Updating Rails when vendor/rails is under local svn

In some of my projects I have Rails checked out in vendor/rails and I keep it under local subversion repository (not as an external nor ignored). Why? It is sometimes to handy to have just whole application in one repository. The only problem I encountered is when I need to upgrade Rails version. Normal rake …

REXML and missing iconv

If You are parsing XML with Ruby, You probably have been using REXML to parse it. Well yesterday I was faced with error left by REXML: /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/rexml/parsers/treeparser.rb:90:in `parse’: No decoder found for encoding ISO-8859-2. Please install iconv.> (REXML::ParseException) I was a bit surprised, since it was on FreeBSD box, which have installed iconv by default. …

Rsync for backup

Rsync is very useful tool for making remote backups. I use it with following options: -avzP which are suitable for making backups. However there are some more. First –bwlimit=XX for setting upper bandwidth limit. I wish there was some way to dynamically changing limit, when rsync is running. I normal operation mode rsync makes copy …

Memory usage for simple FreeBSD server

I’ve recently discovered, that anyone planning to run simple FreeBSD server for some standalone Internet domain (mail+AV+SpamAssassin, DNS, Apache+MySQL+PHP+WordPress) need at least 512 MB RAM (this server runs this, and some minor addons, and chocks with its 256 MB of RAM). I know that is small amount per today’s standards, but when You use as …