Scrum.org launches course registration site

March 20, 2010 — 2 Comments

Scrum.orgLast week Scrum.org launced a redesigned homepage. As part of the redesign I assisted with the development and customization of courses.scrum.org.

Founded by Ken Schwaber, the co-creator of Scrum, and other leading international Agile experts, Scrum.org provides a complete solution for companies seeking high-impact results from Scrum and Agile development.

One of the offerings by Scrum.org is the Professional Scrum Developer program. It is an interesting take on Scrum training–not for Scrum Masters or Product Owners, but for developers.

You can read more about the launch on Scrum.org.

In Announcements, Projects, Ruby on Rails
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Monitoring Rails POST requests

March 19, 2010 — Leave a comment

Just found this draft post, that I had almost forgotten about. If you need to monitor POST requests to your Rails application for whatever reason, here is an easy way of doing it:

class HomeController  :post_up
  
  def index
  end
  
  # monitored by http://uptime.alal.com/uptime/
  # this will test if Rails is up and responding to GETs and POSTs
  def rails_up
    url = URI.parse(url_for(:action => 'post_up'))
    res = Net::HTTP.post_form(url, {})
    
    # body will be "success" if POST request is successful
    render :text => res.body
  rescue Exception => e
    render :text => "error: #{e.to_s}"
  end
  
  # verify that POST requests are working
  # we've had problems with Apache segfaulting on POSTs
  def post_up
    render :text => request.post? ? "success" : "only POST allowed"
  end
end

Only downside to this, is that it generates an additional request for every request to /rails_up. If you run a low number of Mongrels or Passenger instances, this might be a problem.

In Ruby on Rails
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Having fun with a new Canon EF f/1.4 50mm

July 17, 2009 — Leave a comment

My f/1.8 50mm lens recently broke and was just out of warranty (isn’t it always so). I’ve had loads of fun with that tiny lens, mostly shooting portraits, so I knew I had to get a replacement. Since the build quality of the Canon f/1.8 maybe isn’t…

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Superstar Kid #2

September 26, 2008 — Leave a comment
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Superstar Kid #1

September 26, 2008 — Leave a comment
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I love my dirt cheap Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 Lens

September 19, 2008 — Leave a comment

More photos from the same weekend in Thyborøn on MobileMe.

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hvirring.dk finally has a home again

September 19, 2008 — Leave a comment

And maybe I’ll even update it once in a while. Thanks to Posterous I only have to send an email to post stuff here.

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Scrum Training Institute on Rails

September 18, 2008 — Leave a comment

Scrum Training InstituteThis week I launched a new site for The Scrum Training Institute at “scrumtraininginstitute.com”:http://scrumtraininginstitute.com. If you’re getting started with Scrum or Agile these are the experts you want to learn from! Currently their team consists of Jeff Sutherland (co-creator of Scrum), Jens Østergaard (a fellow dane), Gabrielle Benefield and Pete Deemer.

Working with them has been just great. As a developer I just love having clients, that unasked will send me emails going:

Jesper, here’s the story:
As a customer, I want to be able to…

The site is live now and we will be adding more features over the coming weeks, as I work my way through the backlog.

In Announcements, Projects, Ruby on Rails
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Rails 2.1.0 without a Database

June 3, 2008 — Leave a comment

If you are running the just released Rails 2.1.0 and have disabled ActiveRecord, you will likely run into problems launching script/server.

The culprit is the new config/initializers/new_rails_defaults.rb, which should test to see if ActiveRecord is loaded.

The “bug report is here”:http://rails.lighthouseapp.com/projects/8994/tickets/303-configs-initializers-new_rails_defaults-rb-should-check-for-disabled-frameworks#ticket-303-2 and the patch “AR can be disabled, new_rails_defaults.rb should check” has “already been applied”:http://github.com/rails/rails/commit/4b4aa8f6e08ba2aa2ddce56f1d5b631a78eeef6c.

It’s a very tiny patch, so until the next Rails release is out, you can easily apply the patch manually.

In Ruby on Rails
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My latest Radiant project is now live!

February 6, 2008

KORPUS SundhedsparkI don’t usually work on “plain old websites”, but I had an itch to try out “Radiant CMS”:http://radiantcms.org, and so I decided to take a small gig building a showcase site for a real estate developer (or property developer, depending on which side of the pond you’re on).

So far Radiant has been a pleasant experience and I’ll definitely use it for a couple of other sites. Initially my impression was that it had way too few features to be of any real use, but it has the 20% features that you use 80% of the time. For the rest there’s a bunch of extensions, some which are almost mandatory for any site, like the page_attachments extension, that enables file-uploads on all pages. Also, Radiant is based on “Rails”:http://rubyonrails.org/, so if you can’t find an extension with the functionality you need it can be easily extended.

Working with Radiant also gave me a chance to look into Rails hosting options in Europe. Most of the dedicated Rails hosting companies have data centers in the US, so I needed to look elsewhere. I ended up hosting the site on a VPS from “RimuHosting”:http://rimuhosting.com, who have a data center in London. They don’t specifically promote themselves as a Rails host, but they do have “instructions for running Rails on their servers”:http://bliki.rimuhosting.com/space/knowledgebase/linux/miscapplications/ruby+on+rails and they will install a complete Rails stack for you if you just ask when ordering the VPS. Setup was a amazingly fast even though it involved a real person handling my order. Within 15 minutes of submitting the order I had an email back saying they were working on my order and about 30 minutes later I was logging in to my new server!

The site is live now at “korpus-sundhedspark.dk (KORPUS Sundhedspark, Danmarks største og mest ambitiøse sundhedsbyggeri i miljørigtige rammer – netop overfor Køge Sygehus)”:http://korpus-sundhedspark.dk (in Danish).

In Announcements, Projects, Radiant, Ruby on Rails
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