So What’s the Deal with IndexCards?

March 24th, 2010

What’s all this IndexCards nonsense?

IndexCards is a website that I’ve been devoting a good deal of my free time to recently. It is a family project where we draw new stuff on index cards everyday.

So it’s an Art Project?

Well yes, and no. IndexCards is:

  • An Art Project – You got me, yes it’s in some ways completely non-technical.
  • A Family Activity – Since my kids have gotten involved, it has just gotten better and better.
  • An Evolving Sinatra Based Website – My first Sinatra based project, and I am really liking it.
  • A Way for Me to Try out Tokyo Cabinet – I’ve found that I don’t always need a relational database.
  • An Opportunity to Use my Razsell Gem – A live app that consumes feeds from Zazzle.
  • A Design Project – Let’s face it creating a website from scratch that is part of the design community raises the bar a little.

IndexCards is an Art Project

I created IndexCards in response to the Design Something Every Day Challenge posted on Smashing Magazine at the end of 2009. I enjoy drawing and painting, but have directed so much of my interest towards Ruby and Open Source Projects (and the internet) in the past couple years that I haven’t spent time creating any art. As a new years resolution, I decided to change this by accepting the challenge.

IndexCards is a Family Activity

After a month or so of me scribbling away on little pieces of paper, my kids asked me what I was up to. So I explained that it is a project to help me to improve my artistic skills and “enjoy the journey” so to speak. They all wanted to participate and so I’ve been including them since then. Recently, I’ve started creating Art Night events where I introduce a theme and we all start drawing away. It has been a great family activity and I’ve been very impressed by all of their work.

IndexCards is an Evolving Sinatra Based Website

OK there is a technical side to this project, but that’s perfect for me. I find that I like both the technical and creative sides of things. When one side of my brain needs a break I can flip over to the other and continue working on the project. A lot of the site’s inner workings are not visible from the web, but there is definitely a web based component. For that I decided to use Sinatra and it’s been great to work with. It’s a lot more open that working with Ruby on Rails, but many of the tedious parts of working directly with Rack have been smoothed out. I’m interested
in creating another Sinatra based application.

IndexCards is a Way for Me to Try Out Tokyo Cabinet

Another technical bit I wanted to try out in Tokyo Cabinet a key value store of Mixi fame. I used the rufus-tokyo gem to interface with Ruby along with the Repository pattern. I was really worried at first that I’d get to a point where I really
needed a relational database and I’d have to rewrite the data persistence in MySql. As the project goes on, I’m finding that my fears were unfounded. Tokyo Cabinet was a great fit for the project.

IndexCards is an Opportunity to Use my Razsell Gem

Ah Razsell. I created this gem while starting out on Kung Fu Tees, a T-shirt design site I wanted to make with my kids. Kung Fu Tees, this far is vaporware, but Razsell has emerged as it’s own project any users. It allows you to query the Zazzle.com rss API and consume the feed to populate a store. Using it has caused me to make a few changes, which is great, because that’s what happens when you really use the code you write.

IndexCards is a Design Project

So I’ve always been wary of CSS and web design in general. I mean I’m ok at it, but am generally disappointed with the look of my sites when I compare them to so many of the other websites out there. Designing a website that is part of the web design community ups the ante a bit. So far I’m not
completely satisfied with it, but it is much better than I’d feared it would be.

But, Why Index Cards?

I wanted to draw daily, but I didn’t want to burden myself with a huge canvas. Index cards are the perfect size to constrain the scope of the image and challenge me to make it fit. Not to mention they are cheap and you can find them almost anywhere. That leaves a little budget for art supplies, and
I’ve been picking up a few things here and there. Just today I ordered a Lamy Safari fountain pen to try out, and am looking forward to it.

Original small works of art (OSWOA) have
stemmed from the Artist Trading Cards and ACEO communities on ebay. Maybe I can find a tie-in for those. They fit right in.

IndexCards is fun, You Should Check it Out

If you haven’t been to IndexCards go take a look. Maybe you will be inspired to do some art of your own.

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Posted in Ruby, Thoughts | No Comments »

Getting 502 Bad Gateway with Passenger after cleaning gems

February 25th, 2010

502 Bad Gateway

Recently I was updating some gems on my server. I did a gem update and a gem update –system. Everything seemed to be running smoothly. However a few minutes later I was checking my sites and I discovered that all of my Rack based sites were down and giving a 502 error.

The Background

In my short experience being my own webmaster, I’ve found that the 502 error code is the most unhelpful of error codes. It means that your app is not working. After a few times checking my error logs I noticed that the error that was bubbling up was “No such file or directory”. So I took this and searched through my apps looking for a file that might be missing

After a few hours of searching, restarting Nginx and reinstalling passenger, my apps and my gems, I took some time to think about the issue. I realized that all of my passenger apps were now suddenly failing, but my wordpress blog was still chugging along just fine. So I decided that the problem must be with Passenger.

The Culprit

After much digging around, I found that the Nginx config was still pointing to the Passenger version 2.2.9. A version I’d removed with gem clean many hours before. Once I updated this to version 2.2.10, which was the current version installed, everything started working again.

The Moral

If you update Passenger make sure that your webserver configuration is pointing to the new version.

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Ruby Wisdom

February 17th, 2010

I got this error today testing a Rails 3 app that I’m working on..

  3) Error:
test_updates_status(QueueWorkerTest):
NoMethodError: undefined method 'save!' for "g":String
    /home/rubyyot/working/stuff.longshotlabs.com/lib/stuff/queue_worker.rb:66:in 'block in retrieve_item_info'
    /home/rubyyot/working/stuff.longshotlabs.com/lib/stuff/queue_worker.rb:64:in 'each'
    /home/rubyyot/working/stuff.longshotlabs.com/lib/stuff/queue_worker.rb:64:in 'retrieve_item_info'
    /home/rubyyot/working/stuff.longshotlabs.com/lib/stuff/queue_worker.rb:38:in 'process_unit'
    /home/rubyyot/working/stuff.longshotlabs.com/lib/stuff/queue_worker.rb:14:in 'process_queue'
    /home/rubyyot/working/stuff.longshotlabs.com/test/unit/queue_worker_test.rb:35:in 'test_updates_status'

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Date.parse() is not your friend.

February 7th, 2010

I’ve started looking at Ruby 1.9 with multiruby, and one of the first things that I found in testing is that Date.parse assumes European dates (dd/mm/yyyy format) in v1.9. The solution is to use strptime() instead so you can specify a format.

Date.strptime("12/31/2009", "%m/%d/%Y")

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Moving soon

February 1st, 2010

I got frustrated with Dreamhost the other day because they downgraded the version of git available on the server to v1.4.4.4. That broke what I’d done with rubyyot.com. So I got a virtual server on Linode. It’s very nice so far. Hang on things will be in transition for a little while.

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Posted in Personal | No Comments »

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