peat dot org

Banksy spends some quality time in New Orleans. Article and photos at Juxtapoz.

For the last couple of months I’ve spent a little time each week with the OpenSolaris team at Sun, putting together an Amazon EC2 image that makes it easy to deploy and experiment with Ruby on Rails.

They released the AMI last Friday, but I’ve been too crazy busy to make an announcement. Here’s the official word, and here’s my take on it …

My goal with this project was to help people get a Rails app running as quickly as possible. We set up this AMI so that you can get your hands dirty with Rails if you don’t want to spend the time installing everything on your home system or server, and it’s an inexpensive and easy introduction to OpenSolaris if you’re curious.

All the requisite goodies are pre-installed: Rails 2.1, Mongrel, PostgreSQL and MySQL, Subversion, Git, Capistrano, and a few others choice gems. You also get DTrace built into Ruby, if you’re keen on that sort of thing.

There’s also a sample Rails app in your home directory, and a pre-configured SMF file that serves as a handy introduction to the very handy Service Management Framework — the OpenSolaris system for managing daemons and other server processes.

Working with the OpenSolaris AMI team was a lot of fun, and in particular I’d like to give a thanks to Prashant who did most of the hard work getting everything set up.

I spent this morning adding i-name support to the open_id_authentication plugin. Until it gets merged with the master repository, you’re welcome to take a look and tinker with my branch on Github: http://github.com/peat/open_id_authentication

What is an i-name? It’s an alternative way to identify yourself through OpenID. Instead of using my DNS based OpenID (peat.myopenid.com), I can use my i-name (=peat) … it’s a lot shorter, and it’s not explicitly tied to a specific company or location.

Interested? Read more about i-names over here.

Are you a web developer?

Do you want to create little apps for the iPhone, but not too keen on picking up Objective-C and Cocoa?

Check out iUI — a CSS/JS framework that lets you write web pages that behave like iPhone native apps.

I built a demo app this morning in about two hours. It’s an anonymous micro-forum … really simple stuff, but fun to play with!

http://ib.peat.org/