http://www.digitalhobbit.com Thoughts from the hobbit hole Thu, 28 Aug 2008 06:17:02 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en As I mentioned in a previous blog post, Rails 2.1 natively supports incoming JSON requests. Unfortunately, it still struggles with JSON data containing non-ASCII characters. According to the JSON spec, JSON fully supports UTF-8 encoded text, so with a few exceptions it generally should not be necessary to escape non-ASCII characters ... http://www.digitalhobbit.com/archives/2008/08/27/rails-and-json-containing-unicode-characters/ I realized that it's been quite a while since my last update. Unfortunately it seems like the amount of interesting stuff I have to write about is inversely proportional to the spare time I have available for writing... ;) Anyway, I figure I'll try to get back into the habit of ... http://www.digitalhobbit.com/archives/2008/08/27/its-been-a-while/ I've been meaning to set up a network monitoring tool at work for a while. We have a couple of different applications using various technologies (currently mainly Ruby on Rails and PHP), running on various VPS servers. While we are using Monit to keep an eye on our Rails apps ... http://www.digitalhobbit.com/archives/2008/06/24/network-monitoring-with-scout/ According to this blog post and several mentions on Twitter, Phusion announced today's release of Passenger (aka mod_rails) 2.0 at RailsConf. Apparently, Passenger 2.0 will be Rack compliant and thus support not only Rails, but any Rack compatible web framework, including Merb and Sinatra. Interestingly, Passenger will not even be ... http://www.digitalhobbit.com/archives/2008/06/01/phusion-passenger-now-rack-compatible/ Earlier this week, we tried to figure out the cleanest and easiest way to get our Rails app to accept incoming JSON requests. Up until recently, developers were able to use various Rails plugins for this purpose, such as the json_request plugin. Luckily, it turns out that full support for JSON ... http://www.digitalhobbit.com/archives/2008/05/25/rails-21-and-incoming-json-requests/ A couple weeks ago, Phusion Passenger (aka mod_rails) was released. I recently tested this at work, on an EC2 instance, and my initial experience was so smooth that I am already planning to use it to deploy our various Rails applications. The benchmarks I've seen put its performance on approximately ... http://www.digitalhobbit.com/archives/2008/05/14/phusion-passenger-aka-mod_rails-on-dreamhost/ Earlier today, TechCrunch's poorly researched claim that Twitter is abandoning Ruby on Rails in favor of PHP or Java generated a lot of buzz in the Twitter and Ruby communities (the claim was later refuted by Twitter developer Evan Williams). Of course, the article's comments attracted the usual, ignorant TechCrunch trolls. ... http://www.digitalhobbit.com/archives/2008/05/01/twitter-ruby-on-rails-fud/ I just got back from an ice cream social with Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson (aka DHH). I had come across his blog post about this casual event last week and figured I'd make my way over there, particularly since the location (Michael's Gelato & Cafe) in downtown ... http://www.digitalhobbit.com/archives/2008/04/20/gelato-with-dhh/ As some of you may know, I have decided to leave Google and go back into the startup world. Friday was my last day at Google, and even though I normally don't blog much about my job, I figured I was due for an update. First off, Google is an amazing ... http://www.digitalhobbit.com/archives/2008/04/13/on-leaving-google/ After having signed up for an Evernote beta invite a while ago, I finally received one this week. Evernote is a next generation note taking service. What sets it apart from similar applications are the numerous ways of entering as well as retrieving notes. First of all there is the Evernote ... http://www.digitalhobbit.com/archives/2008/03/15/evernote-a-promising-start/