Categories
programming tips work

Restarting mongrel_cluster with capistrano

Update April 2, 2009: This post is REALLY old. Do yourself a favor and install Passenger. I have and it’s a life saver for my Rails sites. No more crashing mongrels, or mongrels that don’t want to restart. Just sites that know they need to spin up if they’re down.

Update April 17, 2007: Bradley, the author of mongrel_cluster, was already aware of this issue and is getting ready to release a new version with some fixes for this issue. Best practice for now is to update your config files to place the pid files in /var/run/mongrel_cluster. He mentioned it way back on February 23rd. I shoulda read closer.

If you’ve been experiencing problems with restarting your mongrel cluster through Capistrano then I have two solutions that have worked for me and I’m pretty sure will for you as well.

Categories
car earth me me me tips

Save the world… Save the cheerleader

Cathy and I watched “An Inconvenient Truth” last weekend and it was really inspiring. Sure, it’s a glorified PowerPoint presentation but, with all apologies to Marshall McLuhan, in this instance the medium is not the message. So, I’ve tried to step up my looking for ways to help reduce my impact on our environment. My small steps may not make a HUGE difference but they’ll help and I can also help spread the word on my tiny little blog here. One thing that helps not just the environment but your pocketbook as well?

Stop idling the car!!

Studies have shown that idling the car for longer than 10 seconds is very wasteful. 10 SECONDS PEOPLE! That’s many stoplights out where I live, if I hit it right… wrong… umm, just as it changes to red. So, I’ve started to turn my car off when I think I can get away with it. The following link has more information and there’s a quaint, though low-budget (I love the squirrel), video that makes a good point as well.

(inspiration for this post) Homemade Hybrids – with the 10-Second Rule

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7IyOlcfoMc]

Using this 10 second rule can even save you gas. The person quoted in the story I linked to above said he got an extra 30 miles in one month. That’s an extra gallon in my car. $3.45 saved. Per tank. I go through a coupla tanks a month. That’s big bucks.

What else am I doing?

  • I’m starting to take lightrail more often into work
  • I don’t run the water in my shower waiting for it to get hot as long as I used to. I used to shave while waiting but it gets hot enough, fast enough, that I start the shower after shaving.
  • We’ve replaced standard lightbulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs in many places, though I think I know some places where we haven’t.

Little things, but things that help. You can too. So, if you find yourself idling your car, anywhere you’re going to be longer than 10 seconds?… A long stoplight… Waiting for the kids to come out of school… Tailgating… etc… Turn it off.

PS – What’s the deal with the title? If we save our world? We’ll be saving the lives of countless cheerleaders too. I, for one, am all for that! 🙂

Categories
cool note to self tips wtf?

The # is a ….

Octothorpe??!!!???!???!?

Huh. Who’d a thunk it.

Categories
note to self technology tips work

Autostarting Mongrel clusters in FreeBSD 6.x on bootup

Update April 2, 2009: This post is REALLY old. Do yourself a favor and install Passenger. I have and it’s a life saver for my Rails sites. No more crashing mongrels, or mongrels that don’t want to restart. Just sites that know they need to spin up if they’re down.

Jeez this has been a confusing day. I’ve been trying to figure out why the mongrel clusters powering my websites weren’t starting after a reboot of my servers. I’m initializing the reboots so don’t worry that my servers are unstable. 🙂 they’re not. They’re well-behaved children.

FreeBSD has the /usr/local/etc/rc.d directory for shell scripts that will autostart services for you. Kinda like the “Startup” directory in windows. Great. So I found a shell script someone had written and sent in this email on the Mongrel-users mailing list. I copied that to the rc.d directory and placed the require mongrel_cluster_enable=”YES” line into /etc/rc.conf.

reboot.

Nothing. Apache was starting. Mysql was starting. WTF.

Categories
cathy funny me me me tips wtf?

What the…

Why did I get to see this advertisement when reading my mail the other day?

Ad for a stripper pole in GMail
I’ve uploaded
a bigger version of the first image to Flickr.

Now, not that I don’t appreciate a good stripper pole. And not that I haven’t thought of having one installed. And not that I don’t have someone I’d like to see using it. And not that she hasn’t ever used one….

The pole dancers

Umm…. What was my point? I got distracted. 🙂

Categories
firefox tips

Firefox 1.5.0.7 is out

Get Firefox!The latest version of the WORLD’S BEST WEB BROWSER (IMNSHO of course) is out. 🙂

If you’re already using any of the 1.5 versions of Firefox then you can either wait for it to update in the background, unless you’ve disabled that ability or you could click the “Help” menu and then “Check for Updates”.

