A friend alerted me to an article he put together recently regarding deployments in a custom build environment.  It’s intriguing, as my own software company has a similarly-setup system.  The idea is to keep logs of deployments on a MediaWiki-powered internal wiki automatically, allowing developers to see what repository revision was rolled out, the build version number, along with other salient information.

For our internal processes, we wanted to keep a running list of the code release version (such as “0.9.1″), the SVN repository revision that was deployed, the timestamp Capistrano used as the folder name in the Releases directory, and a more human-readable date and time of deployment. The first field, the release version, is an arbitrary string given by the person making the deployment; Capistrano prompts the deployer for this string as the first step in the deployment. The repository revision and release timestamp are both provided by Capistrano, and the human-readable date is provided by Media Wiki.

Some additional coolness: automatically linking to BugZilla bug numbers whenever they’re referenced in the commit messages, and automatically creating “readme” files containing commit messages for each new build.  Check out the article here.

This is a programming quickie, but can be one of those gotchas if you don’t know what to look for. As I mentioned recently, I had to temporarily switch back to the Windows side of things when my MacBook died, and in doing, had to learn new tools for getting my work done. One of those tools was to replace Cyberduck, which I used to open a remote connection (via SFTP) to edit files live. Well, I was recently working on a Ruby on Rails project, and I noticed a strange side effect: whenever I would edit a file (a view, controller, etc), and hit reload in my browser, I never noticed the change. It could be the simplest or most complex, but it never seemed to appear unless I restarted Mongrel.

Turns out the problem was actually quite simple: WinSCP, the replacement I was using for Cyberduck, was set to preserve timestamps on files by default. Mongrel checks timestamps of files to determine whether to reload them live (in development mode, mind you, where I wasn’t doing any caching), and these timestamps need to be changed by WinSCP in order to show up to Mongrel.

To fix the problem, just click the Preferences icon in WinSCP, click the Transfer selection on the left, then uncheck the “Preserve timestamp” option under Common options. This should now update timetamps correctly and your changes should appear to Mongrel. Enjoy.

I was thinking I’d start a new thread on this blog about some of the things I do on a regular basis to get work done. Lately (like since the release of the new Safari beta), I’ve been trying out different web browsers to find one that really fits. For a long time, I was using Firefox on my Mac and was doing just fine, until I really gave Safari a chance and realized how much FASTER Safari is over Firefox (and how much that really makes a difference for me).

Using Safari was good for some time, though my biggest issues were the plugins (I really need a good ad-blocking program, and SafariBlock seemed buggy and missing some features), and site support. Since many sites are setup to allow only the most popular browsers, certain features weren’t available within Safari. With Apple’s latest version of the browser being released for Windows as well (most likely in a ploy to get more developers on board for the iPhone), this will probably change. But for now, I found Firefox was still a better choice for me over Safari.

I then tried out Camino (which is what I’m using currently). Camino is different from Safari in that it uses the same rendering engine as Firefox (so pages that work in Firefox should also work in Camino), though has a much more MacOS-friendly interface than Firefox (and seems a bit faster). So far, I’ve been very happy with Camino, and I like the built-in ad-blocking feature. One downside, however, is the lack of a Javascript console. Since I do a lot of web development, I’ve come to rely on Firefox’s Javascript console (and the Firebug plugin), so unfortunately, I still need to use Firefox to do this.

Hope you found this useful. I’d like to turn this into a regular thing: discussing what tools I use in my work, why I choose to use that tool, etc.