If there’s one thing that’s saved me no end of heartache it’s including Apache conf settings for a Rails app or Merb/PHP/whatever, in the app’s config folder. You get versioning for free. You don’t forget your settings. You know where to find it every time. No other process can mess with it (not looking at anyone in particular CPanel…). Just make sure your web app can’t mess with it

i.e. create a file /var/rails/myrails/app/current/config/httpd.conf in which you place your host pointing to your rails app.
Then in your apache conf file (normally /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf) ensure you include the file above.

On my main app config file I try to pop in the top of the file the passenger config settings, as again it’s easy to find, then any of the required vhost(s) that the app uses.

Nice clean and in one place.

So after ‘Fringe it appears I’m not the only Rubyist with a deep love of music. I love music, listening to it, making it hmm not so much (I can’t) - thus thought I’d blog about further adventures in audio-listening-land. I needed some replacements for my desktop system after a minor technical glitch, and have been temporarily using some Def Tech Pro Monitor 800s with a NuForce Icon - see at end.

I’ve looked at Totem Mites, Def Tech Pro Cinema 1000’s, and been pouring over product reviews of everything under the sun, trying to find something in the sweet spot of sounding good, but not going to get strung up by..err.. yeah you can complete that one.

After an audition the Totems were honestly gorgeous, and sounded wonderful but just too expensive, and still quite big. Deciding losing my left nut wasn’t an option they were quickly ruled out. ProMonitor 1000’s were a step up from the 800’s but getting quite bulky for the desk and lost their appeal. Given that I don’t really like the 800’s for music they were off the list. Numerous product reviews and “my speaker choice is better than yours” leads you down a rabbit hole.

So Saturday I went to “go get the cat food” and ahem well we alll know what that means don’t we?, came back with a pair of these…

(note the bling gloss of the desk I made.. a year on it still looks hot)

My new home town (not just the place I live, but now HOMEtown) rocks. The unspace crew did a freaking amazing job on RubyFringe. Joey has a huge list of notes on his blog if you want some nitty gritty.

For me personally, here’s the stand outs…

- I have to say Damien Katz’s presentation was extremely raw and powerful. The story of how CouchDB came to be will stick around in a lot of peoples minds for a very long time I’m sure.
- Giles Bowkit’s talk was just an assault on the senses. Wow. Almost want to go to Burning Man now. Looking over the shoulder of my cohort’s laptop on the backchanel it seemed dead quiet in the 5 secs I peeled my eyes off stage.
- Nick Sieger’s Jazz presentation taught me more in 30 mins than any music class ever has (not that I attended many) did in school. Even though I love music. Love it to bits. But he broke it down so well I was stunned. Wow. Thank you.
- Mr Grigsby. Resourceful. What more can I say. This dude plays the system hard.
- Leila had a hard job having the last talk of the day, but her essence was on the money, do something people love (and therefore value) and you’ll do well. If your customers love the stuff you build. You’ve got it made. She showed an extremely hard core passion for her company. Fantastic.
- Less than 200 people seems a perfect number for networking. Not large enough that you’re anonymous, not small enough so you’re talking to the same people. Met so many great people. Hope to stay in touch.
- Libin, my man, you should be THE official Canon product tester. I believe he was trying to hit 1k photos. at time of posting 413 odd photos were up on Flickr but he hasn’t uploaded Sunday’s yet…

Surprisingly technology was less of a focus of most everyone’s presentations. Instead of the usual tech stuff every day on blogs, to mix things up the talks really got into the hearts, minds, and souls of the presenters. All of which just can’t be conveyed in the web medium. The tech presentations that were given were solid as well, it felt like just the right mix between screeds of cool innovative code and deep talks.

It’s amazing what can be achieved in just 30mins !

Opening night and day 1 are over. Just about to go pick Krispy and head down for day two. Truly, my mate mates down at Unspace have done an AWESOME job. The vibe is amazing. A lot of “best conference ever” comments going round.

Yes.. those are laptops waving in the air, and yes that is Zed on stage. Just look out for the mp3..

So I’ve been thinking about things, thinking about the state of web development. What could I write about to could help out some new recruits and budding developers. (Note this is a long one, so get some coffee, sit back, read, and I’d love to see your thoughts and opinions at the end …). In a nutshell:

I have a rather entrepreneurial friend back in New Zealand, he consulted at a Software company I worked for once. Over time we became good friends.. One day him and his business partner came up with a widget. And sold a few, and then needed to sell some more. Then one day he gave me a call. You can imagine as a web developer the conversation “Yeah some some company wants [insert horrendous figure here] to build us an e-commerce site” pffwaaaattt (coffee all over desk)…

And so began a new relationship. Realising the scope of work was BIG, I actually called up one of my dev mates. “Oi, I’ve got some work for us, keen?” Gave him the specifics. We agreed to do it 50/50 (side note, later on I ended up taking it on 100%). We struck a deal. I drew up a contract and we got underway.

