The horrible state of ruby in a production environment.

As a long time perl guy I was attracted by ruby.  It’s very perl like method chaining is extremely useful and intuitive.  I like ruby, but the state of  ruby applications in a production environment is horrible.  There are plenty of really good tools out there for ruby developers.  Vagrant, sahara, bundler, capistrano, etc the list goes on.  RVM and rbenv are two really good alternatives for maintaining your development environment in a sane manner.  We are in the stone ages when it comes time to go to production.  Distro support for ruby is shaky at best.  Most places are still running centos/rhel5 which leaves them with ruby 1.8.5 or if lucky ruby 1.8.7.  If you’ve upgraded to a rhel6-ish you’re fortunate enough to get wait… ruby 1.8.7.  I’m not as familiar with debian but I’m fairly certain it’s 1.8.  Ubuntu has an available 1.9.1 package but that’s officially a beta version, plus most indications is that it’s extremely buggy.  As of writing ruby is on 1.9.3.  When it comes to rubygems the situation is even worse.  Most ‘best practices’ recommend managing everything with gems.  This introduces a world of pain especially when you start installing things that are based on ruby but provide shell level commands (rackup, unicorn, etc).  Now you’ve got two package managers trying to determine the state of a system, but one of them only knows about one part of it.  It’s a mess.

puppet and vim

I’ve been using vi/vim for nearly my entire professional life, and most of my computer life as well. I gave emacs an honest try for a couple of days a few years ago but just couldn’t grok the shortcuts and make it feel natural. Recently I overhauled my setup on my laptop and in specific tuned to to what I generally spend a lot of development time on… puppet.

Photonecromany

I’ve been interested in photography at various levels for some time.  I dabbled a bit in college with 35mm film but never really got into it, mainly due to cost.  Without access to your own darkroom developing film can be an expensive proposition.

I’ve been doing a lot of research about dSLR’s lately in prep to buy myself a dSLR.  I figured I’d detail my thoughts from a relative newbie’s perspective.  First a little bit on my parameters and intentions.

My budget is roughly $1000, I’m looking for a reasonable advanced camera that I can use as a learning tool.  The goal is to learn more about the technology of photography (hopefully dragging the art out of me kicking and screaming) as well as taking better pictures.  I’ll mostly be shooting sporting event type activities, (disc golf, kids in the backyard, etc) family stuff, but I do want to do a little bit of artistic photography.  Several of the new cameras have HD video as a feature.  While this isn’t real important to me, it’s a fun thing to play with.

Password Manager for iPhone

I’m on the hunt for a good password manager for the iPhone. But there’s a slight catch. I’m looking for something that works with fedora. I’d like to be able to sync it locally as well. There seem to be couple of things that will sync “to the cloud” but that seems to be a horrible idea for passwords.

Anyone have suggestions?

Journey into sync

I’m fairly picky when it comes to how I manage my personal data.  I like a fair amount of separation between things but I want everthing accessible.  Quite a while ago I moved my domain (for email, etc) over to google apps.  I can’t really understand why anyone with less than 3 or 4 thousand users would run their own mail servers, but that is a post for another day.  Since I’ve been a user of google apps for a while I’ve been looking for a good way to manage my calendars.  I’ve never been totally happy with GoogleCalendar especially when compared with iCal.  I’ve used both spanning sync as well as busy sync, but I never got enough use out of them to warrant paying for them.  Throw in the addition of my iphone and I just wasn’t happy with how things were setup.

RSS Aggregators

I had never been much into RSS (and specificially aggregators) until I got an iphone.  Now it’s the primary way I read news.  So this holiday I spent some time redoing all my feeds, consolidating, cleaning up, etc.  I was using netnewswire on my iphone with newsgator.com since it was free and pretty good.  But I got to the point where it just wasn’t cutting it anymore.  So I consolidated everything over to Google Reader and bought Bylines for the iphone, which has full API support of Google Reader.  So far it’s rocked.  I’ve also added a widget to the blog here that’ll show links that I mark in google reader.  This is nice because there are a lot of links I like to share but don’t deserve a post of their own.