I started my company about a year ago, but I’ve been doing consulting for a long time. In fact, my first job in the IT industry was working for a consulting firm. Before that, starting as far back as grade school, I was involved in a lot of volunteer civic and community service activities. I admire companies who get involved in their communities, or even outside of their communities, wherever help is needed.

As part of my business plan, I’ve put in place a policy of accepting one pro-bono consulting project per year. So far, I haven’t gotten any requests for free consulting work, so here’s my public shout out to let you know what types of services are available:

1. Speaking or Training. My specialties are things like advanced Linux administration and SQL, but I’m perfectly capable of delivering content for people who just need to know how the internet works, or want to …

It is no joke that computer hardware has advanced by leaps and bounds over the past decade. 10 years ago, multicore systems were expensive and high-end; today, your grandmother may have one and probably have no clue what she has!

Alas, application software has not kept pace. The Linux OS has done a fair job at being able to leverage some of the power multicore systems offer us, but applications running on them have not. The same can be said more or less for Windows, but it’s been a long while since I did anything systems-level with Windows. But the same issues do apply, however.

We are today with the multicore situation where we were in the 80′s and the 90′s with the multithreaded issues. Back then, CPUs grew support for multithreaded programming, but software — including some OSes — were slow to adopt. The Macintosh, when it was first released in 1984, would only support “cooperative” multitasking when the underlying …

The call for papers for OSDC 2009 is open until 30 June 2009; yes that’s only a few more days. Submit your abstract and do a talk at this fab conference!

This is a grassroots style conference designed by developers for developers.  It covers Perl, Python, Ruby/Rails, PHP, Java/Grails and Open Source operating systems as well as some business aspects.  If you’d like to cover something else as well that is Open Source themed, please feel free.

The Call for Papers can be found at: http://2009.osdc.com.au/call-for-papers
The important dates are:

• Call for Papers Closes      30 June, 2009
• Proposal acceptance         20 July, 2009
• Accepted paper submissions  14 September, 2009
• OSDC 2009 Main …

Introduction

StackOverflow is an amazing site for coding questions. It was created by Joel Spolsky of joelonsoftware.com, Jeff Atwood of codinghorror.com, and some other incredibly smart guys who truly care about user experience. I have been a total fan of SO since it went mainstream and it's now a borderline addiction (you can see my StackOverflow badge on the right sidebar).

The Story

Update 6/21/09: This server is currently under very heavy load (10-200), even with caching plugins enabled. Please bear with me as I try to resolve the situation.

Feel free to …

Although rails is a great development environment for web applications, for a newbie the deployment of a rails application can be challenging due to the myriad dependencies on various gems, native libraries etc.

image_science is one such ruby library that provides an easy way to generate thumbnails. It is therefore quite popular in web2.0 type applications (there isn't a site today that doesn't let you upload photographs of yourself, your pets, gadgets, whatever).  It is a very simple implementation and available as a ruby gem and so easy to install. However, the real work is done by a native library called FreeImage and installing this on OpenSolaris is a little bit of work. Although, I use OpenSolaris here, the instructions apply to Solaris 10 as well if you are using ruby from Web …

Although rails is a great development environment for web applications, for a newbie the deployment of a rails application can be challenging due to the myriad dependencies on various gems, native libraries etc.

image_science is one such ruby library that provides an easy way to generate thumbnails. It is therefore quite popular in web2.0 type applications (there isn't a site today that doesn't let you upload photographs of yourself, your pets, gadgets, whatever).  It is a very simple implementation and available as a ruby gem and so easy to install. However, the real work is done by a native library called FreeImage and installing this on OpenSolaris is a little bit of work. Although, I use OpenSolaris here, the instructions apply to Solaris 10 as well if you are using ruby from Web …

Although rails is a great development environment for web applications, for a newbie the deployment of a rails application can be challenging due to the myriad dependencies on various gems, native libraries etc.

image_science is one such ruby library that provides an easy way to generate thumbnails. It is therefore quite popular in web2.0 type applications (there isn't a site today that doesn't let you upload photographs of yourself, your pets, gadgets, whatever).  It is a very simple implementation and available as a ruby gem and so easy to install. However, the real work is done by a native library called FreeImage and installing this on OpenSolaris is a little bit of work. Although, I use OpenSolaris here, the instructions apply to Solaris 10 as well if you are using ruby from Web …

Since a long time people (including me) complained that storeconfigs was a real resource hog. Unfortunately for us, this option is so cool and useful.

What’s storeconfigs

Storeconfigs is a puppetmasterd option that stores the nodes actual configuration to a database. It does this by comparing the result of the last compilation against what is actually in the database, resource per resource, then parameter per parameter, and so on.

The actual implementation is based on Rails’ Active Record, which is a great way to abstract the gory details of the database, and prototype code easily …

Let’s say you need to do a website that must support multiple languages for cultures as diverse as Japan, France, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Brazil, as well as the US. This can be quite a daunting task, with all kinds of unexpected gotchas.

The ideal character set of choice is, of course, UTF8. Alas, you will note that most of the systems you’ll need to use defaults to LATIN1, including MySQL. If your site is written in PHP, that also by default is set to LATIN1.

I find it quite puzzling that in this day and age of globalization that many of the tools don’t default to UTF8. And there are major issues with this, because everything in the chain of delivery must either be set to UTF8 or can handle UTF8 or you’ll see bizarreness when you attempt to display the characters of some languages. You will probably see a series of question marks (“??? ??? ?????”) instead of the actual words. Sometimes you may see a series of squares. …

loops is a small and lightweight framework for Ruby on Rails and Merb created to support simple background loops in your application which are usually used to do some background data processing on your servers (queue workers, batch tasks processors, etc).

Originally loops plugin was created to make our (Scribd.com) own loops code more organized. We used to have tens of different modules with methods that were called with script/runner and then used with nohup and other not so convenient backgrounding techniques. When you have such a number of loops/workers to run in background it becomes a nightmare to manage them on a regular basis (restarts, code upgrades, status/health checking, etc).

After a short time of writing our loops in more …