His computer is a SGI O2
In this video Avi talks about his Silicon Graphics O2 and the classic car effect:
Fcgimon updated
In march I wrote a post about our fcgi monitoring and management tool Fcgimon. Today I fixed some rough edges and decided to call this version 1.0.
The biggest change is the way Fcgimon gathers and presents it’s data from `ps`. Earlier versions would just find all the dispatchers and spawners in the process list and show them. This means that not running application would just not show up in the list. Fcgimon now shows the status of all the configured projects, which makes it easier to detect broken spawners. Fcgimon will still show all fcgi processes and spawners outside of the configured projects, but under the normal list and with a small warning.
Minor changes include memory usage information and in general nicer output.
If you like what you see you can download Fcgimon from our Subversion repository.
MySQL NULL gotcha
Never try to find the authenticated user in a Rails app running on MySQL with something like:
@authenticated = Person.find_by_id session[:authenticated_id]
Only use find_by_id if session[:authenticated_id] is not nil:
unless session[:authenticated_id].nil?
@authenticated = Person.find_by_id session[:authenticated_id]
end
When you do a find_by nil the following query is executed:
SELECT * FROM people WHERE (people.`id` IS NULL) LIMIT 1;
Most of the time this returns an empty set, but if the previous query was an insert into the people table, MySQL will return the row for the last insert. This is because NULL somehow returns the generated id:
mysql> SELECT id FROM people WHERE id IS NULL;
Empty set (0.00 sec)
mysql> INSERT people SET username='bob';
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.08 sec)
mysql> SELECT id FROM people WHERE id IS NULL;
+----+
| id |
+----+
| 11 |
+----+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
mysql> SELECT id FROM people WHERE id IS NULL;
Empty set (0.00 sec)It would take some time and determination to exploit this, but it’s certainly not impossible.
Update: This was fixed in Rails just after the release of 1.2.1.
Normal business accounting rules?
Email from Skype:
You’re receiving this email around 30 days before your Skype Credit balance expires. Skype Credit expires 180 days after your last purchase or SkypeOut call. If you’re not using your balance we need to expire the credit sooner or later to comply with normal business accounting rules. Not very exciting, but true.
If you have any idea what these ‘normal business accounting rules’ exactly are, please let me know.
Ruby on Rails Development Timeline Fun
I always follow the Ruby on Rails development timeline to see if my patches get applied and if there are any nice new features. Turns out that apart from the usual stuff, there’s the funnies on page three. Just like in the newspaper.
Sad
The Media Guild aims to support the development of creative talent and entrepreneurship in the fields of ICT and New Media.
Great. The website looks like this in Firefox:
and even more broken in Safari:
Those who also still think they can get away with a website that only works in Internet Explorer should definitely check out their ‘range of specialist media services’ or have their ‘concepts rapid-prototyped by the Guild’s selected apprentices’.
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