Rblog

...so the Kindle just works out better for me

2011-03-07T13:38:00.001-07:00

I can't believe how long this post turned out to be. Yikes. If you don't care about what shaped my evaluation criteria, feel free to skip to the conclusion.

It's true, I owned a Casio PDA

I recently decided to jump into the ebook market. I've been following it for quite some time but could never justify being an early adopter with the Sony line and figured I'd just wait it out. I have many fond memories of getting involved with project Gutenberg back in 2002 and discovering the immense library of public domain texts. At the time I read exclusively on a Cassiopeia E-125 but my commitment to ebooks waned as I upgraded devices and became far more involved in pursuing my degree.

Then iOS happened and Apple introduced their bookstore

I was initially quite interested in the concept of reading on my iPhone, again harkening back to the Casio days when I was traveling often for work and reading quite a bit. I bought a book, on a whim and out of other reading material, when coming back from a business trip in Oct 2010. I loved the book I read and I loved the convenience of my iPhone. But, quite frankly, it took it's toll physically on my eyes as well as making me wish swipe was never invented. My lasting impression was how much a hassle it was just to turn the pages, over and over and over.

Eink contenders aplenty, turns out I want an ecosystem too

For a long time I followed what Sony was doing and watched various other Chinese manufacturers make eink-based device announcements. However, I was never motivated to purchase because I realized (over several years of following) that the hardware was only half the solution for my ideal setup. While I loved reading on the Casio, it wasn't particularly enjoyable loading my ebooks from Project Gutenberg and it got messy managing things when my library became large (not to mention the lack of availability of new publications).
Bottom line, I finally think the market is in a mature-enough place (though far from ideal maturity IMO) that I didn't considered anything other than the Kindle 3 or the Nook.

Grading criteria

I've been patient, for a long time, and have been mentally recording a healthy list of criteria that I wanted to measure. Yes, there are dozens of reviews on both of these devices, but I frankly wasn't satisfied with what I'd read because I wanted a hands-on, personal, thorough evaluation for just my list of requirements. Thus, the following opinion/analysis really only satisfies what I care about and, of course, YMMV. What I wanted to evaluate, in no particular order:

The Feel
The Kindle is lighter than the Nook, but that didn't make it an immediate winner. I liked the extra weight on the Nook that made it feel more handleable (is that a word?). However, with the extra weight, the Nook felt slightly more fragile and I noticed I was more careful when carrying it while walking and reading or doing other activities rather than just staying put and reading. The Kindle, though lighter, also seemed more robust and resilient.
Winner: Kindle
Affordance and Input
(in terms of how intuitive it was to use the device both visually and non-visually and also how intuitive the initial experience was)
Kindle: The page turning buttons are slimmer than the Nook but (again, IMO) more well defined both physically and visually. The keyboard and 5-way button provide immediate input and tactile response. The overall experience of getting to know, and get comfortable, with the device was very natural to me.
Nook: The Nook navigation buttons have little visual separation other than the large arrows, but physically the user can feel the difference due to a raised bump. On more than one occasion I inadvertently navigated in the wrong direction. After a while I got used to it and I like how much wider the buttons were than the Kindle, though with the additional width the user loses grip area. I did not like the LCD navigation, and maybe that's because I tested the Kindle first, but I found the navigation slow (in response to gestures), slightly confusing (scrolling options) and generally less appealing. Plus, the backlight is a strong contrast to the placid eink display for my eyes (yes, the backlight dims very quickly, but the combination just didn't work for me)
Winner: Kindle
Instapaper support
I like Instapaper a lot. It saves me time. It removes content distractions. It lets me collect stuff that's not important to read immediately, but important enough that I want to read it when I'm ready (meaning, when I have more time). It's convenient (works in all browsers), works on multiple devices (iOS, Android, Blackberry) and is simple to use (one click). So, if I want to read my Instapaper content on the Kindle or Nook, what are my options? Just Kindle.
Winner: Kindle
File archiving
Both B&N and Amazon have areas where the user can download previously purchased content. There was, at one time, legitimate concern about Amazon exercising the remote kill switch (as it did once), but under terms of the suit settlement they agreed that it will not happen in the future.
Winner: Tie
Notes and highlights (I like to annotate, not all the time, but frequently)
Kindle: Notes can be multi-lined and added to all content. User moves cursor and starts typing.
Nook: Notes are limited to a single line and not available for PDF content. User awakens LCD, selects menu option, selects another menu option, move cursor with d-pad, selects menu option, moves cursor, selects menu option, begins typing note.
Winner: Kindle
API (since I like to play with code)
Kindle: KDK available here
Nook: No API or development kit available (though rumor has it the color version will soon be unlocked for full the full Android Marketplace)
Winner: Kindle
Performance
Performance was pretty good in terms of rendering and input responsiveness. The only times I noticed a difference was when comparing menu navigation, but since the menu approach was unique to each device, I'm not going to compare the menu performance in conjunction with general use. The eink refresh was fast enough to never annoy me and they both seemed nearly identical in that regard.
Winner: Tie
Lending
From what I understand lending is currently subject to publisher overview, so I didn't notice a unique advantage comparing one device to the other. Both vendors allow a single-use, 14-day lend on publisher-approved books.
Winner: Tie (user is equally hosed regardless of vendor, sigh)
PDF Support
Turns out this feature became more important to me the more I thought about it. There are many times I have technical PDFs open on my desktop that I just don't get around to reading in a timely manner. After testing two of the latest (this and this), I was sold on being able to not only read these but also annotate them.
Kindle: Multiple rendering options to adjust zoom and device orientation. Five contrast settings. Supports notes and highlights. Graphics properly rendered, layout preserved. Overall, very readable and usable.
Nook: Supports three different text fonts and six text sizes. Mangled embedded graphics in my evaluation. Subject to layout mishandling and text injections (first PDF was very difficult to follow). No annotation support or additional rendering options. One time I got an error indicating I needed to force close the Activity Reader when I was navigating a PDF.
Winner: Kindle
Extensability
Kindle: No user extendable memory or replaceable battery
Nook: User replaceable battery and microSD slot located underneath rear cover (thanks Cary A. and Jeff J. on this!)
Winner: Nook
Battery life
I wasn't sure how I was going to accurately measure this. Turns out I didn't have to worry about it. I've had both of these devices for several weeks now (time of this post) and have been using the Kindle quite a bit more than the Nook at this point. I charged both devices before my evaluation. At no time during the past several weeks have I charged either device and only minimal time in syncing via USB. Thus, after finishing my first book on the Kindle I was ready to read something of equivalent length on the Nook to test it out. Unfortunately, the battery was nearly depleted. And that was after being powered-off, nearly every day, for more than a week. I finished up the lengthy user manual and settled on a book to try, then powered down the device. I turned it on the following day to be greeted with the message that it needed to be charged (which it is doing at this time). Maybe I have a defective battery? The Kindle, under much heavier comparative use, appears to be at slightly less than 50%. Scientific approach? No, I wussed out, this is good enough for me.
Winnner: Kindle

Everything said and done

I enjoyed comparing both devices and I can clearly see advantages for both. If I had a family member that was a book-a-week reader, aware and on top of recent releases, visited the bookstore often and was happy with an eink device, I'd recommend the Nook. But, overall, I found for me that the Kindle was the superior choice for my needs. Quite frankly, Whispernet became a selling point for me (after I had already purchased the Kindle). I had no idea how convenient it'd be to simply email stuff away (for free) and have it arrive on my Kindle ready to go. That's turned out to be very convenient and was icing on the cake. There were sprinkles too, like the immediate dictionary, being able to tweet/share passages, openlibrary.org integration and line-spacing options...so the Kindle just works out better for me.

Git, Gerrit, Redmine, gitflow: An ideal software development and release management setup

2011-02-15T16:55:00.000-07:00

I've been using Subversion for more than 5 years and have been following Git's development, adoption and maturation during that entire time. At work, each time we would create a new repo for a project, I cringed at the thought and questioned, "but, we could be doing this in Git..." However, given the development environment as well as business context (not a software shop), it just wasn't suitable to immediately jump into Git. So what did it take to make the jump? Some rather significant dissonant (and concurrent) development tasks, branch management issues and several deploys that cost more time (and thus, money) than they could have.

Our primary requirements for the SCM migration included the following:

1. Central repo to act as an on-site, internally maintained, redundant source authority with replication capabilities
2. Integration into Redmine
3. A well defined methodology for maintaining several projects through multiple concurrent phases
4. Mature CLI toolset
5. Hudson/Jenkins support
6. IntelliJ integration
7. SCM should be open source with a vibrant community

I knew most of these requirements could be met with Git, but didn't want to make a blind choice and simply choose Git as the new internal de-facto standard. I've had some simple experience with Mercurial in the past and even spent some time doing some projects in Darcs several years ago. I have a good friend whose company (software shop) moved to Mercurial and he offered their arguments in support of choosing Mercurial. Frankly, I liked a lot about what I saw in Mercurial and I didn't ever have any negative experience when toying around with it. Though, truth be told, the projects I conjured up for trying it out were very simplistic and never moved outside of my local development environment. During my investigation I found stackoverflow.com to be immensely helpful in identifying specific differences and perceived strengths and weaknesses.

Git

In the end, after all the reading, playing, comparing--I found that Git just jived with me and it satisfied our requirements (4,5,6,7). Darcs just didn't fit, and Mercurial looks great, so I have nothing negative against those projects. Plus, they don't have Gerrit. Kudos to the Java Posse for a recent podcast in which Gerrit was discussed, timing happened to be critical as it was in the middle of my research, and it sounded like just what we needed to address a recent issue of lack of code review. Even though I was already heavily leaning toward Git at this point, Gerrit clearly brought additional benefit to the migration and methodology changes we were considering.

Gerrit

Gerrit is wonderfully simple to get setup and running. I very much appreciate that it's quite self-contained and offers OpenID support to avoid the grief of maintaining local user accounts. In fact, Gerrit will not only help facilitate code review and branch maintenance, it can act as our centralized repo while abstracting OS-level duties (specifically, user management) for utilizing SSH as our transport protocol. Gerrit's permissions model is more than adequate for our needs on a per-project basis, but is simple enough to setup and get going. Thus, Gerrit easily satisfied requirement #1 and gave us the extra bang-for-the-buck with its inherent review functionality.

Redmine

Redmine (1.0.1) was easy to modify for our situation and it made the most sense to replicate the central repo as a read-only repository locally available to the Redmine instance. Once the clone completed, the only remaining task was setting up a periodic cronjob for updating (git fetch --all) the repo.

gitflow

gitflow was the answer to requirement #3. One of the beauties of Git (and DVCS in general) is the fundamental capability of determining your own release cycle/phase/management process. In some cases when dealing with a DVCS setup it means there's a lot of rope to hang yourself. Our previous release practice was suffering, from time to time, with 100% consistency. I stumbled on gitflow only after deciding on Gerrit, and it made a lot of sense to embrace it not only for what it provides out of the box (helpful bash scripts) but also for the well defined development convention that it helps to enforce. Actually, it's not that gitflow just helps to enforce process, rather, it eases process implementation. Turns out that its process definition matches, and enhances, what we've already (mostly) been doing. Vincent deserves a heap of credit and has our gratitude.

CI

Hudson/Jenkins (Oracle is being a hoser about this, IMO) has two plugins options:
Gerrit: http://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Gerrit+Plugin
Git: http://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Git+Plugin

Really like the idea of pushing changes to Gerrit fires off CI tasks in Jenkins, then verifies/fails the changeset depending on the results. However, integrating that plugin during the initial migration turned out to be a lower priority. At the very least we simply swapped out the current setup of using Subversion with just the normal Git plugin.

IntelliJ

While I'm in a shell nearly 100% of the time, on occasion it's convenient to have some SCM support in Intellij 10. However, I did run into some issues with merging in IntelliJ and spent some time looking into various merge tools. My emacs blood revolted when I chose the Perforce merge tool over emerge (which I liked a lot better than opendiff, Meld or diffmerge). Thanks to Andy Mcintosh for his tips.

Conclusion

After walking through multiple discussions with several team members, it's been very clear to them the benefits and strengths this setup provides over our current process with Subversion. So as of this post, the first major project (72k LOC) has been migrated. This setup feels right, and it's good to see additional corroboration in the community (thanks, AlBlue).

Mule JMS message routing using an external ActiveMQ instance

2009-12-22T15:12:00.001-07:00

I have a scenario where I'd like Mule to monitor an incoming queue, filter the messages and route to appropriate outgoing queue--using a separate ActiveMQ instance instead of the optional embedded one. While perusing Google results I didn't find a source that explicitly showed how to accomplish this. So using what information I did find from indirect examples and other documentation, this is what I came up with.
First, the connection factory Spring bean:

 <spring:bean name="activeMQConnectionFactory" class="org.apache.activemq.ActiveMQConnectionFactory">  
   <spring:property name="brokerURL" value="tcp://${esb.jms.endpoint}"/>  
  </spring:bean>

Since I have Maven filtering my resources, the actual tcp URI will be replaced with the appropriate environmental property--in my case, being in an active development environment, and using activeMQ 5.3.0, the filtered value would be "tcp://localhost:61616".

