What I’ve Been Up to Lately

I just thought I’d give a brief update about things I’ve been doing and working on lately.

In no particular order, except that which they came out of my mind and into my fingers:

• Switched my blog over to use Disqus for comments. I’ve seen it used elsewhere, and I like the idea of integrating my blog with Twitter and Facebook. I don’t really get a lot of comments here anyway, so we’ll see how it goes. I did have one issue with the WordPress plugin for Disqus, thought. The import function, which is supposed to copy all your existing WordPress comments to Disqus did not work. If anyone has any ideas on what could be wrong, let me know. Everything looked good and it says it did it, they just never show up.
• Started playing with MongoDB. I’ve been hearing a lot about the NoSQL style databases, as we all have, and I’ve been curious about using them. MongoDB had fairly good documentation and looked like a pretty simple PHP implementation, so I choose it over some of the other options. I ended up using the 10gen packages for Ubuntu/Debian to install Mongo on my servers. You might note that the packages only support Ubuntu 9.04+.
• In the process of installing Mongo, I managed to bork my one server pretty bad, so I restored from a backup and created a new one for testing. After getting a testing server up I decided to take a big giant step and install Ruby on Rails to get started experimenting with it a bit more than I have previously. Until now, I’ve avoided it, as I don’t enjoy the copious use of command-line tools that are involved in Rails development and deployment. I’ve been known to call Rails proponent ‘commies,’ because of its highly-automated scripts. Luckily, in the last few months, as I’ve gotten used to running my own Ubuntu servers, I’ve become a lot more comfortable with the command line. So, I felt like it was time to give it another try. I installed Passenger in Apache, so it’s all set to go.
• After getting Mongo and Rails setup on a new cloudserver, I decided to make sure I could do it all over again. Being able to replicate my setup is pretty key to me, so I downloaded a copy of VirtualBox and dove into the world of virtualization, as well. So far so good; I now have a very similar Ubuntu 9.10 server running locally within VirtualBox. It seems like Virtualization has come a long way since I last used Parallels on my Mac. I always found that the virtual machine would bog down the rest of the system so much that it made the system fairly unusable. It doesn’t seem to be the case with the latest generation of virtualization software. It really makes me wonder about setting up a virtual cluster of servers somewhere… cuz you know, I need that much power.
• Client work out the ears. I incorporated my own development firm, Conflux Group, Inc., in January, and since then I’ve been quite busy doing client work. I feel like I’m off to a good start, having plenty of work to keep me busy every week, but I still would like to expand my client base, so as not to put all my eggs in one basket.
• New lens for my SLR. I’ve been thinking about it for a while, and I finally went ahead and got myself a new lens for my Olympus E-500 DSLR. It’s a bit of an odd camera, not too common, so lenses are a bit hard to come by. I settled on a Sigma 50mm f/1.4 lens. The results are beautiful, even with my lack of photography ninja skills.

That’s most everything for now. I hope to have more to say about my experiences with MongoDB and Ruby on Rails as I dig in further.

One final note. If you’re a CodeIgniter or ExpressionEngine person, you should definitely consider coming to EECI2010 in San Francisco this May. I’ll be there, along with my posse of nerdy counterparts hailing from all over. It should be a great time, and I’m really looking forward to it.