Ubuntu

When I started this techblog in 2007 and got my first 500 real visitors, I was in the clouds. If you told me then I'd hit the 5,000,000 visitor milestone 3 years later, I would have probably slapped some sense into you. Not in my wildest dreams did I imagine my little side-project would take off like this.

If you want to set up Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu Lucid from scratch, there are quite some articles online to choose from. I found most of them involve compiling, only highlight 1 aspect, or are a bit outdated. On top of that, getting it right can be hard as there are a number of issues related to Ruby and Debian/Ubuntu. This is an attempt to put all the sweet info in 1 place.

At Transloadit we use HAProxy "The Reliable, High Performance TCP/HTTP Load Balancer" so that we can offer different services on 1 port. For instance, depending on the hostname, a requests to port 80 can be routed to either nodejs (in case of api.transloadit.com), or nginx (in case of www.transloadit.com). HAProxy has been good to us and setting it up was a breeze. But getting HAProxy to log on Ubuntu Lucid was harder than I thought. All of the tutorials I found either didn't cover logging, or had deprecated information on it. Google suddenly stopped being my friend.

The core of our new project runs on Node.js. With Node you can write very fast JavaScript programs serverside. It's pretty easy to install Node, code your program, and run it. But how do you make it run nicely in the background like a true server?

If you are in IT professionally (coding or sysadmin) you will be staring at monospaced fonts for many many hours a day. So it's probably justified to spend 2 minutes picking a very good one. It can make your work (typing ; ) just a little bit more pleasing.