Rails Bug Mash Starts Today!

Posted 5 months ago

Rails Bug Mash starts today! We will have our Seattle offices open from 11am to 11pm today, and 10am to 5pm tomorrow for the Seattle Ruby crowd to come join us in squashing bugs. Our offices are in Pioneer Square at: 206 1st Ave S., Suite 300, Seattle WA 98104. The door you’ll be entering in is in a bright orange facade on 1st Ave, to the left of a store called Synapse.

The building is secured on the weekends, so we’ll have a number posted on the door for you to call and one of us will come down and let you in.

We look forward to seeing every one there!

Blue Box Group to Sponsor Rails BugMash!

Posted 5 months ago

Update! Locations are helpful! We’re hosting this at our new Seattle offices: 206 1st. Ave South, Suite 300, Seattle, WA 98104. During the weekends, the building is secured, so you’ll need to use your cell phone to call up to the offices when you arrive. We’ll have the number available on the sign and on this site this afternoon.

At Blue Box Group, we are all Ruby Hackers, and most of us got our start with Rails. So it is with great excitement that we announce sponsorship of the second Rails Bug Mash! If you are not aware, it’s September 26-27, 2009, and a great way to get involved in the Rails community.

We will have our offices open 11 AM – 11 PM Saturday and 10 AM – 5 PM Sunday. We will have wifi, desks, pizza and caffeine. So feel free to drop on by, and say ‘Hi’, or lend a hand!

If you plan on hanging out with us, please do RSVP. Just use our contact form to drop us a line to let us know.

We are also going to have a 1TB Apple Time Capsule drop shipped to 1 lucky prize winner! (Prizes determined by RailsBridge). So, start up your mad bug mashing skills, and come on down!

About BugMash:

The idea is simple: RailsBridge has a lot of energy. The Rails Lighthouse has a lot of open tickets. With the help of some Rails Core team members, we’re going to see what we can do to cut down the number of open tickets, encourage more people to get involved with the Rails source, and have some fun.

More at the BugMash Wiki.

About RailsBridge:

RailsBridge was formed with the goal “To create an inclusive and friendly Ruby on Rails community”. They have succeeded with projects like RailsBridge Mentors and the Builders network.

More at the RailsBridge site.

About Blue Box Group:

Founded in 2003, Blue Box Group provides managed web hosting solutions. They approach web hosting, virtual and dedicated servers as a partnership with their customers. Blue Box Group knows technology and scalable ruby on rails deployments. Blue Box Group offers quality service and dedication to each customer, ensuring your rails hosting experience is smooth and uncomplicated!

Redundant Memcache Servers and Rails

Posted about 1 year ago

In the web 2.0 world, redundancy and scalability are buzzwords you hear every day. At Blue Box Group, we are constantly working with our clients to ensure that their sites are both fast, and available during a failure. During recent testing of a client’s website, it was discovered that in the default installation of Rails 2.2.x (and possibly other versions) are using memcached code that will lock up an installation of Rails if the memcached server dies. Additionally, if you are using multiple memcached installations for redundancy, rails will not gracefully fail over to use the second.

Not good.

However, our friends over at FiveRuns have devised a clever set of patches for the memcache client gem. You can read about their fix in their blog post here. You can install their patched version of memcache client with these commands:

$ sudo gem uninstall memcache-client
$ sudo gem install fiveruns-memcache-client --source http://gems.github.com

Preliminary testing shows that this gem fixes all the associated problems with the existing memcache-client and HA setups.

We will continue to test this configuration in production, but don’t expect to see problems with it.

Thanks to FiveRuns for providing the fix. Hopefully this will be adopted into mainline soon.

- Jesse Proudman
Blue Box Group