My Nerd Score
Oct/071
Sheesh. Hard to decide if I should be embarrassed because the score is high, or because I didn’t get those last two points! I know the guy who would get 100 (DrLloyd11).
RightScale and Amazon’s EC2, S3, etc.
Oct/070
I got a nice comment from Michael Crandell at RightScale regarding my post on Amazon’s EC2, ‘cos I had mentioned their offering.
I should say an additional word or two about RightScale.com: That’s how I first launched an EC2 instance. When I first saw EC2, I read that you had to download command-line tools: But that seemed awkward to me, and I delayed experimenting. Then I read about RightScale.com, which provides a full-blown web-based interface for managing and launching instances. Personally, I think this is the way to get your feet wet with EC2.
It’s great to use the command-line tools, as I have done now, and possibly use Amazon’s programmable API directly to manage and create instances. But to get a feel for the products, I really like getting some guidance, and RightScale provides that — and more, of course, such as the bundled MySQL setups I mentioned before.
Amazon made an interesting decision to provide EC2 and S3 via an API and leave it to others to create the web-based interfaces. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall to hear the debate in the company as to whether they should offer the API or the API plus a web-based interface . . .
Making rake package zip on Windows
Oct/071
If you want to do rake package on Windows and specify need_zip = true, it’s a bit of a problem because Windows doesn’t come with a command-line zip program. To be sure, one could always install Cygwin.
I’ve seen blogs talking about hacking rake, but that seems really gross.
Another option is to clone as much of zip as rake needs (not much!) with the rubyzip gem. After doing gem install rubyzip, the following seems to be acceptable for rake (haven’t tested this a lot; feel free to fix my code 
). This little bit of code — simulating what command-line zip does — seems to be a sort of missing link in the documentation and tests for rubyzip. It’s easy, but not super-obvious from the docs.
require 'zip/zip'
recursive = false
if ARGV[0] == '-r'
recursive = true
ARGV.shift
end
archive = ARGV.shift
ARGV.each do |arg|
files = recursive ? Dir[ arg + '/**/*.*' ] : [arg]
files.each do |f|
Zip::ZipFile.open(archive, Zip::ZipFile::CREATE) do |z|
z.add( f, f)
puts " adding #{f}"
end
end
end
And then in your Rakefile.rb, something like:
desc "Zip up project"
Rake::PackageTask.new("#{PROJECT}-#{USER}", "1.0.0") do |p|
p.need_zip = true
p.zip_command = 'ruby ../myzip.rb'
p.package_files.include("./**/*")
p.package_files.exclude("./**/*.svn")
p.package_files.exclude("./doc")
p.package_files.exclude("./pkg")
end
Viva Los Sox Rojos!!
Oct/070
I think I got the Spanish right . . . Click for a fine garment from my friends at The Red Seat:
