There is a new (0.2.7) version of Astrails-Safe.

New features since 0.2.5:

• default options for gpg now include '--no-use-agent'
• support for 'command' option for gpg
• quote values in mysql password file
• add 'lib' to $:
• [EXPERIMENTAL] Rackspace Cloud Files support

If you follow us on twitter (@astrails if you wondering) you already know that we are at the Startup Weekend Israel right now.

Which is going amazing by the way, thanks for asking, lots and lots of nice people, very creative and energetic atmosphere, food and beer.

Turns out our idea attracted a great team of developers, designers and business developers.

Startup Weekend comes to Israel.

The event will take place at IBM offices in Petch Tikva from Dec-16 to Dec-18. We are going to participate and also sponsor the event.

Startup weekends are known to be a good place to network with all those startup people, like enterpreneurs, VCs, lawyers, developers and designers.

Israeli event seems to be kosher, so it’s not exactly a weekend: Wed - Fri :-) Grab your discounted ticket using discount code swearlybird, and as they say you should bring “laptop, good attitude, and creative energy” there.

Follow Startup Weekend Israel tweets to stay updated.

We will tweet our impressions and blog about them here.

Looking forward to have some geek fun.

This is going to be the first part of a blog post series about javascript widgets.

First type I’m going to cover is Popup Widget. Sometimes it’s called Popin Widget because there is no actually new window that pops up, instead the content is shown IN-side a current page. The idea is quite simple: you provide some html/js snippet to other sites. They put it into relevant place, and you have some functionality of your site running there.

I’m going to explain how exactly it works, what should be done to achieve this, and what common mistakes i see once and again.

At the end of the blog post you will get a link to complete javascript library, grab it, play with it, and use it for fun or profit.

Everyone needs a backup, right? Unfortunately almost no one does though. Why?!

We needed something for ourselves and our customers. Something simple, free, configure-and-forget. Most of the time there is no need for something fancy, a simple tar + mysqldump can do the job for many small/medium sites.

We participated in JRuby on Rails with GlassFish Code Camp hosted by Sun Microsystems Inc. I was speaking about the framework in general trying to infect Java developers with Ruby On Rails. Slides are available.

Amit Hurvitz gave exciting presentation about GlassFish and short introduction into DTrace. Find out more details about the Code Camp.

2008 was the year when we finally switched to full time consulting. And like all consulters we faced the problem of correct pricing. There are two well-known ways to charge a customer: per-hour rate and fixed bid quote, and several combinations of them.

Blog moved to Mephisto. So we have comments now.

We just incorporated our own Ltd. company.

It was coming for a while now but we finally got to it when we started to hire people :)