Update: More on Wubud from TechCrunch (here).

Irish entrepreneur Paul Walsh is giving away a MacBook Air in order to promote his new venture wubud. So what do you have to do to win? Well very little, you don’t have to sell your soul or link to his homepage from a site with a high page rank …… all you need to do is follow the user wubud on Twitter. Once wubud reaches 5000 followers, Paul will draw and see who wins the MacBook Air - so it’s pretty easy to get a 1 in 5,000 chance of winning such a kick ass piece of kit. AND …… to entice you even further, if you leave a comment here with your Twitter username before following wubud and direct message wubud telling him how you found out about the competition and then go on to win the MacBook Air, I’ll throw in a free copy of TextMate so you can use one of the Ruby community’s favourite text editors to get coding straight away.

Matz, Koichi Sasada of YARV fame, Dr. Nic, David A. Black (author of Ruby for Rails), Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo (JRuby guys) are all confirmed presenters. That’s a pretty impressive line-up in anyone’s book. I’m really looking forward to this conference.

Ever wanted to have an oracle of all human knowledge at your fingertips? Well now you can thanks to a young Irish developer, Patrick Collison. Patrick hacked together an offline Wikipedia reader for the iPhone over Christmas. I haven’t used it as I don’t have an iPhone but I’m going to have a quick look at the mongrel based Ruby version he used for debugging in development. I currently have a Nokia N95 and while I’ve very happy with it as a piece of hardware, I’m jealous of the iPhone users who get the coolest apps first. Lets be honest the iPhone looks a lot sexier too. Rather than just moan though I might take a look at the SDK for Nokia N95’s this weekend and see what would be required to get the nifty Wikipedia reader running on my N95.

Unfortunately, this weekend coincides with my broadband connection going on the blink, again - thanks BT Ireland. Last time my DSL modem died and I had to wait a few days for a replacement. This time I’m not so sure what the cause is: my troubles started on Tuesday evening when my connection went down. As I’d be working late, I didn’t worry too much about getting online when I got home and my connection returned later in the evening. Come Wednesday evening the connection was down again, after playing around with the BERT for a quarter of an hour I was back online. Last night, I tried a few restarts, hard reboots and played with the BERT again but without any sign of success.

So rather than go home tonight, call BT support and get told that it’s something up with my modem again and that they’ll send me a new one out next week, I’m going to pre-empt that possibility and get myself a 3G broadband modem. I figure it’ll be handy to have one of them for when I’m on the road too. I’ve been looking at the packages available and they look very reasonably priced to me. Since there seems to be little difference in the offerings from the different providers I think I’ll go with 3 since they’ve the cheapest monthly price plan. Hopefully it works as well as advertised and I can get some work done this weekend.

I took this afternoon to kit out my new VPS slice with the full Rails stack - Rails, Apache, Mongrel, MySQL. I have to say it did take longer than I thought it would but mainly because I was getting an error when trying to use Deprec. I figured that it’d be no harm to do a manual install to learn my way around though, so thats what I ended up doing. I think it was a worthwhile exercise but now that I have a working snapshot backed up that I can roll out when necessary, I think I’m going to rebuild my slice and give Deprec another shot. I’ll take my notes for this afternoon and post them here over the next few days so anyone about to tackle their first VPS install might be able to learn from my wrong turns.

Performance so far on my slice is average but again this is probably in large part due to not having doing any optimization on the server setup yet. If setup optimization doesn’t improve things then I’ll have to tidy up a few things in my app - there’s plenty of room for improvement here as well, such as removing unused plugins etc. If at that stage performance under a simulated load isn’t of a sufficient standard I have two options. First, I can take the easy way out and upgrade to a more powerful slice. Or secondly, I can do some investigating, root out the causes of any performance issues and refactor or rewrite those problem areas. At the moment, I think I might even take a little from column A and a little from column B - upgrade my slice to improve performance while I work on resolving the underlying issues. Thankfully, I’ve a bit more time to address any of these things before I have to make a definitive call one way or the other.

Shared hosting with Apache and FastCGI seems to be a viable option for experimenting with RubyOnRails but I personally wouldn’t feel comfortable putting something into production on this kind of environment based on the comments and reviews I’ve seen of it. So that left the Virtual Private Server option.

I looked at all the major VPS players based in the US, as well as some of the Irish competition. In the end, it basically came down to a decision between Slicehost and RailsMachine. Both of these companies seem to get very good online reviews and are very competitive on price, especially when taking the weak dollar into consideration. RailsMachine seems to do a lot more for you in regards setting up your VPS for you with a full Rails stack, this is reflected in the price but still represents excellent value I’m sure. Inspite of this, I decided to go for the basic Slicehost plan. I want to take this chance to set up and configure my own VPS as I find that kind of thing to be useful in learning how things work and so don’t require the additional features of the RailsMachine hosting plan. I hope to use Deprec and Capistrano to automate the server setup and application deployment, if they both work as advertised it’ll make my life a hell of a lot easier.