VPS-like Virtualization sollution for Rails Servers: OpenVZ

This article shows how to create multiple VPS-es using OpenVZ and how to configure those VPS-es as a Rails prod/testing server.

It is an updated and improved version of http://wiki.openvz.org/Quick_installation

Why OpenVZ?

+ low overhead, good performace (claiming only 3% penalty)

+ soft memory allocation

+ free

+ relatively easy to install/manage

- requires both host and to guest OS be  Linux

- no GUI on guest machines

Rails IDEs issues: change Java interpretor to Sun Java 6 JRE

Sometimes,the Rails (mostly written in Java, like RadRails, RubyMine, 3rd Rail, or Netbeans for Ruby) have some problems running with the default Ubuntu open source java interpretors. You may check the installed java version with:

java -version

Complete Ubuntu install for a Ruby on Rails developer (utils, rails, ff addons)

This is a guide on creating a full-featured Ubuntu dev box for RoR. It assumes that you have already installed the latest version of Ubuntu.

Utils

sudo apt-get install build-essential
 

Git push error (fatal: protocol error: expected sha/ref, got’)

Problem: forked a project from Git, made some changes, wanted to push the changes. Got this error:

git push
fatal: protocol error: expected sha/ref, got ‘
*********’

You can’t push to git://github.com/user/repo.git
Use git@github.com:user/repo.git

Rails Startup App – Basecamp (with Rails 2.3)

A lot of GitHub projects are dedicated to creating a Rails Start-up application that should have the most used functionalities in any web application, like:

• user authentication
• profile management
• user roles
• users management
• integration with other authentication systems (OpenID, FacebookConnect, etc)

Some of the most well known are listed below:

Recover / Export Tomboy Notes

For writing a short ToDo list, taking some notes from a conference or saving an interesting shell command, an Ubuntu user needs a simple sticky notes desktop widget. Tomboy Notes is the easyest to use but in the same time very well featured, and it is bundled in Gnome Desktop.

Ruby on Rails interview questions – part 2

Continuing the “RoR interview questions” sequel(part one here) , these are some general Rails concepts and technologies questions. Enjoy .

Design Patterns: Ruby and Ruby on Rails

I am creating a new page on my blog, regarding Ruby and Ruby on Rails Design Patterns links.

Regarding Ruby Design patterns, there are (in my opinion) 2 major resources: The “Ruby Design Patterns” book of Russ Olsen and the Ruby Best Practices Blog. The Design page is about the rest of them .

A first link: a slideshow regarding common design patterns (Observer, Decorator, Factory, Command) implemented both in Java and Ruby. Enjoy.

Windows live CD

When something goes wrong in Windows (I can’t boot, not even in safe mode), and I really really need that data, the first thing that crosses my mind is to use a Ubuntu Live CD. However, if Win was not shut down correctly, the ntfs partition can not be mounted.

Recovery disks are plenty on the internet. They all come bundled with all kinds of little programs to help you debug/recover your data. What if such a recovery disk would give you a standard win(explorer) inteface, with network access, disk utils, debugging tools? A trully Win Live CD.

Database UML tool for MySQL – automatic UML schema from DB

MySQL has a UML tool that also can reverse engineer the existing tables.
It is free (of course ) and you can grab it from here: http://dev.mysql.com/workbench/