Ruby on Evan Hoffman

The m3.medium is terrible

Tue, 12 Aug 2014 13:51:08 +0000

I’ve been doing some testing of various instance types in our staging environment, originally just to see if Amazon’s t2.* line of instances is usable in a real-world scenario. In the end, I found that not only are the t2.mediums viable for what I want them to do, but they’re far better suited than the m3.medium, which I wouldn’t use for anything that you ever expect to reach any load.

"You have to install development tools first." - OSX Mavericks, ruby, chef, and nokogiri

Tue, 29 Jul 2014 16:57:06 +0000

I was trying to get knife ec2 working on my Mac, but even though my system Ruby was at 2.0.0, the embedded Ruby that chef/knife use (in /opt/chef/embedded/bin) was 1.9.1. Installing knife-ec2 should just be a matter of typing “gem install knife-ec2” but due to some weird issues with nokogiri, I burned about 4 hours trying to make it work. I tried everything I could find - installing iconv, libxml2, and libxslt via brew and telling “gem install” to use the custom libs in /usr/local/Cellar was the most common suggestion on StackOverflow - but nothing worked. What ended up fixing it for me was reinstalling chef. :|

Wasted time with Exchange 2010, SquirrelMail, and IMAP-SSL

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 17:32:11 +0000

I’m setting up SquirrelMail to point to my Exchange 2010 server via IMAP (don’t ask) and couldn’t get SM to talk to Exchange on port 993 (imaps). Even though the servers on the same subnet, any time passwords are being sent over the network I like to opt for SSL. I found a couple of sites suggesting that the problem was that there was no SSL certificate installed, but I knew for a fact there was a valid certificate because I could get to https://webmail.example.com/ for OWA.

Ruby/Sinatra part 2

Fri, 08 Oct 2010 15:38:19 +0000

Following up on my previous post, I decided to go the easier route and just install an older version of Ruby that didn’t have the problem with Sinatra, since I wanted a setup I could replicate easily, and editing the server.rb each time I installed wasn’t what I was going for. I downloaded 1.9.2-rc2 from http://ftp.ruby-lang.org//pub/ruby/1.9/, compiled it and it works:

[evan@evanfc12 ~]$ ruby --version
ruby 1.9.2dev (2010-07-11 revision 28618) [x86_64-linux]
[evan@evanfc12 ~]$ ruby hi.rb ^C
[evan@evanfc12 ~]$ cat hi.rb

require ‘sinatra’

Trying to teach myself Ruby (again)

Thu, 07 Oct 2010 17:09:28 +0000

Now that I have a real web project to work on I figured it’s a good time to try and teach myself Ruby again. Sinatra seems to be the new hotness so that’s what I’m trying, but so far things aren’t going quite as I expected. Everything appears to be installed, but when I run the “Hello, World!” script, the webserver doesn’t start as it’s apparently supposed to do:

[evan@ehoffman 16:59:34 ~]$ ruby --version
ruby 1.9.2p0 (2010-08-18 revision 29036) [x86_64-linux]
[evan@ehoffman 16:59:39 ~]$ irb
irb(main):001:0> require 'sinatra'
=> true
irb(main):002:0>
You have new mail in /var/spool/mail/evan
[evan@ehoffman 17:00:20 ~]$ cat hi.rb
#require 'rubygems'
require 'sinatra'

get ‘/’ do “Hello World” end [evan@ehoffman 17:00:24 ~]$ ruby hi.rb [evan@ehoffman 17:00:33 ~]$