Kangaroo Court {concept47 blog}

Even Bill Gates knows that Microsoft makes crap software…

This might be old hat to some of you, but this was pure gold for me.
Without further ado, go read this rant that Bill Gates sent to members of his team about his painful experience in trying to download and install Moviemaker.

Welcome to my world Bill.

Add comment June 26th, 2008

The haters crawl out of the woodwork on mod_rails project

There has never been a statue erected to honor a critic.
- Ziglar, Zig

I couldn’t believe that someone would have the gall to actually go on record with grouses as trite as these against the creators of mod_rails … but they did

Basically here are their complaints about Phusion Passenger/mod_rails

- Their product has ‘Enterprise’ in the title
- They shouldn’t be up to version 2.0 already (yes … they actually said that)
- They release FREE products ‘late’ (late being an excruciating 2 weeks)
- They’d like for them them to be more ‘modest’ (like they haven’t heard of DHH)
- The marketing seems too slick and something ‘fishy’ is going on because they’re trying to make money with an Enterprise ready version of Passenger/mod_rails?!?!
- The ‘rails community’ will not embrace mod_rails because of these laughable quibbles … I guess these guys don’t count as part of the ‘rails community’ right?

ridiculous.

PS: Note that the original ‘rant’ appeared on Ruby flow, where it was rightly eviscerated

Add comment June 16th, 2008

mod rails Passenger 2.0 RC2 released … even more stable?

The kickass developers over at Phusion have released an update to Phusion passenger (or as I prefer to call it … Apache mod rails).

You can see the list of original improvements here

It seems that this particular problem with mod-rails hanging after a few hours and taking down apache with it (I experienced this in an apache deployment that I tried personally … and its a bit scary) was part of the motivation behind the original mod_rails/Passenger Release Candidate.

Updating mod_rails to to 2.0 made all my problems go away (mod_rails also had some trouble interacting with the soap4r plugin), but this update has even more fixes.

I have a site running on mod_rails that was formerly served up using 3 mongrels in a cluster and it runs a bit faster than before, but deployment and application management is obviously MUCH less of a headache.

These guys are doing something for Ruby on Rails, that I don’t think many understand the implication of, but cannot be overstated. Big cheers to the guys at Phusion!

Add comment June 16th, 2008

Ruby on Rails gotcha with empty? vs nil?

Just got bitten by this one in Ruby on Rails.
If you use empty? to check a hash slice that doesn’t exist you get an error, instead of the behavior of nil? which simply  reports that it is actually nil …


irb(main):004:0> test = {}
=> {}
irb(main):005:0> test = {'test' => '1'}
=> {"test"=>"1"}
irb(main):006:0> test
=> {"test"=>"1"}
irb(main):007:0> test.empty?
=> false
irb(main):008:0> test[test]
=> nil
irb(main):009:0> test['test']
=> “1″
irb(main):010:0> test['test'].empty?
=> false
irb(main):011:0> test['test'].nil?
=> false
irb(main):012:0> test['testx'].nil?
=> true
irb(main):013:0> test['testx'].empty?
NoMethodError: undefined method `empty?’ for nil:NilClass
from (irb):13
irb(main):014:0>


Add comment June 16th, 2008

Very nice Google Webmaster tool tutorial

Very good Google Webmaster Tools intro for developers and other not-SEO-savvy folks out there.

Add comment June 16th, 2008

(98)Address already in use: make_sock: could not bind to address 0.0.0.0:443

I ran into this problem after I installed mod-rails on a cent OS server.

To get my changes to take … I kept running

httpd -k graceful

and it kept working until, all of a sudden, it didn’t.

This was the error I got

[XXXX@XXXXXXXXX]# httpd -k graceful
httpd not running, trying to start
(98)Address already in use: make_sock: could not bind to address 0.0.0.0:443
no listening sockets available, shutting down
unable to open logs

argh!

Then I found this marvellous blog posting on how to fix the “Address already in use: make_sock: could not bind to address - Apache - HTTPD Error”

Here is what I did. (click to enlarge)

worked like a charm too.

Add comment June 9th, 2008

Fix for IE6 problem with select drop downs ignoring z-index with Jquery

I just ran into this bug for the first time today.

In it, a select box appears through an element with you’ve positioned over it using a z-index.

As an example take a look at this screenshot

This is a pesky problem in IE6 that has no simple solution.

So imagine my joy when I stumbled on this blog post linking to a jquery solution for the IE6 select box z-index bug!

You just download the bgiframe jquery plugin, and with a simple command apply the iframe fix to every element that you want to appear over select boxes. For me the code was this simple snippet

$(’.tool_tip span’).bgiframe();

That was it … I refreshed the page and voila!

enjoy.

Add comment June 8th, 2008