Tom Purl’s Web Site

I spent most of my “hobby-time” this week “converting” my demo Ruby On Rails (RoR) application to Jruby.  I hope to have a post on all of my steps posted this week.

• Rails Powered by the GlassFish Application Server – Nice overview of RoR on top of the Glassfish J2EE server, but it’s a bit dated.
• Gnome 3 – A Quick Visual Tour – A few of my nerdy friends are pretty excited about this.  I’ve been using Gnome on-and-off for about 8 years now, and am pretty happy with it, so I hope the new revision doesn’t break any of my favorite features.
• Web Browser History – First, Early – This is a cool link courtesy of the Myths Of Innovation book by Scott Berkun.  I’m surprised by the total number, and that I had never heard of most of them.

I had lots of great opportunities to work with unfamiliar technologies last week, so I have an unusually large list of links in my tab sweep.

Solaris Zones

I learned late last week that Solaris Zones use different monitoring tools than any other Unix or Linux distribution, so I spent a good portion of this week learning about them.

• Monitoring Memory and Disk usage [Joyent Wiki] – This has some nice information on using prstat from within a Zone.
• The Joyent Community / How to check my zone size? – Another great post on Zones from the Joyent web sites. This article discusses the differences between RSS and SIZE/SWAP on Solaris.
• Slightly Skeptical View on Solaris Zones – This is a good, general overview of Solaris Zone technology.

RoR Deployment With Capistrano

I get the impression that a lot of people have a love/hate relationship with Capistrano, and I believe that I’m joining those ranks. When your recipe finally works, it works very well, but getting to that point can be very frustrating. Here are some links that helped me figure things out:

• Capistrano Home Page – This is a good starting point, but it’s lacking much advanced information.
• Streaming Capistrano — err.the_blog – A nice little tip if you want to monitor remote command-line streams using Capistrano.

Heroku + Toto

I discovered the Toto blogging “engine” this week, which led me to Heroku. It’s a very interesting deployment and hosting model for Ruby web applications, and I look forward to learning more about it.

• Deploy A Free, Ruby Powered Blog In 5 Minutes with Toto and Heroku – The title really says it all.
• My Toto Test Blog – An interesting test, but I don’t think that it will replace my WordPress blog any time soon.
• UsabilityPost – Blogging Simplified – A cool Toto blog with a great CSS stylesheet.