, consider using my Slicehost referral link. Thanks!

405 Not Allowed

So, I got this error today and it took me a few minutes to track down why. Seems like the kind of thing that might be interesting to people. I’m using nginx on a project and this error was being thrown by nginx, not by Rails. What could be the cause?

Nginx configuration and REST

Do you have something in your nginx config file that looks like this?

if (-f $request_filename) {
  break;
}

Basically, render an existing, static file directly, aka. bypass Rails. This is great, we don’t incur the overhead of hitting Rails for static files, including cached files, right? Wrong.

You see, with REST, your URL will be the same for a POST to create as it will for a GET to index. For example, viewing the users index and creating a user:

GET  /users <= user's index
POST /users <= create a user

See the problem?

That’s right, if you cache the user’s index using a technique like caches_page then you have a static file (e.g., users.html) that matches regardless of the HTTP method. Therefore, it will bypass rails and attempt to serve the static file on a POST request, resulting in a 405 error. Whew!

Caching with nginx

So what do you do? I don’t know. But this is what I did and I hope it helps. Add the following to your nginx config prior to the serving of static files.

if ($request_method != GET) {
  proxy_pass http://foobar;
  break;
}

Uh, where foobar is the name you specified in the upstream declaration in the nginx config. This should pass any non-GET request to Rails immediately since we don’t want to statically serve files for anything other than GET.

References

• Ezra’s nginx config
• IRC conversation from February 6, 2008