Mike Perham

RubyConf 2009 is taking place in San Francisco November 19-21. I’ll be there and have most of the 18th free if anyone is near SFO and wants to join me in some coffeeshop coding.

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I’m giving away a free copy of my iPhone app, Zinger, to every person who gets their app running with our new metrics service, Dash. Just email me. Steps (documented in more depth here):
1) Request an invite by signing up at https://dash.fiveruns.com
2) Log into Dash, create a new Rails application and note your [...]

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This article spurred me in a completely unexpected technical direction over the winter break: Massive Christmas iPod Touch Sales Boost App Store Downloads. Two facts struck me:

An application which makes farting sounds was selling 40,000 units/day.
I’ve had a secret dream for a year…

My dream? To make a $5 keychain sold at the checkout [...]

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I cleaned up the blog style as I thought the previous look and feel was a little busy. I hope you like the changes!

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I’m going to be introducing my new Politics gem at RubyConf 2008 tomorrow. This gem provides a few modules which solve a couple of distributed computing problems we were having at FiveRuns in providing fault tolerant, scalable processing across many machines.
Here’s my RubyConf slides (1MB, Keynote), minus the screencasts I created to demo the [...]

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Good News Everybody!  I’ll be speaking at RubyConf 2008 in Orlando, FL in November on “Patterns in Distributed Computing”.  I’m going to discuss the various algorithms we’ve used to provide fault tolerance, reliablility and performance from server-side processing daemons.
In other news, this week marks my first anniversery in the professional Ruby world.  I’m pretty happy [...]

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I’m upgrading my Rails testbed, http://www.tracknowledge.org, with the latest and greatest.  The Rails world moves VERY quickly and staying on top of it can be challenging.  When I built it initially in April 2008, nginx + mongrel was the typical deployment model.  I stuck with Apache though since it was already installed on the machine; [...]

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Well, I wrapped up my talk in Berlin yesterday at RailsConf Europe and I’m giving it one last time in Austin at LoneStarRubyConf before putting it out to pasture.  If you want to see the slides, you can find them here:
How NOT to Build a Service (Keynote, 2.5MB)
How NOT to Build a Service (PDF, 2.2MB)

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It was a Google Gears bug.  I uninstalled it and blew away its data directory, reinstalled the latest and everything seems to work properly now.

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With all due respect to Pres. Kennedy, I stole his memorable phrase because I’m going to Berlin! RailsConf Europe 2008 accepted my talk “How NOT to Build a Service”. I’m very excited to be traveling to Europe; it’s been three years since I was in Amsterdam and I can’t wait to visit the [...]

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