CRAZ8

I recently read Play Money, a book about how Julian Dibbell spent a year trading virtual goods in Ultima Online with real money. This is an interesting read for anyone building any sort of online system that has virtual goods of any kind. Even if you don’t want people to trade items in your world, people will find a way to do it, and some may make money from the process, and others will be ripped off (and blame you for it too!)

The cool thing is that if you have any success at all, there will be a demand for this type of trading that you can take advantage of – you just need to plan it out to make it transparent to users and not allow holes that cheaters can take advantage of.

I’ve just moved this blog onto an installation of Phusion Passenger. If you can’t see this post, then the DNS hasn’t caught up yet.

The installation instructions at the ModRails site are pretty good for setting the thing up, but there are some tricks.

On Ubuntu, the Apache configuration goes in a file in the /etc/apache/sites-enabled directory. The entire contents of that file for this blog is here. I needed the Directory section to allow access to the static files.

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName blog.craz8.com
    DocumentRoot /srv/rails/craz8/current/public

    <Directory "/srv/rails/craz8/current/public">
      Options FollowSymLinks
      AllowOverride None
      Order allow,deny
      Allow from all
    </Directory>

    ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/craz8_blog_error.log
    CustomLog /var/log/apache2/craz8_blog_access.log combined
</VirtualHost>

I’ve been using the new Rails feature of named_scope for my current project. One thing I do for all new pages is to check the Rails development.log file to make sure that the SQL queries I’m expecting are actually the ones that are executed.

Typically, my controller will run the queries to get all the data, and the views will use the results to display the data. This pattern is clear in the log file. The Controller runs the query and retrieves the data before the View code is executed.

However, named_scope queries don’t actually perform the database query until the data is actually requested in the code, so the SQL text in the log file will show up when the views are rendering, not when the controller code runs. And if the view never uses the results, the query is never executed.

All of this is transparent to your code, but it caused me a few minutes of confusion trying to find the query that I was expecting to see.

Check out our Craigslist posting

We’ve had a lot of response from Microsoft stack people, some Java, a few PHP people and a few people with no programming experience at all.

We got really lucky with our first attempt a few months ago – we ended up hiring the first person to respond to the listing (which is kind of scary). Perhaps now we’re hitting the reality of hiring people this way.

We’re looking for people to build social networking games in Rails, so any combination of some of these skills would be a great start. So far, no-one with Rails or Social Networking experience has responded.

If anyone is looking to work for a cool new company, building Social Games in Rails in the Seattle area (we really need lots of face time), get in touch!