Today i spent a couple of hours trying to get Lernanta the Open Source application that supports P2PU’s courses. If you are not familiar with any of those, i highly reccommend giving it a try. While trying to set up my local installation according to the Lernanta Installation Guide, i ended up facing the following error:

Could not import users.views. 
Error was: /home/vitor/.virtualenvs/lernanta/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/M2Crypto/__m2crypto.so: 
undefined symbol: SSLv2_method

After a little bit of researching and googling around, i found out that this error was related to the absence of SSLv2 in Ubuntu’s OpenSSL package. The Ubuntu people build OpenSSL without SSLv2 support because the protocol has known security issues. This was introduced in 11.10 version and it also happens in 12.04 Alpha 1.

The following links are related to this issue.

• https://github.com/saltstack/salt/issues/391
• https://lists.launchpad.net/openstack/msg06427.html

Solution:

The installation guide instruct us to create our virtualenv using the command:

mkvirtualenv lernanta

However, virtual env now changed its default behavior. It seems that since 1.7 version is out one must provide the –system-site-packages trigger modifier to have the old behavior back and have virtualenv also look for system wide packages and use the apt-get version we installed while following the Installation Guide.

mkvirtualenv --system-site-packages lernanta

Creating your virtualenv this way, will make virtualenv work as expected in documentation and, finally, make your Lernanta installation work as expected.

More information about this subject can be found in this link.

• https://github.com/pypa/virtualenv/issues/210

I hope it was helpful!

See you next time,

Since i switched back from Mac OS X to Linux, i noticed some of my rails apps were running its tests much slower (almost 10 times slower in few cases).

After many wrong guesses and false alarms, i found out that MySQL doesnt like much ext4 ubuntu default settings.

I hope it can help fellow googlers facing this very same issue. After adding some minor tweaks at my ext4 partition, my test suite now runs under 3 seconds. Before those changes, it used to last almost 80s!

TL ; DR

Add barrier=0 to your fstab, restart your machine, and MySQL will run much faster.

Mine fstab entry is currently like this, feel free to change that accordingly to your needs:

# / was on /dev/sda6 during installation
UUID=98e8b440-fd76-4e49-b45a-e8e3c9dec2e4 / ext4    errors=remount-ro,noatime,data=writeback,barrier=0,nobh 0 1

For more information regarding ext4 and those tweaks im using, check this awesome blog post from Nick Gauthier

Yesterday i’ve been playing with this project called whereuat. This project is a very neat idea which enables your users to give feedback, approve and reject stories marked as delivered directly at your pivotal tracker.

The application is pretty simple by itself. Its basically a scaffold for recipes, with whereuat integration.

For anyone working in a situation where clients or even QA are required to participate more closely at the development process, i would recommend it to give whereuat a look.

Check the examples

You can see the code for this application in:
https://github.com/pellegrino/whereuatdemo

To see it running at heroku:
http://whereuatdemo.heroku.com/recipes

The storyboard used in this example can also be viewed here:
https://www.pivotaltracker.com/projects/323133

Im really proud to announce that i am the 43rd student to join #RbMU alumni network. The course was a very intense, 3 week long, about Ruby development, OSS and Application Design in general. That was a really awesome experience. In short, if you are a ruby developer and want to take your skills seriously, you should look in doing the Core Skills ASAP. :)

Is that a really tough course?

Yes. Definitely it is. Gregory (@seacreature) and all the mentors really do push you hard to go even further (which is great!). Looking back, i never thought i could acomplish that much in so little time. I was envolved almost my entire career in Web Development, so i never did some sort of “tool development” before. That was something i really was looking forward to change, and RMU was the perfect excuse for me to do it :)

My personal experience about it

Before joining RMU, i considered myself a pretty competent Ruby Developer, given the fact i’m on rails since 2006, so wasn’t very sure about what i could expect from this. The fact is that i really did learn a bunch. The course is aimed at Intermediate Ruby developers, but i’m sure that anyone would benefit a lot from this kind of experience. The amount of feedback you receive during the course is ridiculus.

To be honest, i never thought (even after seeing so nice feedback from other alumni) that the interaction between student could be so strong, since there were no such thing as classes during the course - most of our comunication happened in a asynchronous fashion - but i was plain wrong. It was simply awesome to see how everyone did improve during the course and a “colleague spirit” did emerge from that. During the first week, most of the feedback were given by the instructors and mentors, but quickly my peers were giving me lot of quality advices and i felt very comfortable to do the same for them. I must say that, after these 3 weeks i’m a reassured about open source development in general.

If you value the RMU much like i do, i hope you will help it to keep on rocking and providing top notch trainning for Ruby developers worldwide.

Blogging and open-source are two things i’ve always wanted to do more seriously but never knew how to get started. After RMU (BTW, if you are serious about mastering Ruby and OSS development, THIS is the place) i felt i needed a whole refresh at this space.

Since i’m most of my day at Emacs and Github, Jekyll was perfect fit for my current setup. I hope it works for me.