Archive: posts from February 2010

Passenger 2.2.10 packages for Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy 26 Feb 10

Phusion released Passenger 2.2.10 this week, fixing some bundler compatibility bugs and a file descriptor bug that could lead to “mysterious crashes”.

We’ve built our Ubuntu Hardy packages for i386 and AMD64 architectures which are now available from the Brightbox apt repository.  We’ve also upgraded our librack-ruby packages to 1.1.0.

Important announcement: Multiple users and accounts release 11 Feb 10

We recently previewed some upcoming changes to how users interact with Brightbox accounts. This feature will be going live at 12:00 GMT on Weds 17 Feb and since it represents a change in behaviour for existing customers, I’ve summarised the details below.

Maintenance period

Starting at 12:00 (midday) on Weds 17 Feb, the Brightbox control panel will be unavailable for approximately 20 minutes whilst we perform the updates. One of the updates will include a migration to create an owner user account (name and email address) for all existing active customer accounts.

Change of login from “username” to email address

Once the above maintenance period is completed, you’ll be able to login to the control panel again as normal, but now using your registered email address to login, together with the existing password.

Adding and inviting users

Once logged in you’ll be able to give other people access to your account via the “User access” link.

It’s important to note that initially, as described below, all users that you give access to your account will have full access (apart from the ability to invite other users).

Interim billing and technical roles

Currently, customers are able to specify two additional “contacts” on their account – a billing contact (receives cc’ed payment email notifications) and a technical contact (receives copies of support ticket notifications and server notifications). These “old style” contacts do not have access to the account, unless the account owner supplies them with the account username and password.

The main purpose of this work is to enable a “many to many” relationship between users and accounts i.e multiple users can access a single account and single users can have multiple accounts. We will be introducing a more extensive permissions system into the control panel in due course, but in the meantime the four “roles” that users can have will each have full access to the account but differ in their behaviour…

• Owner (one per account): Full access + add/invite new users to have access. The owner role is the person ultimately responsible for the account and can’t be assigned by users.
• Primary technical (one per account): Full access + single point of contact for Brightbox technical support to receive email notifications etc
• Technical (many per account): Full access.
• Billing (many per account): Full access + receive copies of payment email notifications

If you have any questions about these changes and how they will affect you, please drop us an email.

Full Text Indexing in Ruby with Xapian Fu 1 Feb 10

I’ve just properly announced my Ruby full text indexing library, Xapian Fu, on my personal blog.  It’s a Ruby interface to Xapian, an open source search engine Library.  Xapian Fu basically gives you a Hash interface to Xapian – so you get a persistent Hash with full text indexing built in.

For example:

  require 'xapian-fu'
  include XapianFu
  db = XapianDb.new(:dir => 'example.db', :create => true,
                    :store => [:title, :year])
  db << { :title => 'Brokeback Mountain', :year => 2005 }
  db << { :title => 'Cold Mountain', :year => 2004 }
  db << { :title => 'Yes Man', :year => 2008 }
  db.flush
  db.search("mountain").each do |match|
    puts match.values[:title]
  end

The full announcement is here, github project here and rdoc here.  Hope you find it useful!