Michael

A software developer and network engineer for over 25 years. Currently developing Microsoft Windows desktop applications with Delphi and web services with Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Ramaze and Javascript. Web services are hosted on CentOS and Ubuntu servers under either Xen or VMWare powered via Apache, passenger, mysql and postgresql.

Ramaze vs. Padrino Benchmarks

Posted by Michael on May 1, 2010 in General

I have been developing all of my web-based projects in Ramaze since January 2009 when I switched from Rails to Ramaze. At that time, I did some benchmark comparisons. The other day, I heard about Padrino, the micro-framework for Sinatra, which is comparable to the Ramaze micro-framework for Innate. What caught my [...]

A comparison JRuby vs. Ruby MRI with Sequel

Posted by Michael on April 25, 2010 in General

For the most part, I stick with Apache 2, Phusion Passenger, and Ruby MRI as my deployment stack. Even so, I regularly foray into other territories to see what’s going on in the wide world of Ruby. This weekend, I turned my eyes to JRuby again for the first time in almost 18 [...]

Getting Ruby to talk to MSDE

Posted by Michael on April 9, 2010 in Configuration, General, Ruby Language, SQL, Setups

Getting Ruby to talk to Microsoft SQL Server 2005 is one thing. Getting Ruby to talk to Microsoft SQL Server Developer Edition 2000, has one twist that threw me off for hours. Here, I’ll show you how to do and hopefully save you lots of frustration and brain damage from banging your head [...]

Implementing Ruby jobs in the background

Posted by Michael on November 6, 2009 in Programming, Ruby Language

I needed a way to kick off a background job that was triggered by an end-user on my Ramaze-backed website and could run for almost two hours! This article brings together all the elements to get the job done.
Preamble (a.k.a. Ramblings)
I can hear you exclaiming, “Two hours!? Are you nuts? You really [...]

What makes a top award candidate, anyhow?

Posted by Michael on August 1, 2009 in General, Ruby Language

In our local Linux user group mailing list, one of the participant asked the group for recommendations for open source software projects that should be considered for a prominent publication’s top 100 awards. The ensuing discussion got me to wondering: What is the purpose behind doing the awards? Most of what I [...]

Apache 2.2 and Active Directory and Group restrictions

Posted by Michael on July 22, 2009 in Configuration, Servers, Setups, Systems

I was really struggling with getting Apache and Active Directory talking and restricting access (authorizing) only a sub-set of users that belonged to a particular group. Here, I show you how I solved the problem.

The Stage
I am setting up a Ubuntu server with Apache 2.2 and authenticating users against a Windows 2003 Server’s Active [...]

macports is not darwinports

Posted by Michael on June 23, 2009 in Macs, Setups, Systems

For those of you who don’t keep a close eye on the macports system that provides you with convenient builds of popular open source software, let me put you on guard: macports supplanted darwinports a few years back to avoid continued confusion over the name.
I was having a good bit of trouble getting ports [...]

One ActiveRecord Model Acting as a List and Tree

Posted by Michael on April 30, 2009 in Programming, Ruby Language

Occasionally, Rails can appear to make your life extremely easy while silently throwing you a curve-ball. I needed a model that required a hierarchy while also preserving order of the records. Although fairly straightforward to set up and start immediately using, there are a couple of “gotchas” to watch out for and this [...]

Rails vs. Ramaze Performance Comparison

Posted by Michael on February 19, 2009 in General, SQL, Servers, Systems

One of my biggest concerns of late is that my “more than just a little trivial” Rails projects seem to find their way straight into the heavyweight category in no time at all. While I am quite hopeful that Merb being the 3.0 version of Rails will resolve many of the issues I face [...]

Install Passenger on Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10

Posted by Michael on February 14, 2009 in Configuration, Setups

Phusion Passenger is one of the easiest Rails and Rack environments to set up and configure with Apache2. With my bootstrapping scripts, the ability to establish a Virtual machine image and have a working Rails application on it in minutes is a reality. Here is how I do it.
Bootstrap Passenger
Begin by Bootstrapping Ubuntu. [...]

Next Page