Every week I buy milk.

Every week I take a milk gallon up to the front desk that has a “Sell By” date that has passed. This week I took one up that was SIX DAYS past the sell by date. I’ve been doing this for the last 3 months EVERY WEEK. I’ve been told by the managers on multiple occasions, “We’ll fix it”. I was told once they hired a new Dairy manager to deal with it.

I give up. I’m going to Sendiks Fine Foods.

/records/show/12345 used to be valid, but has been replaced with the RESTful version /records/00123. The ID is now also meaningful instead of a MySQL generated id.

My first attempt was to just redirect to the 404 page.
record = Record.find(params[:id]
rescue ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound
redirect_to("/404.html")

But as I watched the logs, I noticed that this really wasn’t right since it was still returning a 302 (redirect) and the a 200 (OK) code for those links. The crawlers were getting the instruction that you should just display the 404 page for those links. That might seem OK, but really I wanted them to get the 404 immediately and remove the page from their databases.

record = Record.find(params[:id]
rescue ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound
render(:file => "#{RAILS_ROOT}/public/404.html", :layout => false, :status => 404)

By rendering the 404.html directly and including the 404 status code, it should help to fix the situation.

I’m considering slicehost.com, linode.com and webfaction.com.

I guess the other big reason is that I want to play with MongoDB and each of these gives me that option.

bundler08 is for bundler 0.8.4 and such, which plays really well with rails 2.3.5

bundler is for bundler 0.9.x and beyond which plays well with rails 3 (and rails 2.3.5 if you can get it to work…)

This is a really good thing because you can now install both of them at the same time and the warning that you must un-install all previous versions of bundler is now moot. Really helpful if you’re running on dreamhost with mixed rails 2/3 sites.

Here’s the blog post where I found this.

Here’s the actual page.

No wonder there are massive bot nets and phishing scams and email spams going every day. People are just… wow.

Take a look at this gist and see if it can help you.

Edit: Updated the gist to a better one.

When running bundle install in the future, Bundler will use packed gems, if available, in preference to gems available in other sources.

This will be nice and solve my issue of re-installing all the gems on each deploy.

You will want to run bundle unlock to remove the lock, then bundle install to ensure that the new dependencies are installed on your system, and finally bundle lock again to relock your application to the new dependencies.

We will add a command in a near-future version to perform all these steps for you (something like bundle install –relock).

This will also replace the unlock, update, lock steps I’ve got in the callbacks.rb for my deploy scripts. Not a huge deal, but fewer commands is better.

The combination of these two updates should speed up the deploy a lot.

If you’re not running an old version of bundler, this should be an easy update. If you are, it gets complicated to the point that for now, it’s not worth updating since bundler 0.9.3 still seems to have issues with rails 2.3.x.

The first thing I did was to install the bundler gem in your usual location for dreamhost. This isn’t going to be a “how do I set up rails and custom gems for dreamhost?” post as those resources exist on the web already.

On dreamhost:
gem install bundler

Now you want to setup your rails 3 application, get it into a git repository and push it there. The main point of this post is to include my deploy files which are based on the github ‘git’ deploy strategy, which is really nice. I’ve added in some code for jammit as my asset packager, and some custom bundler callbacks.

I’ve included a gist below with my deploy code. Make sure the files are in the proper directories.

Why did it fail?

It failed because it never lived up to the single scene where “Future Hiro” met with Peter in the subway. This single scene set up so much of what could have been great about the show, and instead they turned Hiro into a clown, and Peter into a limited power moron.

TV needs to start accepting shows with specifically limited runs so they can cut out all the crap and just have episodes of excellent. Notice how Lost got good again when they set the end date. Dollhouse, for is spectacularly bad beginning, became brilliant when they stopped doing the “story of the week” and focused on the downfall of the tech and corporation.

TV executives need to find people with brilliant ideas, give them a show that will ONLY last 1-2 seasons, but give them the ability to make more than one series. The audience will follow great storytelling, even if it’s not the same characters.

built on the work of
http://www.zorched.net/2009/05/08/password-strength-validation-with-regular-expressions/
and
http://www.techpint.com/programming/regular-expression-check-password-strength