It’s been really sunny and warm in London for a few days now. At work, we spend as much time as possible outdoors, which isn’t very much time at all—the life of a software developer may have its perks, but being close to nature isn’t one of them. But the “downstairs” conference room is getting good use, and nearby Spa Fields has become our lunch room—ours and everyone else’s within a half-mile.

We had a sunny spell about a month ago, at the beginning of June, and Spa Fields were lush with green grass. Now the dryness of summer has baked the foliage until crisp and brown, but after eight months of cold, rainy grey we are grateful for the sunshine, regardless.

I’ve been so busy working on the nuts and bolts of organization that I’ve hardly spared a breath to write about what I’ve been up to. Exactly what I’m organizing is Rails Girls South Florida, which will take place in the Miami area in November. It will be awesome!

Rubyweb is a small program I wrote to address a small problem, but one that keeps popping up. Apparently, the “normal” way of running a simple web server in Ruby is too difficult, so people have been using Python’s SimpleHTTPServer instead. Now I’m totally cool with using Python or any other language’s tools to do that, but the main argument seems to be the number of characters you have to type in order to launch the web server.

Rubyweb is very simple to install and use:

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gem install rubyweb
rubyweb

Have a look at Rubyweb’s GitHub repo and let me know what you think.

I’ve migrated my blog to Jekyll/Octopress. The import wasn’t perfect, so I’ll be adding backin missing images and fixing post bodies that have somehow ended up being titles.

When I got home yesterday, I noticed that our 2009 Mac Pro was unresponsive. I checked to see if it was on the network, and then powered it down. When I turned it back on, it booted into the recovery volume.

That Mac Pro had a RAID 5 array on it, composed of four 2TB hard drives, bought for a premium price from Apple so they would support the system.

I opened up the RAID utility and saw that the RAID controller was recognising all four hard drives were no longer in a RAID set. Although all of them were reporting that they were “ok”, the RAID set and therefore the RAID volume were gone.