The Learning Journey

I got an update from Ninh Bui from Passenger fame about Dreamhost progress on mod_rails adoption.

We’re working closely with Dallas Kashuba (CTO of Dreamhost) on getting Passenger ‘dreamhost’ ready (even though we’ve inferred it was already production ready, taking on a huge hosting company is a challenge on its own, i.e. it’s in its own league :-)).
We’re making excellent progress, and maybe I’ve already said too much
Stay tuned for a little longer!

from the Passenger Discussion thread.

The amount of corn needed to produce a full tank of gas for an SUV is enough to feed a person for a whole year.

The 2008 World Development Report “Agriculture for Development” provides a compelling example of the food-for-fuel debate: over 240 kilograms (or 528 pounds) of corn – enough to feed one person for a whole year – is required to produce the 26 gallons, or 100 liters of ethanol needed to fill the gas tank of a modern sports utility vehicle.

Source: World Bank: Africa - Rising Food Prices Spell Hunger for Millions Across Africa.

The guys from Phusion - The Computer Science Company - released mod_rails (Passenger) today. I’m just feeling unusually happy.

They made a great job not only producing that longly-awaited piece of software (years in the waiting), but also creating a great hype, marketing, documenting, testing, and nailing down the details that made Rails deployment as easy and as enjoyable as Rails development.

Thank you guys for giving us that peice of software; it sure will lower barriers to entry into Rails/Ruby world even further. I know that there are rough edges, yet, the community owes a lot to these guys.

After a journey of Webrick, Apache+FCGI, Mongrel, Apache+Mongrel, NGinx+Mongrel and deployment processes that are more suited for JavaEE applications, now I’m finally prepared to enjoy Rails to the last drop.

Dreamhost!? I’m waiting.

UPDATE: A donation was due. Although modest, I felt compelled.