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Post-Install Ruby on Rails with Passenger on Media Temple (dv) 3.5

Brian — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 05:32:24 +0000

So Greg Goodwin has a very good post on installing Ruby on Rails with Passenger on a Media Temple dedicated virtual server. However, there were some post-install gotchas I ran into. I don’t recall running into these problems before. Perhaps I did and solved them last time, but did not write the solutions down. Well now I’m going to.

The mysql gem will error out if you use:

gem install mysql

You need to use:

gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/usr/lib/mysql/mysql_config



If you use capistrano, the apache user needs write access to the folders under shared.  chown -R FTPUSER:psaserv shared should do the trick

For setting up actionmailer, make sure delivery_method is set to :sendmail.


Some gems/plugins have external dependencies and may fail silently, for example Paperclip which depends on ImageMagick.  yum install ImageMagick will fix that.  Is there a way to check for these sort of dependencies similar to config.gem?



Tally Ho! Olympic Medal Rankings Should Be Weighted
Brian — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 04:15:41 +0000
The Olympics are over.  However during, it annoyed me how the media outlets ranked the medal totals either counting total medals or counting total golds.  Neither option accounts for the relative values of the medals.  The former treats all medals as equal, whereas the former disregards the value of the other two medal colors.  As others have proposed, a weighted medal count makes the most sense, the simplest being gold = 3, silver = 2, and bronze = 1.  With that the top five rankings are as follows:



Country
Gold
Silver
Bronze
Weighted Total


CHN
51
21
28
223


USA
36
38
36
220


RUS
23
21
28
139


GBR
19
13
15
98


AUS
14
15
17
89


It’s interesting to note how close China and the USA match up.  



18–1
Brian — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 06:05:20 +0000
Grats to the Giants.  Grats to Eli.  I’m glad to see you’ve come into your own.  Too bad MVP is an individual award since the NY defensive line kicked ass.  Belichick, you’re an ass.  You snubbed Peyton and you ignored Eli and left early.  Learn not to be a sore loser.  Long live the 72 Dolphin’s perfect season.  I miss you Shula.  



Calendar Casting Call
Brian — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 02:51:24 +0000
Did you restyle your embedded Google Calendar using MyGoogleCal?  Maybe you’ve restyled Google Calendar Gadget by following my instructions to modify the XML configuration?  Do you want to show off how you integrated your calendar into your site?  Just leave a URL comment with a link to your web site.



Life Is Out There
Brian — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 00:35:41 +0000
Like many children inspired during the height of the NASA shuttle program, I once wanted to be an astronaut.  Also having grown up with the likes of E.T., the Transformers, Robotech, and a multitude of other scifi stories and questionable newscasts about UFO sightings, I was fascinated with the idea of extraterrestrial life.  Now given the vastness of this universe, I don’t have the hubris to believe that we’re the only life contained within it.  After reading The Undiscovered Planet, it turns out we can’t even call ourselves the dominant form of life on this planet, even if we judge ourselves as the most intelligent—which is certainly debatable.  The honor of the most dominant life form on this planet goes to microbial life.  The article even postulates that should life exist elsewhere it will most likely be microbial.  So it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to hypothesize that the most dominant life form in the universe is microbial.  Now this shouldn’t put a damper on SETI’s efforts which looks for extraterrestrial intelligent life.  Even if the majority life in the universe is microbial, Drake’s equation by conservative estimates puts the number of intelligent civilizations in a galaxy as non-zero.  Plus sensitivity of communication sensors continually improve.   Yet it will probably be a long time before we get sensors so sensitive that can detect life on a microscopic scale over stellar distances if such a feat is physically possible.  Which probably means that we’ll most likely encounter this microbial life first-hand as either human explorers or more likely by proxy via robotic probes.  It’s funny; space viruses may not be science fiction after all.



All Your Key Belong To Us
Brian — Wed, 02 May 2007 06:43:31 +0000
“May Day” is exactly what Digg is exclaiming right now.  Anyone who’s a regular reader of Digg, Slashdot and the like knows, users are doing nothing short of revolting against DRM and responding to—what people say is uncalled for—censorship (even if its in a site’s power to moderate the user-posted content).  They’re flooding Digg with links to ever more creative expressions of the access key for unlocking HD-DVDs.  The MPAA might as well just throw in the towel and either generate a new key, develop a new copy-protection scheme (that will get defeated sooner or later), or just follow the music industry’s lead and phase out DRM all together.   By trying to squash this information, all they’ve done is publicize it even more.  When they say that if it gets on the internet it stays on the internet, they mean it. 



Then there was light…
Brian — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 21:23:20 +0000
Putting up a site for my posse was always on the back burner.  Odd since my current profession is web development, one would think such a creation would be birthed sooner than later.  Yet as studious, hard-working, creative, and focused as the four of us can be, our natural tendency is towards laziness.  Many an anecdote will attest to that.   Not that laziness is a bad thing.  Getting the most out of the least effort is nothing short of being efficient.   And we should all strive to  be more efficient.   So in spite of said laziness (and a need to justify a sizable expenditure for a hosting plan) I built ourselves a soapbox.  So it begins…