Lunch Shoppe

fork is not implemented yet in JRuby due to a couple of factors having to do with how it was implemented in Java. However, Charles Nutter came up with a solution using ffi. However, it is not in the mainline yet which is sort of annoying since so much task based software seems to use it. Also, I don't want to start using MRI again on my server box.

Edit:

This should enable fork. But it hasn't been working well from what I have been using it for.

 jruby -J-Djruby.fork.enabled=true filename.rb # (EXPERIMENTAL, maybe dangerous) Enable fork(2) on platforms that support it. 

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I moved to Phusion Passenger on traytwo. It looks like deploying rails apps will be a whole lot easier. No longer do I need to worry about maintaining mongrel ports and what not. A simple addition of a vhost file and a restart of apache to launch an new app is all that is needed. Also, apparently it is a whole lot faster than Mongrel so we'll see if that is true.

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I am working on a website where I am outsourcing key elements having to do with handling RSS feeds to the Google AJAX Feed API. The outsourcing of this component is great for a several reasons. First, I don't have to worry about caching and updating the RSS feeds, that is handled by Google. Second, it allows me to focus more on the major components of the site leaving the mundane tasks of updating rss feeds to a company that is actually competent at it. This move to a component architecture will probably be the way the web will move especially with OpenID and OAuth making such headwinds. This is economical since sites can specialize allowing the more mundance components that take up resources to be outsourced.

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I've been content with Mercurial as it's fast and lets you do development and for the most part keeps out of your way. It has few dependences and is a great DVCS. However, the problem I am finding with Mercurial and one of the great benefit's of DVCS is branching and Mercurial, I think, gets its branching legacy from CVS/Subversion. To branch in Mercurial you basically clone the repository into a new repository and work in the new repository. For example, say you have repository A. Branching it involves running cloning A into B. You make your changes in B and merge them back into A when you are ready. This works but it sucks especially for Rails development which I do. The way one usually does Rails development is you have a checkout of a repo and you run a development server and work on those changes. However, when you want to branch in Mercurial you have to go to the new directory and start a new server instance and develop, merge, stop the server, start new server, etc. For some of you this may be fine, but for me it is a pain in the ass! This is one of the things I like about git all the branches are within the same directory tree so you don't need to do all those change directories. You can basically branch within the same tree and work with that. No need to clone all these repos to different directories. Now the things I dislike about git is that it's written in C! When I went to install it on Debian it had n+1 different packages it had to install! Though, I am biased toward scripting languages I personally think it would have been easier to port the app in the long run. However, another feature that I love about git is git-svn. It make branched development so easy as the branches are local so best of both worlds. This is especially since I work with a lot of subversion code bases. If I need to make different patches it makes it simpler to do so, especially when requirements change unexpectedly and you want to start a new branch without checking out the trunk again. So I'm going to play with git for a bit longer, but overall for now I like it. The documentation has clearly improved since I last looked at it.

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I've long been a slave to Apache. I mean it's a great server, but it is just so bloated. However, lately I've been noticing that I only really use my server for Rails and static file hosting both of which do not need a full blown Apache install. This is especially true since I have yet to get Rails and Apache to play nice. So I have started using a different solution which basically is Perlbal and Mongrel. Perlbal is a reverse proxy and simple web server written by the guy who did LiveJournal. So far it is working well for what I am using it for and things seem to be running a lot faster. A cool feature of Perlbal is it can dynamically add or remove nodes. So for example you can use EC2 to dynamically start instances as loads increase and just forward requests to those EC2 instances from Perlbal. Thought this might not work well with SSL, for most insecure connections it works absolutely fine. Update: I have stopped using the built in webserver and have moved to using lighttpd. I assume I just need a full blown web server for somethings which just can't be handled by Perlbal so I have added it.

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I landed a new gig as a Web Developer for i5labs and fynspire run the by Jason Wong and Scott Thorpe respectively. It is a refreshing change and I get to play with Ruby on Rails as a full time gig. It is nice to also be able to work in San Francisco and right next to Union Square nonetheless.

Besides that I am working on a startup with a couple of friends. Our code is coming along and the design is nice. I'll write more as we come closer to launch.

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Today I created an Elastic Computing Cloud image on Ubuntu Feisty and wanted to share some of the oddities, weirdness  and coolness that I have experienced along this path of being a guy who created an AMI and made it actually run on EC2. Amazon has been great lately coming out with such nifty technologies that help startups and the little guy such as Simple Storage Service, Elastic Computing Cloud and Simple Queue Service. The recently released Amazon Flexible Payments Service also seems like a great competitor to Paypal, but I wish it had a non-cobranded version. However, these other services are not the story, but EC2 is. EC2 is a virtualization technology based on Xen provided by Amazon where you pay per instance hour. That is you pay per the hour that the instance is running. It is great for sites that need to add servers on the fly as load is added. Although it is not cheap as it runs about $70 dollars a month it does provide decent specs for the hardware. What  I realized is that EC2 is more like running a system using a LiveCD then an actual system install. What does this mean? It means that storage is temporary and as soon as the instance is shut down all data is lost. However, if you reboot the instance the files seem to stay alive. Also most importantly the root filesystem gets very little space. That means you have to work with /dev/sda2 which is usually mounted to /mnt. You are provided with 150gb of space on sda2. I ran into this snafu when I was trying to configure MySQL. Since MySQL uses /var/lib/mysql (on Ubuntu) to store the logfiles I kept on getting "Storage out of space" errors. To solve this I wrote a startup script that moves the mysql files to /mnt. Uploading a new image was relatively simple, however, I got annoyed that I had to type out the Private Key and Public Key on the command line. Bundling the image itself was relatively straightforward as it was just converting a loopback device. Creating a Ubuntu image was relatively straightforward especially with these directions and debootstrap taking care of the hard part. Remember to install libc6-xen if you are creating a Linux image. I wish Amazon would be less rpm specific and provide debs for the bundling apps. However, alien was great and got me through the process of installing the files. Overall, I must say if you are really into creating your own images/distribution that you want to use to run various specific services then EC2 is amazingly efficient at it. Though I wish they would provide state if you want to run a bunch of images to do processing such as video transcoding, Hadoop clusters or mass indexing then Amazon is a gift from the web gods. Plus I recommend everyone create an image and upload it. I learned quite a bit in the process.

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This is the path I take to get something into a SCM.

1. I work on project.
2. I don't want to screw up the project I have been working on so I start organizing files in a directory.
3. I put the directory under version control basically "hg init".
4. I add the files that I want under version control.
5. I check in.
6. I pull to another computer as a backup.
7. I regularly push to the backup after doing a bunch of changes.

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