Next is the connector definition:

  <jms:connector name="JMSConnector"  
          specification="1.1"  
          persistentDelivery="true"  
          connectionFactory-ref="activeMQConnectionFactory" >

And finally, the endpoint:

 <jms:endpoint name="asynchIn" queue="asynch.in"/>

The service definition for this simple case is:

 <service name="Asynchronous processing">  
    <inbound>  
     <inbound-endpoint ref="asynchIn" synchronous="false"/>  
     <wire-tap-router>  
      <stdio:outbound-endpoint system="OUT" name="debugTrace" connector-ref="SysOut"/>  
     </wire-tap-router>  
    </inbound>  
    <outbound>  
     <filtering-router>  
      <jms:outbound-endpoint queue="test.out" />  
      <message-property-filter pattern="JMSType=test"/>  
     </filtering-router>  
     <filtering-router>  
      <jms:outbound-endpoint queue="test2.out" />  
      <message-property-filter pattern="JMSType=test2"/>  
     </filtering-router>  
    </outbound>  
   </service>

Notice that the inbound definition contains a wire-tap-router reference, this makes it much easier (IMO) to trace the message flow during development while defining the routing rules and generally tweaking things. Mule will send the message to sysout and also apply filter routing.

The filters generally speak for themselves, in the cases above the filters are based on the type of message.

To test the setup with a vanilla ActiveMQ install (stomp enabled and the stomp gem installed), this quick Ruby script works quite handily:

 require 'stomp'  
  Stomp::Client.open("stomp://localhost:61612").send("/queue/asynch.in","\n\n\n!!!!!!!!!!!!!!\ntest message\n!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!",{:persistent => true, :type => 'test'})

Mule's wire-tap-router should dump the message:

 system out:ActiveMQBytesMessage {commandId = 3, responseRequired = false, messageId = ID:vsbeta-45609-1261505977249-4:104:-1:1:1, originalDestination = null, originalTransactionId = null, producerId = ID:vsbeta-45609-1261505977249-4:104:-1:1, destination = queue://asynch.in, transactionId = null, expiration = 0, timestamp = 1261518816945, arrival = 0, brokerInTime = 1261518816946, brokerOutTime = 1261518816946, correlationId = null, replyTo = null, persistent = true, type = test, priority = 0, groupID = null, groupSequence = 0, targetConsumerId = null, compressed = false, userID = null, content = org.apache.activemq.util.ByteSequence@7c66f0, marshalledProperties = org.apache.activemq.util.ByteSequence@4a4890, dataStructure = null, redeliveryCounter = 0, size = 0, properties = {content-type=text/plain; charset=UTF-8}, readOnlyProperties = true, readOnlyBody = true, droppable = false} ActiveMQBytesMessage{ bytesOut = null, dataOut = null, dataIn = null }INFO 2009-12-22 14:53:37,033 [JMSConnector.dispatcher.1] org.mule.transport.jms.JmsMessageDispatcher: Connected: endpoint.outbound.jms://test.out

ActiveMQ's admin screen should show pending messages inside of the test.out or test2.out queues. Messages could be consumed via Stomp:

 require 'stomp'  
 client = Stomp::Client.open("stomp://localhost:61612")  
 client.subscribe("/queue/test.out"){|message| puts "consuming #{message.body} with properties #{message.headers.inspect}"}

producing output:

 consuming   
 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!  
 test message  
 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! with properties {"MULE_ORIGINATING_ENDPOINT"=>"asynchIn", "content_type"=>"text/plain; charset=UTF-8", "MULE_CORRELATION_ID"=>"0f2295b0-ef45-11de-856a-538c667e24a7", "expires"=>"0", "timestamp"=>"1261519075346", "destination"=>"/queue/test.out", "message-id"=>"ID:Rohirrim.local-51739-1261518810672-0:0:7:1:1", "priority"=>"4", "MULE_SESSION"=>"SUQ9MGYyMjk1YjEtZWY0NS0xMWRlLTg1NmEtNTM4YzY2N2UyNGE3", "content-length"=>"46", "MULE_MESSAGE_ID"=>"ID:vsbeta-4  
 5609-1261505977249-4:117:-1:1:1", "correlation-id"=>"0f2295b0-ef45-11de-856a-538c667e24a7", "MULE_ENCODING"=>"UTF-8", "MULE_ENDPOINT"=>"jms://test.out"}=> nil

This approach enables a single queue to collect asynchronous message requests and leverage Mule's filtering-routers to decouple the producer and consumer. The requests go on the ESB, Mule defines where they should go, and the service components act and process the request independent of the requester.

We chose Mule for our ESB

2009-12-10T18:34:00.002-07:00

After careful consideration of multiple open-source ESB products, Mule made the most sense for implementation into our data information infrastructure. The other major competing providers were OpenESB(GlassFish v3), FUSE (Apache stack) as having an open-source solution was a very strict requirement. Mule is very component oriented and can be quickly setup for integration with existing services (of which we have several). Furthermore, it is Spring-based and supports Maven -- which fits right into our existing application development
methodology.

Mule has many strong points, the most relevant for our decision being:

very mature, years of development and major deliveries

a solid installation base across many significant enterprises

well-documented with excellent examples and diagrams

is open-source (CPAL 1.0)

a commercial support model with additional tools (service registry,monitoring)

flexible configuration and instantiation options

wide-array of built-in and downloadable modules

a top-choice in DTS of Utah ESB comparison

excellent testing framework

I read a lot on OpenESB, watched presentations and then checked out tutorials. Simply put, OpenESB appears quite overkill for our specific needs. Furthermore, I'm not a fan of vendor lock-in and OpenESB appears to be very heavily biased towards NetBeans (which isn't really a surprise).

As for the Apache side of things, I spent a fair amount of time reading comparisons on ServiceMix and Mule. The favor was typically weighted on Mule's behalf and the one major viable commercial support option for ServiceMix was through
Fuse. Fuse appears to have some good documentation, but it wasn't nearly as in-depth as Mule. Also, going this route appeared to require more "gluing" using Camel and ServiceMix is also more specifically oriented to JBI--a shared trait among both OpenESB and ServiceMix.

Mule made it very easy to get up and running quickly. Within minutes I had implemented a REST service component using an existing endpoint. After some time reading more documentation I recognized a good case for using the template URI pattern and exposed another two REST endpoints in a separate service. Finally, with a Maven archetype, it was very easy to generate a Mule project and tweak it to support multiple environment deployments (dev,test,beta,prod, etc). I created a simple bootloader to start up the Mule context and register a shutdown hook with the JVM. This approach leverages Maven's capabilities in property filtering and distribution assembly. Thus, we can now create standalone distributions with full Maven dependency support (avoiding the hassle of updating MULE_HOME/lib/user), integrated testing, custom property filtering, and artifact assembly for multi-enviroment support.

calling dynamic domain finders in Grails

2009-03-13T15:33:00.001-06:00

Had the need today for calling a Grails domain class finder method outside of the normal artifact setup. There's a singleton I wanted to write to cache certain hunks of data from the database. It'd be very convenient to have access to those domain classes to save me the pain of writing boilerplate Hibernate config and EJB classes. So, here's what ended up working.

I injected a GrailsApplication reference into my bean and created a closure that I passed to a new Groovy Timer instance. Inside the closure I'm able to invoke the dynamic finders on the domain classes because I can fetch a new instance this way:


def person_class = grailsApplication.getArtefact("Domain","Person")
def person_instance = person_class.newInstance()

That's simple enough, to actually call the finders (in this case "list") the next step was:


def results = person_class.metaClass.invokeStaticMethod(person_instance,'list',null)

Next plans are to create a generic way of exposing the ability to call the dynamic methods so that any Groovy class in the app has has access to them.

Maven, Grails and Metro -- it works

2009-03-12T13:43:00.001-06:00

I was really stoked about the maven-grails plugin when I had some time to start playing with Grails 1.1-SNAPSHOT last week. In fact, Grails has matured quite a bit since I first looked at it a little more than a year go. Almost two years ago I wrote about an integration of NetSuite's WebServices with Ruby's SOAP4r. We've been using this integration for nearly two years and have found ways to improve our original approach. In fact, usage has significantly increased, so much so that scalability is now becoming a concern. Don't get me wrong, SOAP4r has never actually croaked on us. But it makes sense to de-couple this element from the application and make a full-fledged service layer for additional in-house integrations. It's time to port the code to Java.

So, back to Grails and Maven. With over five years of Maven experiences I'm completely sold on its many benefits. I've been watching Grails and hoping that the two would integrate to a point where it's completely usable to manage a Grails project in Maven. That day is here, and it's solid. I created a prototype (love how fast it was) with Axis using Grails 1.1-SNAPSHOT. I was sold. Then, just two days ago, Grails 1.1 was finalized and became GA. Funny thing, as soon as I upgraded my project I could no longer use my prototype because I would receive the dreaded:

java.lang.LinkageError: loader constraints violated when linking javax/xml/namespace/QName

That really made me sad, my prototype was hosed. I didn't want to start sleuthing the class dependency collision. Mike Heath suggested I check out Apache CXF and Sun's Metro, both of which appear to be more "cleanly" designed than Axis. I spent a while trying to get CXF to work, but apparently it has a bunch of jars that need to be excluded since it hosed grails:run-app (No such property: readable for class: org.springframework.core.io.Class).

Finally, I had some success with Metro in Maven and Grails. I regenerated the NetSuite classes via wsimport, and only had to add jaxws-rt and jaxws-tools to my dependencies (this was helpful, https://metro.dev.java.net/guide/Using_JAX_WS_from_Maven.html). For now, I'm up and running and looking forward to more Grails development.

RESTlet with Portlet in Liferay

2008-11-20T10:14:00.004-07:00

Liferay allows authentication plugins in order to flexibly accommodate implementations that need more than what comes out-of-the-box. Incidentally, a portlet we have been working on has some rules governing its render state. There are situations where it shouldn't be rendered due to a blacklisting strategy in our requirements. Unfortunately, Liferay's permissions are strictly based on whitelists.

So, how to not render the portlet for a group of people and do render it for others using a whitelist? Logic for who should see it is purely internal to the portlet and it made sense (in simplicity and respecting separation of concerns) to expose a RESTlet for consumption of our authentication module. The authentication module in turn puts people in the proper groups for various community and portlet access. Setup was incredibly simple and it didn't take much more effort to enable JPA transaction support with this class:



/**
* Enables JPA transactional support for subclassed Restlets.
*/
public abstract class AbstractJpaRestlet extends Restlet {
 private static final Logger logger = Logger.getLogger(AbstractJpaRestlet.class);

@Autowired
 private EntityManagerFactory emf;

 /**
  * Handler for Restlet requests and responses. Implementing this method
  * will ensure db connectivity and transactions support with the DAOs
  *
  * @param req  incoming Request
  * @param resp outgoing Response
  */
 public abstract void doHandle(Request req, Response resp);


 @Override
 public void handle(Request request, Response response) {
   EntityManager em = emf.createEntityManager();
   TransactionSynchronizationManager.bindResource(emf, new EntityManagerHolder(em));

   try {

     doHandle(request, response);
   } catch (Throwable t) {

     logger.error(this, t);
     TransactionSynchronizationManager.unbindResource(emf);

     throw new RestletException(t.getMessage());
   }
   finally{
     TransactionSynchronizationManager.unbindResource(emf);
   }
 }
}

This is my first RESTlet and I'd be interested in any feedback or pointers in this approach. I'm quite happy with how fast it was to code up. There's only one implementation of this class at this point, but the pattern is very simple and allows for quick future expansion as we need to expose more data.

Revisited: Spring InvervalJobs and scheduling in Liferay 5

2008-11-19T14:51:00.003-07:00

Update to a better way to go about Spring scheduling: I tried simply defining a destroy method on the scheduler bean instead of relying on the extended ContextLoaderListener. This never appeared to be invoked and subsequently didn't unschedule the jobs. This is quite problematic in the long-run. Not good to have duplicate jobs running at the same time, it's sloppy and bad things could happen. So simply having the destroy method was insufficient.

Instead of extending Liferay's JobScheduler (as I suggested in the previous post), it made more sense to create a singleton POJO that then invokes com.liferay.portal.kernel.job.JobSchedulerUtil.getJobScheduler().schedule(). That way the dependency is relying on Liferay's Quartz integration altogether (not thinking any of this would ever live outside of Liferay, but in the event that it does should be able to propagate that dependency with minor adjustments). Everything said and done (and tested), this is the scheduler:


public class JobScheduler   {
  private static Log _log = LogFactory.getLog(JobScheduler.class);
  public Set jobs = new HashSet();

  /**
   * Set all of the scheduled jobs.
   *
   * @param jobs Set of jobs to schedule.
   */
  public void setJobs(Set jobs) {
    this.jobs = jobs;
  }

  public void init(){
    com.liferay.portal.kernel.job.JobScheduler scheduler = JobSchedulerUtil.getJobScheduler();

    for(IntervalJob job : jobs){
      try {
        _log.info("Initializating " + job);
        scheduler.schedule(job);
      }
      catch (Exception e) {
        _log.error("Initialization error instantiating " +job);
        _log.error(e);
      }
    }
  }

  public void destroy()  {
       com.liferay.portal.kernel.job.JobScheduler scheduler = JobSchedulerUtil.getJobScheduler();

    for(IntervalJob job : jobs){
      try {
        _log.info("Unscheduling " + job);
        scheduler.unschedule(job);
      }
      catch (Exception e) {
        _log.error("Unscheduling error with" +job);
        _log.error(e);
      }
    }
  }
}

Spring InvervalJobs and scheduling in Liferay 5

2008-11-19T14:09:00.002-07:00

If you have a Liferay portlet that requires some scheduling you can easily use Liferay's built-in Scheduler to add an IntervalJob to the job list, like this. However, what if your IntervalJob is a Spring bean and has dependencies on other Spring beans in the portlet? Unfortunately, at the time of this writing (Liferay 5.1.2), the hot deploy code invokes the Scheduler configuration and execution before the context is initialized--which means you're up a creek when Spring is setup to be initialized with the context (happens to be my case).

