Open Sourcery

Thanks to Dr Nic Williams for highlighting this at such an awesome time. I’ve got the source for ActiveRecord::Tableless now on GitHub and RubyForge, thanks to git. So you can grab a copy any time you want and contribute patches

Get the code via from here:

git clone git://rubyforge.org/tablelessmodels.git
git clone git://github.com/kennethkalmer/activerecord-tableless-models.git

Leaps like this make sharing code a breeze, and makes one think how far you can still go with git before reaching the limits.

The basic “cap deploy:cleanup” does its job well, but can leave traces behind.

I recently picked up that one of my servers in a Rails cluster had plenty more release directories than its peers, and they were very old. I was baffled, how does this happen when I run “cap deploy:cleanup” religiously after a release has stabilized… I decided to figure out why, and how to dodge it. Who knows how many other release directories are scattered around the network.

It seems that cap gets the directory contents of the “releases” directory from the first server in its internal list. It then uses that directory content to remove stale releases from all servers. This is a sane approach, but things do go wrong and releases will build up over time.

Running the task once for every host seems the quick solution without messing with cap itself.

$ cap deploy:cleanup HOSTS=10.0.0.1

This gives each individual host a fresh start. From here, lather, rinse, repeat.

Later

Nope, its not another post about how incredible git is, instead I’m just gonna highlight a quick way to get used to git and/or git-svn during the transition (yes, resistance is futile).

$ sudo gem install cheat

$ cheat git

$ cheat gitsvn

No need to open a browser, search through delicious or even google.

Hope it helps make git and/or git-svn more digestible.

UPDATE (2008-04-29)

I got beaten to the punch on using cheat, thought I’d just add some more links for your enjoyment

Git and Ruby on RubyInside
Printable Git Cheat Sheet (scarily similar to the Mercurial ones)

Just sharing a quick thought really. I must admit that I thought it would be a real effort to get AVI files to play in Linux, especially DivX. DVD’s sounded even more unrealistic. To my surprise I discovered two applications that made this job really easy.

Mplayer is a powerful open source media player. Capable of playing a lot of different formats out the box. I installed it using yum from Dag’s repository and it was a snap really. It didn’t take to playing my DivX files, but that was some wierd display error on my test box (still uses a 3Dfx Banshee card).

I then recalled something called XINE and a quick Google revealed that it’s another media player. Took a chance and I saw that Dag had these as well, let yum do the dirty work and of we go.

Two players that can both play DVD’s and a lot of other formats was well. They work well and the quality is great considering my test box is only a 667Mhz box with 256MB memory and a rusty old 3dfx card.

For people looing at plating other formats like RealMedia, get a copy of HelixPlayer from RealMedia. It looks nice, could find a file to test it with though. It comes standard with Fedora Core 3, so just open the package manager and let rip.