Archive for September, 2009

A couple of Mongrel forks

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

Mongrel, still probably the most-used workhorse for serving Rails applications, has been abandoned for a long time – first by its creator, then its so-called maintainers. It’s been a farce, actually, that this important piece of infrastructure has been tossed around in this casual manner. I still rely on Mongrel in several ways, and I know others do too.

Anyway, I wanted a gem with the Ruby 1.9 patches in it, so I made one . Nothing but 1.1.5, plus the Ruby1.9 patches (thanks ), there will be no ongoing changes – all I care about is that I can do

sudo gem1.9 install sho-mongrel

update: fucking github has turned off gems so this doesn’t work anymore.

and it works.

If you’re looking for more progress than that, phurley is actively improving mongrel in (which I didn’t know about before I made mine). He is also making it available as a gem, and looks to be actively improving and modernising the ancient battleaxe.

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CPU History

Monday, September 21st, 2009

Like having a running graph of CPU usage in your dock, but hate Activity Monitor’s 10%+ overhead?

Try CPUHistory, an ultra-lightweight replacement which uses more like 0.3%. Great stuff.

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GitHub’s really fucked today

Friday, September 18th, 2009

Practically unusable for large parts of the day. Becoming a real annoyance. Looks like their move to Rackspace is not a moment too soon. If I was paying for this, I would not be happy.

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Telstra faces forced break-up

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

The government finally told Telstra to break up or be broken up, in preparation for the NBN.

I have been waiting for this day for 15 years!

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Song of the Week

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009

Heaven on a Bird, by Bryan Scary & The Shredding Tears.

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Rails can’t scale!

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 
Processing AdminController#do_import (for 124.170.0.0 at 2009-09-14 11:33:51) [POST]
  Parameters: {"commit"=>"submit", "authenticity_token"=>"qUBkNAAEB7EM4SGQRnlM+uaKlqmVM09+8l4sCFhPvBw=", "import_order"=>{"number"=>"5000"}}
Redirected to http://adomain.com:3000/admin/import
Completed in 6026460ms | 302 Found [http://adomain.com/admin/do_import]

Er, obviously this is not Rails’ fault. It’s an import script processing large numbers of records, and it blocks while it’s doing so. I really should farm it out to a worker daemon, but it’s just a one-off thing as I set up a new site, so I can’t be bothered going to all the trouble for something that will only be used once.

But I am quite proud of that number – almost 2 hours for a single request. Lucky Mongrel doesn’t time out requests, unlike, say, Passenger.

UPDATE: another one

Completed in 7922222ms | 302 Found [http://adomain.com/admin/do_import]

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Wordpress does its usual trick

Sunday, September 6th, 2009

Ah, just when you thought WP had outgrown its massive, public security problems – surprise!

Happily, for anyone who knows anything, updating looks like this:

svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.8.4

However – this BS is still pretty inexcusable. I’ll be leaving WP “soon”. Unfortunately, since writing one’s own blog software is very much a hobby project, it’s been delayed a few times – but crap like this certainly inspires me to get it done soon.

update: Matt Mullenweg sez:

I’m not clairvoyant and I can’t predict what schemes spammers, hackers, crackers, and tricksters will come up with in the future to harm your blog

Matt, we’ve disagreed in the past, but I’m with you 100% on that one.

update 2: ooh, a blog I host – not this one, but a friend’s – was hacked. No risk to anywhere else of course; I am paranoid about security at the best of times and when it comes to WP I don’t take any chances. But still, interesting. The hack inserts a script to hide the new hostile administrator from you in the Users section; never seen that before. Happily, a quick visit to the web developer toolbar in FF got rid of that, and the user is now deleted, and there don’t seem to be any other effects. I don’t see anything weird in an SQL dump either. Currently debating if it’s worth nuking the site and redoing or just sitting it out until all these blogs get moved to another server anyway, which is imminent.

Tags: security, wordpress
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