Talk Unafraid » Charactr http://www.talkunafraid.co.uk The (occasionally coherent) ramblings of a geek Thu, 09 Feb 2012 02:27:36 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 RiCal and Google Calendar http://www.talkunafraid.co.uk/2009/07/rical-and-google-calendar/ http://www.talkunafraid.co.uk/2009/07/rical-and-google-calendar/#comments Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:29:52 +0000 James Harrison http://www.talkunafraid.co.uk/?p=401 So, there was a request on Twitter from ChainerCygnus to get Google Calendar support in Charactr, so I went ahead and implemented it. You can now access an iCal feed of skill changes on Charactr on the characters page, and it uses the Charactr API key to authenticate so it works in anything, no need for HTTP Basic authentication support or anything.

Implementing was actually really easy. I grabbed the RiCal gem off Github, threw in the config.gem line in environment.rb, and added this to the characters controller index action:

respond_to do |format|
  1.   format.html
  2.   format.ics do
  3.     rna = ['(Untrained)','I','II','III','IV','V'] # Used below for roman numerals
  4.     cal = RiCal.Calendar do |cal|
  5.       cal.add_x_property('X-WR-CALNAME','Charactr')
  6.       @characters.each do |char|
  7.         if char.skills_in_training.length > 0
  8.           char.skills_in_training.each do |s|
  9.             cal.event do |e|
  10.               e.summary "#{char.name} finishes #{s.type.name} #{rna[s.level]}"
  11.               e.description "#{char.name} finishes #{s.type.name} #{rna[s.level]}"
  12.               e.dtstart s.end_time-10.minutes
  13.               e.dtstart s.end_time
  14.             end# event
  15.           end # skills loop
  16.         end # skillintraining > 0
  17.       end # char loop
  18.     end # calendar
  19.     render :text=>cal.export
  20.   end
  21. end

So as you can see, it’s a snap. Rails ships with a preconfigured MIME type for the :ics format, so it’s handled properly by nginx automatically. Still having some issues making Google Calendar accept the feed’s name as Charactr, mind you, but the rest works flawlessly and is available for all Charactr users right now.

On a side note, we’ve set up the @mmmetrics Twitter account as a shared account between all the MMMetrics team; if you’re having problems with any of the sites and use Twitter that’s a pretty good port of call. We’ll also be using that for announcements and so on, so it might make sense to follow if you’re interested in what we do.

It’s been a busy day on EVE Metrics 2, so I leave you with a few teaser screenshots. We’re almost done with the basic market view pages, and it’s now a matter of implementing the smaller features- market favourites, map features, and the APIs. EM2 won’t be an instant fullfilment of every feature promised over the past year or so; we’re taking the development slowly. EM2 at release won’t be as feature-packed as EM1, but it’ll work a whole lot better! Once we’ve gotten it released (hopefully in just under a week) we’ll be adding features and maintaining the site continuously to get all the features you want implemented without affecting performance.

Regional Statistics Overview Price History Graphs Order Lists ]]> http://www.talkunafraid.co.uk/2009/07/rical-and-google-calendar/feed/ 2 Rails and nginx/thin http://www.talkunafraid.co.uk/2009/06/rails-and-nginxthin/ http://www.talkunafraid.co.uk/2009/06/rails-and-nginxthin/#comments Fri, 12 Jun 2009 22:04:09 +0000 James Harrison http://www.talkunafraid.co.uk/?p=350 For the EVE people reading my blog, probably best to skip this one. If you’re one of my Rails readers, however, then this may interest you.

Charactr has been doing quite well. We originally released it deployed on Apache with Passenger (also known as mod_rails). While the performance was tolerable it wasn’t the snappiest thing in the world, and on a memory-limited VPS even with Ruby Enterprise Edition we were often running into memory limits. Right now however we’re on nginx and thin, the first production environment I’ve used this combination for.

Performance-wise, I’m impressed. Not only is the static asset hosting snappy as anything, but thin handles remarkably well and does it without chewing up much RAM. I’m pretty sure Passenger/REE would win on a box with a few gigs of RAM, but on something this small (540 megs, including the db server on the same box) the extra overhead from Passenger’s spawner was too much.

Configuration is where nginx really wins out, however…

There’s nothing wrong per-se with Apache’s configuration, but nginx makes life a whole lot easier for hosting Rails apps. First off, many thanks to Igor Sysoev for some recommendations in this config and help debugging an issue with 502 catching (So I can display a pretty page to the users while the cluster restarts; ideally we’d avoid this entirely but I’m not sure how I’d go about doing it on a budget).

