development

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....

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....

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)....

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…...

I realized that it’s been quite a while since my last update. Unfortunately it seems like the amount of interesting stuff I have to write about is inversely proportional to the spare time I have available for writing… ;) Anyway, I figure I’ll try to get back into the habit of publishing smaller posts, but hopefully more regularly. Let’s see how it goes… Ever since I went back into startup life four months ago, I’ve had the chance to play with a lot of exciting technologies, so there’s plenty of stuff to write about....