I think I first heard the term “Rack-app” when I started using Heroku to host a couple of projects. I didn’t know an awful lot about Rack but I did know that it helped a great deal when it came to getting my Rails and Sinatra apps off my workstation and onto the web.
Tonight I [...]
Last year I started researching how CouchDB could be used for the BodyGuard web-app QA platform. Unfortunately I had to put my tinkerings to one side when some extra freelance work came in; contracting during the day and freelancing in the evenings quickly put an end to any spare time and my fitness efforts took [...]
Just a quick reminder to myself on how I installed RMagick on a Debian 5.0.4 “lenny” VPS. All commands to be run as root.
Build ImageMagick from source
curl -O ftp://ftp.imagemagick.org/pub/ImageMagick/ImageMagick.tar.gz
tar xvzf ImageMagick.tar.gz -C /usr/src/
cd /usr/src/ImageMagick-6.6.6-6/
./configure
make
make install
Install the RMagick Gem
gem install rmagick
Bingo!
As an interesting aside, ImageMagick handles a lot of image formats via delegate libraries. I previously [...]
Background
A few months ago I was tasked with migrating and maintaining a bunch of legacy Rails apps and a couple of them were misbehaving. Requests were hanging which was tying-up the front-end Apache child processes and resulting in all the web-apps on the server becoming unresponsive
At the time I didn’t know what was causing the [...]
Last year I created a nano-app which attempted to answer the question, is it raining in Belfast?
I was never completely pleased with it but the objective was to get something done and get it done fast, which was achieved.
This weekend I’ve been tinkering with another project and hit a bit of a stumbling block getting [...]
Some time ago DW and myself had an enthusiastic conversation about logging various aspects of our electronic lives: emails sent and received, RSS feeds read, incoming and outgoing phone calls, the list goes on.
At that time I’d already started tinkering with apps to track my efforts in the gym and changes in my bodyweight, I’ve [...]
The past while I’ve been busy providing technical consultancy to BT and haven’t had much drive to work on anything on my own time. The itch has returned the past couple of weeks though so I thought I’d see what I’ve been missing in the Rails world and in what better way than getting a [...]
I’ve just released the latest iteration of hometi.me, a little nano-app I’ve mentioned before.
Deliberate Practice
It’s only a trivial app but I’ve a bit of free time before the start of a contract so I thought it would be good practice to redevelop it, a task I’d been ignoring for a long time.
Goodbye CakePHP, Hello Sinatra
The [...]
I recently released the latest entry in my series of nano-apps.
As with my previous efforts, istrending.com serves serves no real purpose other than as an act of deliberate practice: going through the process of coming up with an idea, writing code, registering domain names, setting up Cron jobs and configuring deployment systems to get it [...]
At the moment I’m in between paid work and have been using my time to generally enjoy life but to also improve my skills. I’m all about the skills.
As an act of deliberate practice to hone my skills with web-application development and to deepen my understanding of the Rails framework I’ve been adding to my [...]