Please, when designing UI’s make the most important things on a page so you don’t have to scroll for them. Not everyone has giant screens, and even for those of us who are lucky enough to be rocking the world at giant resolutions, we may not like to have the browser maxed out to the full screen resolution.

Think of the actions on the page and group everything so you don’t have to max out your browser window to reach the most used elements on the page. For example, I’m typing this post in wordpress, and arguably the most important things are giving it a title, content, then saving it right ? Nice and easy your eye follows a visual flow, and you didn’t have to go for the scroll bar.

Blue - common eye track/data entry path
Red - mouse movements

Now lets refine the thinking a little more. Same deal with gmail, open it up, compose a message. Notice there’s two send buttons, one at the top of the page not more than 100-200px away from the compose email link ? So where you last clicked was likely exceedingly close to where you need to click next. OR if you happen to be writing a novel and have scrolled to the bottom, you don’t have to scroll back up to the top, as there’s a send button there also.

Now, try posting a message in Basecamp without scrolling - and without cheating by having lots of vertical pixels. If you’re running a giant screen size drop your browser down size to what mere mortals use, notice the distance from where you clicked on messages, to the send button ? (Particularly if you’ve got a couple of companies of contacts to click through!)

Do more than a couple of messages a day and question to yourself, why is arguably the least important things in a message (milestone, attachment) taking up valuable real estate forcing me to scroll.

No one likes a bitchfest, so being a little constructive - why not use that blank space on the right of the message pane to pick your people and send. Even better, have the people field as a text entry area with auto complete items to cut down on clicks. Keep all the important functions clustered above the fold and cut down on the scroll and click!

One of the many plus factors about working from home is you can have the sweetest sounds throughout the day. Without the accompanied hearing loss of listening to Senns or Grados all day in an office.

Some Tannoy active monitors (Reveal 5a’s) graced my desk for the past year or so. Up until a crackle emanated from one of the tweeters on Friday, followed shortly with that ‘I just got a little poorer’ sensation as the sound stage disappeared from the left hand side as the tweeter blinked out.

The associated cost of fixing it may not be worth the effort. Grieving period now over - they are wonderfully detailed, perhaps a little too ‘clinical’ though which is by design but I have certainly had countless hours of fantastic music. After a little digging I figure some one else probably has had one die in a similar manner - so assuming I can get enough for them on Ebay I’m going to try something different.

(photo credit)

Rather than risk a mission to Bay Bloor Radio and the accompanying questions I turned to Google and found these puppies from OrbAudio. Handmade in the States vs shipped out from China. They look pretty damned cool, and unlike most cool looking, handmade products are reasonably priced and seem to get rave reviews. So. The next question, planning what the heck I could drive them with - the Tannoys had integrated amps on each speaker, so now I need to find an amp. I like the notion of trying out a valve amp but can safely say I have no idea what I’m looking for !

Does anyone have any recommendations for good, cheap, stereo valve amp that would suit. I don’t need to have hearing loss, despite my Tannoy’s abilities to wake up the neighbours, I’d really prefer a rich warm soundstage at low volumes than trying to crank Tool out until I’m deaf

Anyone with 2cents to share ?

Sometimes you just forget the stuff you take for granted, but often you hear of people new to apps and not realising what’s there. Here’s a couple of the features of Textmate that are probably my most used…

CMD + T - Go to file, pretty hot. List of files is shown in a dialog that it is in order of last edited/open file, with the last file you worked on as being selected. So I have a big habit of spending my life CMD+T then Enter all day along. Also by typing will filter down the list of files pretty damned fast.
CMD + SHIFT + T - Go to symbol. Hotter still. This allows you to easily navigate through a file with ease. If you single click on a method name, it jumps to that method without closing the dialog box, double clicking closes the dialog. Particularly handy working on a large class/module this tends to stay open all day jumping back and forth between methods.
CTRL + SHIFT + A - Hottest, subversion integration. Diffing from the commit dialog is a godsend.

What’s YOUR favourite feature of Textmate ?

Updated LinkedIn Blog Post

If yellowpages.com or a whole bunch of other sites or the Friends for Sale facebook app wasn’t enough to convince you, that yes, you are on the right track with Rails (no pun intended).

Another solid Rails app has been mentioned in mainstream media http://blogs.zdnet.com/enterprisealley/?p=188 blogs about a Facebook app done by the LinkedIn Light Engineering Development team. Cranking out mac daddy throughput rate - 1 billion page views / month.

Enough said.

Go read the article and watch the (excellent) video.

Then get back to the business of building hot Rails apps.