Tame deer above Glen Brittle

So the year is coming to a close and I’d like to communicate some wee open source tools I’ve been working on this past year.

Below is a list of open source tools I have released recently. I would not go as far as to call them open source projects as there is rarely anyone involved in these projects apart from me. I learnt at frozen rails that its great to get involved with other peoples open source projects instead of going out on your own all the time. (something I have a habit of doing.)

If anything here catches your eye, or you want to use it, get involved.

Chef Cookbooks

I have been building a fair amount of server infrastructure lately and have been using the excellent chef tool to help with this.

Along the way I have released a few cookbooks which I have extracted from the work I have been doing. These are in a relatively rough state but do work and are in production use. If you want to help me improve any of these, please go for it.

chef-squid
chef-oh-my-zsh
chef-ipcoffeetables
chef-backup
chef-locales

Deployment recipiez

I have been doing a lot of varied application deployments, all with capistrano. For the last couple of years I have been maintaining a collection of customs scripts which I was including in each project. Versioning was becoming difficult and git submodules are not an amazing workflow.

With bundler its possible to manage dependencies well and it can be used outside of rails projects. Recently I have been writing messaging apis in NodeJS and deploying quite successfully with capistrano and a few setup scripts.

With recipiez its possible to setup a node deployment with upstart, nginx, logrotate and monit. This creates a nice “production ready” environment for deploying node apps.

I have packaged it up and released it as a gem. Instructions for use are in the Readme.

recipiez

OpenSSL Extensions

This is a library written by Nathaniel Bibler of Ruby5 fame. I have used this extensively in an SSL certificate reselling app I have been working on which has not yet seen the light of day.

This library was my first github pull request success. Where you open a pull request, discuss the change with the author, make a few alterations, then it gets merged upstream!

openssl-extensions

Wee Flickr

This is a little sinatra app which is meant to get deployed to heroku. It allows me to include images in blog posts very easily and give me a little textile snippet to paste into blog posts.

This scratches a very specific itch but is a example of a sinatra app communicating with the flickr api. It also has a random image function which give a random image from your flickr stream. This is used on my random flickr desktop script which I use at work.

wee_flickr

Solon

This is a gem for integrating with sage pay server. It lacks the standard api of activemerchant but as the service is offsite it doesnt work that well with the activemerchant api.

Using it might help you if you are doing a sage pay integration within a rails app.

solon

Merry Christmas!

Skinning in front of Store Vengetind

Vanny in Fontainebleu

In the spirit of DIY with the likes of the haute route post , here is a description of the DIY Campervan we created last summer.

Helen and I went on a trip to France this summer past, starting in Nottingham and finishing in Inverness after a nice tour of France and parts of the UK.

Wild camping is banned in France along with a few of the other central european countries. Meaning that if you want to be ‘out in the nature’ you need to stay in a campsite or hotel.

However, there is a big campervan culture in France which means that campervans are accepted all over the place and there is a network of aires which provide essential services such as water and waste disposal.

The downside of campervans is that they are very expensive to buy and hire .

Famous refuge and gash

If you want to spend time in the alps or the pyrenees a good way to do it is with a DIY Camper™

There are some amazing Van conversions out there which take a lot of time and money to create. This is not one of them. This conversion can be done for minimal funds and in a couple of days.

Vehicle

Buy a van, max 2m high as this means you can park in regular car parks. Features to look out for are low mileage, ply-lined, carpeted. without bulk head, turbo diesel, side and back doors. Buy something which has a decent resell value as you will likely want to sell the van on after your trip.

As of 2011 £2000 would be a good budget. We started with a Mercedes Vito electricians van purchased from Autotrader vans.

Post training lunch in the heat.

Sleeping

You can pick up an IKEA sofabed for about £100, this acts as both a sofa and a bed! Jobs a good un!

High altitude camp spot.

If you have more time / expertise an mdf sleeping platform design is far superior as it allows you to store luggage underneath the sleeping area when you sleep.

Mods

Solar Shower in Action

• Inverter for a DC power supply (Laptop and Mobile) – sourced from Maplin.
• Large water container. You need a lot of water storage as often days can pass without water. – sourced from Decathlon.
• Solar shower. A large black back with a nozzle attached was excellent for cheeky washes. – sourced from Decathlon.
• Seat organisers, these clip onto the back of seat.
• FM transmitter, good way to listen to Ipod / Phone in the car without modifying the stereo.
• Screw hooks on the ply lining for organising stuff.
• Cooking was done outside with an MSR Whisperlite International stove running on petrol.
• Take a basic tool kit for repairs. Our main issue was the back section of the exhaust needed tied onto the chassis for most of the trip. If you get a good van you will hopefully escape mechanical issues.
• Curtains for the back doors with velcro attachments. Well made by Mrs Palmer.

Tips

• Use the aires in villages for services (but buy something in the village!). You can also sleep in them as well.
• When driving long distance we split the driving and did 2hr efforts, which can be maintained.
• The pyrenees is a lovely area.

4×4 intervals followed by Barbeque