Posted by Rob Anderton on June 30th, 2008 @ 15:48 – 1 comment
Updated on July 14th, 2008 @ 12:54
Tagged with holiday, italy, wedding
In the week when TheWebFellas became famous for five minutes thanks to Ryan Bates, Antonio Cangiano and Gregg & Jason at Rails Envy, I was away enjoying a relaxing holiday in the beautiful Garfagnana region of Italy. But taking a break from the fast-paced world of Rails development wasn’t the only motivation for the trip: my brother and partner in crime at TheWebFellas was getting married to his girlfriend of many years Samantha.
Resisting offers from Hello magazine (although the wedding did feature in the equally popular Barga News) the highly exclusive ceremony was held in the Barga Commune with only 22 members of immediate family and close friends in attendance. The evening was spent in the grounds of the 18th Century “I Cedri” villa in nearby Albiano where we enjoyed a huge Tuscan feast that went on well into the night. I’ve put a few of my photos up on Flickr: incredibly the official photographer managed to take about 600 photos!
For the remainder of the week I was able to relax by the pool, drive on some of the greatest roads in Europe in my trusty Micra convertible and enjoy some excellent food in various restaurants and pasticcerias: if you ever find yourself in Barga you must visit Bar Lucchesi in the new part of town for some genuine Italian atmosphere, pastries and the best cappuccino ever.
Sadly while Chris and Sam are still enjoying a leisurely trip back through Europe I’m now back in the UK, working hard and missing my swimming pool with a view!
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Posted by Chris Anderton on June 12th, 2008 @ 09:00 – 0 comments
Updated on June 12th, 2008 @ 08:59
Tagged with amazon, aws, cloud, consultancy, drdb, ec2, fuse, infiniteftp, linux, persistence, persistent storage, persistentfs, rails development, s3fs. elasticdrive, storage
As I previously posted Amazon have announced that persistent storage is on it's way for EC2. Sadly the public launch date has not yet been disclosed - it's "coming later in the year". In the meantime this leaves the question of what to do when you need data to persist?
There are a number of options, especially when you start to consider scalability and fault tolerance. I won't dare claim I've considered all the options out there - I've simply started to look at what the immediate options are for persistent storage.
Without further ado, then, on to the technology. I've found a number of choices - rather than this being a 'how to' then it is more about the solutions I have found so far and that are on my list for consideration. Hopefully, if one of the options fits my needs then I will provide a guide at a later date!
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Posted by Rob Anderton on June 9th, 2008 @ 18:00 – 22 comments
Updated on July 9th, 2008 @ 19:30
Tagged with activesupport, cache, memcached, performance, rails, rails development, ruby, win32, windows
Rails 2.1 has just been out a week and so far something that seems to have passed most people by is that it now includes much better caching capabilities, including built-in support for memcached.
Last week I reached the point with an application where I needed to cache some models in memory to get a performance boost and decided to check out the current status of plugins like cache_fu and CachedModel to make sure they’d work with Rails 2.1. It was completely by accident that I stumbled across this innocent looking commit by DHH from start of this year and realised that Rails already had everything I needed!
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Posted by Rob Anderton on June 2nd, 2008 @ 15:23 – 2 comments
Updated on June 10th, 2008 @ 12:12
Tagged with database, migration, mysql, patch, rails, rails development, ruby, schema, unsigned
Ok, so I’m starting a new Rails application, I’ve spent some time refining my database, I’ve considered storage requirements and performance when choosing the data types for my fields and now I’m ready to create some migrations to implement my design.
And then I’m reminded that, lovely though Rails migrations are, there are two things that really bug me about them: they create signed primary keys and they don’t allow me to easily create unsigned integer columns.
It’s been discussed before, dismissed as an ‘uncommon requirement’ (probably because MySQL is, as far as I know, the only database that uses unsigned integers) and, as far as I can tell, not a lot more has happened. So, while sat out in the garden, enjoying a sunny Saturday afternoon, I grabbed edge Rails from GitHub and decided I’d see if I could do something about it (how’s that for geekyness?!)
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