RailsConf Europe took place last week in Berlin. Below are the links to speaker notes and reviews that I’ve collected.

Speaker Notes

Official Slide Summary

Reviews and Commentary

• http://www.loudthinking.com/posts/12-good-times-at-railsconf-europe
• http://www.loudthinking.com/posts/11-sun-surprises-at-railsconf-europe-2007
• http://blog.comtaste.com/
• http://casperfabricius.com/blog/2007/09/18/railsconf2007-dhh/
• http://casperfabricius.com/blog/2007/09/20/railsconf2007-notes/
• http://www.liverail.net/articles/2007/9/18/railsconf-europe-dave-thomas-keynote
• http://blog.nicksieger.com/articles/2007/09/18/railsconf-europe-david-heinemeier-hansson
• http://www.jkraemer.net/2007/9/20/railsconf-europe-roundup
• http://poocs.net/2007/9/23/railsconf-europe-2007
• http://www.gra2.com/article.php/railsconf-europe-2007-day-three
• http://ola-bini.blogspot.com/2007/09/railsconf-europe-recap.html
• http://justaddwater.dk/2007/09/22/railsconf-europe-2007-recap/
• http://railsbros.blogg.de/eintrag.php?id=3

Let me know if you know of others and I’ll post them too.

I’ve been lax about blogging over the last few weeks. September is always a busy month. Everything that was put on hold during August vacations suddenly shifts into high gear. My back log of blog-worthy posts is intimidating, so I’ve decided to handle it expeditiously and keep posts short and sweet until I’m caught back up.

php|works 2007 was two weeks ago in Atlanta. Below are some of the session notes and online reviews I’ve collected.

Session Notes

• Testing with PHPUnit and Selenium
• Advanced PHPUnit Topics
• Designing RESTful Web Applications

Reviews and Commentary

• http://benramsey.com/archives/phpworks-2007-day-2/
• http://benramsey.com/archives/phpworks-2007-day-3/
• http://blogs.oracle.com/opal/discuss/msgReader$170
• http://blogs.oracle.com/opal/discuss/msgReader$203
• http://blog.libssh2.org/index.php?/archives/74-phpworks,-Session-Day-1-aka-Conf-day-2.html
• http://blog.libssh2.org/index.php?/archives/75-phpworks-2007,-Session-Day-2-aka-Conf-day-3.html
• http://www.surripui.net/2007/09/15/phpworks-is-now-over-back-to-work/
• http://shiflett.org/blog/2007/sep/php-works-recap
• http://devzone.zend.com/article/2557-phpworks-Wrap-Up

Let me know if you find more and I’ll add them to the list.

New and Notable This Week

• Calvin Harris: I Created Disco
  I’m a fan of LCD Soundsystem, Datarock and HBO’s “The Flight of the Conchords”. How could I not love this too? I think this music would fall under the label “electroclash”. To me, it sounds like David Bowie, Talking Heads, and Kraftwerk all mashed together.
• Hot Hot Heat: Happiness LTD.
  This is what bubblegum indie-rock sounds like. It’s not very filling, but if you like The Killers, Franz Ferdinand and The Bravery it might tide you over until the next meal.
• Black Lips: Good Bad Not Evil
  Delightfully-out-of-tune garage and surf punk. They remind me of The Creation, The Sonics and The Pretty Things. I know those names are nowhere near the mainstream, so if you don’t already know that you like garage it’s probably not for you.
• Rogue Wave: Asleep at Heaven’s Gate
  A good alt rock band that reminds you of dozens of other alt rock bands. That’s both a reason to like them and a reason to skip them.
• Shout Out Louds: Our Ill Wills
  The Cure meets The Killers. That forumla is wearing out.
• 50 Cent: Curtis
  Not groundbreaking but there is some good stuff here. I like the guest appearances: they show good taste and they add much needed contrast to his gravelly voice (and keep everything from sounding like “In da Club”). I probably couldn’t code to it though—it commands too much of my attention.
• Ben Harper & The Innocent Criminals: Lifeline
  Soul, blues, gospel, country and even folk influences show up on Ben Harper’s latest.
• Various Artists: Across the Universe
  Terrible Beatles covers. Even the songs with Bono are bad.

