Confounding URL typists since 2007.
I just noticed that Passenger has finally released. If you haven’t heard of this, it basically does for Rails deployment what mod_php does for PHP. I gave it a try on a test server I run, and it works as easily as advertised. I had it up and running in about 10 minutes. Check out the user docs — it’s a pretty slick package, from the looks of things.
…this site is the number 1 search result for at Google, for the moment, despite only posting one article about it. Yet, somehow, it’s number 2 for the search, . Now that’s what I call a dearth of documentation. The API, not the badgers.
I love Google’s quote of the day feature. Every so often a real gem shows up there. Today was one of those days. Let me introduce you to the Escalator Principle.
“I like an escalator because an escalator can never break, it can only become stairs. There would never be an escalator temporarily out of order sign, only an escalator temporarily stairs. Sorry for the convenience.”
-Mitch Hedberg, comedian
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A central source for user authentication is a worthwhile thing for a company to have. Unfortunately, for much of the corporate world, this means Microsoft Active Directory. Hey, it’s not all bad. At least Ruby applications can access Active Directory with the ruby-net-ldap gem. Still, code in a Rails application which has to deal with LDAP attributes can look downright foreign next to all of your nifty English-looking attribute names, and ActiveLdap, while very cool, is overkill for simple tasks. Sometimes you just want a simple way to get at a few key attributes about your users once they log in. Maybe you’re looking to cache that info in a local database table so that you can enforce database integrity checks, for instance? Here’s a single file you can just drop into your Rails (or plain old Ruby) project and use any way you see fit.
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