Have Skills, Will Travel Charles Armour

Busy is a good thing, right?

I’ve been incredibly busy lately, the incredibly is an understatement!  To give a recap, here’s what I’m up to:

• Working a full time contract position with ActiGraph through CED Technical Services.
  • Alas, this is the end of CWA Consulting for the foreseeable future.
• Developing a couple of websites with CED Technical Services.
• Actively developing three iPhone games and applications with Wirehead Labs, with seven (yes, seven!) more in queue.
  • Trying to get Wirehead Labs’ web presence off the ground as well.
• Helping out with ITGulfCoast and finishing up their iPhone Application.
• Re-learning more Visual Basic 6 than I ever wanted to know!
• Attending area technical groups and meetings to promote Wirehead Labs.

I doubt anyone will be particularly hurt by it (or even notice), but I won’t be posting much in the near future.  It’s good to be busy, so without further ado I’m head down and working my butt off!

CentOS 5.3 RoR Apache Install

I promised this addendum to my previous post CentOS 5.3 RoR Install.  Sorry for the wait!  Please execute everything in the previous post (from a totally clean install), then continue with these commands:

yum -y install httpd httpd-devel apr apr-devel apr-util apr-util-devel
gem install passenger
passenger-install-apache2-module

Press enter a few times and you should have all the software installed, so now it’s time to configure Apache:

nano /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

Search for the last LoadModule line (there’s a large block of them), and insert the following after it:

LoadModule passenger_module /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.4/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
PassengerRoot /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.4
PassengerRuby /usr/bin/ruby

Apache can now host Ruby on Rails apps, but you’ll need to create a virtual host directive to link it to an application.  I prefer to use small standalone configurations to configure each app separately, here is how:

nano /etc/httpd/conf.d/rails.conf

Replace “rails.conf” with something appropriate (such as “rails_appname.conf”, but make sure it ends with “.conf” so Apache will see it.  In this file, paste the following (change to suit) then exit and save:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName yourdomain.com
    DocumentRoot /opt/application/public
</VirtualHost>

Be sure to change “yourdomain.com” to the domain you want to listen on, otherwise it will answer all HTTP requests to the server.  You can also delete the ServerName line if you want that.  I prefer to put applications in my “/opt/” folder, but the above DocumentRoot should point to the “public” folder of your RoR application, wherever it may be.

Almost done!  Issue the following command to restart Apache:

service httpd restart

Visit your configured domain (or server) and voila, that’s all there is to it!  Certain applications don’t work so well with Passenger, but the majority do.  Let me know if you have any trouble with specific ones and I’ll help you through it.

p.s. restarting Apache using the above command will restart your application(s), too.

CodebaseHQ.com

I’m not one for advertising (especially other people’s stuff) usually, but today I found a stellar replacement for GitHub and immediately switched over all my projects to it.  As you might have guessed from the title, it’s CodebaseHQ.com, and it’s so far ahead of the curve that I can’t imagine anyone ever using that clunky old piece of crap called GitHub (sorry GitHub guys, you’ve got some serious catching up to do, especially on uptime and performance!).

They’re set up much the same way as GitHub, except that repos are owned by projects and the cost is calculated by projects (rather than repos and collaborators like GitHub).  They don’t have anything exactly equivalent to GitHub for that reason, but for $8 a month more I get 5 more projects/repos, the same storage quota, unlimited collaborators, and far fewer headaches waiting 5 seconds per page refresh.  An added bonus is a much more complete project management toolset that includes tickets (rather than issues), milestones, and time tracking.

I won’t miss the pretty graphs that GitHub produces from your branches and merges, but if you love them you’ll have to look for something else.  So far the only issue I’ve had with CodebaseHQ (and I suggested they step up their marketing to compensate) was that it took me so long to hear about them!  Thanks to Wes R. for another excellent recommendation!

Wirehead Labs News

So I’ve been busy over at Wirehead Labs, and today we had some great news.  Check it out:

Wirehead Labs Blog

Be sure to check out the iPhone Workshop, too…it’s promising to be a lot of fun and very informative to boot!