Archive: posts from March 2009

Scotland on Rails Party, Friday evening 25 Mar 09

If you’re heading up to Edinburgh for Scotland on Rails 2009, you’ll be pleased to know that we’ve teamed up with the guys at Unboxed Consulting to provide free drinks and pizza for the Scotland on Rails party on Friday evening at Fingers Piano Bar in Edinburgh. It’s pretty much a last-minute addition to the programme, but I do think it’s important to have some sort of “official” party/social where everyone is invited. I’ve been to numerous tech events which have overlooked this, leaving those who have come on their own or who aren’t buddies with the elite to be left out.

Each SoR attendee will get a voucher for a free beer, glass of wine or soft drink and some pizza, so bring yours along and hand it to the bar staff.

When?
Friday 27th March @ 10pm (straight after lightning talks)

Where?
Fingers Piano Bar, 61 Frederick Street, Edinburgh EH2 1LH (map)

See you there!

Phusion Passenger 2.1.2 packages for Ubuntu 14 Mar 09

Following Friday’s release of Passenger 2.1.2 by the Phusion folks, we’ve updated our Ubuntu packages.  We’ve been testing version 2.1.1 packages for a little while now and they’ve been very stable, supporting both Rails 2.3 and older apps that still depend on Rack 0.4 (such as older Sinatra apps).

The details are on the usual page on our wiki.  If you have any problems or need any help, try our forums.

The new packages depend on new versions of the Ruby rack libraries (not the gem), but this is provided in our repository too and will be automatically installed. You need to install the fastthread gem yourself though.  Our repository provides a few other useful Hardy packages too.

We are only testing our packages against Ubuntu Hardy right now, but they should install and run fine on newer versions of Ubuntu too.

Remember, for maximum memory savings (and speed improvements) try our Ruby Enterprise Edition packages for Ubuntu Hardy (currently only 32bit packages available).

Free software and Brightbox 9 Mar 09

At Brightbox we like free and open source software.

Every Brightbox runs Ubuntu, which is an operating system built on top of the GPL Linux kernel. Our infrastructure is built upon Xen, Apache, Nginx, MySQL, Nagios and many other open source software projects; not least of which are Ruby and Rails themselves.

But whilst we benefit from this software, without contribution, free software is nothing, so we contribute anything we can. The most obvious of these are the Brightbox deployment gem and its associated server-side tools. These are extensions to Capistrano that help you get your application onto your Brightbox as quickly and easily as possible.

We also have our apt repository where we repackage a number of free software projects to make configuring your Brightbox as easy as possible. More details on the repository are available on the wiki, but the most notable are our Passenger and Ruby Enterprise Edition packages.

However, nowadays, the real place for sharing your code is on Github. We have a number of projects available there, ranging from the tiny to the large.

These include:

• Flashing rails

  A rails plugin that makes it simple to display flash messages in your views in a consistent manner.

• Rujitsu

  A simple gem that collects together a number of convenience methods and various helpers.

• RSpec-rails extensions

  A gem that tidies up specifying your code with RSpec-Rails.

• Object Factory

  Brightbox’s very own answer to Factory Girl or Machinist that lets you build your test data with minimal configuration and no fixtures.

• Altered Beast and Redmine.

  We have taken our own forks of two popular Rails applications. David’s version of Altered Beast handles the Brightbox forums and Redmine handles our internal bug tracking and task lists.

• Warren and Bigwig

  Last, but by no means least, we have Warren and Bigwig. These are our wrappers to AMQP and RabbitMQ.

  We use RabbitMQ internally to deliver messages across our various infrastructure systems and needed a simple way to interface our ruby code to Rabbit (which is implemented in Erlang).

  This led to Warren, our wrapper over the AMQP protocol that make it simple to post messages onto the queue.

  In order to receive and act on those messages, we also built Bigwig (no prizes for spotting the rabbit references there), which takes those messages and responds. Bigwig matches each incoming message against a set of plugins, each plugin being small and focused on a particular task. Unrecognised messages are discarded, ensuring that rogue commands can’t wreak havoc upon our network.
  UPDATE: It turns out that Bigwig isn’t quite ready yet, as a big chunk has been rewritten. We’ll get it out there as soon as we can.

As these are all free software projects, please take a look inside and poke around. Any suggestions, improvements, patches or forks will be gratefully received. Also, stay tuned for an announcement on a major project we are looking to start in the next couple of weeks.

Update 2: We’ve also put the code for Isitruby19.com onto Github, under an MIT licence. Please go to the forum if you have any questions.

Rails Business UK Meetup in London 2 Mar 09

This Wednesday (4th March), Rahoul and myself will be travelling down to the Big Smoke for the inaugural Rails Business Meetup at the Benugo Bar at BFI Southbank.

Afterwards, we’ll be out and about in London for a few hours so if any customers, potential customers or random rubyists fancy a coffee or a beer on us, drop me a mail at jeremy@brightbox.co.uk