Robby on Rails

Martin Fowler has written a piece on his bliki titled, TravelClothing

He goes on to describe some best practices for choosing travel-friendly clothing. While reading this… I was instantly reminded of a trip that Jeremy and I made in November.

This is how Jeremy Voorhis packs for a business trip.

How about you?

PLANET ARGON is still working out some of the details … but we’re planning a 46 hours on Rails project.

Expect more updates in the next day or two… but it will be awesome!

Any guesses as to what it might be?

Hint #1. It will not involve a slideshow presentation…

We’re excited to announce that as of last week, the Typo development team and PLANET ARGON made an arrangement to relocate the current hosting of the Typo project to PLANET ARGON. This includes moving Subversion, Trac, downloads, mailing list(s), IRC bot, etc. There is also rumor that some energy will be going into creating a new home page for the project.

David Gibbons is currently working on migrating everything over for them and we are managing this process through our BaseCamp with the Typo team. He’ll be posting an update on his blog when this process is finished.

We’re honored that they chose PLANET ARGON to the official hosting sponsor of the Typo project. We were the first hosting provider to offer Typo hosting to customers back in April.

We look forward to helping Typo prepare for 2006…

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Random update…

I thought it would be amusing to see just how I fit into the history of Typo. Aside from PLANET ARGON being the first host to offer Typo hosting… I was one of the first few people to run Typo as a blog… or at least I tried… see ticket #8

I was also the first person to ever run Typo on PostgreSQL (ticket #9). ... like that would surprise anyone. ;-)

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During this period of moving from Tobias to PLANET ARGON, we are collecting email information for people so that when we help launch the new site for the project… you’ll all be notified.

TypoSphere.org (coming soon)

Wow. I didn’t want to be the last one to mention on their blog that Rails 1.0 is out! (like 2 days ago… I’m so behind on stuff…)

Read the full release here.

Kudos to David and the entire Rails Core team!

I’ll be the first to admit that server reboots do happen. Whether they are for planned hardware upgrades or the unexpected runaway CPU processes…they can cause some problems for your applications.

Recently, we had an unexpected outage on one of our servers and noticed that some of the lighttpd instances were not restarted automatically. I personally went and started up each one manuually and documented who they all were. We wanted to build a nice solution to this… but because every user has their own method of invoking lighttpd and we kind of let you run free with that… the idea to build one init script to meet everyones needs… isn’t currently practical. We want you to have some freedom with that and we can help you along the way. :-)

So… what should you do?

Well, David Gibbons (our new Lead Systems Administrator) has a nice tip on his blog, a cool trick with cron.

He shows you how to use the @reboot option in crontab for scheduling scripts to startup on a reboot.

This is great to use and should work if you are a hosting customer at PLANET ARGON. Expect more little tricks like this in the future as David has many up his sleeve. You might want to subscribe to his brand new Typo blog RSS feed. ;-)

class David < ActiveRecord::Base
  has_many :tricks
end

Have a great weekend!

DHH wrote that Tim O’Reilly wrote on O’Reilly Radar, Ruby Book Sales Surpass Python.

While I was looking at the data, though, I noticed something perhaps more newsworthy: in the same period, Ruby book sales surpassed Python book sales for the first time. Python is up 20% vs. the same period last year, but Ruby is up 1552%! (Perl is down 3%.)

...awesome!