An alternative approach is to extend com.liferay.portal.job.JobSchedulerImpl with a Spring singleton and configure the jobs via Spring. While this is very flexible, the singleton is now operating outside the Liferay Quartz realm and therefore will not be subject to the lifecycle of the portlet. That is to say, when you redeploy the portlet the jobs stay scheduled. A more annoying aspect to this is that if you try to shutdown Liferay it appears to hang. Sure the log says that Coyote is stopped, but that's not the case and the process appears to be waiting on a thread. This in turn requires manually killing every time. During development this is such a pain. My guess, without significant research into the bowels of the Liferay Quartz integration, is that the Spring singleton hasn't been properly disposed of.

One solution to this situation is to extend org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener with something like this:


public class SpringSchedulerContextLoaderListener extends org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener{
  private static final Logger logger = Logger.getLogger(SpringSchedulerContextLoaderListener.class);
  public void contextInitialized(ServletContextEvent event) {
    super.contextInitialized(event);
  }

  public void contextDestroyed(ServletContextEvent event) {

    JobScheduler j = (JobScheduler) StaticApplicationContextHolder.getApplicationContext().getBean("jobScheduler");
    j.shutdown();
   
    super.contextDestroyed(event);
  }
}

This will ensure that the Spring singleton JobScheduler will unschedule the registered IntervalJobs when the context is destroyed. You're good to go once this entry replaces org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener in web.xml.

There may be a more efficient way to do this, but for now this works.

Alfresco content management with Liferay

2008-03-31T10:32:00.004-06:00

At work we've been pondering a better long-term solution to our content management. A year ago we gave some thought to Liferay and in fact deployed it for one of our sites. Recently we've reconsidered our approach due to some new additional requirements accompanied with a more thoughtful perspective on leveraging internal content management with future web projects. We spent last week looking at JSR-170 alternatives/companions to Liferay, which with all due respect, only provides the implementation in their Document Library. We wanted something all-encompassing, that is, a repository where we could manage both web, print and other electronic content. Alfresco seemed to be the best option for us. After all of us spending a week with it and having various meetings trying to define the roles of stakeholders and functionality requirements, this was my conclusive perspective with enumerated priorities:

Versioning
This is easily satisfied with Alfresco and I was specifically impressed with the various ways to update content. I'm particularly pleased with the multiple capabilities of creating/updating content given the built-in CIFS server, FTP server, Office plug-ins and web interface. This wide array of interfaces should enable our users to begin versioning content with a limited learning curve (especially in terms of the shared drive notion). The WebProject versioning feature is very worthwhile in that it provides us with the ability to view/rollback content at any given time for each release, very helpful for auditing and liability. Lastly, their implementation of sandboxing is especially beneficial in concurrent development as each user can submit their work to workflow after sufficient authoring and testing.

Document Management
Alfresco was written primarily to manage documents, and given the aforementioned information on versioning, I think it's very capable for our needs.

Integration
I'm very pleased and excited about the ease of creating REST endpoints using Alfresco's WebScript framework. We won't have to write any extra functionality (read: additional JARs) to work with existing APIs but can rely on implementing custom WebScripts for exposing what we want, how we want. This is particularly useful for rapid development for any of our potential integration points, this is specificall a boon for both integration with our Rails CRM and the custom Liferay content portlet Jeff Wilson is writing.
Workflow
I think creating workflows specific to our needs will require the most work. Granted, the WCM component ships with a very basic approval workflow, we'll still need to create custom workflows once we decide how to hone our processes (and choose our deployment strategies). Depending on our needs, we may only need to define the rules in XML and forgo additional code (I believe our definitions will need to precede the investigation of additional functionality).

User Experience
Again, referencing the Versioning info above, I think this is covered. It'd be very helpful for the users to see that state/phase of workflow that a given item is in, but that appears to be a current enhancement request (per Jared).

Additional Benefits

Search: all meta-data (including custom aspects) is indexed, with incredible ease users will be able to find content much faster than perusing through shared drives trying to remember the location of specific files.

Task dashboard: users are able to see what tasks they have awaiting their action (be it approval, updates, reviews, etc.)

SSO options are plentiful for integrating with our ActiveDirectory: LDAP, NTLM, Kerberos

Simplified replication: there's already a pre-configured XML doc for repository replication

Space Rules: Alfresco has a great rule-engine for manipulating content based on a set of Space rules. For example, specific meta-data (via custom aspects) can be applied to certain content as defined in the rules. Space rules have an inheritance model

Roles are configured per Space (and thus also subject to inheritance) enabling a very flexible detailed system of privileges. Roles can be applied to users or groups of users, per Space.

Content transformations: Alfresco integrates with OpenOffice to provide instant content transformations(text to PDF, PowerPoint to Flash) and can be extended to provide custom transformations.

Send content to Alfresco via email: The next release of Alfresco will include the ability to add content to Alfresco via email attachment. This could be a very efficient way for sales people to put quotes,proposals,contracts, etc straight into Alfresco without leaving their email client.

Space Templates: we can setup a space and template it to create future spaces based on that template, thereby ensuring default layouts and content are appropriately propagated.

Alfresco deployable run-time enables us to deploy the repository to our environments w/o the overhead and deployment of the web client (a clear separation of concerns strategy that also avoids potential content tampering).

Stability and product maturation: Alfresco is clearly a player in the marketplace with 400+ enterprise clients and 20k deployed instances.

Speed: Alfresco and RedHat created a JSR-170 benchmark with Optaros validating its results in a 10 million doc test exercising repository corruption avoidance and high-concurrency usage, 0.4s response time. Updated results.

Search: all meta-data (including custom aspects) is indexed, with incredible ease users will be able to find content much faster than perusing through shared drives trying to remember the location of specific files.

I clearly believe that the Alfresco solution, coupled with our Liferay content-rendering portlet, is the best approach we could pursue in managing long-term corporate content. It enables all of our departments and users to create and manage content, whether print or web-related, in a variety of very intuitive and thoughtful interfaces. Furthermore, it satisfies multiple IT goals in terms of application integration, data replication, content authorization and workflow/process definition. To that end, and knowing more functional valued enhancements will be soon released, I strongly recommend it.

Been a pleasure to muck with it, looking forward to future implementation (which I hope is approved).

Great look at virtualization

2008-03-20T08:12:00.002-06:00

Virtualization: Nuts and Bolts

What I appreciated most about this article was the lack of fluff found in most of the VMWare or XEN docs comparing X or Y and why they're better than the other guy. Johan does a great job of providing a bit of history and background in virtualization (specifically binary translation then paravirtualization) and then explores the Intel VT-x and AMD SVM roles at the hardware level. He discusses memory and I/O challenges that can still be hindrances. It's a long article so if you're not interested in all the gory details, at least check out page 12 for a good look at benchmarking (and what's NOT being benchmarked) and page 13 for a well-summarized conclusion.

Coming away from reading this leaves me anxious for the next article and future enhancements at the hardware level. I'd like to find more articles similar to this one for more information and academic research. Appears there are still great strides to be made to hone efficiency. Fun stuff!

JNI library testing on OSX 10.5

2007-12-18T16:12:00.000-07:00

Refactoring a bunch of the JNI H-ITT code that I was working on last month caused me grief when I was nailed with the presence of UnsatisfiedLinkError during my maven build. My Mac prototype code was very simplistic and I had all the libraries (and Java test driver) in the same directory and it worked flawlessly. Sheesh, LD_LIBRARY_PATH in OSX 10.5 is not the right env variable, should be DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH. Once that was added to my pom I was good to go, tests passed as expected.

Madison Summit Oxfords, second pair

2007-12-13T21:52:00.000-07:00

Three years ago I wrote about a horrible experience with junk shoes from Wal-Mart . Tonight I bought my second pair of Timberland Madison Summit Oxfords. I love these shoes and forwarded my thoughts to Timberland:

To Whom it May Concern,

I just wanted to write a quick note and thank you for such fantastic shoes. Two years ago I was looking for a new pair of shoes that I could use for work (business-casual), for school (walking around college campus), for home (playing sports with my kids, shoveling the walk, and wearing around the house) and for anything else. I was talking with a fellow in my church congregation and he suggested Timberland. I headed over to a local sporting good store and the sales guy immediately showed me your Madison Summit Oxford.

I purchased that pair of shoes 23.5 months ago and they has served me very, very well. I have worn them exclusively, for every activity. The best part about this shoe was how well it "restored" when I regularly applied my leather-weather cream.

Tonight I purchased my new pair, the exact same size and model for $30 cheaper than two years ago. I commend you on a fine product and its outstanding endurance. I appreciate your company's values and commitment to the environment. I hope this next pair will last me another two years and that I can continue on with my Madison Summit Oxford addiction in the foreseeable future (2010, 2012, 2014...).

TextMate: Subversion Annotate command

2007-12-12T15:00:00.001-07:00

I really like vc-annotate in emacs. Considering the other very easy command I created earlier, thought I'd give this one a shot too (since it's not in the default Subversion bundle). Again, extremely simple and minutes to complete. Here's the command (edited from the Info command):


require_cmd "${TM_SVN:=svn}" 
: ${TM_RUBY:=ruby}
FORMAT_INFO="${TM_BUNDLE_SUPPORT}/format_annotate.rb"

"$TM_SVN" annotate "$TM_FILEPATH" |"$TM_RUBY" -- "$FORMAT_INFO"

And here's the Ruby formatter:


require ENV['TM_BUNDLE_SUPPORT']+'/svn_helper.rb'
include SVNHelper

puts html_head(:window_title => "Info", :page_title => "SVN Annotation", :sub_title => 'Subversion')
puts '<div class="subversion">'
STDOUT.flush
@colors = ['BlanchedAlmond',
'BlueViolet',
'Brown',
'BurlyWood',
'CadetBlue',
'Chartreuse',
'Chocolate',
'Coral',
'CornflowerBlue',
'Crimson',
'Cyan',
'DarkBlue',
'DarkCyan',
'DarkGoldenRod',
'DarkGray',
'DarkGreen',
'DarkKhaki',
'DarkMagenta',
'DarkOliveGreen',
'Darkorange',
'DarkOrchid',
'DarkRed',
'DarkSalmon',
'DarkSeaGreen'] #see http://www.w3schools.com/html/html_colornames.asp for more pretty colors 

@color_hash = Hash.new
@color_ind_size = @colors.size() -1

def color_for_rev(rev)
  color = @color_hash[rev]
  
  unless (color)
    color_index = rev % @color_ind_size
    color =  @colors[color_index]
    
    @color_hash[rev] = color
  end
  
  color
end

$stdin.each_line do |line|
  rev = line.strip.split(" ").first.to_i
  
  color = color_for_rev(rev)
  colored = "<div style='color:#{color}'>#{htmlize(line.strip)}"
  
  puts(colored)
end

puts("</div>")
html_footer()

TextMate command db query prompt

2007-12-12T12:03:00.000-07:00

I decided to give TextMate another whirl last night. I thought since I gave NetBeans 6 some time recently I'd see how efficient a couple of days with TextMate would be (compared with my life-blood emacs). I was pleasantly surprised at its extendability, speed and myriad of bundle choices. While perusing the SQL bundle I noticed I couldn't see of a way of directly typing in a query. I really like sql-mysql in emacs, so I was hoping I could do something similar--the workaround being typing a query into a buffer, selecting it, then invoking the command to send it. After poking around in the TextMate manual I was shocked at how easy it appeared to be to add custom commands. In less than a minute I had this (edited straight from the manual example of showing a dialog for input):


res=$(CocoaDialog inputbox --title "Send query" \
   --informative-text "Enter query text:" \
   --button1 "Submit" --button2 "Cancel")

[[ $(head -n1 <<<"$res") == "2" ]] && exit_discard  res=$(tail -n1 <<<"$res")  db_browser.rb --query="$(tr '\n' ' ' <<< "$res")"

If I can just get over my remaining habits (screen splitting, hippie-expand, and more), I may end up paying for this editor. Too bad it's not OSS :(

Rxtx to MINA H-ITT Flash integration out of the park

2007-11-21T12:49:00.000-07:00

That's a lame title, but it advertises all of the relevant (okay, short of Java's role, which is inherent since Apache MINA is written in Java) technologies in my latest project at work. We'll be using a Flash based application for our next training platform. One of the goals of the platform is to integrate an audience response system with the training. We specifically chose H-ITT as our provider because the offer a simple SDK (cross-platform translation library) and they appeared to have the most developed system and provide solid support.

