I used pow in the past and didn't like it. I've given it a second chance and it seems to be working out. I'd like to give Invoker a try though but I'll save that for another day.

Pow is a daemon that runs your rack (Rails) apps in the background when you request them at a special example_app.dev domain. You don't have to start your app manually anymore (e.g. rails s). If you don't use your app for 15 minutes it kills your app's process to free up memory (restarting it on the next request). It doesn't run workers (I recommend inline que workers via ActiveJob) or other daemons such as those in your Procfile. It just looks for a config.ru and (presumably) does a rackup on it. It's very simple to set up and it's Mac OS X only.

I've recently been messing with a lot of hex thanks to my current client. I ran across a key/value hex string where each key/value pair was NULL terminated (pairs separated from other pairs with a NULL character) and each key was seperated from its value by a colon. Here's the hex string:

>> hexstr = "56494e3a3147314a433534343452373235323336370050524f544f3a3500504152414d533a302c312c322c342c372c392c31312c31342c323000494e44435452533a302830303030303030303030303131292c3128303131303031303131313129"

First I wanted to convert this to ASCII, Ruby makes this fairly simple:

I've been writing a Rails template for our future projects at Brightbit and I've been testing everything, including our application's environment. I've wrote a special rake task to test our different environments (development, test, staging, production, etc). This helps us ensure each environment is configured correctly. Ideally it would let the person running the tests know what is wrong with their environment and how to resolve it.

One of the environment details I wanted to test was that memcache was setup and running correctly. I could of course test for the memcached binary or check if it was running, but since we are running these tests in the context of a Rails app, why not just ask Rails if it can connect to the memcache server?

Currently at Brightbit there's 4-5 team members to add to each Heroku app. And with some projects having two, three or more apps (staging, production, splash, etc) it gets a bit cumbersome adding all of us and it will only get worse with more team mates.