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Deploying MediaWiki via Chef
After deploying a few custom servers to support both Ruby and php applications, setting up a server to run MediaWiki seemed like a breeze. And it is, sort of, so long as you know where to draw the line. It seemed plausible to create a Chef cookbook to deploy a ready-to-run MediaWiki installation. And I…
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What’s Wrong with Chef and Other Rants
My apologies, this is a placeholder for a number of things I have meant to write about using Chef to deploy our cloud servers. It turns out the task took longer and was a lot more convoluted than imagined, even after considering Hofstadter’s Law, so the writing has all been pushed back. But here’s the proposed list…
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New theme :-(
Today I upgraded a raft of things on this WordPress site, one of them my base theme. And the site looked like crap-o-la. Apparently, creating a child theme to avoid losing custom styling when upgrading the base theme… is virtually no help at all. So it goes. Spending the afternoon fiddling with CSS seemed like…
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Announcing encoding-inspector
First there was the encoding_sampler Gem Last November, I created the encoding_sampler Gem (RubyGems, github) to help find the desired encoding for a particular text file. From the Gem description: EncodingSampler helps solve the problem of what to do when the character encoding is unknown, for example when a user is uploading a file but has…
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Fear and loathing with Chef and nginx
I always hate having to explain why I spent 4 hours on one line of code: override[‘nginx’][‘pid’] = ‘/run/nginx.pid’ It’s not really even code, it’s just a configuration setting. I ran into the problem using Chef, the opscode nginx cookbook, and the very-new Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Not sure if this applies to other configurations but debugging this sort…