…then the DNS has propagated, and all is good with the world. Well, maybe not the whole ‘good with the world’ thing, but definitely the DNS has propagated, which means you’re viewing the site on it’s shiny new Linode  VPS running on mod_rails (AKA: Phusion Passenger).

Media Temple was a great host, but something changed over the past several months, and my Capistrano deployments were no longer working. It was less of a headache to get a better host than it was to figure out what actually went wrong, and it’s about time I started bumbling around in happy server deployment land again. It doesn’t hurt that mod_rails drastically reduces the Ibuprofen required in the deployment of Rails apps.

As an aside, it’s been so long since I’ve looked at Apache configs in any depth, that it took me a few minutes to figure out how to use the same VirtualHost config for both humandoing.net and www.humandoing.net. The answer (at least the one I used) was ServerAlias. I’m surprised that this didn’t appear anywhere in the mod_rails docs, but I guess it’s more of an Apache thing than a mod_rails thing.

See my config below:

<VirtualHost ip_goes_here:80>
  ServerName humandoing.net
  ServerAlias www.humandoing.net 
  DocumentRoot /var/www/apps/humandoing/current/public
</VirtualHost>

I’m doing deployment using Vlad instead of Capistrano, but man, the documentation sucks. I think that the problem is almost that it’s too easy to use, but that aside – the documentation still seems uber-lacking.

That title has been in my mind for days now, but sadly I haven’t had time to write anything. Which is to say, I’m getting that “before Christmas” burnout, which is translating into more and more Gears of War and less and less Actual Useful Stuff Getting Accomplished.

One problem that I have with Evil Corporations is that they take away (often at the ignorance of customers or end users) our ability to choose which company we’d like to deal with. It’s like a monopoly, but one that tries to lie to people by having two stores, with two completely different names and web sites.

Let’s take Canada’s cell phone gong show industry for example. You hate Rogers and go with Fido? Well, Rogers owns Fido. You hate Telus and go with Koodo (despite the ads that make you want to vomit) – well Telus owns Koodo. This list goes on and on. I ran into someone the other day who had no idea that Best Buy owns Future Shop. Bell owns Solo Mobile. I could go on.

One of the things I find funny about the cell phone situation in particular is how the ads for both Fido and Koodo come off completely mocking and deriding our infamous “System Access Fee” – and have abolished it, but their parent companies (Rogers and Telus, respectively) embrace the System Access Fee as a primary feature, er… a great way to screw customers, er… LOOK! SOMETHING SHINY!.

I’ve started to use Paperclip on a pet project I’m working on (a recommendation from Josh Owens), and the API is great, except for the fact that I couldn’t get it to work.

Files were being uploaded fine, but my thumbnail and other variations were not generating. The documentation says that the whiny_thumbnails option defaults to true, but my reality seems to dictate otherwise.

After I added that…

has_attached_file :receipt, 
                  :styles => { :medium => "600x600>", :thumb => "100x100>" }, 
                  :whiny_thumbnails => true

...I was at least getting an error:

/tmp/stream.13496.0 is not recognized by the 'identify' command.

At long last, I figured that the error message is totally inaccurate. What it really meant is “I’m looking for ‘identify’ in /usr/bin instead of /opt/local/bin even though /opt/local/bin is in your user path”.

For fixing:

cd /usr/bin
sudo ln -s  /opt/local/bin/convert convert
sudo ln -s  /opt/local/bin/identify identify

You’ll probably only have this problem if you installed ImageMagick via MacPorts (as I did). I probably could have fixed it by adding /opt/local/bin to the $PATH used by the web server user, but whatever. This worked.

If anyone reads this blog anymore – I’m looking for 1-2 intermediate Ruby / Rails developers for some ongoing freelance / contract work. The work could last several months, and be anywhere from 5-25 hours per week.

I’d prefer people in North America (I’d really prefer people in BC). I’m only interested in individuals, not outsourcing shops.

Email me if you:

• Are Smart
• Get Things Done
• Read people like Joel Spolsky, Rands, Reg Braithwaite, John Gruber, Jeff Atwood, Charles Oliver Nutter, Rob Walling, Paul Graham or other people who are much smarter than I am
• Would never in your right mind consider working on a project that doesn’t use source control
• Have excellent communication skills.

Just for kicks. The “base” iPhone plan in Canada (by our favorite company Rogers Wireless) is advertised at $60/month. This plan manages to offer what I like to call “No Value Whatsoever” – whereas Rogers believes it offers their customers “flexibility” and “special value bundles”. I don’t know how Yoga relates to this, and unless Rogers hired a marketing person who believes that “special value bundles” is synonymous with “getting stabbed in the eye and kicked in the face” – I think that someone has a very perplexing idea as to the meaning of the word “value”.

As if it weren’t bad enough, let’s see what the actual cost is if you want your phone to be usable. By usable I mean have a half decent number of text messages, Call Display and a moderate 6GB of data (now advertised at $30/month from Rogers if you sign up before August 31st). So now what’s the cost of those 150 minutes plus a half decent amount of data?

$ 60.00 - Basic Voice Plan
$ 30.00 - 6GB of Data
$ 15.00 - iPhone "value pack" to get call display and some text messages
$  6.95 - Standard System Access Fee
$  0.50 - 911 Fee
$  5.62 - GST
—————————————
$118.07 per month.

This might be off by a few cents, because I don’t know if they charge GST on the System Access Fee and 911 Fee. But as far as I’m concerned, and for all intents and purposes, the real cost of actually having an iPhone on the basic plan with the features that actually make it usable for what it’s designed to be is almost DOUBLE the advertised price set out by Rogers.

I don’t know what you call that, but I call it lying, cheating your customers and downright scummy business.