At work we have two Chef environments, staging and production, so that we don’t break our entire infrastructure because of a typo. Changes go to staging, and once we know they work we push to production…

I’m getting into using Sinatra for smaller web applications, instead of the behemoth that is Rails.

For many purposes, Rails is still perfect, but I often find that it can be overkill if all you need is to display a couple of pages, and possibly provide an API. Here’s a quick guide on creating a Sinatra application that can be tested using RSpec and Cucumber…

When installing Ubuntu 10.04 Server as a VirtualBox VM, don’t use the “Install Minimal Virtual Machine” option in the installer options.

Strangely, that causes installing it as a VM to fail spectacularly, with