Today I finished a proof of concept and made it available to them, here are the relevant sections of my email (heading home soon, this saves me time from repeating myself):
--begin email chunk--
I wanted to let you know that I have successfully completed a workable Windows H-ITT-Java-Flash prototype. I have some of the code operational in OSX but haven't pursued it in light of our goal of a single Windows deliverable (with embedded JRE) that _doesn't_ require an installation routine. I've used Java as the communication layer, natively interfacing through your SDK, and created a rudimentary TCP protocol for communication with the Flash application. I've heavily relied on the open-source Apache MINA project in conjunction with the Rxtx libraries (which will be included in a later stable release of MINA), Simple-Log and Launch4j.

The prototype simply exhibits the ability to auto-detect the transceiver's serial port (baud can be manually configured via a properties file, defaults at 19200), sets up the appropriate serial connection, and then forwards the responses to the Flash app. Java logging is written to disk unless executed from a read-only medium. The Flash prototype provides an "Acquire" button that kicks off the auto-detect, a log console (scrolling is there, but not so visible, I'm not a Flash guru), and also virtual buttons related to the remote. Thus, when configuration is successfully complete, pressing the buttons on the remote invokes the related event in the Flash app to show which button was pressed. The whole setup serves as a basic proof-of-concept for what we're pursuing with our next-gen training platform.
--end email chunk--

Thanksgiving is tomorrow, I'm feeling grateful: So I've already plugged H-ITT in the beginning of the post, but I really gotta say they've been great to work with and very prompt in answering questions. Next plug goes to the MINA team. MINA intuitively and simply (relatively, I thought the docs and examples were sufficient) provided a great framework for custom socket communication with Flash. It's elegantly architected (IMHO) and easily integrated with what I had envisioned for the Java communication layer. Props to Mike Heath for recommending MINA and assisting my approach. Simple-log and Launch4j simplified logging and customizing a single Windows .exe file. Lastly, Rxtx provided the crux of the serial-communication and I applaud the development team in their cross-platform approach and deliverables. Finally, my thanks to Ross Asay for the JNI help, since I was intending a cross-platform delivery to correspond with H-ITT's libraries this proved to be a good challenge and learning experience.

Failed to get IPC connection

2007-09-12T18:18:00.000-06:00

This convenient message showed up tonight on a Windows 2003 Server VM under VMWare server. Restarting the service, no go. Restarting the VM, no go (same message). Remove devices and change the VM settings, no go. Restarting host (Suse), no go.

A bit of looking around didn't help much, but someone mentioned a permissions issue. Here's the log entry:

Sep 12 18:13:56: vmx| CnxAcceptConnection: Could not receive fd on 187: invalid control message
Sep 12 18:13:56: vmx| Failed to get IPC connection

Going out to the directory of the VM, and executing a "chown root:root -R ." did the job. Restarting the VM after that brought it up nice and happy. So the question remains as to what caused this to occur.

Why I love Apache's Ldap Studio

2007-08-15T12:18:00.000-06:00

I've gotta modify some attributes on people in our ActiveDirectory. The fun Microsoft way to do this is to download ADAM-adsi management console plugin, and then go from there. It's pretty basic and is usual MS ugliness. On the other hand, Apache Ldap Studio provides a much better user experience. Being built on top of Eclipse enables a slick interface and a very intuitive way of dealing with your directory (browsing, searching, editing). Kudos to the guys that wrote it, I can now enjoy mucking with AD from my Mac with ease and finesse.

Remote files in Emacs

2007-08-09T10:20:00.001-06:00

Today I decided I was sick of always SSHing everywhere only to open up a couple of files for editing and then saving them. It doesn't make sense to copy my .emacs everywhere either. I discovered Tramp, and it just makes me all the more happy with my Emacs zealotry. Even better, my current snapshot already includes it.

Works great with dired too:
/ssh:hoser@somebox:/whateverdirectory

installing the latest nginx on OS X

2007-08-01T11:06:00.000-06:00

I've read a lot about nginx lately and wanted to test its performance for our up-and-coming Ruby on Rails CRM application. It looked very easy to setup and easily configurable (especially with this). My first attempt was installing it through MacPorts, but that didn't fly, as I received the unpleasant "dyld: Library not loaded: /usr/local/lib/libpcre.0.dylib". Turns out I had the same problem when trying to execute after building straight from source (which happened to be a newer version).

So with MacPorts I installed pcre 7.2_0, deactivated 7.0_0, created the symlink as "sudo ln -s /opt/local/lib/libpcre.0.dylib /usr/local/lib/" and was then able to start up nginx from the source build. Unfortunately the generated configuration file I am using expected a user and group for "nginx". A quick work around for that was to just reference myself instead. Here's what I ended up with (awaiting tweaks and optimizations):


#user and group to run as
user  russ russ;

# number of nginx workers
worker_processes  2;

# pid of nginx master process
pid        logs/nginx.pid;

# Number of worker connections. 1024 is a good default
events {
 worker_connections  1024;
}

# start the http module where we config http access.
http {
 # pull in mime-types. You can break out your config
 # into as many include's as you want to make it cleaner
 include       conf/mime.types;

 # set a default type for the rare situation that
 # nothing matches from the mimie-type include
 default_type  application/octet-stream;

 # configure log format
 log_format  main  '$remote_addr - $remote_user [$time_local] $status '
                 '"$request" $body_bytes_sent "$http_referer" '
                 '"$http_user_agent" "http_x_forwarded_for"';

 # main access log
 access_log  logs/access.log  main;

 # main error log
 error_log  logs/error.log debug;
 #error_log logs/error.log debug_http;

 # no sendfile on OSX
 sendfile        on;

 # These are good default values.
 tcp_nopush        on;
 tcp_nodelay       off;
 # output compression saves bandwidth
 gzip            on;
 gzip_http_version 1.0;
 gzip_comp_level 2;
 gzip_proxied any;
 gzip_types      text/plain text/html text/css application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml
                  application/xml+rss text/javascript;

 # this is where you define your mongrel clusters.
 # you need one of these blocks for each cluster
 # and each one needs its own name to refer to it later.
 upstream vscrm {
   server 127.0.0.1:8000;
   server 127.0.0.1:8001;
   server 127.0.0.1:8002;
 }

 # the server directive is nginx's virtual host directive.
 server {
   # port to listen on. Can also be set to an IP:PORT
   listen       80;

   # sets the domain[s] that this vhost server requests for
   server_name  vscrm;

   # doc root
   root /home/russ/forge/svn/vscrm/trunk/public;

   # vhost specific access log
   access_log  logs/vscrm.access.log  main;

   #Set the max size for file uploads to 50Mb
   client_max_body_size  50M;

   # this rewrites all the requests to the maintenance.html
   # page if it exists in the doc root. This is for capistrano's
   # disable web task
   if (-f $document_root/maintenance.html){
     rewrite  ^(.*)$  /maintenance.html last;
     break;
   }

   if ($host ~* "www") {
     rewrite ^(.*)$ http://vscrm$1 redirect;
     break;
   }

   location / {


     # needed to forward user's IP address to rails
     proxy_set_header  X-Real-IP  $remote_addr;

     # needed for HTTPS
     proxy_set_header  X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
     proxy_set_header Host $http_host;
     proxy_redirect false;
     proxy_max_temp_file_size 0;

     # check for index.html for directory index
     # if its there on the filesystem then rewite
     # the url to add /index.html to the end of it
     # and then break to send it to the next config rules.
     if (-f $request_filename/index.html) {
       rewrite (.*) $1/index.html break;
     }

     # this is the meat of the rails page caching config
     # it adds .html to the end of the url and then checks
     # the filesystem for that file. If it exists, then we
     # rewite the url to have explicit .html on the end
     # and then send it on its way to the next config rule.
     # if there is no file on the fs then it sets all the
     # necessary headers and proxies to our upstream mongrels
     if (-f $request_filename.html) {
       rewrite (.*) $1.html break;
     }

     if (!-f $request_filename) {
       proxy_pass http://vscrm;
       break;
     }
   }

   error_page   500 502 503 504  /50x.html;
   location = /50x.html {
     root   html;
   }
 }
}

sanitizing Rails input parameters

2007-07-31T13:18:00.000-06:00

I really like how Tapestry automagically escapes HTML input when posted from a form. In fact, it was just great never having to worry about that when coding. I'd like to have the same functionality in Rails especially after reading about Rails XSS vulnerabilities and work-arounds. Since the webapp I'm writing has no requirements for allowing formatted user input, I just need something simple to clean/sanitize all the params. Here's the latest:


 #escapes all HTML from the given hash's values (recursively applied as needed)
 def sanitize(hash)
   dirty_hash = hash

   dirty_hash.keys.each do |key|
     value = dirty_hash[key]
    
     if(value.kind_of?Hash)
       dirty_hash[key] = sanitize(value)
     else
       if (value && value.kind_of?(String))
         dirty_hash[key] = CGI.escapeHTML(value)
       end
     end
   end
  
   hash = dirty_hash
 end

This is then invoked by a before_filter. Seems to do the job, is there a better/cleaner/faster way of doing this? Let me know how it could be improved...

Ruby: constant time for include?

2007-07-11T09:53:00.000-06:00

Sure would be nice if the Ruby docs (including this book) would provide more details to the implementation of the Set class. According to this, Set implements its backing collection with a Hash, which would essentially mean that it's synonymous (to some degree) with Java's HashSet. Thus providing a constant time lookup when Set#include? is invoked. Just for grins I benchmarked this in irb with a million Fixnums and was pleased with the 15 microsecond lookups. I looked at the source of both and found a fair amount of similarity.

Sorting serialized objects from a YAML file, Ruby vs Java

2007-06-22T22:01:00.001-06:00

I recently had a large dataset that I needed to sort, basically a bunch of objects with 9 string attributes. I dumped them to a YAML file so I could benchmark various aspects of sorting (Class#to_yaml really rocks, really). As it turns out Enumerable#sort_by was the more efficient way to go rather than Enumerable#sort (check it). The dataset contained 5429 unique objects, here's the benchmarking I did in irb:


>> bm do |x|
?> x.report("all"){results.sort{|a,b|a.account_name <=> b.account_name}}
>> end
  user     system      total        real
all  0.070000   0.000000   0.070000 (  0.073835)
>> bm do |x|
?> x.report("all"){results.sort_by{|a|a.account_name}}
>> end
  user     system      total        real
all  0.020000   0.000000   0.020000 (  0.020745)

Noticeable difference between the two methods, and quite pleasing to see how fast sort_by performed (Apple MBP 2.33GHZ 2GB RAM Ruby 1.85). Then the thought occurred to me, since I have this in a YAML file, I could write something really quick in Java and see how fast the sort would be by dumping it into a TreeSet.

So I set off to find out how I could marshal the data into POJOs from the YAML file. JYaml and JvYaml are the only (insofar as I looked) open source Java YAML libraries. Both seem half-baked in their own right, likely containing just the functionality the respective author needed and not much more (at least that's how it appeared). I ended up using JvYaml and had to search-replace the yaml entry identifier("tag:yaml.org,2002:map") so that JvYaml would create HashMap instances for me instead of its completely worthless PrivateType class.

From there I iterated through the maps to create the POJOs and shoved them into a HashSet. Once that was completed I created the comparator for my POJO, passed it into the TreeSet constructor and then timed an addAll giving it the entire HashSet:
#1: 55ms
#2: 28ms
#3: 27ms (pretty much constant thereafter)

Interesting results eh? The dataset I used was from a randomized generator and now that I have these initial numbers ( Ruby appears to have won this round), I want to test a larger set. And to be really fair I should do more research on benchmarking best practices (in addition to still needing to take my stats class).

X11 tunneling via SSH in OSX

2007-04-17T16:18:00.000-06:00

-X isn't enough for the ssh args in OSX according to this post. So, "ssh -XY hoser@remotebox" worked just great when remoting in to a Suse server and firing executing fvwm.

1024 vs 2048 RSA encryption/decryption fun in Ruby

2007-04-12T16:34:00.000-06:00

Using Tobias's handy openssl wrapper I decided to run a couple timing tests to see how well Ruby's openssl implementation performed in encrypting/decrypting a set of 1000 identical messages, with 1024 bit and 2048 bit keys. Nothing scientific about this, just three runs of the script on my MacBook Pro (2.33 GHZ, 1G RAM).

Encrypted text: "This is a much longer message since than what I intend to encrypt"

Encryption results, avg time
1024: 0.000300691s
2048: 0.001010027s

Decryption results, avg time
1024: 0.005472064s
2048: 0.035524023s

Pick your poison.

