Presto reduced the updates to 2.9 M from 74 M which is a 97% savings.

What I like about the presto deltarpms plugin for yum is, that it shifts the burden especially for large updates from a potentially scarce resource to a more plentiful one: from the network to the local CPU. Also, I find the bit of reporting that it comes with just exactly right.

Finishing rebuild of rpms, from deltarpms
<delta rebuild>                                              |  74 MB     00:56

Nice!

I had originally bought the Eee for its being small and light and the 6 hours of (new) battery runtime. The latter had naturally gotten lesser over the past few months and there were also times when the Atom CPU just didn’t cut it. Now that the CULV class of thin-and-light laptops is out on the market, I felt that this was what I had actually been looking for in the first place.

The specs of the new machine excel in several places: CPU (Intel Core 2 Duo SU9400), hard drive (Intel X25-M), RAM (4GB DDR3) are all performance relevant parts of the package that the Eee is no match for. Thanks to the hard drive being an Intel SSD (hdparm -tT says we’re reading at 160MB/s), I can now boot Linux entirely in the same time that my X58 Core i7 machine needs to get through all if its BIOS initialization screens (ugh!), which is about 10-12 seconds. Incredible. The CPU is a joy (compared with the Atom) I like having a digital display output (HDMI) and I got an actual 6 hours of work out of the thingie when I tried.

What’s the catch You ask? The model with the Intel SSD I bought (AS3810T-6775) appears to have disappeared from the market. And the keyboard and touchpad do not get a recommendation, especially the former definitely reminds me of the low price ($799) of the laptop as it feels like a toy.

irb(main):005:0> require 'rubygems'
=> true
irb(main):006:0> require 'activesupport'
=> true
irb(main):007:0> ['John', 'Paul', 'George', 'Ringo'].to_sentence
=> "John, Paul, George, and Ringo"

1. get the brackup sources via svn (from http://code.sixapart.com/svn/brackup/trunk/)
2. on my Fedora 10 Server, I had to install perl-Net-Amazon-S3 and perl-DBD-SQLite via yum, ymmv
3. perl Makefile.pl, make and make install did their usual trick (you’ll end up with an installed program that is)
4. after that, just execute brackup in your home directory once: it will come up with a help message and create an example config file there (~/.brackup.conf)
5. Add your backup source description and S3 credentials there
6. to complete the configuration, you will also need your gpg key available (I had to create one with gpg –gen-key)

Now with a source like, say Documents configured, you can just brackup –from=Documents –to=amazon and it will just encrypt and backup everything in there to your S3 account. Stop making up excuses – start backing up your digital photos!

Here is an example config file:

[TARGET:amazon]
type = Amazon
aws_access_key_id     = xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
aws_secret_access_key = xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
keep_backups = 5

[SOURCE:Documents]
path = /home/steffen/Documents/
chunk_size = 5m
gpg_recipient = F179E120

• As usual with rails apps, have a symlink point from within $HOME/public_html to the public folder of your sinatra app.
• Create a .htaccess file in the same public directory, looking like

  PassengerEnabled on
  RackBaseURI /linkname
  

  which certainly means that you have to put in the name of the symlink
  

• Create a config.ru file in the app root

  ENV['GEM_PATH'] = "#{ENV['HOME']}/gems:/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8"
  ENV['GEM_HOME'] = "#{ENV['HOME']}/gems"
  
  require 'rubygems'
  require 'sinatra'
  
  set :env,  :production
  disable :run
  
  require 'app'
  

  The only significant change to a plain config.ru is the addition of the GEM_PATH at the very top of the file – this way your locally installed gems are being picked up by passenger

One more thing: it turned out to be a good idea to include the ENV['GEM_PATH'] = “#{ENV['HOME']}/gems:/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8″ line on top of the rails application file as well. Without that, starting a fresh passenger fork will cause an exception – it will however work on the second attempt. Will have to look into this …

Give yourself 5 minutes to read the Tutorial and then go convert one of your RHTML templates to Haml. Feel the power of the “DELETE” key. Simplify. Enjoy. Laugh. 20 minutes later, you will never go back.

But after having converted all of my erb templates in about 45 minutes, I was indeed smiling. Try it yourself!

• Install gems rspec, rspec-rails, ZenTest, redgreen
• generate scafffolds/models/controllers with the rspec method (installing the gems gives you, among others, the additional generator targets rspec_controller, rspec_model, rspec_scaffold)
• export RSPEC=true and start autotest

One quote from my first autotest run:

Finished in 0.963479 seconds
400 examples, 400 failures