DO IT NOW!!! 🙂 heh

Categories
funny me me me tips

Hap Ha Birt T M

Happy Half BirthdayI JUST realized that Cathy and I forgot to celebrate my half-birthday on the first of this month. And it was my 69th no less!!!! <sigh> But wait what’s this? According to this calculator, my 1/2 birthday is August 31st. Frak that! I’ve always celebrated on September 1st and that’s what I’m gonna keep doing. You can’t stop me. JUST TRY!!! 🙂

I know I know. 1/2 birthday? What are you a freak? Well. YES I am. And PROUD of it spank you very much. Tthhhpppptttt.

Celebrate everything you can!!!

I’ll leave you with something my mom just forwarded to me that reinforces what I just said…

Categories
funny tips video wtf?

An important message about airplane safety

Chris Pirillo is the guy behind much online greatness. Lockergnome, Gada.be, Rent My Chest. When he lived in San Francisco I went to a They Might Be Giants concert with him at The Fillmore. A brush with greatness that included hanging out with Robert Scoble (pre-microsoft days I believe). Pretty great guys. Anyhoo…

Chris recently flew somewhere and he wanted everyone to know that airplane safety is NO LAUGHING MATTER. However, this video is. Sit back as Chris explains airplane safety in his own inimitable way.

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDepABf9JOg]

Categories
firefox technology tips work wtf?

STOP USING INTERNET EXPLORER

For those of you still using Internet Explorer… [smack upside the head] WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU THINKING? STOP IT. and if the abundance of capital letters in those last two sentences don’t turn you around, perhaps the article I link to below will be enough.

Browser bugs, a year-around bite | CNET News.com

You should at LEAST evaluate your options. Firefox, Opera, Safari… The Big 3.

People. Just Do It!!! Your karma will be better for it. Make me happy. Really, come on. You don’t want to make me come to your house and put a world of hurt on your little dog Toto too.

Categories
technology tips work wtf?

SUPER helpful windows tip

Had an issue with my work computer the other day. For some strange reason, some system file was corrupted or deleted and the computer stopped displaying dates. Anywhere a date was supposed to be displayed, windows would either just not display anything or the text would be certain non-date characters (letters, symbols, etc.)

Got worried that I might have to reinstall windows. NOT something I was looking forward to doing since I’d probably lose personal settings, program information, etc. Back in the old days this probably would have been my only recourse. But windows has grown up and gotten “better”. It certainly has some GREAT new diagnostic utilities. My new favorite is the System File Checker (SFC).

From the “Help and Support Center” at microsoft.com …

System File Checker gives an administrator the ability to scan all protected files to verify their versions. If System File Checker discovers that a protected file has been overwritten, it retrieves the correct version of the file from the cache folder (%Systemroot%\System32\Dllcache) or the Windows installation source files, and then replaces the incorrect file.

To the layman, that means that it fixes corrupted or missing files that were part of the original windows installation. Since my computer ran just fine but just didn’t display date information, I figured a reinstall would be overkill. One strange thing was that even without date information being DISPLAYED, apparently date information was still associated with the file because the files would still be sorted correctly when I was in Windows Explorer, using “Details” view, and sorting by “Date Modified”. It HAD to be a corrupt file somewhere. Something not “mission critical”.

I started to research avenues of attack (yeah, my stories ramble). Links to helpful websites are at the end of this post. Reading articles on these websites didn’t exactly help toooooo much (though they’re still VERY helpful websites). Searching Google can be a tricky issue at times since choosing the right collection of words to search for is important. And apparently the problem with my computer isn’t all that common. A GOOD thing when you think about it, but it DOES make it difficult to find a solution when you’re staring at the problem on your own computer. I posted a couple of help queries on the Microsoft discussion forums which are basically web-based USENET gateways. This elicited a few semi-helpful responses but finally someone pointed out that before I reinstall, I should put my original Windows XP cd in my CD/DVD drive, open a command window and run “sfc /scannow” sans quotes.

This I did.

It opened a windows application that started scanning my system. I’d hear my CD spinning at times too. The progress bar kept growing and so I left my computer alone to think about what it’d done. 🙂 When it finished it didn’t say anything. It just closed the program. Since no errors had popped up I assumed that everything had gone swimmingly (where did that phrase come from? oh, ok). I rebooted my computer and despite a few MINOR hiccups, my computer was healthy again.

SFC had saved the day!!!!

My programs were fine. Settings where retained. Desktop was fine. and BEST OF ALL. My computer was displaying dates again. <whew> I can be productive again. Guess this means I have to go back to work. 🙂

Almost makes me want to switch to the Mac platform. I’ve enjoyed “toy”ing with the Mac Mini at home. And the Unix platform is quite enticing. Cathy will be soooooo pleased. If only it wasn’t a so much more expensive and restrictive hardware platform. Perhaps with the change to the Intel processor, things will get “better”.

Links I found useful