I've wanted to include a little blog candy for a while, and this weekend I made it happen. I like how you can see what's playing on my iTunes in iChat or AIM (Adium actually). I wanted to do the same thing on my blog.

I found a nice plugin for iTunes that enables this. Here's how it works:

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I recently got a VPS with Dreamhost, and am now serving this blog with 1 mongrel rather than a handful of FastCGI processes. So far the default out of the box DH config is doing me right. This blog doesn't see a firehose of traffic. Yet.

There is an issue, though. I got confirmation from the L2 support on this, as well. The default stats link breaks with the proxy setup for Mongrel. The answer is to do some more Apache config, but you don't have access to that config.

You also cannot "turn off" Apache from what I can tell (and have read on other blogs). I have a couple of feelings about this:

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I have 2 young boys. One of them listens better than the other one. The "other one" is our "spirited" one. We've taken to counting to 3 a lot lately when something isn't getting done.

I'm going to count to 3, and if you don't put the pick up all the laundry that you just unfolded you will choose to have 1 less story tonight.

1, 2, 3....

And every time I do that all I can think of is "1, 2, 3, get loose now!" Rob Base - It Takes Two.

I am a product of the 80's. I can't fight this feeling any more....

Backstory

Back in the day I landed my very first website gig. I found a company that had positive feedback and placed well on a rating site or two. I didn't really know what I was doing, but I had a gig. The company I chose for my host was CI Host. They were not good, and in the end they were dodging my calls and I had to issue some stop payments with my credit card company.

I got another gig for another site, and I needed a host. At the time I decided to just go with a really big company to compensate for the issue I had with the previous host. That company was Yahoo. It seemed like a great idea at the time for a few reasons (big company, search engine, nice control panel, supported perl and PHP).

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I am on my Dreamhost VPS now. I can see how heavy Apache or a Rails app is as I monitor my memory usage with top. I have a handful of rails apps running on my VPS, and I am more mindful of these sorts of things all of the sudden. I think I may have been one of those jackasses sucking down the shared host resources.... Sorry other people on lara.

Simplelog is a lightweight rails blogging app, and it's the one that I use. Typo on the other hand leakssssss. I have 3 instances of ruby running right now, though, and they are taking up about all the memory I have allotted for this VPS.

So I am learning about cacheing in a rails app, which is nice. Anything that you cache lives in the public folder of the app. Anything that is in the public folder is served by the web server rather than the rails app. So you can keep ruby/rails from spinning up and sucking down your resources for a page that can be cached. Sweet.

Note that anytime you deploy a new version of the app you reset your cache because you're pushing up a fresh copy of your public folder. That is if you didn't check in the cache from your development app. You would have had to turn cache on in development in order to do that, though.

VPS is cool, and I am not my administrator on Slicehost. Yay.

I don't have anything mind-blowing to share, but I have been busy with a lot of random things.

At work we're still working on this phat rails project. It's a support application for an even bigger project. Most recently we cobbled together an image server that serves images via Tomcat (which is what the primary application is server through) using an HTTP request. Why did we do this? Because Apache mod_rewrite is not our idea of fun. The rails app takes the images and thumbifies them in real time using RMagick (rails ImageMagick). I'll then use a lightbox plugin to show the full image. Yay.

I also have a handful of websites for clients for my "side gig." Most of them are PHP, which I decided that I am done with. That's probably part of the reason that I am also done with Perl. PHP just leaves a bad taste in your mouth, you know. It's like that rancid grease they use to cook your fries. The fries may taste good at first, but in the end they are really really really bad for you. That's PHP.

So I'm working on moving these sites to Dreamhost where I can happily serve them in Rails. It's slow-going, but you pick up some good tips with these sorts of things. These sites don't have a lot of complicated stuff going on in them, so it's been a good opportunity to get back to the basics with the MVC stuff.

I also just discovered last night that Network Solutions (the host) makes it really difficult to transfer a domain away from them. You cannot unlock the domain in the control panel if you are "just" the admin or tech contact for the domain. F that. Games like that may move Network Solutions into the realm of CI Host as the Most Bastard Host Company Ever. Probably not, though. CI Host were actually thieves. I got out of that deal thanks to Citibank stopping payment on some old charges. Seriously - they are crooks.

I'm also trying to find some freelance graphic artists in my area that won't cost a lot of dollars for some site design.

I did an MS 150 ride last weekend -- I rode my bicycle 150 miles in 2 days.

We're about to redo our backyard.

Good times all around....