BMAO!

For the past three weeks or so, the wonderous twitter has been completely hosed for me. Behold the beautiful 500 message I get each and every time I hit the home link.

I’ve emailed them about this, and heard screw all back. Friends of mine have been complaining about a myriad of issues while using twitter as well. I get it, they have tons of traffic. What I don’t get is why they haven’t fixed the site yet. Perhaps they’re spending all their support cycles on a potential PHP rewrite.

The developers in twitter land have complained ad infinitum about how shitty rails is with scaling, but I’m wondering if the fact that this was their first rails site has anything to do with it.

As far as I’m concerned, twitter is for the birds. Pun totally intended.

So I ran into a really strange issue in a rake task that downloads a zip file, then uses rubyzip to extract it. The download was working great, but rubyzip was puking trying to extract the file with a buffer error.

To make a long story short, instead of trying to figure out what was up with that, I decided to just use the built in system method in ruby. With system, you can call any arbitrary application that resides on the machine where the ruby code is executing. On my Ubuntu box I first installed unzip with sudo apt-get install unzip, then in my rake task system(“unzip #{path_to_zip_file}”).

Done deal. I can definitely foresee Ruby’s system method coming in handy in a lot of other situations as well.

El started up an IRC channel for us (#feather) on freenode. El and I are going to be hanging in there as much as we can so if you have a question about installation, working on your plugin or whatever, feel free to jump in. Or if you want to just shoot the shit, that’s cool too.

Jake migrated his blog over to feather today! Congrats bro. He used his super slick feather-mephisto plugin to get the job done! Props dude.

In the market for real estate? Live on Facebook? If you answered yes to either of these two questions, mosey on over to Cribfinder, and let all your real estate dreams become reality… urr… or something.

In all seriousness, we just redid a lot of the layout, and general navigation, so it should be infinitely easy to browse for rentals or, arrange an appointment to checkout a house that strikes your fancy.

Conversely, if you’re trying to rent a place out, or sell your house, we have a plethora of great lead tracking stuff for you.

The guys over at Rails Envy mentioned feather in their latest podcast. That so rocks! They had some good suggestions for us, so we have to get cracking on new feather features in the near future. I’ve just been really busy with my day jobs lately, which has not been super conducive to getting that much done on fun open source projects.

In other Feather news (wow this blog is turning into all things feather.), my boy Jake is just about done with a really useful plugin for importing directly from a Mephisto database. I can’t wait for him to roll that out! From what Jake tells me, it’ll make shifting from Mephisto to Feather a breeze.

Good times.