Rails, Facebooker, and memcached Session Store

We’re using Facebooker for our Rails based Facebook apps. However, we ran into a problem after migrating our session store to the MemCacheStore. Every request was producing the following stacktrace: /!\ FAILSAFE /!\ Sat Feb 28 10:24:09 -0800 2009 Status: 500 Internal Server Error session_id '2.wYavYw2U9jBTnFOcX9rjMw__.86400.1235934000-1023424742' is invalid /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/actionpack-2.2.2/lib/action_controller/session/mem_cache_store.rb:54:in `initialize' /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/cgi/session.rb:273:in `new' /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/cgi/session.rb:273:in `initialize_without_cgi_reader' /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/actionpack-2.2.2/lib/action_controller/cgi_ext/session.rb:19:in `initialize_aliased_by_facebooker' /Users/mirko/Work/questionx/vendor/plugins/facebooker/lib/facebooker/rails/facebook_session_handling.rb:35:in `initialize' /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/actionpack-2.2.2/lib/action_controller/cgi_process.rb:94:in `new' It turns out that Facebook session ids include dots and underscores, which the MemCacheStore chokes on....

February 28, 2009 · 1 min · 143 words · DigitalHobbit

Merb and Rails are merging!

No, it’s not April 1st, and as far as I know, hell hasn’t frozen over either. The Merb and Rails teams have in fact announced that they will be joining forces. The end result will eventually be released as Rails 3. Rather than repeating all the details here, below are links to the original announcements by various team members: DHH (Ruby on Rails Blog) The day Merb joined Rails (Ruby on Rails Blog) Yehuda Katz Ezra Zygmuntowicz Matt Aimonetti (also includes a short FAQ Video) Carl Lerche It is unclear how much of the actual Merb code will make it into Rails 3, but the important thing is that Rails will embrace many of Merb’s core principles, such as a lightweight core, performance, modularity (i....

December 23, 2008 · 2 min · 333 words · DigitalHobbit

Hacking the D-Link DNS-321 NAS

For some reason I derive immense gratification from hacking cheap commodity consumer devices and making them do much more than they were originally designed to. Not that I can’t claim all that much credit (as I generally just apply readily available hacks that others have figured out), but still… Some of my favorite past hacks include: Original Xbox: I haven’t played games on it for years, but with XBMC on it, it remains a formidable media center....

November 26, 2008 · 4 min · 659 words · DigitalHobbit

Rails in the Cloud: AWS, Heroku, and Morph

Amazon Web Services Over the course of the past 6 months or so, I’ve had the opportunity to explore various cloud hosting services, starting with Amazon Web Services. I don’t want to go into detail about AWS here, but suffice to say that I like this suite of services a lot, and it was a great fit for an SMS app / messaging server I deployed on this infrastructure. The application consisted of a set of loosely coupled components running on EC2 (some daemon apps and some Merb based web frontends), communicating via the Simple Queue Service (SQS)....

November 13, 2008 · 10 min · 1973 words · DigitalHobbit

Amazon EC2 Out Of Beta

Today, Amazon removed the beta label from their EC2 service, along with a bunch of related announcements. This is great news! Over the past half year, I have become an enthusiastic user of the various AWS services, including EC2, which has been very stable for me thus far. But now Amazon is formalizing this by offering a 99.95% availability guarantee as part of the new EC2 SLA. I don’t personally care about the new Windows support, but I suppose this might make some Microsoft aficionados happy…...

October 23, 2008 · 3 min · 632 words · DigitalHobbit