One last hitch

2007-04-02T10:16:00.000-06:00

According to this, friendly errors such as


/opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/soap4r-1.5.5.20061022/lib/soap/mapping/mapping.rb:520:in `class_schema_variable': undefined method `class_variables' for nil:NilClass (NoMethodError)
      from /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/soap4r-1.5.5.20061022/lib/soap/mapping/mapping.rb:353:in `schema_ns_definition'
      from /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/soap4r-1.5.5.20061022/lib/soap/mapping/mapping.rb:380:in `schema_definition_classdef'
      from /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/soap4r-1.5.5.20061022/lib/soap/mapping/registry.rb:198:in `schema_definition_from_class'
      from /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/soap4r-1.5.5.20061022/lib/soap/mapping/literalregistry.rb:73:in `any2soap'
      from /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/soap4r-1.5.5.20061022/lib/soap/mapping/literalregistry.rb:37:in `obj2soap'
      from /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/soap4r-1.5.5.20061022/lib/soap/mapping/literalregistry.rb:127:in `stubobj2soap'
      from /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/soap4r-1.5.5.20061022/lib/soap/mapping/literalregistry.rb:114:in `each'
      from /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/soap4r-1.5.5.20061022/lib/soap/mapping/literalregistry.rb:114:in `stubobj2soap'
       ... 15 levels...
      from /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/soap4r-1.5.5.20061022/lib/soap/rpc/proxy.rb:126:in `call'
      from /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/soap4r-1.5.5.20061022/lib/soap/rpc/driver.rb:179:in `call'
      from (eval):6:in `search'

prohibit the following default generated objects from correctly mapping when invoking the NetSuite searches:

OpportunitySearchBasic

EmployeeSearchBasic

PartnerSearchBasic

ItemSearchBasic

TimeBillSearchBasic

Each of which contain an entity named 'class', and while soap4r intelligently generates an attribute 'v_class', it also erroneously generates accessor methods that override Object.class. Big woops. Extremely easy fix just by renaming those methods.

NetSuite and Ruby, the final chapter

2007-03-28T22:00:00.000-06:00

NetSuite requires a maintainable session for subsequent requests after the initial login by way of several cookies they return upon successful authentication. The standard Net::HTTP library requires mucking with headers by hand in order to perpetuate cookie information. We were easily able to override SOAP::NetHttpClient::Response and SOAP::HTTPStreamHandler in the soap4r gem in order to provide the functionality for maintaining the NetSuite session.

However, NaHi's http-access2 library already provides cookie management (even persistence if needed). After installing visnu's gem it's simply a matter of turning off the SSLConfig#verify_mode and everything works flawlessly. The final test code:

require 'rubygems'
require_gem 'soap4r'
require 'defaultDriver' #generated by soap4r
require 'pp'

driver = NetSuitePortType.new
driver.wiredump_dev = STDOUT
driver.proxy.streamhandler.client.ssl_config.verify_mode = nil

passport = Passport.new
passport.email = '123123123@123123123.com'
passport.password = '123123123'
passport.account ="123123"
passport.role = RecordRef.new
passport.role.xmlattr_internalId = '123123123'

driver.login(LoginRequest.new(passport))

record = RecordRef.new()
record.xmlattr_internalId = '123123123'
record.xmlattr_type = RecordType::Customer

pp driver.get(GetRequest.new(record))

Everything said and done, this has been a good learning experience. But more than anything it has exposed one of the Ruby community's greatest weaknesses: documentation. I've known this since the beginning of my Ruby days (2004) and have grown accustomed to reading code. Nevertheless, that takes time, and usually more time than scanning decently-documented APIs. The other side of this story is that I understand the Japanese/English language barrier which may intimidate or otherwise prevent library maintainers from providing more documentation. In the end, Ruby is a community-driven language, which is not sponsored by massive corporate dollars (cough, Java, cough, .Net) and its beginnings have solid Japanese roots. Here's to hoping that documentation improves as more libraries become available and the language matures. In the mean time, thank goodness for Google, mailing lists, blogs and IRC. I believe that documentation practices exhibited by 37Signals and the Rails community are the guiding example, they're not perfect, but the situation continues to progress.

soap4r and NetSuite revisited

2007-03-28T10:38:00.000-06:00

In the last post I mentioned that the generated file (default.rb) contained redundant object definitions. I also ended with the concern about the RecordRef element not appearing to be correct. That led me to look at the generator and as it turns out I was invoking the wrong one. Funny thing, the soap4r gem ships with wsdl2ruby.rb and places them in two different locations. The first (in OSX) was in /opt/local/bin where the second was in /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/soap4r-1.5.5.20061022/bin/. Yesterday we explictly invoked the one in the gem, disregarding the the executable wrapper in /opt/local/bin. That was the mistake, as the results can be easily reproduced with executing

ruby /opt/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/soap4r-1.5.5.20061022/bin/wsdl2ruby.rb --wsdl https://webservices.netsuite.com/wsdl/v2_5_0/netsuite.wsdl --type client

The problem being that the wrapper adds the necessary "requires" for referencing the gem's code (correct results) and not the standard (incorrect results).

Using the correct wsdl2ruby the following test works without any modifications to the generated code:


require 'rubygems'
require_gem 'soap4r'
require 'defaultDriver'

driver = NetSuitePortType.new
driver.wiredump_dev = STDOUT

passport = Passport.new
passport.email = 'test'
passport.password = 'test'
passport.account ="test"

role = RecordRef.new
role.xmlattr_internalId = '123123123'

passport.role = role

response = driver.login(LoginRequest.new(passport))

pp "successful login: #{response.sessionResponse.status.xmlattr_isSuccess}"

adventures in soap4r and NetSuites webservices

2007-03-27T18:15:00.000-06:00

Spent most of the day becoming familiar with soap4r in order to communicate with NetSuite. Turns out that the soap4r shipping with Ruby 1.8.5 is outdated and quite buggy compared to its gem counterpart. In fact, we would've saved a couple hours if we knew that was an option before we even started setting breakpoints.

WSDL2Ruby worked decently enough with NetSuite's WSDL but the generated file containing the classes (default.rb) had redundant entries, like 35 definitions for the Passport object. Next, there was an issue with some of the classes being incomplete. For example, RecordRef was:


class RecordRef
@@schema_type = "RecordRef"
@@schema_ns = "urn:core_2_5.platform.webservices.netsuite.com"
@@schema_element = []

def initialize
end
end

which is incorrect as it is defined as:


<complextype name="RecordRef">
<complexcontent>
<extension base="platformCore:BaseRef">
 <attribute name="internalId" type="xsd:string">
 <attribute name="externalId" type="xsd:string">
 <attribute name="type" type="platformCoreTyp:RecordType">
 <!-- primary record internalId -->
 <!-- record type -->
</attribute>
</attribute>
</attribute>
</extension></complexcontent></complextype>

The object we created to get the request working correctly is


class RecordRef
@@schema_type = "RecordRef"
@@schema_ns = "urn:core_2_5.platform.webservices.netsuite.com"

attr_accessor :internalId
attr_accessor :externalId
attr_accessor :type

def initialize(internalId = nil, externalId = nil, type = nil)
@internalId = internalId
@externalId = externalId
@type = type
end
end

Finally, calling


response = driver.login(LoginRequest.new(passport))

produced a successful response from NetSuite. However, something still seems awry with the request as the role element is not properly formed:


<n1:login xmlns:n1="urn:messages_2_5.platform.webservices.netsuite.com" xsi:type="n1:LoginRequest">
 <n1:passport xmlns:n2="urn:core_2_5.platform.webservices.netsuite.com" xsi:type="n2:Passport">
   <n2:email>test </n2:email>
   <n2:password>test</n2:password>
   <n2:account>test</n2:account>
   <n2:role xsi:type="n2:RecordRef">
   </n2:role>
 </n1:passport>
</n1:login>

Geocoding service findings and comparison

2007-03-09T15:39:00.000-07:00

Google Maps:

requires an API key

http geocode service that'll return results in XML or JSON

lots of documentation on javascript implementation

issues in resolving bad addresses by suggesting alternatives and flagging them with the best accuracy-level

comma separated values on the query string

50k per day limit

Yahoo MapService:

http geocode service return results in XML or PHP

cleaner documentation

ApplicationID required

address suggestion behaves more as expected and accuracy seems better

query string attributes expected in request

5k per day limit

Note regarding accuracy statements above: I tested both services with variations on my home address which can be identified strictly by number coordinates or with the street name (Valley Sage Drive). Google's service did not find my address in any format I tried but continued to respond with varied suggestions none of which were applicable (though it stated they were the highest level of accuracy). As for yahoo, it found my address in every variation and for those that it suggested it clearly indicated a warning as an attribute of the ResultSet. Odd that Google Maps works for my address, but the geocoding service does not (and they're supposed to be integrated).

Both services provide city and state values when given a zip.

Determining valid addresses may prove to be a bit difficult given that both services "suggest" what the closest match could be.

a more efficient top for OS X

2007-03-08T17:23:00.000-07:00

echo "alias top=\"top -d -o cpu\"" >> ~/.profile

The "-d" bypasses the strain on Mach"-o cpu" and will sort by procs consuming the most CPU.

HttpUtility.UrlEncode, fails again

2007-03-07T06:40:00.000-07:00

Bitten a couple months ago by the fact that System.Web.HttpUtility.UrlEncode does NOT encode ticks/single-quotes ('). How lovely. I filed a bug, someone at MS closed it out almost a month later with no explanation. It's current state is "won't fix".

Bitten again by another bug in the same function. What a shocking surprise. UrlEncode does not escape/encode the plus (+). It should encode it as %2B, but no, it doesn't, it just leaves it in the string.

Hosers.

Mike Heath stumbles upon pile of java JIT

2007-02-26T10:50:00.000-07:00

Mike has had a great time with this and we've had some intriguing conversations about it. Once he posts his svn repo url I'll snag the code, run the tests on my MacBook Pro and add the results to his matrix.

UPS xml online tools and Ruby

2007-02-21T10:53:00.000-07:00

UPS provides "XML Online Tools" to account holders here. Once you register as a developer you can get access to these tools and the associated specs and sample code. I needed access to the Rates and Service Selection tool, which happened to contain VB script and Java sample code from 2001. The docs are very thorough, but the code (as expected) was very outdated. Once I had it working with 1.5 (not too difficult at all) I was able to better understand what was needed for working with their HTTP-XML services.

The following barebones Ruby code is the result of a quick implementation:


require 'net/https'
require 'uri'

auth_xml = (access request xml doc goes here)
req_xml = (request xml doc goes here)
both_xml = auth_xml + req_xml

url = URI.parse("https://....")
request = Net::HTTP::Post.new(url.path)
request.body = (both_xml)
request.content_type = 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded'

http = Net::HTTP.new(url.host,443)
#http.set_debug_output $stderr
http.use_ssl = true
http.timeout = 30

@response = nil
http.start do
  @response =  http.request(request)
end

p @response.body

Another reason I dislike Microsoft

2007-01-31T12:09:00.000-07:00

http://ajax.asp.net

Hooray, welcome to the Ajax world ASP.NET. It's been around long enough, someone bright in Redmond actually started the movement back in the mid 90's. But, Microsoft, could you not kill the term by branding your Ajax components as AjaxThisOrThat when it's really just a wrapper for DHTML functionality? It appears to me that you're trying to capitalize on the current wave by simply naming DHTML controls as Ajaxed controls. Which is simply wrong. Then again, I suppose that's no surprise considering your failed attempt at changing the meanings of things anyway.

Sadly, for the ASP.NET developers who may be new to it, they'll now be dumbed down (once again?) to the real concepts and essentials of what Ajax _really_ is and how/why it works.

Oh, and nice job on making it only work with web services and kudos to making configuration a breeze.

Quote model, has_many and a couple hours of grief

2007-01-29T16:32:00.000-07:00

I have two models, Quote and QuoteLineItem using the has_many and belongs_to respectively. I was having issues with AR dumping out insert statements like


INSERT INTO quote_line_items (`created_on`, `quote_id`, `price`, `modified_on`, `product_id`, `quantity`, `modified_by_person_id`) VALUES(#<Quote:0x36551f0>,
#<Quote:0x364dba8>, #<Quote:0x3645728>, #<Quote:0x363efa4>, #<Quote:0x362ef3c>, #<Quote:0x3636728>, #<Quote:0x3624618>))

This drove me nuts so I jumped into rdebug to figure out the issue. Turns out there is an ActiveRecord method name collision when using


belongs_to :quote

so you have to provide an alternative, something like


belongs_to :related_quote, :class_name => "Quote"

Wish I knew that when I was creating this migration....

UPDATE:
http://dev.rubyonrails.org/ticket/4248

Spotlight and indexed content

2007-01-23T15:21:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: Check it out: http://www.arcadianvisions.com/downloads/RubyImporter.html

Became apparent to me today as I was searching for some files that Spotlight only indexes content for files based on their extension (and plugin, if installed). I was able to confirm this with the following code:


echo "hello you hoser" > something.java
mdls something.java

There's a bunch of data there associated specifically to the .java extension. Find that file based on its contents:


mdfind "you hoser" |grep java

Aha, there's the file.
Trying this again with, say, a .rb extension:


echo "take off you nob" > somethingelse.rb
mdfind "take off you" | grep something

No results. mdls shows that there are some attributes associated with the .rb extension, but somehow the content isn't indexed.

