Inspirational Technology

The next edition of Agile web development with Rails is now available in PDF form and is expected in book stores around the same time that Rails 1.2 is released. I’ve been reading the beta PDFs and am looking forward to getting the paper book when it ships. The REST features of Rails 1.2 are a great enhancement that brings Rails one step closer to being a true next generation web framework.

Desert Code Camp is coming up Oct. 28 in Phoenix. The last Code Camp was actually pretty disappointing due to the complete lack of hallway interaction and the heavy Microsoft orientation of the sessions. All I really care about is meeting smart people who are doing cool stuff, finding out about the latest Microsoft technology is something I can do online. This one looks like it might be a bit better so we’ll see how it goes. If nothing else, the Phoenix Ruby community will be out in force and there are a number of sessions on Ruby and Ruby on Rails.

I’ve been looking around at ways of encrypting file systems on servers. dm-crypt seems like a good way to go, however the big question for me is how do you handle key management? It’s great to have the data encrypted, but that key still needs to be on the system somewhere or else you hang if the system restarts. That was something that always bugged me about SSL certs that required a password to decrypt them when the webserver started. In order to have a self sustaining system you had to put the key somewhere which obviously defeats the whole point of encrypting anything. So if you had to build a system with application code encrypted on the drives, how would you manage keys?

A new website for the Ruby language has been launched. It may now win the award for the slickest looking site of any programming language. A dramatic improvement over the old Ruby site.

The next installment of Refresh Phoenix is tonight at Inza Coffee in Scottsdale. I guess the topic this month is marketing, but the topic is rarely the interesting thing, it’s much more about sitting around and chatting with a bunch of other geeks.

Also the Ruby users group is meeting next monday. So if you’re in Phoenix and interested in Ruby or Ruby on Rails it’s worth stopping by. We also hit up Havana Cafe afterwards for some food and more converation.

A common question I see from people working with Ruby on Rails migrations is where’s the documentation? That’s a pretty good question and there doesn’t really seem to be a whole lot around right now. Here’s a few things I’ve dug up that may be helpful.

• Screencast example
• API Docs
• Getting started with Active Record Migrations
• The joy of Migrations
• Rails Migration Cheat Sheet

Also the newer books have some information on it. I suspect the second edition of Agile Web Development with Rails will be the main source in the future. Also Rails Recipes has a little info.

If you know of other sources please add them as comments.