Archive for the 'miscellaneous' category

Accessing FedEx Web Services From Ruby/Rails

I recently played around with adding FedEx shipping services to the active_shipping plugin and found a bit of confusion online in regards to how to hit FedEx depending upon the style of service being exposed. Somewhat confusingly, FedEx has non-SOAP services as well as SOAP services that you can hit restfully in an HTTPS [...]

Lightweight Ruby Web Services

The recent Oreilly book Enterprise Rails has a few chapters on SOA and the entire time I was reading those chapters I kept thinking to myself that Rails is sorta overkill for most services implementations, unless you plan on bundling APIs and applications together. I was going to write something about translating the services [...]

Monitoring Radiant CMS and Phusion Passenger on Slicehost

In my previous post, I wrote about quickly setting an Ubuntu Hardy slice up with Radiant and the latest Phusion tools (mod_rails and Ruby Enterprise) and alluded to some setting up logging and monitoring as next steps. As monitoring and logging are fascinating subjects, I figured I’d follow up with a few sentences about [...]

New Baaba Maal Live Acoustic Album

Definitely a posting for the random category, but having waited 7 years for a new album since his excellent album Missing You, I figured the release of Baaba Maal’s new album was worth blogging about. He’s an absolutely amazing live performer. Do yourself a favor and check him out. Especially if [...]

Web Site Optimization News

Some interesting resources and news in the world of web site optimization recently. Good stuff for those who care about this sort of thing. I look forward to clogging up my works print queue with Velocity presentations on Monday even though printing is a bit evil.

How Helpful Are Microloans?

Interesting New Yorker article on the current microfinance vogue. Sites like Kiva are unquestionably great, but I wonder if they’re maybe missing an ingredient?
“What poor countries need most, then, is not more microbusinesses. They need more small-to-medium-sized enterprises, the kind that are bigger than a fruit stand but smaller than a Fortune 1000 corporation.”

Fire Eagle

Location, location, location.
Now this is interesting…. In some industries they say location can be everything…

Is Your Site Green?

Interesting post from the High Performace Web Sites Blogs. Perhaps not surprisingly, efficient page serving is good for your users and our environment.

Superb Remote File Access on Leopard

If you haven’t yet checked out ExpanDrive and you do a lot of remote file editing, you’re missing out.

Sun not feeling Groovy?

What language will feel the love next?