XCode provides a project template called "Metadata Importer" so you can write your own to deal with custom extensions. Apple's doc explains the process.

quicksilver shortcut for locking the screen in OSX

2007-01-12T14:16:00.000-07:00

I copied the ScreenSaverEngine.app from System/Library/Frameworks/Screensaver.framework/Versions/A/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app
to a cataloged QuickSilver directory. From there I just bound a key through the Triggers. Now I can lock the machine with ctl-option-l.

Suse 10.2 64-bit and VMWare Server

2007-01-08T11:35:00.000-07:00

Need a 64-bit server so we can run our VMWare machines on it and utilize the 8+ gig of RAM. Originally tried CentOS but because VMWare Server is compiled against 32-bit libraries, it would be a nasty amount of work to install the needed libraries one-by-one (ldd spit out at least 20 libraries we needed). After digging around online it turns out that VMWare "officially" supports Suse but not much else. Time was of the essence and we bagged Gentoo for that reason.

The 10.1 install was pleasant, but the user experience was very unpleasant. I didn't actually install it, but a coworker did and it was only a matter of days until he migrated to Ubuntu. We were hoping that some of the usability issues were resolved in 10.2, happy to report that is the case. We installed the base system, developer libraries, kernel development and the 32-bit libraries during the initial package selection. After that, once the system was up and running, vmware installed without issue.

To use vnc (via ssh) we enabled Remote Login in Login Window Preferences (not sure why that's a System Application but not in the Control Center). The command to enable port forwarding for local vncviewer execution is "ssh -g -L localhost:5901:machine:5901 user@machine -X", then "vncviewer localhost::5901" will connect right up through that ssh tunnel (also, ssh with the -g enables anyone to use your tunnel).

Javascript dialog libraries

2006-12-13T08:37:00.000-07:00

We explored various available libraries for managing dialogs within the application. We wanted an easy-to-implement solution that was intuitive to the user and didn't bog down the browser when rendering. We looked into the following solutions:

Yahoo UI: YUI is feature-rich, but you pay for it. In order to render dialogs there were (IIRC) 5 javascript files to include. It also appeared to be slower than the other solutions and was a serious amount of code for just opening a URL as a dialog. Wasn't too hard to ditch this after looking at the more simple solutions.

Lightbox gone wild: We liked this solution, but was pretty confined in terms of usage. You basically create links with a lightbox-specific class and then the initialization code for the page activates those links to function as lightboxes. No doubt this is easy, but it posed a problem with dynamic pages. We had some page that were returning links via AJAX, which would then require us to manually call the lightbox initialize() in order for those new links to behave properly. Wasn't worth the effort for the little (though nifty) functionality that lightbox provided.

jt_appdialogs: This was a very simple solution, but seemed slow (moving around the dialog) and not very friendly to fetching URLs (designed for rendering divs already in the page).

submodal: Another rather simple solution, but limited in functionality. Couldn't move the dialog around, though that's supposed to be doable. We also had issues in getting the right sizes.

prototype window class: Of all the solutions, this was the easiest to implement, provides a very intuitive user experience, is well-documented and simple to use.

testing issues with threaded ActiveRecord commits

2006-12-06T09:28:00.000-07:00

I need to create a more generalized test in order to better exhibit the problems I experienced when spinning up a bunch of threads that all accessed a synchronized block of code that invoked ActiveRecord::Base#save & ActiveRecord::Base#destroy with use_transactional_fixtures = true. Below is the investigation and conversation with Jamis:


(12:27:33) russ: Jamis, can I plead with you yet again for more assistance? Name your price.
(12:31:34) jamisbuck: haha :) what's up?
(12:32:06) russ: I'm having some deadlocking issues with some thread-safe code I'm _attempting_ to write, and I've narrowed my issue to what I'm doing with ActiveRecord
(12:32:13) russ: here's the test:
(12:32:18) russ: 
def test_provider_is_threadsafe
    Thread.abort_on_exception = true

    @ids = []
    threads = []
    
    #obtain three threads, each getting 10 ids
    begin
      3.times do
        
        thread = Thread.new do
          10.times do
            sleep(0.2)
            id = IdServiceHelper.instance.next_id

            if (@ids.include?(id))
              fail("Duplicate ID!")
            else
              @ids << id
            end
            
          end
        end
        threads << thread

      end
    threads.each {|thread| thread.join}
      
    rescue Exception => ex
     fail("Exception raised! " + ex.message + ex.backtrace.join("\n"))
    end
  end
(12:32:39) russ: and the culprit code is this:
(12:32:45) russ: 
def next_id
    
    next_id = -1

    synchronize do
      #get the next seed
      orig_seed = Seed.new
      orig_seed.save
      seed_val = orig_seed.id
      
      #destroy the used seed
      orig_seed.destroy      
   
      next_id = @@provider_class.id_for_seed(seed_val)
    end

    return next_id
  end
(12:33:04) russ: however, when I run the tests I get deadlock errors
(12:33:10) russ: and I've spent several hours trying different variations
(12:33:19) jamisbuck: what does the 'synchronize' method look like?
(12:33:39) russ: mixing in MonitorMixin
(12:33:54) russ: if I remove the .save and .destroy on the Seed models then my deadlocks disappear
(12:33:58) russ: but of course that fails the test
(12:34:14) jamisbuck: deadlocks from where?
(12:34:15) jamisbuck: AR?
(12:34:33) russ: that's my issue, not sure exactly
(12:34:39) jamisbuck: can you show me the error?
(12:34:41) russ: Loaded suite test/unit/id/id_service_helper_test
Started
.deadlock 0xb7d73748: sleep:J(0xb73e2204) (main) - test/unit/id/id_service_helper_test.rb:57
deadlock 0xb73e1a0c: sleep:-  - /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/thread.rb:100
deadlock 0xb73e209c: sleep:-  - /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/monitor.rb:266
deadlock 0xb73e2204: sleep:-  - /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/monitor.rb:266

(12:34:46) jamisbuck: ok, not AR
(12:35:03) jamisbuck: what's your OS?
(12:35:05) jamisbuck: and ruby version?
(12:35:06) russ: Gentoo
(12:35:13) russ: 1.8.4
(12:35:47) russ: so even if I remove the synchronization block, which I have done, I get the same errors
(12:35:47) jamisbuck: where is MonitorMixin defined?
(12:35:55) jamisbuck: is that in the stdlib?
(12:35:57) russ: think so
(12:36:12) jamisbuck: ok, I see it
(12:36:21) jamisbuck: to be honest, I've never used monitor mixin
(12:36:24) jamisbuck: I always just do
(12:36:26) jamisbuck: require 'thread'
(12:36:29) jamisbuck: mutex = Mutex.new
(12:36:34) jamisbuck: mutex.synchronize { ... }
(12:36:37) russ: done that too
(12:36:38) russ: same results
(12:36:39) russ: :(
(12:36:54) russ: perhaps I should approach this differently
(12:37:03) jamisbuck: it's almost like Seed#save or Seed#destroy are trying to do something thread-wise
(12:37:11) russ: right, my thoughts also
(12:37:17) russ: I already have  ActiveRecord::Base.allow_concurrency = true
(12:37:22) russ: which I thought would solve my problem
(12:37:29) russ: (since there is an underlying "freeze")
(12:37:33) jamisbuck: well
(12:37:37) jamisbuck: that only allows multiple connections
(12:37:42) jamisbuck: one per thread
(12:37:44) russ: gotcha
(12:37:46) jamisbuck: AR is not thread-safe
(12:37:48) jamisbuck: by itself
(12:37:58) jamisbuck: but still
(12:38:03) jamisbuck: save/destroy shouldn't be problematic
(12:38:17) russ: k, so if I approach this differently, the problem being that I want to fetch a new Seed, get the id and then destroy it
(12:38:36) russ: and lock anything else from getting the same value
(12:38:38) russ: any other ideas?
(12:38:42) jamisbuck: is your ruby version built with phtread support?
(12:38:50) russ: good question, I'll check
(12:39:23) russ: there is a USE flag for -threads
(12:39:31) russ: not sure if I have it enabled or not
(12:39:38) jamisbuck: k, well, you don't want it, regardless
(12:39:42) russ: k
(12:39:49) jamisbuck: try looking at what the ruby binary is linked against
(12:39:51) jamisbuck: ldd
(12:40:10) russ: ldd /usr/bin/ruby
        linux-gate.so.1 =>  (0xffffe000)
        libruby18.so.1.8 => /usr/lib/libruby18.so.1.8 (0xb7e3b000)
        libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0xb7e21000)
        libcrypt.so.1 => /lib/libcrypt.so.1 (0xb7df3000)
        libm.so.6 => /lib/tls/libm.so.6 (0xb7dd0000)
        libc.so.6 => /lib/tls/libc.so.6 (0xb7cb6000)
        /lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xb7f05000)
(12:40:17) jamisbuck: k, looks good
(12:40:35) jamisbuck: I really have no idea on this
(12:40:49) russ: then maybe the issue is that freeze I saw
(12:40:51) jamisbuck: this is outside my area of expertise
(12:41:11) russ: well you've broadened my horizons
(12:41:15) jamisbuck: :)
(12:41:18) russ: I'll keep digging in
(12:41:22) jamisbuck: k, good luck
(12:41:31) russ: you let me know if you have an Amazon list
(12:41:39) jamisbuck: :) I don't, but thanks anyway
(12:41:43) russ: your time is valuable and I appreciate the info
(12:41:53) jamisbuck: fwiw, ruby threads are awful..if at all possible, you should consider using fork instead
(12:41:59) jamisbuck: not always possible, but definitely preferable
(12:42:04) russ: that's good to know
(12:42:06) russ: I'll explore that also
(12:42:12) russ: have a good one
(12:42:15) jamisbuck: you too

I changed my code to try a more sql-native approach with the following:


      #version 2

       connection = ActiveRecord::Base.connection

       orig_seed_val = Seed.find(:first).id
       connection.begin_db_transaction
      
       seed_val = orig_seed_val+1
       connection.delete("delete from seeds where id=#{orig_seed_val};");
       connection.commit_db_transaction
       Seed.connection.execute("insert into seeds values(#{seed_val});");

       next_id = @@provider_class.id_for_seed(seed_val)

Using this method I was then getting a native MySQL error regarding a lock timeout. This was curious and lead to the following:


(14:05:01) russ: wanna hear the gruesome details?
(14:05:20) jamisbuck: let's hear it
(14:05:38) russ: the locking was at the MySQL level
(14:05:48) russ: I tried to bypass AR
(14:05:53) russ: and execute straight sql
(14:06:03) russ: only to get a Lock timeout from mysql
(14:06:12) russ: investigated by "show innodb status"
(14:06:20) russ: and it gave me the locks/threads
(14:06:25) russ: followed that to my log
(14:06:30) russ: and whattayaknow
(14:06:40) jamisbuck: really! the exception you posted didn't look like one from the database, so I discarded that hypothesis
(14:06:48) russ: well, here's the culprit: self.use_transactional_fixtures = true
(14:07:24) jamisbuck: ah, ok
(14:07:26) jamisbuck: very wierd
(14:07:27) russ: the top level transaction had the lock!
(14:07:28) jamisbuck: what mysql version?
(14:07:57) russ:  Gentoo Linux mysql-4.1.20
(14:08:05) jamisbuck: wierd! good catch
(14:08:13) russ: anyhow, changing back and then using AR
(14:08:15) russ: everything is good again
(14:08:21) jamisbuck: awesome, glad to hear it
(14:08:27) russ: so I lose, for that specific test, the benefits of transactional fixtures
(14:08:30) russ: oh well it's a toss up
(14:08:34) jamisbuck: yah
(14:08:43) jamisbuck: if your test uses transactions, you can't use transactional fixtures
(14:08:46) russ: so I suppose the theory learned is:
(14:09:03) russ: you can't write your own thread-safe code using AR in a test with self.use_transactional_fixtures=true
(14:09:19) jamisbuck: well, not even thread-safe
(14:09:21) jamisbuck: transactional
(14:09:23) russ: right
(14:09:27) russ: anyhow, back to work
(14:09:30) jamisbuck: cool beans
(14:09:32) jamisbuck: good find

deadlocks and ActiveRecord

2006-12-05T08:48:00.000-07:00

According to this ActiveRecord is thread-safe. Turns out that I have some code for multithreaded identifier generation and since the seed is from the db, I must have thread-safe db interaction through ActiveRecord. My tests kept puking with deadlocks and I narrowed it down to the save/destroy operations on the model. Found this post which contained my answer:


    ActiveRecord::Base.allow_concurrency = true

The kicker here is that this is never mentioned in the API docs...

self-signing certs in iis 6

2006-11-29T11:06:00.000-07:00

Easiest way to do this is to download the IIS 6 Resource Kit Tools. Then find the site's id that will be assigned the cert. Search for the site's name in %SystemRoot%\System32\Inetsrv\MetaBase.xml, the id is the number appended in the Location attribute. For example:


<IIsWebServer Location="/LM/W3SVC/445577612" AuthFlags="0" 
LogPluginClsid="{FF160663-DE82-11CF-BC0A-00AA006111E0}" SecureBindings=":443:" 
ServerAutoStart="FALSE" ServerBindings=":80: 192.168.88.62:80:" ServerComment="testsite" />

The id here is 445577612.

