Announcing version 0.5 of Mommy or Daddy? The premise is that people want to see whether a child kid looks more like the father or mother. Let me take a couple steps back. The premise is that people will have a TON of fun with the site. Please try it, upload some photos, provide recommendations, vote and send to friends!

Technically, there's a bunch of interesting things we're doing. We're using Ruby on Rails, of course. This is the first live slice on Cluster 2 of Engine Yard. Finally, we're using Amazon's S3 web service for storage and upload of files. I expect things to break, so please do go ahead and try it out. You can reach me at technique at gmail dot com.

With Andre's help, we migrated Mephisto from Rimuhosting to a Lifetime (sorry guys, deal is over) Joyent Accelerator. $649 compared to $40 / month. No need to even think twice about it.

Two initial impressions. Solaris is going to take some getting used to, and not NEARLY as slick as apt-get, but I'll deal. Next, this thing is freaking fast. I don't know how it compares to slicehost in terms of speed, but page refreshes are near instantaneous for writes to the DB, which wasn't the case on Rimu.

I'm a happy camper, and over the long haul, I'm saving a ton of money.

For those of you not in the know, on the Mac, Textmate is hands-down, the editor of choice for Ruby on Rails. My friend recently told me that there are 41,000 copies sold to date. I've known for a while that I'm one of the first buyers of Textmate, but I'm actually much cooler than I thought.



So while I have the 9th copy of Textmate, I'm actually the second purchaser of Textmate, and I have the dubious distinction of being the first tech-poser to drop cash on it. I mean, I blog with it. That's pretty cool, right? Guys?

I've successfully converted my blog from Typo to Mephisto! It's surprisingly easy. The only note I'd make about conversion is that you actually don't have to create a new entry in the database.yml file. It's now included so you have to edit the existing file. That took all of 15 minutes for me to figure out (duh).

That also means this machine's migrated to Rails 1.2. W00t! DHH thinks I'm a wuss for not living on edge rails, but I'll live.

I need a little bit to settle into my new surroundings, but this really is quite nice. Looking forward to posting actively again!

In exciting Rails news, Zed Shaw just released his PDF book Mongrel (Digital Shortcut): Serving, Deploying, and Extending Your Ruby Applications. If Zed's writing is anywhere near as good as the server he's written, he'll have a hit on his hands.