GoDaddy hosting now supports Rails: “GoDaddy now supports Rails on their Deluxe and Premium hosting plans. Welcome aboard!
(Via Signal vs. Noise.)
Whitepapers are problematic on their own:
That’s not to say they don’t have a place, but thinking that people are going to read your whitepaper just because you wrote it is wrong. A whitepaper’s place is to back up the other things you say.
For example, say I create a product
and it:
Now being the student of marketing that I am (meaning I study marketing all the time, I’m not sitting in a class somewhere right now), I’d back this up with an example of the output of this great product and 2 or 3 testimonials (video if I can get them) of people explaining how their lives are sooo much better because they have a real time method to see the “errors of their ways”. No installation, no maintenance.
That’d be enough for most people to buy it.
Now, it would add credibility (to some people) to have a 10 page study (ie whitepaper) that backs up this claim. Nobody would read it, but to some, it might be a comfort that someone at least bother to write such a thing.
If you’re one of these people, you’re about to get run over by a horde of forward thinking marmosets. As you lay examining the conference room’s geometric carpet pattern, you may wonder why such a thing wasn’t mentioned in the planning meeting. You have TPS reports to do, shoo.
22. No matter how tempted I am with the prospect of unlimited power, I will not consume any energy field bigger than my head.
There’s also this one:
60. My five-year-old child advisor will also be asked to decipher any code I am thinking of using. If he breaks the code in under 30 seconds, it will not be used. Note: This also applies to passwords.
Get the rest of the list here.
Rails 1.1.1 Gives Spurious Warnings: “Rails 1.1.1 got pushed yesterday, fixing a number of issues with the
massive 1.1 release.
One attempted fix, however, seems to have backfired. Many folks who
aren’t developers use the Typo blog, normally hosted on an ISP such
as Textdrive or Dreamhost. When those ISPs upgraded to 1.1, a change in the
way Rails handles loading its environment broke Typo, and all the blogs
stopped working. In a well intentioned (if somewhat hasty) reponse, Rails
was modified in 1.1.1 to record its version when you first create an
application. It then uses RubyGems to ensure that the application continues
to use that version of Rails. Of course this only applies to new
applications, so it doesn’t fix the Typo issue, but longer term it
will allow applications to continue to run when new releases introduce
incompatibilities.
However, this change has brought with it an unfortunate side effect. Now,
when you run script/generate for controllers, and models,
you’ll see a warning:
./script/../config/../config/environment.rb:8: warning: already
initialized constant RAILS_GEM_VERSION
This is apparently benign, so the advice from Rails core is to live with it
until 1.1.2.
“
(Via PragDave.)
Finally! Parallels, Inc has released a BETA version of their virtualization software for OS X. If you have an Intel based Mac…
Back when RedHat decided to stop developing the Red Hat Linux and switch to their “Enterprise” line of products, we penguins have not been able to gain any sort of confidence in the Fedora project because it’s always felt like RedHat didn’t really want to do it. ArsTechnica has an interesting take on it today:
Red Hat gives up on Fedora Foundation: “Red Hat has decided against establishing a nonprofit foundation to run the Fedora Project. What does this mean for the future of the distrubtion, and what are the implications for corporate involvement in open source development?
A few weeks ago, we reviewed Insightix Enterprise 1.5. Quick as a penguin chasing a herring, they released 2.0 on us. A round up of new features are:
The 2.0 product continues the “turn it on and it works” functionality that we enjoyed so much in the 1.5 review. In about 20 minutes, we had a real time picture (literally) of every device and virtual machine on our network.
The new features in the 2.0 release make the overall product feel more mature. We found a rouge DHCP service running on an old testing machine almost immediately. The inventory right click menu saves a bunch of time when editing an element and gives the browser interface a desktop like feel. The automatic OS signature generator reduced our unidentified OS count to a manageable handful.
There were a number of other features we really liked that aren’t so obvious unless you used the 1.5 version. Software release updates can now be applied and managed through the web interface. The configuration screens (that you don’t need to use very often) have a much more logical layout than the previous versions and the whole thing feels faster.
On the release date(today), they only support Internet Explorer for management. While IE may have 85% of the browser market share, we’d be willing to bet that Firefox is the vast majority in the data center. Official word is that some bugs related to Firefox couldn’t get fixed in time for the release date, but this is a real sore point. With Microsoft’s complete failure to fix a serious bug for a few more weeks, no good admin is using IE these days. It’s hard to even find a copy here in Penguin Land, we did manage to dig one up inside on old Xen virtual machine to do our testing. This release without broad browser support can be a deal killer for many shops.
The historical/offline feature needs some tweaking as well. If you have a device that drops off the network and then reenters with a different IP address, we found that sometimes it shows up as a separate (and unauthorized) device. This could get a little out of hand in a large DHCP range of machines but we think this might just be a little release day bug.
The new features make Insightix feel more like a mature product. They’ve added a number of features that make managing more than a few hundred devices much easier than their previous releases and the whole interface has a more snappy feel to it.
That being said, we can’t help but long for something more to do with all of this cool data that it gathers. We can view things like performance data in real time, but there’s no way to look at it historically. This means that we still need something else to collect and manage this exact same data and that something else is going to be much more intrusive to our network than Insightix is. Maybe an OBDC connection to the data, or a more flexible reporting interface would do the trick.
All together, Insightix does do exactly what they say it does, it gives you a real time view into your network without any fuss. There’s a simple elegance to the product that is very appealing and it fits very nicely into our “it just works” mantra.
On the east coast, you can buy Insightix from Assurance Data, Inc.