cooking, climbing, code
Recently I was rebuilding an old “virtual user” vsFTPd server, this time using Chef. Of course I started by looking for a decent vsftpd cookbook. There are several popular ones, for example: The vsftpd “supermarket” cookbook might be fine for some users, but it’s not been updated since 2010, and it seems to lack a good way to override…
This week I finally got around to cleaning up the EncodingSampler gem, mentioned previously on this site, and publishing it here as encoding_sampler at Rubygems. It’s amazing how simple it is to publish and use open source software these days. Creating an account a Rubygems.org takes just a username, an email address and a password. Easy.…
If you have a few hours weeks to kill, go online and search for RVM, rbenv, “bundle exec“, “You have already activated…” and a dozen other common issues. Based on the volume of articles and forum posts on these topics, I’d say that managing Ruby and Ruby Gems versions is perhaps the largest single Time…
I’m wrapping up an app with some ActiveRecord models that are based on fixed data (i.e. data tables that are not created or managed by the Rails app.) This is actually a pretty useful way to access some types of external data in Rails, but problems cascade if/when you accidentally write to the supposedly r/o…
Is there a good automatic way to determine file encoding? If you have had to deal with importing user data from text files, you’ll know a couple things about character encodings: Using the wrong encoding to interpret the file is disastrous. Once you start to notice this, you’ll see it all over the web. Users have no…