I was setting up the AAB dev environment on my macbook pro when I realized that I was only running Rails 2.0.2 but AAB wanted 2.1.0.  Ehh...  no big deal I thought.  I opened up Terminal and typed...

$ sudo gem update rails

All the usual output scrolled by, indicating that everything went as expected.  Once it was done I tried to check the rails version and that's when I realized that there was a problem

$ rails -v
/Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems.rb:377:in `report_activate_error':
RubyGem version error: activesupport(2.0.2 not = 2.1.0) (Gem::LoadError)
  from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems.rb:309:in `activate'
  from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems.rb:335:in `activate'
  from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems.rb:334:in `each'
  from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems.rb:334:in `activate'
  from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems.rb:76:in
`active_gem_with_options'
  from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems.rb:50:in `gem'
  from /Library/Ruby/bin/rails:15

So then I ran 'gem list' and saw what was up.

...
actionmailer (2.0.2, 1.3.6, 1.3.3, 1.2.5)
actionpack (2.0.2, 1.13.6, 1.13.3)
actionwebservice (1.2.6, 1.2.3, 1.1.6)
activemerchant (1.1.0)
activerecord (2.0.2, 1.15.6, 1.15.3)
activeresource (2.0.2)
activesupport (2.0.2, 1.4.4, 1.4.2)
...

When I did the rails update, none of the rails dependencies were updated.  I tried the update again, thinking that maybe something had just choked in the process, but it was no luck.  A quick Google search yielded the solution of using update with the --source option and http://gems.rubyonrails.org as the URL.

$ sudo gem update --source http://gems.rubyonrails.org
Updating installed gems
Updating metadata for 13 gems from http://gems.rubyonrails.org/
.............
complete
Updating actionmailer
Updating metadata for 13 gems from http://gems.rubyonrails.org/
.............
complete
Successfully installed activesupport-2.1.0
Successfully installed actionpack-2.1.0
Successfully installed actionmailer-2.1.0
Updating activerecord
Successfully installed activesupport-2.1.0
Successfully installed actionpack-2.1.0
Successfully installed actionmailer-2.1.0
Successfully installed activerecord-2.1.0
Updating activeresource
Successfully installed activesupport-2.1.0
Successfully installed actionpack-2.1.0
Successfully installed actionmailer-2.1.0
Successfully installed activerecord-2.1.0
Successfully installed activeresource-2.1.0
Gems updated: activesupport, actionpack, actionmailer, activesupport, actionpack, actionmailer, activerecord, activesupport, actionpack, actionmailer, activerecord, activeresource

That did it! Now rails and all its dependencies are at 2.1.0.

Posted 2 months ago with 2 comments so far...
Tagged as:  rails  rubygems  2.1.0 

Brent Collier

1201 Stone View Crossing
Morrisville, NC 27560
brentmc79(at)gmail.com
(919) 564-6915

Summary

As a developer, I strive to exceed expectations at every opportunity, attaining a key role in any team with which I am involved by becoming a dependable and valuable resource.

With a background in the service industry, I have excellent verbal and communication skills, enabling effective collaboration within team environments. In addition to a B.S. in Computer Science from Virginia Commonwealth University, I’m also a Sun certified Java developer and an active member of the Raleigh Ruby Brigade.

Experience

March 2008 to present
Near-Time – Durham, NC
Rails Developer

• New feature development, including full life cycle of requirements gathering, design, implementation, and testing on  an enterprise-level collaboration application.
• First project involved a full rewrite of the wiki rendering engine, which handles converting all wiki syntax and user-generated wysiwyg content to and from a proprietary xml format for persistence, requiring all content models in the system (hundreds of thousands of rows) to be updated.
• Integrated Google Maps to display member location and encourage collaboration via proximity.
• Developed an embeddable feed widget able to consume and display internal and external RSS/Atom feeds, while abiding by security permissions and roles.

November 2006 to Mar 2008
kajeet - Bethesda, MD
Software Engineer

• Led an agile scrum team of about 5 developers who's main focus is designing, building, and managing a pair of enterprise Java applications.
• Worked with the team to maintain our customer-facing web portal, including deployments, database migrations, and emergency bug fixes. Also participated in the design and implementation of new features, such as featureManager and our generic promotions system.
• Played a major role in supporting and extending our Care Desktop, an application used by our customer service representatives to address customer issues.
• Led a project to build our internal Operations Desktop. The application was built using Ruby on Rails and integrated with several of our third-party vendors to automate and/or simplify numerous tasks that were previously tedious, time-consuming, and error prone.

July 2007 to November 2007
Yappd.com - Rockville, MD
Co-Founder, Rails Developer

• Worked together with my partner to design, implement, and manage Yappd.com, a micro-blogging social network built using Ruby on Rails.
• Yappd was featured on several prominent blogs and websites, including TechCrunch, Mashable, and PCMagazine.com.
• Yappd was acquired in November 2007.

October 2006 to November 2006
Saxon Mortgage Inc - Richmond, VA
Developer

• Updated and maintained a group of production applications as a part of a small team, performing both front-end and server-side development. Provided value from day one by automating several tedious processes previously performed by hand, effectively cutting the cost in time from days to hours.
• Performed help desk duties for production application users.

July 2005 to September 2006
Dominion Digital - Richmond, VA
IT Consultant

• Worked on a large agile team developing an enterprise Java system for a key client. The system incorporated an n-tier architecture, multiple relational databases and a rules engine.
• Played a key role in development of the Suspense functionality, which allowed erroneous or incomplete transactions to be suspended, but still accounted for, until corrections could be made. This functionality helped increase operator transaction entry rates by reducing errors due to faulty or incomplete information.
• Acted as lead developer in implementation of the Pipeline Loan Boarding functionality. This enhancement enabled workflow activities around loans before they were fully boarded into the system.

