Shinji Kuwayama

Basecamp makes things easy, and I love it. Here’s an odd example though: Basecamp makes it incredibly easy to post the wrong link to a Writeboard—one which prompts for a mysterious password that no one knows.

I know how to avoid this mistake and in a moment, so will you!

Writeboard and Basecamp are actually separate products, much as Highrise and Campfire are separate. Basecamp provides Writeboard integration, and most people I know just think of it as a Basecamp feature (which is fine).

See, this is actually a Writeboard URL, and we’re not in Basecamp right now.

If you copy-and-paste the URL from the Location: field, you’re actually capturing a link to your Writeboard account, and not your Basecamp project. That’s why 37signals provides the “Share this Writeboard” link. If you want to link to this document Basecamp-wise, you must right-click the “Share this Writeboard” link, and select “Copy this link” (on a Mac, that is). You do not want to copy the 123.writeboard.com URL.

This is oddly inscrutable for a 37signals product and I hope it gets improved someday. In the meantime, we’ll just have to suck it up and make ourselves remember to link to Writeboards the right way and not the wrong way.

New Relic is the best way to track a Rails app’s performance, no question, but it still confounds me at times. Here’s something I learned today.

New Relic reports the number of instances per host; until today, I was reading this as the size of our mongrel pool.

It’s not, actually—it’s more like the ideal size of the mongrel pool. New Relic is actually counting individual instantiations of mongrels, which is to say the number of mongrels which have run. If you’ve got a pool of 8 mongrels (who could ask for more?), and 2 of them have restarted, then New Relic is going to report that you had “10 instances”.

It makes perfect sense in retrospect, but I didn’t realize this until Justin at New Relic pointed it out to me. They’re very responsive at their support site.

I haven’t had the opportunity to see how New Relic displays instance counts for Phusion Passenger deployments; if you have anything to add, please post in the comments!