It’s just data
Armed with my new Mac Mini, I set off to to repeat my testing of various versions of Rails and Ruby. Whereas I have been using, and happy with, RVM on Ubuntu for dealing with Ruby versions; I decided to try rbenv/ruby-build. What I started with was a new machine, a full installation of XCode, the Command Line utilities, and Homebrew.
Five years ago today, I bought a mac mini to do book development. On Wednesday, I bought a new mac mini simply because I’m told that Mountain Lion won’t install on a vintage 2008 mac mini, and because my readers have had problems on Mac OS X 10.8.
Overall, I have continued to be unimpressed, and can’t help but wonder why my open source friends seem attracted to this system.
It started with two notifications we received via postal mail. First Time Warner was going to start charging us rent for an outdated cable modem. Second they were going to drop a number of cable channels, but if I acted now, I could request a digital adapter which would allow me to watch these channels on exactly one TV.
This process has turned a fairly complacent Time Warner customer into one that is actively seeking alternatives. In looking around, I see plenty of promo offers of more service than I have (basic cable and basic internet) for considerably less than I am currently paying. I am OK with waiting an hour or more for an answer, but I am not OK with having to be on hold for that entire time. And I’m definitely not OK with renting a separate box per device simply to get access.
This process has turned a fairly complacent Time Warner customer into one that is actively seeking alternatives. So I am beginning my research: starting with looking for alternatives to cable TV. What I want is a single plan that allows me to watch whatever I want wherever I want. I am OK with upgrading my devices as long as we are talking about a purchase not a lease.
Any pointers people might leave in comments would be appreciated.
The interface is a bit low level, but workable:
require 'dbus' # gem install ruby-dbus
bus = DBus::SessionBus.instance
sm = bus.service('org.gnome.SessionManager').object('/org/gnome/SessionManager')
sm.introspect
sm.default_iface = 'org.gnome.SessionManager'
cookie = sm.Inhibit($0, 0, 'inhibiting', 4).first
at_exit { cookie = sm.Uninhibit(cookie) if sm.IsInhibited(4).first }
Note: the call to Uninhibit is optional — it will occur on process exit anyway.
Hat tip to JanuZ.
Jacques Distler: Remarkably, even after a decade of such pain, Unicode is, in 2012, still “cutting edge.”
Ouch.
I previously had installed Ubuntu 12.04 on a NetBook, and my overall impression was simply that it was more stable than its predecessor — particularly for Unity.
For the first time I tried it on a desktop, and to my surprise the following worked:
sudo apt-get install ruby1.9.3
And by worked, I mean not only did it install Ruby 1.9.3, but it made it (and gem, and irc) the default ruby.
For those that still use rvm, (many of the ‘cool kids’ have moved on to rbenv, I noticed a few niggles
Usage: add wunderbar and nokogiri to your Gemfile and run bundle install. Template extensions supported are _html and _json. Examples: view, layout, json.
Note that as Rails layouts and views are predicated on the assumption that output is produced by concatenating text, one must use _ yield instead of simply yield. On the plus side, Wunderbar will note when the first argument to a call which creates an element is html_safe? and will treat it as markup.
The result is a lot like Markaby, except you get to be/have to be explicit when you are creating a tag. In this demo, there is no logic, so the benefits of doing so are less clear, but include you being able to use tags that aren’t known to Markaby, like the ones that were added in HTML5. Both inline and views are supported, but support for layouts has yet to be added.
Future plans include Rails.
This site was hacked. A reader of the site noted that Google’s index of this site had been co-opted by dubious pharmaceutical offerings. I’ll gladly thank that individual publicly if they give me permission to do so; but my email reply got bounced as spam.
The immediate culprit was the addition of the following lines to a number of .htaccess files
It is increasingly becoming the case that Agile Web Development with Rails is being actively co-developed with Rails itself.
While my tests have been an official part of the release process for a long time now, yesterday’s release of 3.2.3RC1 provides a number of examples that illustrate this.
The intent is to prove an updated to the eBook free of charge which incorporates the necessary changes, either concurrent with the final release of 3.2.3 or shortly thereafter.
Intertwingly.net is moving to DreamHost. I’m sure that every one of my scripts has hard coded paths or depend on the server being in EST/EDT or will otherwise break for unanticipated (but in retrospect entirely obvious) reasons. I don’t believe that I will lose any email in the process, but you never know.
My @apache.org email address will not be affected by this move.
Patch for /usr/share/applications/google-chrome.desktop:
108c108 < Exec=/opt/google/chrome/google-chrome %U --- > Exec=/opt/google/chrome/google-chrome %U --incognito 114c114 < X-Ayatana-Desktop-Shortcuts=NewWindow;NewIncognito --- > X-Ayatana-Desktop-Shortcuts=NewIncognito;NewWindow
Clearly if you want to develop a real web application, you need a router, a templating language, ability to separate out your model, view, and controller, scalability, and much more.
However, at times this is both too much, and yet not enough. I find that I write a lot of scripts that do report generation, execution of shell commands, and the like, and in many cases would like to present a richer output than plain text: things like tables, fonts, and most importantly hypertext links. I’ve been extracting some of the common logic from these scripts out into a library, and recently have started refactoring that library.
Problem: I’m not always at the machine that is VPN’ed into work.
Solution: place the following into /etc/network/if-up.d/sametime-forwarder:
#!/bin/sh # # redirect Sametime's port 1533 to messaging.ibm.com # echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward # turns on forwarding iptables -F -t nat # Flush existing translation tables iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 1533 -j DNAT --to 9.17.136.77:1533 iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -j MASQUERADE
It turns out that the following is all it takes to install Debian Unstable in a chroot jail under Ubuntu, and then to log into that jail as root:
apt-get install debootstrap schroot mkdir /tmp/unstable debootstrap unstable /tmp/unstable chroot /tmp/unstable
I wonder how many people who are diss’ing Dart on Twitter and elsewhere have actually tried the building the language?
Knowing that Thunderbird was going to be upgraded in Ubuntu 11.10, I took a look at the one extension I use, and found that it was not compatible. I know I could hack it, but if things went wrong down the line, I would rather understand what I was dealing with. Particularly, as my needs are meager: I simply wanted to create a button that would invoke fetchmail.
Experiences with a clean install of Snow Leopard on a 2008 vintage mac-mini: sleep/wakeup issues, getting suexec working, RVM, installing and uninstalling MySQL, and playing with Mail app.
Sqlite3 3.7.4 doesn’t like Mac OSX 10.5.8. Rails 3.1 doesn’t like sqlite3-ruby -v 1.2.5. Neither Best Buy nor Apple will sell me Snow Leopard; not from their Brick and Mortar stores nor online. Nor is Lion an option as upgrading to Snow Leopard is a prerequisite.
If anybody has any suggestions, please let me know. Meanwhile, I can say this: while every previous version of Agile Web Development had screenshots of Safari on a Mac, the next update will have screenshots of Chrome on Ubuntu.
Now that I actually have a width-constrained device, I’ve finally found the motivation to make this site more useful in such an environment. I’m now using CSS3 Media Queries to weblog into a single column format and kill both horizontal whitespace and the site’s watermark for window widths that are 800 pixels or less.