Then, the command to assign the self-signed cert is:


C:\Program Files\IIS Resources\SelfSSL>selfssl.exe /N:CN=SERV2003DEV /K:1024 /V:700 /S:445577612 /P:443

Where CN is the server's name, K is the key length, V is the number of days the cert is valid, S is the site id, P is the port.

I did this on Windows 2003 Server, so no idea if it works in XP.

loading a cert into IIS 6 w/o a pending request

2006-11-28T17:32:00.000-07:00

Thank you TechNet:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/WindowsServer2003/Library/IIS/53dfdb5e-6106-4d99-85bb-da199bc27c7e.mspx?mfr=true

Basically all that is needed is:


certutil -addstore my certnew.cer

And then it'll appear in the "Assign an Existing Certificate" wizard selection and be available for selection.

ActiveRecord in .Net

2006-11-15T21:11:00.000-07:00

I'm using ActiveRecord in .Net for a school project. And it's making db interaction somewhat bearable. Coming from a Hibernate/ActiveRecord background, this is a breath of fresh air. Never been a fan of the data-mapper/set and stored proc that MS is so up on. Thanks to the Castle (http://castleproject.org/) guys for putting this together, it's very simple to get up and running and I found it _far_ easier to understand their tutorial than any of the NHibernate ones. Their blog app is a piece of cake to understand and runs out of the box (granted you have have a "test" db created).

The biggest issue I had was connecting to SQLServer Express 2005. Here's the connection string I ended up using:


Server=127.0.0.1,1433;Database=patstracks;Integrated Security=SSPI

ActiveRecord really makes it easy to decorate POCOs using attributes:


[ActiveRecord("[Client]")]

    public class Client : ActiveRecordBase{
...
 [PrimaryKey]

        public int Id

        {

            get { return id; }

            set { id = value; }



        }
...
public static Client[] FindByNameLike(string name)

        {

            return (Client[])Client.FindAll(typeof(Client), new Order[] {Order.Asc("Name") }, new ICriterion[] { Expression.Like("Name", name+"%")});

            

        }
...
}

in place phone editor via Ajax

2006-11-01T14:04:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: I went about this the wrong way. Should've just overridden the necessary methods. I'll do it and replace this when I'm done.

Morphed the InPlaceEditor and made it more friendly for handling phone number entry:



// script.aculo.us controls.js v1.6.4, Wed Sep 06 11:30:58 CEST 2006

// Copyright (c) 2005 Thomas Fuchs (http://script.aculo.us, http://mir.aculo.us)
//           (c) 2005 Ivan Krstic (http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/ivan)
//           (c) 2005 Jon Tirsen (http://www.tirsen.com)
// Contributors:
//  Richard Livsey
//  Rahul Bhargava
//  Rob Wills
//  
// See scriptaculous.js for full license.
/*
 *Only tested via  load_text url
 *Parses for extension on '$'
 *Returns input as phone_value and ext_value
*/
Ajax.InPlacePhoneEditor = Class.create();
Ajax.InPlacePhoneEditor.defaultHighlightColor = "#FFFF99";
Ajax.InPlacePhoneEditor.prototype = {
  initialize: function(element, url, options) {
    this.url = url;
    this.element = $(element);

    this.options = Object.extend({
      okButton: true,
      okText: "ok",
      cancelLink: true,
      cancelText: "cancel",
      savingText: "Saving...",
      clickToEditText: "Click to edit",
      okText: "ok",
      rows: 1,
      onComplete: function(transport, element) {
        new Effect.Highlight(element, {startcolor: this.options.highlightcolor});
      },
      onFailure: function(transport) {
        alert("Error communicating with the server: " + transport.responseText.stripTags());
      },
      callback: function(form) {
        return Form.serialize(form);
      },
      handleLineBreaks: true,
      loadingText: 'Loading...',
      savingClassName: 'inplaceeditor-saving',
      loadingClassName: 'inplaceeditor-loading',
      formClassName: 'inplaceeditor-form',
      highlightcolor: Ajax.InPlaceEditor.defaultHighlightColor,
      highlightendcolor: "#FFFFFF",
      externalControl: null,
      submitOnBlur: false,
      ajaxOptions: {},
      evalScripts: false
    }, options || {});

    if(!this.options.formId && this.element.id) {
      this.options.formId = this.element.id + "-inplaceeditor";
      if ($(this.options.formId)) {
        // there's already a form with that name, don't specify an id
        this.options.formId = null;
      }
    }

    if (this.options.externalControl) {
      this.options.externalControl = $(this.options.externalControl);
    }

    this.originalBackground = Element.getStyle(this.element, 'background-color');
    if (!this.originalBackground) {
      this.originalBackground = "transparent";
    }

    this.element.title = this.options.clickToEditText;

    this.onclickListener = this.enterEditMode.bindAsEventListener(this);
    this.mouseoverListener = this.enterHover.bindAsEventListener(this);
    this.mouseoutListener = this.leaveHover.bindAsEventListener(this);
    Event.observe(this.element, 'click', this.onclickListener);
    Event.observe(this.element, 'mouseover', this.mouseoverListener);
    Event.observe(this.element, 'mouseout', this.mouseoutListener);
    if (this.options.externalControl) {
      Event.observe(this.options.externalControl, 'click', this.onclickListener);
      Event.observe(this.options.externalControl, 'mouseover', this.mouseoverListener);
      Event.observe(this.options.externalControl, 'mouseout', this.mouseoutListener);
    }
  },
  enterEditMode: function(evt) {
    if (this.saving) return;
    if (this.editing) return;
    this.editing = true;
    this.onEnterEditMode();
    if (this.options.externalControl) {
      Element.hide(this.options.externalControl);
    }
    Element.hide(this.element);
    this.createForm();
    this.element.parentNode.insertBefore(this.form, this.element);
    if (!this.options.loadTextURL){
      Field.scrollFreeActivate(this.editField);
    }
    // stop the event to avoid a page refresh in Safari
    if (evt) {
      Event.stop(evt);
    }
    return false;
  },
  createForm: function() {
    this.form = document.createElement("form");
    this.form.id = this.options.formId;
    Element.addClassName(this.form, this.options.formClassName)
    this.form.onsubmit = this.onSubmit.bind(this);

    this.createEditField();

    if (this.options.textarea) {
      var br = document.createElement("br");
      this.form.appendChild(br);
    }

    if (this.options.okButton) {
      okButton = document.createElement("input");
      okButton.type = "submit";
      okButton.value = this.options.okText;
      okButton.className = 'editor_ok_button';
      this.form.appendChild(okButton);
    }

    if (this.options.cancelLink) {
      cancelLink = document.createElement("a");
      cancelLink.href = "#";
      cancelLink.appendChild(document.createTextNode(this.options.cancelText));
      cancelLink.onclick = this.onclickCancel.bind(this);
      cancelLink.className = 'editor_cancel';
      this.form.appendChild(cancelLink);
    }
  },
  hasHTMLLineBreaks: function(string) {
    if (!this.options.handleLineBreaks) return false;
    return string.match(/<br/i) || string.match(/<p>/i);
  },
  convertHTMLLineBreaks: function(string) {
    return string.replace(/<br>/gi, "\n").replace(/<br\/>/gi, "\n").replace(/<\/p>/gi, "\n").replace(/<p>/gi, "");
  },
  createEditField: function() {
    var text;
    if(this.options.loadTextURL) {
      text = this.options.loadingText;
    } else {
      text = this.getText();
    }

    var obj = this;

    if (this.options.rows == 1 && !this.hasHTMLLineBreaks(text)) {
      this.options.textarea = false;
      var textField = document.createElement("input");
      textField.obj = this;
      textField.type = "text";
      textField.name = "phone_value";
      textField.value = text;
      textField.style.backgroundColor = this.options.highlightcolor;
      textField.className = 'editor_field';

      var size = 20;
      if (size != 0) textField.size = size;
      if (this.options.submitOnBlur)
        textField.onblur = this.onSubmit.bind(this);
      textField.maxLength = size;
      this.editField_phone = textField;

      var textField = document.createElement("input");
      textField.obj = this;
      textField.type = "text";
      textField.name = "ext_value";
      textField.value = text;
      textField.style.backgroundColor = this.options.highlightcolor;
      textField.className = 'editor_field';
      var size = 6;
      if (size != 0) textField.size = size;
      if (this.options.submitOnBlur)
        textField.onblur = this.onSubmit.bind(this);
      textField.maxLength = size;
      this.editField_ext = textField;
    }

    if(this.options.loadTextURL) {
      this.loadExternalText();
    }


    this.form.appendChild(this.editField_phone);
    this.form.appendChild(document.createTextNode(" ext."));
    this.form.appendChild(this.editField_ext);
  },
  getText: function() {
    return this.element.innerHTML;
  },
  loadExternalText: function() {
    Element.addClassName(this.form, this.options.loadingClassName);
    this.editField_phone.disabled = true;
    this.editField_ext.disabled = true;

    new Ajax.Request(
      this.options.loadTextURL,
      Object.extend({
        asynchronous: true,
        onComplete: this.onLoadedExternalText.bind(this)
      }, this.options.ajaxOptions)
    );
  },
  onLoadedExternalText: function(transport) {
    Element.removeClassName(this.form, this.options.loadingClassName);
    this.editField_phone.disabled = false;
    this.editField_ext.disabled = false;

    var load_values = transport.responseText.stripTags().split("$");
    if((load_values.length == 1) || (load_values.length == 2)){
      this.editField_phone.value = load_values[0];
      if(load_values.length == 2 ){
        this.editField_ext.value = load_values[1]
      }
    }
    Field.scrollFreeActivate(this.editField_phone);
    Field.scrollFreeActivate(this.editField_ext);
  },
  onclickCancel: function() {
    this.onComplete();
    this.leaveEditMode();
    return false;
  },
  onFailure: function(transport) {
    this.options.onFailure(transport);
    if (this.oldInnerHTML) {
      this.element.innerHTML = this.oldInnerHTML;
      this.oldInnerHTML = null;
    }
    return false;
  },
  onSubmit: function() {
    // onLoading resets these so we need to save them away for the Ajax call
    var form = this.form;
    var value = this.editField_phone.value + "$" + this.editField_ext.value;

    // do this first, sometimes the ajax call returns before we get a chance to switch on Saving...
    // which means this will actually switch on Saving... *after* we've left edit mode causing Saving...
    // to be displayed indefinitely
    this.onLoading();

    if (this.options.evalScripts) {
      new Ajax.Request(
        this.url, Object.extend({
          parameters: this.options.callback(form, value),
          onComplete: this.onComplete.bind(this),
          onFailure: this.onFailure.bind(this),
          asynchronous:true,
          evalScripts:true
        }, this.options.ajaxOptions));
    } else  {
      new Ajax.Updater(
        { success: this.element,
          // don't update on failure (this could be an option)
          failure: null },
        this.url, Object.extend({
          parameters: this.options.callback(form, value),
          onComplete: this.onComplete.bind(this),
          onFailure: this.onFailure.bind(this)
        }, this.options.ajaxOptions));
    }
    // stop the event to avoid a page refresh in Safari
    if (arguments.length > 1) {
      Event.stop(arguments[0]);
    }
    return false;
  },
  onLoading: function() {
    this.saving = true;
    this.removeForm();
    this.leaveHover();
    this.showSaving();
  },
  showSaving: function() {
    this.oldInnerHTML = this.element.innerHTML;
    this.element.innerHTML = this.options.savingText;
    Element.addClassName(this.element, this.options.savingClassName);
    this.element.style.backgroundColor = this.originalBackground;
    Element.show(this.element);
  },
  removeForm: function() {
    if(this.form) {
      if (this.form.parentNode) Element.remove(this.form);
      this.form = null;
    }
  },
  enterHover: function() {
    if (this.saving) return;
    this.element.style.backgroundColor = this.options.highlightcolor;
    if (this.effect) {
      this.effect.cancel();
    }
    Element.addClassName(this.element, this.options.hoverClassName)
  },
  leaveHover: function() {
    if (this.options.backgroundColor) {
      this.element.style.backgroundColor = this.oldBackground;
    }
    Element.removeClassName(this.element, this.options.hoverClassName)
    if (this.saving) return;
    this.effect = new Effect.Highlight(this.element, {
      startcolor: this.options.highlightcolor,
      endcolor: this.options.highlightendcolor,
      restorecolor: this.originalBackground
    });
  },
  leaveEditMode: function() {
    Element.removeClassName(this.element, this.options.savingClassName);
    this.removeForm();
    this.leaveHover();
    this.element.style.backgroundColor = this.originalBackground;
    Element.show(this.element);
    if (this.options.externalControl) {
      Element.show(this.options.externalControl);
    }
    this.editing = false;
    this.saving = false;
    this.oldInnerHTML = null;
    this.onLeaveEditMode();
  },
  onComplete: function(transport) {
    this.leaveEditMode();
    this.options.onComplete.bind(this)(transport, this.element);
  },
  onEnterEditMode: function() {},
  onLeaveEditMode: function() {},
  dispose: function() {
    if (this.oldInnerHTML) {
      this.element.innerHTML = this.oldInnerHTML;
    }
    this.leaveEditMode();
    Event.stopObserving(this.element, 'click', this.onclickListener);
    Event.stopObserving(this.element, 'mouseover', this.mouseoverListener);
    Event.stopObserving(this.element, 'mouseout', this.mouseoutListener);
    if (this.options.externalControl) {
      Event.stopObserving(this.options.externalControl, 'click', this.onclickListener);
      Event.stopObserving(this.options.externalControl, 'mouseover', this.mouseoverListener);
      Event.stopObserving(this.options.externalControl, 'mouseout', this.mouseoutListener);
    }
  }
};


Ajax.InPlacePhoneEditor.prototype.__initialize = Ajax.InPlaceEditor.prototype.initialize;
Ajax.InPlacePhoneEditor.prototype.__getText = Ajax.InPlaceEditor.prototype.getText;
Ajax.InPlacePhoneEditor.prototype.__onComplete = Ajax.InPlaceEditor.prototype.onComplete;
Ajax.InPlacePhoneEditor.prototype = Object.extend(Ajax.InPlaceEditor.prototype, {

    initialize: function(element, url, options){
        this.__initialize(element,url,options)
        this.setOptions(options);
        this._checkEmpty();
    },

    setOptions: function(options){
        this.options = Object.extend(Object.extend(this.options,{
            emptyText: 'click to edit...',
            emptyClassName: 'inplaceeditor-empty'
        }),options||{});
    },

    _checkEmpty: function(){
        if( this.element.innerHTML.length == 0 ){
            this.element.appendChild(
                Builder.node('span',{className:this.options.emptyClassName},this.options.emptyText));
        }
    },

    getText: function(){
        document.getElementsByClassName(this.options.emptyClassName,this.element).each(function(child){
            this.element.removeChild(child);
        }.bind(this));
        return this.__getText();
    },

    onComplete: function(transport){
        this._checkEmpty();
        this.__onComplete(transport);
    }
});

iterating an Enumerable just to create another array...

