Silas Snider, Blogger

My New Favorite Song

We’ve recently begun singing a new song at church that I absolutely adore:

Micah 7

What misery is mine?
The fruit that I desire
Does not remain.
The upright man is gone
And those that love your name
Cannot be found.
But I will wait for God
And His forgiveness will
Hear my cry.

Chorus:
Who is like God,
Who pardons sin?
Who is like God
Who won’t forget
The oath of grace
He made long ago?

I’ve sinned and I should bear
The indignation of
The Lord my God.
But Christ has plead my cause,
And He will satisfy
The debt I owe.
He’ll bring me to the light
And then I shall be free
To bless His name.

Chorus.

Things I Need (Part 1)

I’m going to start a mini-series on this blog of the things that I think I, as a programmer/system administrator need. I have not been able to find anything similar in a quick google search, so I’m crowdsourcing. Who knows, I may even add it to my list of projects.

Anyway, the thing I really need is a http server that is fast enough/secure enough/robust enough to compete with apache, but with a configuration file syntax that is a) simple enough for a novice server admin to create virtual hosts and rewrite rules, and b) translatable into an equivalent apache configuration. In other words, the webserver shouldn’t depend on a deep understanding on my part of how virtual hosts work — it should just handle the common cases, and shouldn’t worry about supporting wierd edge cases. In particular, it probably shouldn’t worry about IP-based virtual hosts as much — those can be handled by having multiple instances of the server running, bound to different addresses.

My Rails Journey, Part 1

Just installed Rails, using the always excellent resource at Hivelogic. One thing I noticed right off the bat — gems take forever to install, especially at the point where it’s installing the documentation. Such a change from the days of easy_install in the python world :(

One Project to Rule Them All

I need to move from Facebook Events to something custom, for several reasons: I turn out to have friends that won’t use facebook, I have repeating events, I want to be able to integrate my data more easily than writing a facebook app, and I want to learn something new.

Towards that vein, I’m going to try coding this site in Rails, to see what happens. I already know that I’ll definitely be using Haml/Sassy for the templating language unless something better comes up, and I’ll probably deploy using Phusion’s Passenger (though feel free to chime in below).