# Your thin servers go here
  1. upstream charactrapp {
  2. server 127.0.0.1:3000;
  3. server 127.0.0.1:3001;
  4. }
  5. # The usual server
  6. server {
  7.   listen   80;
  8.   server_name charactrapp.com www.charactrapp.com;
  9.   access_log /opt/www/charactr/access.log;
  10.   error_log /opt/www/charactr/error.log;
  11.   root   /opt/www/charactr/current/public/;
  12.   index  index.html;
  13.   # Compress what we can, but make sure msie6 doesn't get gzip content and don't gzip tiny stuff
  14.   gzip             on;
  15.   gzip_min_length  1000;
  16.   gzip_proxied     expired no-cache no-store private auth;
  17.   gzip_types       text/plain application/xml text/css application/javascript;
  18.   gzip_disable     msie6;
  19.   # Catches anything that isn't sent to assets. (should catch nothing)
  20.   location ~* (css|js|png|jpe?g|gif|ico)$ {
  21.     expires max;
  22.   }
  23.   # Will render page caches if they're there, or redirect to the cluster
  24.   location / {
  25.     try_files $uri/index.html $uri.html $uri @charactrapp;
  26.   }
  27.   # The cluster is here
  28.   location @charactrapp {
  29.     proxy_pass http://charactrapp;
  30.     proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
  31.     proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
  32.     proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
  33.     proxy_redirect off;
  34.   }
  35.   # Catch servers being down and display a message. Has to be a location.
  36.   error_page 502 /502.html;
  37.   location = /502.html {
  38.   }
  39. }
  40. server {
  41.   listen   443;
  42.   server_name charactrapp.com www.charactrapp.com;
  43.   access_log /opt/www/charactr/access.log;
  44.   error_log /opt/www/charactr/error.log;
  45.   root   /opt/www/charactr/current/public/;
  46.   index  index.html;
  47.   gzip             on;
  48.   gzip_min_length  1000;
  49.   gzip_proxied     expired no-cache no-store private auth;
  50.   gzip_types       text/plain application/xml text/css application/javascript;
  51.   gzip_disable     msie6;
  52.   # Enable SSL
  53.   ssl                  on;
  54.   ssl_certificate      /path/to/chained.crt; # This actually has the domain's cert, and the CA's cert/chain all in one file
  55.   ssl_certificate_key  /path/to/app.key; # Key for the domain's cert
  56.   keepalive_timeout    70;
  57.   location ~* (css|js|png|jpe?g|gif|ico)$ {
  58.     expires max;
  59.   }
  60.   location / {
  61.     try_files $uri/index.html $uri.html $uri @charactrapp;
  62.   }
  63.   location @charactrapp {
  64.     proxy_pass http://charactrapp;
  65.     proxy_set_header X-FORWARDED_PROTO https; # Vital for ssl_requirement plugin to function correctly.
  66.     proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
  67.     proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
  68.     proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
  69.     proxy_redirect off;
  70.   }
  71.   error_page 502 /502.html;
  72.   location = /502.html {
  73.   }
  74. }
  75. # Asset subdomain, just caches everything it serves with public Cache-Control.
  76. server {
  77.   listen   80;
  78.   server_name assets.charactrapp.com;
  79.   access_log /opt/www/charactr/access.log;
  80.   error_log /opt/www/charactr/error.log;
  81.   root   /opt/www/charactr/current/public/;
  82.   index  index.html;
  83.   gzip             on;
  84.   gzip_min_length  1000;
  85.   gzip_proxied     expired no-cache no-store private auth;
  86.   gzip_types       text/plain application/xml text/css application/javascript application/x-javascript;
  87.   gzip_disable     msie6;
  88.   expires max;
  89.   add_header Cache-Control public;
  90. }

See? That’s all of Charactr’s configs. Of course, there’s still the server config but that’s pretty simple, and the default will do just fine for that.

So, overall I’m impressed with nginx. Thin I’ve used before and will be doing so with EVE Metrics 2; the combination of excellent stability with an Evented architecture hasn’t failed me yet.

]]> http://www.talkunafraid.co.uk/2009/06/rails-and-nginxthin/feed/ 0 Charactr Released! http://www.talkunafraid.co.uk/2009/06/charactr-released/ http://www.talkunafraid.co.uk/2009/06/charactr-released/#comments Sat, 06 Jun 2009 21:28:40 +0000 James Harrison http://www.talkunafraid.co.uk/?p=347 Well, time to unveil the application that myself, Makurid, flexd and Lilima Zennen have been working on for the past month.

The app is Charactr, a web based skill training monitor and planner with both email and SMS notifications. Go check it out!

The team (MMMetrics) is the same team who will be attacking the problem of EVE Metrics 2. A quick rundown of the features of Charactr:

  • Support for as many API keys as you want
  • Flexible notification framework
    • Send notifications via text message or email
    • Get notifications on specific characters, accounts, or everything
    • Receive daily summaries, messages before or on completion
  • Powerful skill planner
    • ‘New Character’ training speed bonus support
    • Learning skill suggestions
    • Reorder, add and delete skills
    • Training for item/ship
  • Secure and fast access anywhere in the world
  • SMS messaging to over 750 networks in over 200 countries

Enjoy!

]]> http://www.talkunafraid.co.uk/2009/06/charactr-released/feed/ 1