Matt Culbreth

A Few Random Thoughts on a Friday

Well here I am again not blogging for a while.  I had a couple posts that were coming along but they’re taking too long.

Here are a few thoughts:

1. Wasn’t Python 3000 supposed to come out in October?  Looks like they released another release candidate yesterday and moved it to December.  Looking forward to porting our application at Bravadosoft over to the new version.
2. As I’ve written before I really like Microsoft’s LINQtoSQL stuff, but then found out that they will probably be deprecating it in favor of their absurd Enterprise Frameworks business.  Argh.  ANOTHER good reason for using open source software.
3. Which leads us to SubSonic, which I’ll probably use if I (have to) do another .NET project.
4. Beautiful fall colors in East Cobb (Marietta) Georgia this year.  I had thought the drought was supposed to hurt the leaves, but it’s great!
5. Working at home and occasionally traveling to a very cool place beats just about any other form of work environment.  I had it back in 2003-2004 with trips to Santa Monica once a month or so, and now I go to an undisclosed location once every few weeks.  I’d rather be at home ALL the time, but that’s probably not as reasonable.

The Three Month Catch Up Post

Well hello after a three month blogging hiatus.  Every time I start blogging I always say to myself,

“Self, let’s put out at least one post per week.  That’s easy!  One post per week, oh, and make it interesting and thought provoking.  And funny.”

Well, that usually doesn’t work.  Something always comes up to push blogging down, even though it’s fun.  

So I figured I’d simply write a single post to cover the past three months, talk a bit about this and that.  And no pressure to be funny, or even interesting for that matter.

Let’s begin with my weight lifting. Read more

Wall Street Waits for Lunch

The ICFP 2008 Programming Contest (or, My Abject Failure)

Well I tried my hand at the 2008 ICFP Programing Contest. I had fun, but man oh man did I fail. FAIL.

But first, a quick video of success!

Let me get this out of the way first. After many hours spent feverishly coding, testing, coding, testing, submitting trial builds, etc, I left a debugging flag in my code and submitted it. This particular gem instructed my program to quit after 1 run. The trials go 5 runs. My program won’t make it that far, and so I will be disqualified. For all that is holy in this world why did I do that?!

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Building a Pylons Development OpenSolaris Container

Of course one of the cornerstone for effective blogging is to build trust and rapport with your audience. You do that by keeping promises, and also by not having advertisements or tags used in your template. But anyway, as promised in an earlier post on Rails Containers I’m going to outline how to create a simple Solaris Container for Pylons development.

I won’t spend quite as much as before on the setup of the zone. I’ll assume that you can go back there and read that one or one of the other good blogs on the topic. This post is more about Python and Pylons, with perhaps just a bit of PostgreSQL thrown in for good measure.

Let’s have some fun!

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Iron Girl Triathlon

My wife Angela is racing in her first triathlon tomorrow. The Aflac Iron Girl at Lake Lanier outside of Atlanta.

We were at the course today getting her signed in and putting the bike in storage. Here’s a shot of some fellow racers:

A Quick Note on GoDaddy TurboSSL Certificates

At Bravadosoft for our first implementations we’ve purchased individual SSL certificates from GoDaddy.  The TurboSSL is only $29.99 and it’s a great way to get going quickly.

A problem we’ve had though is that most modern browsers will throw the “Unknown Certificate Authority” problem at the user if you only use the .crt file they give you.  It kinda scares the users.

The solution is simple–you need to “chain” the certificate for your site along with GoDaddy’s intermediate certificate together.  Point your web server (Apache, Lighty, Nginx, whatever) at that newly concatenated certificate and you’re good.

I found this post on the process and simplified it a bit for Nginx.  The Nginx wiki has a small blurb about this:

if you have a chain certificate file (sometimes called an intermediate certificate) you don’t specify it separately like you do in Apache. Instead you need to add the information from the chain cert to the end of your main certificate file. This can be done by typing “cat chain.crt >> mysite.com.crt” on the command line. Once that is done you won’t use the chain cert file for anything else, you just point Nginx to the main certificate file.

This worked as advertised for us.

Getting ActiveScaffold 1.1.1 to Work With Rails 2.1.0

When I wrote about a Rails development container I kinda left off with “it all worked and everyone’s happy!” This post goes into a bit of detail about how I upgraded Rails (and ActiveScaffold) to use the newer versions. It’s not that this all that tough or clever but there’s not a lot of information on it.

I followed this wiki page about the process. It definitely gets things going.
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Building a Rails Development OpenSolaris Container

A bit over a year ago I started working with Ruby on Rails and ActiveScaffold for an in-house scheduling application I was building for a new consulting client. At the time the version of Rails was 1.2.3 and ActiveScaffold was somewhere before beta. The project went great and everyone was happy. They’ve been using the app now for a year, managing scheduling of over 600 people for close to 1,000 events.

Recently the client came back with some requests for changes and I figured it was a good time to upgrade versions. I didn’t make a rookie mistake though and upgrade all of the versions on my MacBook Pro development box. No, in that way lies madness. You’ll goof up the Rails upgrade and all of a sudden you have no way to develop. Instead I decided to use my OpenSolaris test server (faithfully running in the basement, right next to the weight bench and the Christmas decorations) and a specially created Container just for this purpose.

What follows is a record of my experiment. I’ll spoil the surprise–I got it to work! But I uncovered a few things along the way that surprised me and I wanted to share. Doubtless one of the gurus at Sun (or even Joyent I reckon) could have short circuited some of the problems I encountered, but to be honest I had a pretty good time here. Well, except when it came time to building Mongrel with its dependent C code using friends, but that’s for later on.

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The first post

So I’m blogging again. It’s been quite a while and I’ve been through a few different blogs. A notable first blog still exists, but that’s from a different life. Or hell, at least it seems that way. I was a consultant and then Managing Partner at a local Atlanta consulting firm named Intellinet, we’d just had child #1 (Anderson), and I was generally a pretty interesting guy.

I’m much more interesting now. I’ve since started a software company with a couple of guys, added another child (Katherine), aged gracefully into my mid-thirties, and rediscovered my passion for software, programming, and (wait for it) all things Apple.

Thanks for reading, and let’s see if I can write some interesting content.

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Hey thanks for visiting. Feel free to email me at mattculbreth AT gmail.com.

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Latest Posts

• » A Few Random Thoughts on a Friday
• » The Three Month Catch Up Post
• » Wall Street Waits for Lunch
• » The ICFP 2008 Programming Contest (or, My Abject Failure)
• » Building a Pylons Development OpenSolaris Container