Musings

Much planning done today, little programming. Our “secret” project is starting to look good and will be unveiled to selected companies next week in Lyon at the Game Connection. There’s a splash page for it too: Mobino University wise got to write about the Liskov Substitution Principle.

Thanks to you commenters. The Rails 3 function I18n.transliterate('some String with ümläüts') #=> some String with umlauts (or even ‘uemlaeuets’ if you specify :locale => 'de' as an additional parameter to transliterate) works beautifully. In other news, I think I have the old retro 700 character format nailed down - let’s see if the organisation can handle the test files we are going to send tomorrow. Other than that - a lot of private meetings, not much of real work done. Now writing a summary and critique of Kanban for the university. We have utilized some Kanban features (namely the WIP limitation on the taskboard) in the enterprise Rails project I was involved in in Munich to good effect. There’s a lot of very good literature around about Scrum / Kanban / Scrumban. Very interesting reading - might change our current style of development to Kanban after the next iteration. ...

Almost no programming today, but meeting with people, discussing the future. Also looking into the cost of doing business and re-calculating our hourly rates (We need to stop subsidizing too many projects….) In the end, we have decided to hire two new developers. If you are looking for a job in a great little company and are either a Software developer or a Web developer (or the combination of the two) then head over to our Job Page and take a look at our offering. Be sure to forward to other people that you might know. ...

The monit saga from yesterday continued - and was solved. Somewhere deep in the monit documentation, it is stated that monit calls the start and stop programs with a very very minimal environment, and certainly not the full environment that for example the deploy user has. So the following code will not work: check process some_process with pidfile /path/to/process.pid start "/path/to/executable start" as deploy stop "/path/to/executable stop" as deploy You can do the following to create an environment for the program: check process some_process with pidfile /path/to/process.pid start "/usr/bin/env PATH=/usr/local/bin HOME=/home/deploy RAILS_ENV=production /path/to/executable start" as deploy stop "/usr/bin/env PATH=/usr/local/bin HOME=/home/deploy RAILS_ENV=production /path/to/executable stop" as deploy ...

Yesterday, one of our Amazon EC2 servers “spontaneously” rebooted, leaving the production environment of our new secret project in shambles. The problem was that we hadn’t yet written monit scripts that watched over if the different database and application servers were restarted as they should have been in such a case. So I spent today writing monit scripts for our unicorn servers and testing them. One thing leads to another, so I also did the same thing for our Postgres server. This in turn led to the realisation that Postgres 9.0.0 (which is current now) doesn’t read database files written by 9.0beta4 (which was installed due to the non-availability at that time of 9.0.0). So back to 9.0beta4, dumping all databases, re-installing 9.0.0, re-creating the databases (as per these instructions). Fun and joy! ...