Iron Girl Triathlon

Written on June 28, 2008 by matt | 1 Comment

My wife Angela is racing in her first triathlon tomorrow. The Aflac Iron Girl at Lake Lanier outside of Atlanta.

We were at the course today getting her signed in and putting the bike in storage. Here’s a shot of some fellow racers:

The Ducks

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A Quick Note on GoDaddy TurboSSL Certificates

Written on June 26, 2008 by matt | Comment

At Bravadosoft for our first implementations we’ve purchased individual SSL certificates from GoDaddy.  The TurboSSL is only $29.99 and it’s a great way to get going quickly.

A problem we’ve had though is that most modern browsers will throw the “Unknown Certificate Authority” problem at the user if you only use the .crt file they give you.  It kinda scares the users.

The solution is simple–you need to “chain” the certificate for your site along with GoDaddy’s intermediate certificate together.  Point your web server (Apache, Lighty, Nginx, whatever) at that newly concatenated certificate and you’re good.

I found this post on the process and simplified it a bit for Nginx.  The Nginx wiki has a small blurb about this:

if you have a chain certificate file (sometimes called an intermediate certificate) you don’t specify it separately like you do in Apache. Instead you need to add the information from the chain cert to the end of your main certificate file. This can be done by typing “cat chain.crt >> mysite.com.crt” on the command line. Once that is done you won’t use the chain cert file for anything else, you just point Nginx to the main certificate file.

This worked as advertised for us.

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Getting ActiveScaffold 1.1.1 to Work With Rails 2.1.0

Written on June 24, 2008 by matt | 5 Comments

When I wrote about a Rails development container I kinda left off with “it all worked and everyone’s happy!” This post goes into a bit of detail about how I upgraded Rails (and ActiveScaffold) to use the newer versions. It’s not that this all that tough or clever but there’s not a lot of information on it.

I followed this wiki page about the process. It definitely gets things going.
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Building a Rails Development OpenSolaris Container

Written on June 22, 2008 by matt | 1 Comment

A bit over a year ago I started working with Ruby on Rails and ActiveScaffold for an in-house scheduling application I was building for a new consulting client. At the time the version of Rails was 1.2.3 and ActiveScaffold was somewhere before beta. The project went great and everyone was happy. They’ve been using the app now for a year, managing scheduling of over 600 people for close to 1,000 events.

Recently the client came back with some requests for changes and I figured it was a good time to upgrade versions. I didn’t make a rookie mistake though and upgrade all of the versions on my MacBook Pro development box. No, in that way lies madness. You’ll goof up the Rails upgrade and all of a sudden you have no way to develop. Instead I decided to use my OpenSolaris test server (faithfully running in the basement, right next to the weight bench and the Christmas decorations) and a specially created Container just for this purpose.

What follows is a record of my experiment. I’ll spoil the surprise–I got it to work! But I uncovered a few things along the way that surprised me and I wanted to share. Doubtless one of the gurus at Sun (or even Joyent I reckon) could have short circuited some of the problems I encountered, but to be honest I had a pretty good time here. Well, except when it came time to building Mongrel with its dependent C code using friends, but that’s for later on.

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The first post

Written on June 12, 2008 by matt | Comment

So I’m blogging again. It’s been quite a while and I’ve been through a few different blogs. A notable first blog still exists, but that’s from a different life. Or hell, at least it seems that way. I was a consultant and then Managing Partner at a local Atlanta consulting firm named Intellinet, we’d just had child #1 (Anderson), and I was generally a pretty interesting guy.

I’m much more interesting now. I’ve since started a software company with a couple of guys, added another child (Katherine), aged gracefully into my mid-thirties, and rediscovered my passion for software, programming, and (wait for it) all things Apple.

Thanks for reading, and let’s see if I can write some interesting content.

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