I am just in the process of making a new Rails application live. I use RVM to manage my ruby environments and I’m currently running ruby 1.9.3. I am deploying on Nginx 1.0.11 and Phusion Passenger 3.0.11 (mod_rails/mod_rack). I followed the usual configuration instructions and restarted the nginx server. When I tried to start the application by accessing the URL in my browser I received an error saying that bundle could not be found. After a lot of trial and error I finally realised I had made a mistake in my nginx.conf file.
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Posted in Linux, Ruby-on-Rails.
Tagged with Linux, mod_rails, passenger, programming, ruby-on-rails, rvm.
By martin
– February 28, 2012
This is a brilliant tip. I would never have worked this out on my own. Thank you Jack Russell Software Company.
http://jackhq.tumblr.com/post/3728330919/testing-jquery-autocomplete-using-capybara
The sleep commands were the critical bit, without them Selenium just wasn’t firing the JavaScript event handlers.
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Posted in Ruby-on-Rails, Software.
Tagged with autocomplete, capybara, jquery, selenium, testing.
By martin
– February 26, 2012
I now have a couple of Digi XBee ZB Zigbee wireless modules. I really like the idea of these little wireless modules, compared to equivalent WiFi modules they are very low powered, cheaper and they can be used to collect simple sensor data without an Arduino. I can feel an iDoorbell v2 project coming along soon!
There are basically two different types of Digi XBee modules available, the series 1 and the series 2 (which includes 2.5). From what I read the series 1′s are much easier to work with, however I bought the latest series 2.5 ZB version not the series 1. I thought I’d share how I managed to get these little modules talking to each other.
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Posted in Internet of things.
Tagged with arduino, ciseco, mqtt, sparkfun, xbee, zigbee.
By martin
– January 19, 2012
I have a number of Ruby-on-Rails apps on my little Ubuntu server, each one accessible using a sub URI. For example, the home controller of the homework application is accessed with:
http://bravo.local/homework/home
Where homework is the sub URI configured to serve my application and home is the name of one of the controllers. The Apache/Passenger configuration for this set up is documented here.
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Posted in Linux, Ruby-on-Rails.
Tagged with apache, decorator, draper, helper, mod_rails, paperclip, passenger, programming, request, ruby-on-rails.
By martin
– January 18, 2012
The whole Internet-of-things idea has really captured my imagination. DIY Sensors and Machine-2-machine computing are becoming a reality thanks to open source projects like Arduino.
Today I stumbled upon a podcast interview on MQ Telemetry Transport, or MQTT, with Andy Piper from IBM. MQTT is an M2M/Internet of things connectivity protocol developed at IBM. Much of the podcast talks about how this technology is being used in home DIY sensor projects. MQTT is based on a “Publish and Subscribe” architecture and requires a Broker to handle the messaging. Although IBM have a few different MQTT Broker implementations, there is an open source implementation of the broker server called Mosquitto that looks worth experimenting with.
If that wasn’t enough to wet your appetite, Andy Stanford-Clark (also from IBM) gave a presentation called “The house that Twitters” which explains how he has used MQTT to create a number of interesting home sensor projects.
Posted in Internet of things, Linux, Podcasts.
Tagged with IT Conversations, mqtt, programming, sensor, twitter.
By martin
– January 18, 2012
I am a software guy and have very little experience with electronics. I am hoping that playing around with Arduino will help me learn a thing or two about resistors, capacitors and the like.
I have started a project using my Arduino that notifies my iPhone whenever a switch in a separate circuit is closed. The plan is to connect this to our home doorbell so as well as the usual ding-dong we also get an iPhone alert. Software-wise this works great using a Wifly shield to enable the Arduino to talk the the Prowl notification service on the Internet over http. It's kind of a wifi version of the project described here http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2010/12/snail-mail-push-alerts.html.
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Posted in Internet of things.
Tagged with arduino, iphone, prowl, wifi.
By martin
– November 7, 2011
Today I needed to update my nginx server to support serving of static gzipped asset files alongside Passenger (Rails 3.1 asset pipeline – server configuration). My install was already a bit of a hack after trying various ways to originally get it installed. This update needed the whole thing to be re-built from source so I decided to get the latest source and write myself some notes so that it won’t be so hard next time.
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Posted in Linux, Ruby-on-Rails.
Tagged with Linux, mod_rails, nginx, passenger, ruby-on-rails, ubuntu.
By martin
– October 4, 2011
I have been researching the technologies behind the Semantic Web for a rather interesting project. Having read as much as I could (none of it great), I manged to created a RDF model and a very basic ontology to do some experiments using SPARQL and the Jena tool kit. I really struggled to get the inferencing to work on Jena so I thought I’d give it a try in Oracle instead.
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Posted in Oracle.
Tagged with database, oracle, rdf, semantics, triples.
By martin
– May 17, 2011
Although I’m a massive fan of Rails, my background (and my professional life) is Java and Oracle. It was inevitable that I would try to bring these worlds together at some point. The following is a description of how I took and existing Rails 3 app, which was developed on SQLite and runs in production on MySQL, and got it to work on Weblogic 10.3.4.0 and Oracle 11g R2 database.
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Posted in Oracle, Ruby-on-Rails, Software.
Tagged with CentOS, java, jruby, oracle, programming, ruby-on-rails, warble, weblogic.
By martin
– April 28, 2011
A little aide-mémoire to remind me how to prepare my Rails database environment for either MySQL or SQLite on Ubuntu Linux.
MySQL
$ sudo apt-get install mysql-server libmysqlclient-dev
...
$ gem install mysql
...
SQLite
$ sudo apt-get install sqlite3 libsqlite3-dev
...
$ gem install sqlite3-ruby
...
Posted in Linux, Ruby-on-Rails.
Tagged with Linux, mysql, ruby-on-rails, sqlite, ubuntu.
By martin
– November 28, 2010
