Archive: posts from March 2008

Euruko 2008 Ruby Conference, Prague 28 Mar 08

John and I are currently in Prague for the Euruko 2008 Ruby Conference.

It looks to be a busy but fun weekend – Brightbox is sponsoring the event, providing drinks for the party at La Fabrika on Saturday evening plus we’re doing a special discount exclusively for Euruko attendees.

If you’re here too, do come and say hello.

UPDATE (2 Apr 2008): Had a great time, and met lots of cool people. Check out the photos on Flickr. Big thanks to Karel Minařík and his team for all their hard work in organising such a great event.

Ruby 1.8.6 and ImageMagick 6.3 for Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper 20 Mar 08

We’ve backported some packages useful for Ruby on Rails deployment to the long term support Ubuntu Dapper distro.  They’ve been available for a while but it only just ocurred to us this might be useful to others!

Dapper has Ruby 1.8.4 (though labelled as 1.8.2 in the package list) and ImageMagick 6.2.  Ruby 1.8.4 has some known problems that are fixed in 1.8.6 and the rmagick gem recently updated to version 2, reportedly fixing the memory leaks, but it requires ImageMagick 6.3.

We backported Ruby 1.8.6 p111 and ImageMagick 6.3 from the latest development version of Ubuntu (Hardy Heron) to Dapper.  They’ve been in use on a few boxes and no problems so far.  Feel free to make use of them.  We’ll be backporting any security updates as they come.

General details of the repository are here, with specific information about Ruby 1.8.6 and ImageMagick 6.3 on their own pages.

Ubuntu Hardy Heron is due out in the next few month, which brings a lot of this stuff with it.  Some of you might have the luxury of being able to upgrade to it, but some may need to stick with Dapper for a while – hopefully these packages will help you out.

Brightbox at Barcamp Manchester UK 1 Mar 08

Jeremy and I went to Barcamp Manchester last Saturday – our photos are on Flickr as usual.  It turned out to be six months to the day since we went live with Brightbox too!

We ran a competition on the day: people had to tell us what they’d do with a Brightbox virtual machine and the best suggestion (as judged by us) kwould win a years hosting on one.  Throughout the day people wrote their ideas on post-it notes and we sifted through them at the end.

Here are some of the suggestions:

• A service to archive scans of old maps for Open Street Map
• Twitter wall app – @replies aggregated in the style of facebook’s wall-to-wall messages
• Start a rails hosting company
• Learn PHP
• Hosting for Deb
• Slowly ticking countdown timer to cause paranoia
• App to mix samples from fiction books to make new fiction
• Run a free hosting competition
• Flame retardant killer robots
• “Anything! They’re so flexible and scalable the possibilities are endless! We love Brightbox!”
• “Dye your hair orange”

The winner was Chris Maltby, who said he’d use it to host a web-based multiplayer turn-based strategy game. This made our geeky senses tingle.

Rob Lee also suggested we open source our management tools – which we already do! I guess we just don’t make a big enough deal about it. Expect to see us making a bigger deal about it soon.