Ruby, Rails, and Randomness

The Washington Post recently profiled Intridea and our products on its WASHBIZ Blog and in print on Monday, April 28, 2008; Page D04. The article explains our MediaPlug, Scalr, SocialSpring, and Smarkr products, and goes on to say that "Intridea may be the model company for the modern Internet economy."

Click here to read the entire article

Since open sourcing Scalr late yesterday we've been mentioned on TechCrunch and the Amazon Web Services Blog

We're extremely happy with the response so far. If anyone is interested in contributing to the project please visit the Scalr Project on Google Code.

Intridea is officially open-sourcing Scalr - a redundant, self-curing, and self-scaling hosting environment build on top of Amazon's EC2.

Scalr utilizes EC2 to provide a multi-tiered hosting environment with pre-built images for load balancers, database servers, and application servers. Designed with flexibility in mind, users can further customize each type of machine to use as nodes in their server farm or customize a generic base image for any number of purposes. The application monitors and maintains the server farm by reconfiguring the entire cluster when machines fail or when new machines are inserted. Additionally Scalr can be setup to replace failed machines and scale up and down based on user configured thresholds.

The system was initially designed for MediaPlug, a white label audio, video, and image transcoding service that needed to scale based on customer demand.

The project can be found at http://scalr.intridea.com

The project is still very young, but we're hoping that by open sourcing it the AWS development community can turn this into a robust hosting platform give users an alternative to the current fee based services available.

Josh Owens and I will be presenting at the upcoming acts_as_conference February 8th and 9th in Orlando Florida.

Adding Media to Your Rails Application

Adding media such as audio and video to a web application can be costly and time consuming. In this talk we'll cover the fundamentals and break down several solutions for uploading large files and transcoding audio and video in Rails.

Presentation slides and files

Here's a quick way to add Subversion notification for Campfire using Tinder.

Create svn-campfire.rb with the correct username and password:

#!/usr/local/bin/ruby
require 'rubygems'
require 'tinder'

svnlook = "/usr/local/bin/svnlook"


campfire = Tinder::Campfire.new 'campfiresubdomain'
campfire.login 'user@example.com', 'password'
room = campfire.find_room_by_name('room name')
room.join

if ARGV.size > 1
  revision = ARGV[1]
  path = ARGV[0]
  # we're using this for multiple svn repos so parse the project name from the path
  project = ARGV[0].gsub("/home/user/svn/", '')
  
  author = `#{svnlook} author -r #{revision} #{path}`
  paths  = `#{svnlook} changed -r #{revision} #{path}`   
  log    = `#{svnlook} log -r #{revision} #{path}`
  message = [log,paths].join("\n").strip
  url = "Changeset \##{revision} by #{author} (http://trac.domain.com/trac/#{project}/changeset/#{revision})"

  room.speak(url)
  room.paste(message)
else
  room.speak(ARGV[0])
end

room.leave

Add this to your SVN post-commit hook:

/usr/local/bin/ruby /path/to/svn-campfire.rb "$1" "$2"

Here's a quick way to send emails to campfire. Create an email address to use for sending messages to campfire and then create mailer-campfire.rb with your domain, usernames and passwords:

#!/usr/local/bin/ruby
require 'rubygems'
require 'action_mailer'
require 'tinder'
require 'net/pop'

# setup an email address to use for campfire
Net::POP3.delete_all("domain.com", nil, "user+domain.com", "password") do |m|
  campfire = Tinder::Campfire.new 'campfiresubdomain'
  campfire.login 'user@example.com', 'password'
  room = campfire.find_room_by_name('room name')
  room.join

  begin
    message = TMail::Mail.parse(m.pop)
    
    subject = message.subject if message.subject
    sender = message.from.first if message.from
    body = message.body if message.body
    
    room.speak("I've received an email from #{sender} with the subject '#{subject}'")
    room.paste(body)                
  rescue Exception => e
  end        
    
  room.leave
end

Then create a cron job to fire this off every minute:

* * * * * /usr/local/bin/ruby /home/path/to/mailer-campfire.rb

Next step, create a Jabber gateway for Campfire using Tinder.