NetBeans the best IDE for RoR

I'm an IDE junky. I like productivity. So far all IDEs for Ruby on Rails have been crappy. Since a few weeks I've been using NetBeans, and it is the best by far.
That is why I wanted to do a post about it. But lifeonrails has beaten me by 6 months ;)

One thing he forgot to mention was CTRL + SHIFT + A to switch from controller <-> view

Logitech diNovo Mini Review

Hi guys.

I'm reviewing the Logitech diNovo Mini today. The diNovoMini is a small wireless bluetooth keyboard and mouse combination perfect for HTPCs and the PS3. It acts just like a normal keyboard and mouse so it should be compatible with any device that supports a usb or bluetooth mouse and/or keyboard. A bluetooth usb dongle is provided.

First of all the diNovo Mini is SMALL. I'd say it's the size of an old pocketpc. It's smaller than my hand. The first thing I did is plug in the battery and the usb dongle. A few seconds later I was ready to go.

The mousepad on the top right acts as both the 4-way cursor of a keyboard and a touchpad mouse. The function is toggled by the switch next to it. The left mouse button is on the top left and is labeled OK. Pressing the pad results in a click too. In mousemode the leds are amber, in cursor mode they are green. It looks pretty cool.

The diNovo Mini turns on as soon as you open the lid, and goes in standby if you close it or if you wait for a few seconds.

There's a compartment for the USB dongle underneath the diNovo just so you won't loose it.

Typing can be done in two ways: keyboard style or with your thumbs. Keyboard style is kinda weird, and the keys aren't layed out exactly as a normal keyboard. I prefer using two thumbs. That's what it's made for. The keys are soft rubber-like.

There are a few media keys such as volume up/down/mute mediaplayer prev/next etc. A webbrowser button is also present which is a nice addition. On the left side there's a pageup/down button which makes reading a webpage easier.

I started up LA-MULANA, an MSX-like game to try and see how well the diNovo performs for gaming. This is where the diNovo falls short. It is not possible to press 2 cursor keys simultaneously. If you do so, for example you press left, and want to press up to jump, it will just keep on walking to the left.
This makes the diNovo unsuitable for action gaming. For strategy games it is perfect though.

The maximum range I measured was over 15 meters, I couldn't really get to the maximum. So that's perfect.

I have no pictures at this moment, but I'm sure you'll find those on google ;)

Google App Engine

I just discovered that google has released a preview of Google App Engine. What it basically does, is allow you to create webapplications in python and let it scale on the google cloud. They have a data store + sql-like query language (GQL). I'm going to digg ;) in to it soon, to see what it's like. Unfortunately they don't have a ruby or java framework. But I assume they do allow for django, or maybe some ruby interpreter for python + an ActiveRecord plugin for GQL

How long until everything is google?

Singularity (C# / .NET OS) source released

Microsoft has released the source of Singularity, an operating system bulit in C#.

Link for the source code on codeplex

Some videos on channel9 about singularity for those wanting to see it in action:

Singularity: A research OS written in C#
Singularity Revisited
Singularity III: Revenge of the SIP
Singularity IV: Return of the UI


In short: The os is pretty cool, and does some compile time stuff that ensures certain things (just like the java preverifier). That way you can run processes on seperate hardware threads.

Ok, I have to watch the episodes again, but I don't feel like it. It was a year ago or something since I've seen them

Deferred debug logging

This is not RoR specific or log4j specific. This is just something that'd be really nice. And I'll implement it soon in RoR...

In production, you don't want tons of logging. If something goes wrong, you wish you had set the loglevel to debug, right? ;)

So the idea is this:
The loglevel is set to info.
Someone makes a request.
The logger logs everything as if it was on debug-level, but all in memory.
If the request outcome was without an error, only log the info/warn/error messages.
But if something DID go wrong, we can now output the whole debug log.

The downside of all this is that it eats a few kb per simultanious request, and all the stringconversions has to be done. IMO it's worth it..

Capistrano

Ok.. I got this book RoR for Java Developers from my friend. While browsing through the book, I noticed capistrano, and I really want to play with that; it looks like deployment heaven :D

I installed redmine, which I like, and looked at the source of both redmine and rforum. redmine is more ruby'ish, but pretty obscure sometimes. rforum is probably the way I'll start out making my apps. Java like if constructs and loops. Yeah I know, I suck

Well.. that's it for now, later...

RoR Deployment

So.. I've been reading about RoR and deployment here and there. Basically it all comes down to running a mongrel for each cpu.

But what if you run 40 rails apps on a single box? will that result in 160 mongrels on a quad-core? And 40*50mb = 2GB of ram?

Isn't it possible to run multiple rails applications on a single mongrel?

Also, I'd like to know if there is some sort of tool that will manage mongrels accross all my servers, and deploy application to servers (and maybe do all that on EC2?) depending on the load / availability.


So far RoR is nice to me. But I haven't deployed it yet on a production environment. I'll be installing redmine on one of our servers. just to see how that will behave.