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Advices for customer as part of project

August 26th, 2009 by vasiliy.kiryanov

Today even great application can die alone .. world has too many great applications.
me

Do you know what software development company sell?
Not just some abstract peace of software but application that can solve customer’s problems .. we should understand what customer wants from the application, what tasks he/she wants to solve with application.

We provide to customer our vision and suggest technology/platform/approach, customer provide ideas/plans/limitations .. together we will end with some satisfied result. But what then?
Then as usual we get our money and leave customer alone with his application.

What else we can give to them?

We should give business advices that can bring closer customer’s target.
Client can take them or not but part of our work is to give ones. Customers see that we care, that help to build better relationship and get great satisfaction .. we make great applications that work!

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    Fast scalability of Ruby on Rails with mongrel under OpenBSD

    August 12th, 2009 by alex.shapovalov

    preamble

    Everybody who works with ruby on rails more then month knows at least 2 things:
    it’s great framework, but can’t handle multiple requests simultaneously due to it still doesn’t use threads.

    fast start

    As scalability is common issue, rubyonrails site wiki provides full set of solutions:
    [http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/#deployment_stacks]

    But we as fast solution will use great OpenBSD pf (Packet Filter) that capable to do many cool things.
    First issue is standard mongrail cluster that can start several instances of mongrail can only create them on one IP with different ports, and pf can’t distribute requests among different ports on same IP.

    Here we can create 2 simple scripts that start and destroy server instances:
    # cat start.sh

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    count=1
    for ip in 10.0.0.1 10.0.0.2 10.0.0.3 10.0.0.4 10.0.0.5
    do
    mongrel_rails start -e production -d --user myapp --group myapp --chdir /var/www/railsdocs/myapp \
    --address ${ip} \
    --pid /var/www/railsdocs/myapp/tmp/pids/mongrel.${count}.pid \
    --log /var/www/railsdocs/myapp/log/mongrel.${count}.log

    count=$(($count + 1))
    done

    # cat stop.sh

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    for instance in {1..5}
    do
    mongrel_rails stop --wait 3 --chdir /var/www/railsdocs/myapp \
    --pid /var/www/railsdocs/myapp/tmp/pids/mongrel.${instance}.pid
    end

    And we need to enable pf:
    #/etc/rc.conf.local

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    pf=YES
    #pflogd_flags=                   # add more flags, ie. "-s 256"

    add one string to configuration file for load distribution:
    #/etc/pf.conf

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    rdr pass log on re0 proto tcp from any to SOME_IP port 80 ->
    {10.0.0.1, 10.0.0.2, 10.0.0.3, 10.0.0.4, 10.0.0.5 } port 3000 round-robin

    check work with:
    # pfctl -s nat

    monitor with:
    tcpdump -n -e -ttt -i pflog0

    for more info on pf:
    http://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/
    man pf.conf (especially ‘TRANSLATION’ and ‘POOL OPTIONS’ sections)

    Then when you see you need more advanced solution for load distribution you can install haproxy.
    Check it with [http://www.openbsd.org/4.5_packages/i386/haproxy-1.3.15.7.tgz-long.html]

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      The Crisis of Credit Visualized

      April 9th, 2009 by henadiy.atroshko

      preamble

      Wonderful guy Jonathan Jarvis created great video as part oh his thesis work in the Media Design Program, a graduate studio at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. Here we can see simple story of the credit crisis.

      “The goal of giving form to a complex situation like the credit crisis is to quickly supply the essence of the situation to those unfamiliar and uninitiated.”

      Thanks Jonathan for good work, keep working, we will be watching you..

      His site: [http://jonathanjarvis.com]
      He works now as interaction & media designer.

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        Mozilla Bespin: web-based code editor on web technologies

        February 13th, 2009 by alex.shapovalov

        Bespin — an experiment from Mozilla Labs that possibly will propose an open, extensible web-based framework for code editing that aims to increase developer productivity, enable compelling user experiences, and promote the use of open standards.

        At this time we have initial working experimental prototype that we can use to understand concepts of Bespin and the possibilities that it opens up.
        The protorype includes support for basic editing features, such as syntax highlighting, large file sizes, undo/redo, previewing files in the browser, importing/exporting projects.

        As for me idea of web-based code editor is arguable due to we have enough excellent standalone open-source code editors like Netbeans [http://www.netbeans.org/] or Eclipse [http://www.eclipse.org/] that have good collaboration possibilities. Standalone code editors we can develop using pretty object-oriented languages like Java and don’t bother with Javascript. But time will say its word.

        Mozilla wants you
        The Bespin experiment is still in its infancy and just getting started. There are many ways to join the team and get involved: [https://bespin.mozilla.com/]

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