Soooo… yeah, I’ve basically failed to do anything interesting with my blog for a while. I have determined that the root cause of this is not laziness, but INADEQUATE SOFTWARE. Thus, I’m switching from Mephisto to Radiant.

Mephisto is OK, but on a lightweight VPS slice like mine it fills the RAM, settles itself comfortably onto the swap partition, and stays there eating all the chips and never cleaning the toilet. Also, the Mephisto guys make releases somewhat less often than I post, so it’s not exactly fresh software.

Anyway, welcome to the new blog! Please be patient while I work out the kinks.

Our first home. :)

With my recent spate of GServer problems, I thought I’d post something that, surprisingly, turned out not to be much of a problem at all: turning a Ruby GServer into a Windows service.

In a previous posting, I demonstrated how to create a telnet server from a Rails application. After having actually used GServer in anger, I can add a few notes to it:

ACCESSING YOUR SERVER REMOTELY

Well, we finally got a new pet!

It took us a while to get past the grief of Nanako’s passing, but we finally felt ready to get another kitty. We searched petfinder.com and made a list of about 20 cats who were just unbelievably cute! Then, we ran into problems. We couldn’t possibly have 20 cats! All we needed was one, maybe two! So, we tried to cull. But really, how can you cull out the cutest little pair of kitty eyes in the whole world? Much less 20 pairs?!

If you’ve ever done any serious development in VB or the old VBScript, you’ve probably done something like this:

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strSQL = "SELECT o.* " & _
         "FROM people p " & _
         "INNER JOIN orders o " & _
         "ON o.person_id = p.id " & _
         "WHERE person_id = " & PersonID & ";"

Ruby on Rails is a beautiful thing; simple, fast, and powerful. As they say, it takes the pain out of web development.

I’m fortunate enough to have been able to use Rails at work for a few months now, and the more I learn about the Rails framework and the Ruby language, the more enamoured I become of the simplicity, beauty, and zen-like nature of these tools. But you didn’t come here to see me gush with adoration like a schoolgirl at an Elvis concert, you came to see:

How to Turn a Rails Application Into a Telnet Server in 30 Lines of Code!

Amazing in the sense of not exactly being the brightest bulb on the tree…

…but making up for it with cute!