Blog posts

I’ve just completed migrating a client site from BackgrounDRb to delayed_job (which is a huge relief on several levels). I had hoped to complete the process this morning, but the delayed_job process kept dying on me without any apparent explanation in the usual logs. Thankfully the RPM log in my app turned out to be capturing one vital detail – the MySQL server had “gone away”, Armed with that knowledge I was able to find this thread on github and from that Brandon’s pointer to the ‘reconnect’ option in database.yml. Setting that appears to have solved that last lingering problem. ...

Alex has beaten me to the punch with Shut the door, have a seat: Suite 4, announcing the fact that a selection of the small businesses on our floor have invested in a meeting room. Well… We hope it’ll be something more than a meeting room. A lot of interesting people pass through this part of town, it’s quite the hub for businesses, and a lot of folks with good ideas and a diverse set of interests are gathered right around here. It seems like the opportunities are there to be grabbed. Hopefully there’ll be some talks, some workshops, and a few drinks. We’re also planning a series of “Innovation Workshops”, offering a wide range of perspectives on… well, whatever you want to get those perspectives on. ...

A fortnight of intense activity seems to have been the unfortunate result of taking a week off to go on holiday. One project had slipped because the client disappeared on holiday, and there was the usual cascade effect. So it is that I’m trying to cobble together some week notes last thing on a Sunday evening. It’s feeling like the last few months have been a little too non-stop. There’s a lot to reflect on, some new practices to bring in, and a whole lot of side projects and admin awaiting attention. Some of us were speculating that it’s a sign of the complex economic times that many people around seem to be in a similar spot. Thinking that does help me think it’s not just us, but it’s hardly a cheery thought. ...

I’ve never really had much need for Rails’ i18n support, but a new project is going to be using it extensively. I was a bit thrown by an error that started to be thrown after I created the relevant locale files, and took a while to track it down (possibly because I was also upgrading to the Rails 3 RC at the same time). It turns out Rails really doesn’t like empty locale files. Adding a couple of translations into my empty files solved everything. ...

As I write I am sitting on the floor of my sister’s hotel room in Paris as she and Kari watch the World Cup Final and my daughter sleeps in the next room. Which is to say–despite my officemates thinking I was inventing the plan simply to hurry some suppliers–I’m actually on holiday. That means the past week was a hectic and scattered one as I made sure as much as possible was wrapped up before my departure. For the most part that worked though one significant project was left in a very uncertain state as the client went on a holiday of his own without informing me. Thankfully 48 hours after leaving the office it is actually taking a little effort to recall the details (which are of course all documented for me on my return). ...

This is the first week in several (probably since I last wrote some weeknotes) that it seems conceivable I might get to the end of the week’s list of tasks. It’s also the first week in several where I’ve been able to spend some time working at the weekend. These two things are related, and are a clear reminder that there are too many projects in play at the moment. ...

The changes to ActionMailer coming in Rails 3 are already a huge improvement, and I hadn’t expected to see much more development before version 3 lands, but it’s great to see this change making it far easier to support inline attachments.

I’m a little late getting to it, but Dan Catt’s writeup of “the [Guardian] Open Platform, APIs and Google App Engine” is well worth a read. Dan explained some of the architecture to me over lunch during The Story a few months back and I was impressed by the way they’ve embraced a plurality of tools to build apps, and devised a caching infrastructure that will ensure their frontend is robust even if something doesn’t quite work out in an experimental piece of the system. ...

With Rails 3 inching ever closer, there’s likely to be a good bit of attention on Rack Middleware over the coming months. It’s there as an option in Rails 2.3, but with Rails 3 it’ll get the attention it deserves. Working on a few Rails 3 apps, I’ve been very pleased to find Coderack (via Robert Brook on twitter, I think). It’s a directory of middleware, packed with interesting tools. The one discovery I’m so far using is StaticFallback, which “bounces or redirects requests to missing static files”. So you can sync up your development environment with your production database, and don’t have to worry about also pulling down all the assets that may have been uploaded to it. Very handy! ...

A client recently asked me to integrate their site with the JangoMail mass mailing system. I wanted to keep them happy so agreed to investigate, but was horrified by what I saw in the JangoMail API documentation. JangoMail appears to be optimised for those with existing databases of email addresses they want to maintain and contact. For those wanting to keep those databases in sync they offer a script you can download and install on your server that they can call with details of various actions (user unsubscribed, user clicked link, job completed, etc) as well as to extract the list of email addresses they should send a given campaign to. So far, so good. ...