The question came up in the course of using RabbitMQ of how to ensure that if something catastrophic happens that the system wouldn't lose any data due to either side of the queue coming down unexpectedly.

We had the exchange and the queues both set as 'durable', which we thought should cover everything. Right?

Apparently not.

In addition to the exchange and queues needing to be durable, the messages themselves must be flagged as 'persistent'.

I've been a member of an online Star Wars club for...wow...almost 10 years now. At the time that I joined I was just learning about databases and web-programming and was rather impressed with the functionality that existed (and still exists) in the club's website.

However...

The site is coded in old-school ASP, with SQL Server on the backend.

I cringe just thinking about it.

I've been trying to convince The Powers That Be for a while now to look at recoding the site to some other environment. For a long time I tried to push them towards PHP, but they just dug in their heels and refused to look at that option really.

Then I discover Ruby on Rails, and I see how much better RoR would be for this site. It would provide structure to the codebase, organization, and seriously increase readability. And since the club is a volunteer organization, with a pretty regular rate of people transitioning in/out of positions, having a strong test suite would be HUGE towards helping new developers ramp up on how the system is supposed to work and quickly identifying when a change in the code has broken something else in an unforeseen manner.

Of course as I'm making those discoveries, The Powers That Be decide to move ahead with PHP...

So, on to the question at hand: What do you do, what information do you use, in an attempt to convince someone to switch from an older technology (ASP, PHP) to Ruby on Rails?

I was introduced to the world of Ruby in general (and Ruby on Rails specifically) almost 2 years ago. Prior to that my professional programming experience consisted mostly of PHP, with a little bit of Java and ASP thrown in for good measure.

Then came that almost magical day when I was hired to a new job and instructed that I needed to learn Ruby on Rails.

"Ok, I can do that."

I absolutely fell in love with the language and the framework, and that experience put me on the path that led here to Pivotal Labs. But I know that I still have a lot to learn, so am still picking up things that in some ways I feel stupid for not having picked up earlier.

One such thing is RailsConf. I had heard of it before, but not in any kind of context that I really appreciated it or understood what that was (I'm getting a better idea now after some research).

Now I really want to get involved and submit a proposal for a talk/presentation at RailsConf. I just have no idea what to do it on or where to start....

Interesting

• A lot of us have been seeing significant slowdown and memory problems with RubyMine lately. One of the Pivots brought this up again today, and remarked that RubyMine performed much better after he removed/detached a bunch of gems and only added back in the ones he was concerned about ever having to go into again.
• Still in the vein of RubyMine, my Pair and I at one point set the memory allocation for RubyMine higher than the initial settings a weeks or so ago. I got to talking with a few of the Pivots about RubyMine and its memory settings and they said this is actually what you do NOT want to do. Apparently if RubyMine has too much memory available, then it doesn't garbage collect anywhere near as often as it probably should.

Helps

• In an Rspec test file, integrate_views is set up to be active by default. However, we want to run a particular describe block in the file in isolation mode. We tried using 'integrate_views( false )' right after the describe header, but that didn't seem to do anything like what was expected. Just calling 'integrate_views' when the default is Isolation mode runs a describe block in Integration mode, but is there a way to do the opposite?

Helps/Interesting

• It was brought up that Snow Leopard has finally, completely, disabled the ability to re-enable the "Awesome" extra functionality of the Screen Sharing app. Once you upgrade to Snow Leopard, you'll have to pay for Remote Desktop to get that awesomeness.

[Title]Standup 19 October, 2009

Pretty tame for my first day as the Standup Blogger for Pivotal Labs. I think the other Pivots were taking it easy on me today.

Helps

• Someone (sorry, still trying to learn names and match them to faces) asked if anyone had an information regarding Ruby Enterprise Edition. Good idea? Bad idea? It was brought up that, for a while at least, REE was broken for 64-bit. Is that still the case?
• The only other thing brought up was another Pivot asked if any of the Jasmine and Jelly experts would stick around after Stand Up to give him some advice.