Arturo Calvo - Blog

I had six Ruby on Rails web apps hosted on Heroku that I wanted to migrate to a more scalable and professional platform within my budget. My first intention was to use my Bizspark account and deploy them to Microsoft Azure but, unfortunately, Azure Web Apps do not support Ruby on Rails yet. My attempt to deploy them in a single Linux Virtual Machine was painful and the performance very poor, so I decided to try IBM Bluemix . After signing up for the 30-day trial , I started loving its engaging and intuitive UI, the simple pricing model and the amount of available services for a 1-year old cloud platform. In less than one hour I had deployed my six web apps using Cloud Foundry CLI , migrated the PostgreSQL databases with the ElephantSQL add-on, and  set up the custom domain and SSL certificates. A tiny " Add Git " button introduced me to IBM Bluemix DevOps Services . This is simply mind-blowing! You are not only allowed to edit your code from the w...

There are some scenarios where we would like to set some actions to be performed at certain times of the day, or periodically. There is an easy way set up these cron jobs in Ruby on Rails with  rufus-scheduler . It does support four kinds of scheduling : scheduler. in '10d' do     # do something in 10 days end scheduler. at '2030/12/12 23:30:00' do     # do something at a given point in time end scheduler. every '3h' do     # do something every 3 hours end scheduler. cron '5 0 * * *' do     # do something every day, five minutes after midnight end The integration is incredibly simple. Just create a new file task_scheduler.rb in your /config/initializers folder, include the gem rufus/scheduler and set up your task. In the example below, I am sending an HTTP GET request to Google every 2 minutes and print the status code. # Required Gems require 'rubygems' require 'rufus/scheduler' require 'net/https' requ...

Sometimes we found ourselves starting manually a set of apps or webservices everytime we reboot our Ubuntu instance. We can easily automate this process. 1)  Open the configuration file with sudo vi /etc/rc.local 2)  Add all the commands that you want to run. For example:     cd /home/myuser   rm *.tmp     nohup java -jar /var/www/myapp/app.jar & With nohup and the final & we force the jar file to run on background, creating the  nohup.out log file. 3) Always end with exit 0 4) Save changes with :x and reboot the system. The commands that you have added should be run at start up.

In the new Microsoft Azure portal, when you create a new Web App, you might struggle to find your FTP user credentials.  This is how you can find them. 1) Open  portal.azure.com and browse to the Web App you want to access to. 2)  Click on the " Get Publish... " button as per screenshot below. It will download an XML file. 3) Open that file with a text editor and you will find the publishUrl , userName and userPWD fields you need.

In the last decade we have seen how advances in biometric technologies have made it possible to identify individuals with their fingerprint, voice, iris or even brainwaves with very low failure rates. I have no doubt that biometrics ( something you are ) will eventually replace passwords ( something you know ), which can be easily forgotten, guessed or deciphered with dictionary attacks. It is a fact, we are not good at choosing robust passwords and we reuse them all the time. Unfortunately, it is not uncommon to hear from considered secure cloud services urging their users to change their passwords after a cyberattack. It is very annoying, but a new password should solve the problem. But what if your biometric information is stolen ?  Most of cloud services protect it the same way they do with passwords, i.e., the information is encrypted and stored in their servers. If after a cyberattack  your fingerprint is deciphered, it could be used in order to acces...