Yeah, so not a lot of interesting thoughts coming out of my blog these days. Well, right now I've got four jobs going on at once, so my free time is pretty expensive lately. The most important one right now is a custom Rails application that I've pledged to have beta-ready in less than two weeks. So far, I'm doing pretty good - mostly fleshing out the data model into MVC fanciness and setting up the Subversion repository and a development hosting environment. Yes, I bought another Ubuntu Dapper slice.
With the likely demands of this application, I'll need full license to tune this thing, so SliceHost is a good choice. Though they're not the most helpful guys out there, they at least don't get in your way. Since this is the second time I've configured a slice, I thought I'd drop some hints on what got me here. I can't claim that I followed all these instructions to the letter (in fact, I took some major liberties), but they did give me guidance on setting up my machine:
- Start with PickledOnion's Ubuntu setup instructions, as there's a great introduction to securing the server from intruders.
- Since I need to run Apache 2.2 (in order to run mod_proxy_balancer with Mongrel), I can build Apache on my own or upgrade to Feisty and pull 2.2.3 off the repository. Follow the instructions here but if you need SSL support be aware that apache_ssl_certificate is broken.
- Next step is to get your Subversion repository up and running. I recommend these instructions but couldn't get SSL or WebSVN working with my self-signed fake-o certificate, so feel free to remove the SSL stuff and just run on port 80 with basic authentication. Oh well.
- Toolman Tim has a great script (which I simply followed manually) for starting a new edge Rails project with Subversion, Piston, and Capistrano.
That should get you all the way to where I am, which is actually writing code now. By the way, this multiple selects form plugin looks awesome (found it here but the repository address listed doesn't work. I found a working one on Google Code). It's a way to tie drop-down select boxes who have a foreign key relationship together. Make a selection in the parent drop-down, and it filters by the selection in the child drop-down. And I thought I was gonna have to get all RJS on it.
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