One of the chores I dislike most is cleaning up and clearing out the log files in my Rails applications. On some of my higher profile sites, I get a lot of spiders probing my applications for security holes. They don’t succeed (knock on wood) but they do fill up my log files with errors.

I finally decided to get smart and get lazy (the two best traits a programmer can have), and I set up automatic log rotation on all of my Rails applications. The idea behind log rotation is simple: make a back up of the current log file, continue logging into a new or cleared log file, and discard log files that are older than a certain date.

Your webserver probably already rotates its own log files. For Apache, they are probably located in /etc/httpd/logs and they are probably rotated weekly. These logs store everything Apache does. Simple webserver stats and traffic analysis tools make use of these log files to show who visits a site when and what pages are viewed.

While it is possible to configure your Rails application to log to your Apache log files, I do not think it is a good practice. It’s much better to give each Rails application its own log file—it will be easier to find important Rails errors, it will keep your Apache logs cleaner and Rails is set up to keep its own logs by default. Fortunately, on a Linux server the built-in logrotate program will make the process super-easy. After the jump, I’ll walk you through the steps to get it set up.

(more…)

I already raved about the newest Spoon album. They are one of my favorite bands and it’s one of the best albums of the year.

Now you have to check out this video for “Don’t You Evah” which features the Keepon robot. The song was already catchy, but the video will put it in your head for weeks! The video was a collaboration between Spoon (several members even make cameos) and Keepon to promote WIRED NextFest which is next weekend, Sept. 14-16, in Los Angeles. Spoon will be playing a kick-off concert on Monday, September 10 to benefit Creative Commons and the Keepon robot is scheduled to join them. (I would have thought he’s too big of a rock star by now… I’m glad to see he’s still humble.)

I love it when creatives and geeks work together. Left brain meets right brain—the way it should be.

On a sad note, opera lovers worldwide will miss Luciano Pavarotti. I’m an opera fan but I never got to see the great Pavarotti. iTunes: “Luciano Pavarotti - The Best”

New and Notable This Week

• Manu Chao: La Radiolina
  Manu Chao is immensely popular in Europe and Latin America, sings in seven languages, and writes rock/folk/world music with a leftist/political/protest angle that incorporate at least as many musical styles. His music has always been fractured and his new album features 21 songs, many of them under 2 minutes, but he moves between styles, languages and genres so deftly that you won’t notice the shift. He has appeared at numerous festivals and opened for bands like Rage Against the Machine, yet his U.S. success has been minimal. To me, this album feels like an attempt to be more mainstream and ends up being good but not as satifsying as his other albums. The earliest tracks are best, especially “Tristeza Maleza”.
• Björk: Family Tree
  An interesting approach to a greatest hits album. Björk selected her favorite songs and packaged them together with art and commentary so that it stands on its own as more than just a greatest hits. iTunes says that a fan selected greatest hits should have come out on the same day but I can’t find it.
• Just Jack: Overtones
  U.K. rap that’s not bad, but not great either. His technique and style is not quite as original as The Streets, but his use of funk and soul elements that remind me of early Thicke or Jamiroquai makes up for it.

Here’s some of the exciting things I didn’t blog about while I was on vacation last week.

• PHP 5.2.4 has been released. The improvements are mostly related to stability and security.
• The first release candidate of Prototype 1.6.0 was announced.
• dev_mode_performance_fixes is a Ruby on Rails plugin to improve development-mode performance by only reloading files that have changed.
• Eric Meyer’s CSS Sculptor, a Dreamweaver extension for generating CSS, was released.
• A List Apart posted “CSS @ Ten: The Next Big Thing” by HÃ¥kon Wium Lie. Though the title doesn’t say so, it’s a call to action to get full font support into CSS.
• A List Apart posted “Put Your Content in My Pocket“, by Craig Hockenberry, which has tips on designing web pages for Apple’s iPhone.
• The Ruby East Conference will be September 28, 2007 at Penn State, Great Valley Campus, PA (just west of Philadelphia). Tickets are $100 and limited to 300 people.
• Dmitry Stogov’s PHP namespace implementation has support for constants and David Coallier provides a usage example.