RaykoBlog

I come to life again, after some inactivity. New year, new things to like, new things to hate and new things to not care. I have a few news to revive the blog and I hope to keep it alive this year. Hopefully I may find material for it.

I come to life again, after some inactivity. New year, new things to like, new things to hate and new things to not care. I have a few news to revive the blog and I hope to keep it alive this year. Hopefully I may find material for it.

After some days of work, I managed to add a simple captcha to Typo blog system. In my opinion, capchas like mine are more efficient at the moment of reject a bot. This is because the captcha is based on logical questions that the user posting a comment needs to answer. So, the answer to the captcha cannot be obtained from the text itself. Now, a better implementation of this would be using images with a little distorded text, but maintaning the question/answer aproach.

One problem with this would be the quality of the questions. Maybe some user would fell confused with trivial questions like "What color is green?", expecting that the answer will be something different from "green". Another problem relays on the answers. Some questions have more than one answer and it gets a little complicated, not imposible, to manage all expected answers. 

My captcha aproach is now under test. I had lots of spam comments before implement it, and now that it's working, it seems to work really well. There is no way (I hope) to get the answers from the user data. A cracker needs access to the root files to get them, and that means cracking the entire server, something a spam bot will not do. There is no information stored on visible variables, only the question. So I hope it last as long as it can.

I had some problems with Typo blog recently. An update of the gem Passenger was causing the application to trhow an error, complaining about a missing method on Passenger's libs. Well, also I updated several gems on my server wich cause to have multiples version of some gems, typo included.

So, after detecting this error, I made some changes on Apache to use the new passenger, and also updated the blog app. Last action was not a good idea. Typo was complaining about missing gems and Postgres about codification. The database was an easy solution but I had to make changes on the blog app, on the database configuration, to set the template0 in order to be able to use unicode.

About the gems, well, misteriously, having multiples versions of a gem makes the app to confuse and don't know what to pick up. Maybe it's because a warning on Rails, wich says that a method version_requirement will be depricated, but the warning also says that this change will take place in October. 

Anyway, a solution to this involves changes on enviorement.rb. First, look for the lines that execute the require of the missing gems. Then, get a list of the gems installed and check the lasteast version you have. Finally, on those lines in enviorement.rb add :version => '~> x,x,x' where x.x.x is your version. 

In my case this was an easy fix to the problem. But for others may be wrong. Anyway, the blog is now active and online again.

Hello everyone, I'm glad to announce the release of NPC-Shop 1.0. We've made several improvements to the site. If you want to see more, vitis the site.

 

http://www.npc-shop.com

 I'm having some troubles with nic.ar wich is the entity that manages domain registration for *.ar domains. It's a public entity, and in my country, any public entity doesn't have good reputation. From a day to another, a domain just stoped working, their DNS registry changed for some unexplanable reason and drop my entire site. For now rayko.com.ar is not accesible due to a DNS problem, however, I decided to purchase a .com domain with a private entity that have good reputation here in Argentina. Now I feel a little more secure about unexpected changes. You can acces any of my sites using raykosite.com or raykoworld.com. For example, for this blog, you should enter blog.raykosite.com. Less dots now so better for the users I guess, hehe.

I don't know what will happen with rayko.com.ar, but my main domain now is raykosite.com. In the future, if the old domain comes alive again, it will work as always. 

I used to have a web on www.rayko.com.ar in where I put information about my musical profile. Some time ago I discovered Ruby on Rails, (ruby is programming language and rails is a framework for web developing), and I started to introduce myself on that language. Before that, I was working with PHP5, so you can notice the change I've been into, if you know the languages.

Also, I was trying out this great and stable operative system called Linux, more specific the Kubuntu distribution, based on Debian. If I wouldn't a gamer also, I wouldn't be tied to Windows. Sadly, many games from known companies, like Blizzard, Epic Games, Codemaster, etc, develop their games for Windows systems, and a very few group of those companies offer a linux version of their games. So now I'm using two operative systems.

Another fact, is that I changed my PC, so now I can move the server from my working PC to a dedicated server. It's not actually a server, but it runs well for being a basic server.

Configuring a new operative system having little knowledge about it takes time. By now the server is up and working properly, as you can see on this blog, wich is one of various applications I'm hosting here. Most of those applications are in developing or should not be public. I'm currently developing an application for an institution (for example), so you will not be able to see it, for obvious reasons.

Setting up the web server was relatively easy. I had it running in no time with the PHP module, but I was starting to use Rails, and set up the server to work with app developed on that framework wasn't an easy task. I had a lot of problems trying to deploy an app on the server. For some reason Phusion Passenger didn't wanted to work with Apache. But at last, I found solutions to my problems and I can deploy any Rails app I want on the server. Now it works like a beauty.

But, what a about RaykoWeb? Well, I want to migrate that app to Rails, it was programmed on PHP in first place, but migrate is not the proper word, I'm re-writting the whole app. Doing this I gain more experence on Ruby on Rails and I produce a better application. This is taking a lot of time and the app is still in developing, so my whole musical profile is down by the moment. I'm hoping to have some free in the next week to keep working on the web, but I don't know when it will be finished. For now, I can only offer this blog. It's a big change though, because I've changed the operative system, the database (from MSSQL 2000 to PostgreSQL) and the language/framework.

Thats the status at the moment. RaykoWeb will be up and fully finctional... some day, hehe.

Yay, now I have a full working blog running. Now I can generate content accesible for other. Mmm... what will I post? well, programming stuff mostly, tweks, tutorials on Linux systems, reviews (personal opinions of course), and whatever I find usefull for others.
Anyway, I declare now the opening of this blog wich I will maintain while I can. I hope you enjoy the stuff here and comments will be apreciated.-

 After some months of hard work, we finally hire a hosting who provide really great oportunities for those who work with Ruby on Rails and need a host to upload their apps. This site is HostingRails. As far as we hire their service, I can say that is a very good service. Their support team is very helpful and quick when there is an issue.

Not only their people is good, the support they have for RoR is excellent. We found about ten thousands, yes you read well 10.000 GEMS that we can use on our apps, ready on the server, including bloggin, forums, authentications, too much to say here. If you don't find your gem, then you can simply follow their tutorial to install your own gems on your local account.

Their plans also are very accesible. Not everyone can pay a VPS, when knowing that the app will not have as much traffic as google is not an option. So if you want to test your new app, you can pay very little, and if you need more, you can switch to other plans, if not, just cancel the account, and you won't lose much.

Now, enough talking about the host, the main issue going on rigth now is the release of the site NPC-SHOP. Im proud to be one of the developers of that site. On each modification and improvement, I learned a lot of things. Now you can check it out and tell us what you think. 

I can see your question rigth now: "What is NPC-SHOP?" Well, you can think of it as a publishing service, like eBay. But on NPC-SHOP you don't buy with dollars, yens or punds, you buy (or trade), with stones, rings, zenys, adena and so on. Don't know what I'm talking about yet? You have little knowledge about games then. MMOs (masive-multiplayer online) use that kind of money, like Ragnarok Online, Linage, Wrold of Warcraft and many other games. So, if you play an MMO and your game allows to sell items to other users, you can come to NPC-SHOP and start your virtual store there. You can interact with other users on the site, and publish your store whenever you want. That's nice, isn't it? 

To contact developers about bugs or suggestions, go to the forums, they will kindly answer to your questions and give you support on the site.

 

You can follow NPC-SHOP on Twitter and FaceBook too, to keep up to date about new features and so. Have fun, and enjoy the service.