Competencies

Roles

• Developer
• Consultant
• Team Lead

Business & Process Competencies

• Agile Development, Scrum
• TDD, Continuous Integration

 

Technologies

Programming Languages

• Java
• Ruby

Servers/Containers

• BEA WebLogic 8.1
• Apache Tomcat 5.0
• Apache Http 2.2

Operating Systems & Databases

• OS X
• Debian/Ubuntu
• Microsoft Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP
• Microsoft SQL Server 2003, Oracle 9i+, MySQL 5.0

Development Environments & Tools

• Eclipse IDE, Netbeans, Textmate
• Apache Ant, Maven, Rake, Capistrano
• Hibernate, iBatis
• Blaze Advisor Rules Engine
• JUnit, FitNesse, Selenium, Canoo, TestUnit, Rspec
• Struts, Spring, Rails

Education

2006 Virginia Commonwealth University
Richmond, VA
B.S., Computer Science.

Certification

Sun Certified Java Programmer – CX-310-035 Java 1.4

Affiliations

Richmond Java Users Group – member since 2005

Interests

• Web design/development - Acts-As-Blogr, BrentCollier.com, Yappd
• Auto repair, maintenance, and modification
• PC repair

Posted 2 months ago...
Tagged as:  Resume  cv 

So I mentioned earlier that I was using Capistrano 2.0.  Well, in actuality, I was using version 2.3.0.  Why's this important?  Well, I'll tell ya....

On my initial deploy:

cap deploy:cold

...everything went fine.  Capistrano did a clone of my Github repo, ran all of my migrations, and started up the mongrels without a hitch.  It was on my subsequent deploy that I had a problem.

macbook:blog brent$ cap deploy
  * executing `deploy'
  * executing `deploy:update'
 ** transaction: start
  * executing `deploy:update_code'
    updating the cached checkout on all servers
ssh_exchange_identification: Connection closed by remote host
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly
*** [deploy:update_code] rolling back
  * executing "rm -rf /home/brent/public_html/acts-as-blogr.com/releases/20080604051355; true"
    servers: ["acts-as-blogr.com"]
    [acts-as-blogr.com] executing command
    command finished
/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/capistrano-2.3.0/lib/capistrano/recipes/deploy/scm/git.rb:217:in `query_revision': Unable to resolve revision for master (RuntimeError)
    from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/capistrano-2.3.0/lib/capistrano/recipes/deploy/scm/base.rb:35:in `send'
    from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/capistrano-2.3.0/lib/capistrano/recipes/deploy/scm/base.rb:35:in `method_missing'
    from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/capistrano-2.3.0/lib/capistrano/recipes/deploy/scm/base.rb:63:in `local'
    from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/capistrano-2.3.0/lib/capistrano/recipes/deploy/scm/base.rb:35:in `method_missing'
    from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/capistrano-2.3.0/lib/capistrano/recipes/deploy.rb:37:in `load'
    from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/capistrano-2.3.0/lib/capistrano/configuration/variables.rb:87:in `call'
    from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/capistrano-2.3.0/lib/capistrano/configuration/variables.rb:87:in `fetch'
    from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/capistrano-2.3.0/lib/capistrano/configuration/variables.rb:110:in `protect'
     ... 35 levels...
    from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/capistrano-2.3.0/lib/capistrano/cli/execute.rb:14:in `execute'
    from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/capistrano-2.3.0/bin/cap:4
    from /usr/bin/cap:19:in `load'
    from /usr/bin/cap:19

I tried again and got the same results.  After a quick google or two, I found this Lighthouse ticket for Capistrano. Evidently there's an issue with cap version 2.3.0 in which it calls 'fetch --tags' to update your code, which returns only tag commits instead of all commits.  This is a problem.

Fortunately, the solution is a simple as either downgrading to version 2.2.0, or upgrading to the latest build.  I opted for the safe route and installed 2.2.0.  Now everything is right as rain. 

Posted 2 months ago with 2 comments so far...
Tagged as:  capistrano  git 

Acts-As-Blogr v2.0 is up and running!

I ended up going with Nginx and a 2 mongrel cluster, and deployed it all via Capistrano 2.0 which thankfully has Git support.

I still need to get all the data migrated over from the old version.  I think I may just re-enter the old posts by hand since there was only a handful.  I also need to get all my links and whatnot setup.

AAB 2.0 is still a little bit lacking.  I could've waited longer, but I figured once I had the bare minimum features, that I'd go ahead and deploy it.

Most of the new features aren't really visible from the public-facing side.  I think once I add a few more features, I'll make a little screencast to show it all off.

Anyway, it looks like I've got some work to do... 

Posted 2 months ago...
Tagged as:  v2.0  nginx  capistrano  git 

In case you haven't noticed, I haven't posted anything for quite a while.  I've been a little hesitant to post anything new since I'm planning to upgrade Acts-As-Blogr very soon.  I've been slowly rewriting the entire application, little by little, over the past month.

This new version version will include several much needed features that the initial version is lacking, including spam protection and comment notification.  I would have just expanded upon the existing code base, but I decided to move it over to a restful architecture, using Rails 2.0.  I'm also working on improving the look and feel by cleaning up the css, adding in a sprinkling of ajax goodness, and a few other things like gravatars and such.

Whenever the upgrade happens, things will likely be down for at least a day or so since I'm planning to completely wipe my slice and start from scratch. Inevitably, there'll be a few headaches and bumps in the road as I rebuild the server.  I'll probably go the deprec/capistrano route, but I may also play with the new mod_rails.

So, there you have it.  That's what I've been up to.  Check back soon!

* UPDATE *

It's done, in case you couldn't tell by the following posts... 

Posted 2 months ago with 1 comment so far...
Tagged as:  v2.0