2006-10-26T10:32:00.000-06:00

via ActiveSupport (thanks Jamis!):


values.map(&:name)

or the standard way


values.collect{|val| val.name}

subversion and gse-locate.el

2006-10-25T11:26:00.000-06:00

Updated this chunk in gse-locate.el:


(defvar gse-locate-regexp-list
  (list "\\.elc"
        "\\.class"
        "/CVS"
        "/target/classes"
        "#"
        "~"
        ".cvsignore"
        "/\.svn/"
        )
  "A list of regular expressions that match \"uninteresting\" filenames.
These will be stripped from the locate list before it is displayed.")

pretty indenting HTML chunks in Emacs

2006-10-25T10:51:00.000-06:00

After reading this and installing xmml and psgml, I can now indent a wildly formatted chunk of HTML with indent-region (in sgml-mode) and my buffer is then much more readable and formatted nicely. xmml modifies the faces in sgml-mode for much better readability and color identification.

Dependency Inversion conversation with Jamis Buck

2006-10-17T14:56:00.000-06:00

This conversation represents the sort of headache/transition in getting out of the strict OO mindset and contract-based programming that Ruby allows you to intuitively avoid:

(14:45:35) russ: if you have a minute, gotta design question for you. I have an authentication component that I'd like to turn into a service so it's interchangeable ala Hivemind. Would you recommend copland for doing that? At this point I only have two implementations of the service, but it makes sense to have more in the future...
(14:45:59) jamisbuck: for ruby, I'd avoid DI implementations as a general rule
(14:46:03) jamisbuck: ruby is flexible enough that you don't need them
(14:46:11) russ: the alternative I could think of would be to create some sort of abstract base class and then extend as needed...though not sure how that would fit into Ruby's methodology
(14:46:32) russ: I'm still stuck in j2ee thinking
(14:46:40) jamisbuck: :) it took me two years to come around :)
(14:46:49) russ: so recommendations for my issue?
(14:47:02) jamisbuck: well, you could use a factory class
(14:47:10) russ: two different classes, rely on some static class and put the logic in there to call the appropriately underlying?
(14:47:11) jamisbuck: Foo.authentication_service
(14:47:18) jamisbuck: sure
(14:47:26) jamisbuck: without knowing all the details that sounds fine
(14:47:30) jamisbuck: there may be an even simpler way to do it
(14:47:39) russ: my problem is contracts: interfaces/abstract base classes
(14:47:52) russ: how to move away from that yet make the Ruby code solid
(14:47:54) jamisbuck: careful not to overthink the problem
(14:48:01) jamisbuck: ruby encourages pragmatic solutions
(14:48:20) jamisbuck: I know that when I was coming out of Javaland, I would frequently overlook the simple solutions because they were so simple :)
(14:48:27) jamisbuck: that's not to say every problem has a simple solution
(14:48:40) russ: indeed
(14:48:49) russ: as usual, your feedback is highly valuable
(14:48:52) russ: thanks Jamis!
(14:48:53) russ: have a good one
(14:48:56) jamisbuck: :) you too!

middle-click selected text into Emacs

2006-10-12T10:15:00.000-06:00

Since my conversion 18 months ago, I've been delaying my quest to find the solution for middle-clicking and getting my text from terminal into Emacs. After some chat in Freenode (thanks to twb)and looking in Google Groups, here's the solution I slapped into my .emacs:


(global-set-key (kbd "") (lambda () (interactive) (insert (x-get-selection 'PRIMARY 'COMPOUND_TEXT))))

UPDATED:
The problem was this line:


(setq x-select-enable-clipboard t)

changed it to:


(setq x-select-enable-clipboard nil)

and now I can paste in from mrxvt, xterm, etc.

maven2 junit jvmargs

2006-10-04T17:00:00.000-06:00

In the original maven you could put the following line in your project.properties to manage jvm args at testing time:


maven.junit.jvmargs=-server -Dconfiguration.resourceType=properties ... -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,address=8787,server=y -Xmx512m

In maven2, the easiset way is:


<project>
...
   <build>
     <plugins>
       <plugin>
         <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
           <artifactId>maven-surefire-plugin</artifactId>
             <configuration>
               <argLine>
                 -server -Dconfiguration.resourceType=properties ... -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,address=8787,server=y -Xmx512m
               </argLine>
             </configuration>
      </plugin>
    </plugins>
  </build>
...
</project>

one of the reasons I like maven2

2006-10-04T15:32:00.000-06:00

http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-12-2005/jw-1205-maven-p2.html


Suppose you want to use Hibernate in your project. You would simply add a new dependency to the dependencies section in pom.xml, as follows:

   
      hibernate
      hibernate
      3.0.3
      compile
   

And that's it! You don't have to hunt around to know in which other JARs (and in which versions) you need to run Hibernate 3.0.3; Maven will do it for you!

That is sweet, and relieves great pain in larger projects with many tendrils to OSS jars.

Adding a custom attribute to the user class in Active Directory, then fetching it via Ruby

2006-10-04T09:04:00.000-06:00

(credit: http://www.lacoude.com/docs/public/Attributes.aspx#_ftn8)

First, install adminpak.msi from windows\system32 and then add the following registry key:


Key: HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\NTDS\Parameters
Value: "Schema Update Allowed" = 0x1

Then run schmmgmt.msc. Right click on "Attributes" and "Create Attribute" as the "imsid" attribute, specifiying the x500 oid as created from oidgen.exe. Index it, activate it, and allow it to be shown in advanced view.

Lastly, go to the properties of the "user" class, select the "Attributes" tab. Add an "optional" attribute by finding the "imsid" attribute.

Now, using ADAM-adsiedit.msc, the Administrator can connect to the AD tree and update users' attributes with the appropriate imsids:


Right-click on ADAM ADSI Edit, select "Connect to..."
select "Distinguished name or naming context"
enter "cn=users,dc=devdomain,dc=it,dc=vital" (adjust dc values as necessary)
click "Ok"
expand the tree, find the CN of the user to edit
right-click on user, select "Properties"
find the "imsid" attribute, edit, apply

Done.

Here's the ultra-basic Ruby code that will lookup and print the imsid attribute:


require 'ldap'

host = "192.168.88.20"
port = 389
username = "servuser"
login = "servuser@devdomain.it.vital"
password = "mypassword"
found_imsid = "not_found"
dn = "cn=users,dc=devdomain,dc=it,dc=vital"


connection = LDAP::Conn.new(host,port)
connection.set_option(LDAP::LDAP_OPT_PROTOCOL_VERSION,3)
connection.bind(login, password)

result = connection.search2( dn, LDAP::LDAP_SCOPE_SUBTREE, "cn=#{username}", ["imsid"])

if(result.size == 1)
  found_imsid = result.first["imsid"][0]
end

p found_imsid

mongrel_cluster startup script for Gentoo

2006-10-03T08:54:00.000-06:00


#!/sbin/runscript
#
# Copyright (c) 2006 Bradley Taylor, bradley@railsmachine.com
#
# Updated Oct 2006  by Russell Rollins for Gentoo compliance.
#
# mongrel_cluster       Startup script for Mongrel clusters.
#
# chkconfig: - 85 15
# description: mongrel_cluster manages multiple Mongrel processes for use #              behind a load balancer.
#

CONF_DIR=/etc/mongrel_cluster
RETVAL=0

depend() {
    need net
}

start() {
    ebegin "Starting Mongrel cluster"
    /usr/bin/mongrel_cluster_ctl start -c ${CONF_DIR}
    eend $?
}
stop() {
    ebegin "Stopping Mongrel cluster"
    /usr/bin/mongrel_cluster_ctl stop -c ${CONF_DIR}
    eend $?
}

pound and mongrel_cluster

2006-10-03T08:52:00.000-06:00

In order to easily manage the development/deployment via Capistrano, it made sense to also be running mongrel_cluster automatically. This way deployment is real-time with instant results.


gem install mongrel_cluster capistrano --include-dependencies

Then install pound via emerge/yast. Edit the pound.cfg file:
(this still doesn't seem to be working)


ListenHTTP
  Address 0.0.0.0
  Port    80
  Service
    BackEnd
      Address 0.0.0.0
      Port    8000
    End
    BackEnd
      Address 0.0.0.0
      Port    8001
    End
    BackEnd
      Address 0.0.0.0
      Port    8002
    End
    Session
      Type BASIC
      TTL  300
    End
  End
End

Start pound and add it to startup:


/etc/init.d/pound start
rc-update add pound default

Next, railsapp/config/mongrel_cluster.yml would look like:


cwd: /home/build/deploy/current
port: "8000"
environment: development
address: 0.0.0.0
pid_file: log/mongrel.pid
servers: 3

Initialize capistrano for railsapp:


cap --apply-to /path/to/railsapp MyApplicationName

Now that capistrano has been initialized, update the config/deploy.rb file adding:


set :mongrel_conf, "#{current_path}/config/mongrel_cluster.yml"

Update the other properties as necessary, paying particular attention to:


role :web, "someserver.yourinternaldomain.local"

The servers will have to be contactable by the exact name placed in the quotes.

Update the remote variables:


set :deploy_to, "/home/build/deploy"
set :user, "build"
set :keep_releases, 5

Be sure to have the "build" user's password on hand since it'll be necessary for capistrano commands.

Ensure capistrano is working with:


rake remote:exec ACTION=setup

Check that the target server has the releases and shared directories created, if so, capistrano worked.

Lastly:


rake deploy

This should pull everything down and place it in the "current" directory (in relation to cwd).

Create a link to mongrel_cluster script and mongrel_cluster.yml then add to startup:


mkdir /etc/mongrel_cluster
ln -s /home/build/deploy/current/config/mongrel_cluster.yml /etc/mongrel_cluster/railsapp.yml
ln -s /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/mongrel_cluster-0.1.3/resources/mongrel_cluster /etc/init.d/mongrel_cluster
chmod +x /etc/init.d/mongrel_cluster
rc-update /etc/init.d/mongrel_cluster default

TODO: autostart failing on Gentoo

Lastly, start the mongrels:


/etc/init.d/mongrel_cluster start

Test from port 80, 8000, 8001 and 8002 that the rails intro page comes up. Done.

openEMM in Gentoo

2006-09-27T16:41:00.000-06:00

1. downloaded OpenEMM-5.0.2.binary.tar.gz
2. groupadd openemm
3. useradd -m -g openemm -d /home/openemm -c "OpenEMM 5.0.2" openemm
4. mysqladmin -u root -p create openemm
5. mysql –u root openemm -p < /home/openemm/USR_SHARE/openemm.db
6. changed JAVA_HOME in httpd.sh to explicitly point to local jdk1.5
7. su – openemm
8. /home/openemm/bin/OpenEMM.sh start

Sendmail stuff to get it working:
vsruss russ # cd /home/openemm/
vsruss openemm # cd bin/
vsruss bin # chown root:root smctrl
vsruss bin # chown root:root ../conf/bav/bav.rc
vsruss bin # chmod 6755 smctrl
vsruss bin # chmod 0600 ../conf/bav/bav.rc

and in syslog-ng.conf:
destination mail { file("/var/log/maillog"); };
options { long_hostnames(off); sync(0); perm(0644); stats(3600); };

restarted both sendmail and openemm

nfs simplified

2006-08-18T16:53:00.000-06:00

(abridged from http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Share_Directories_via_NFS)
For the server

1.emerge nfs-utils
2.edit /etc/exports
example:


/opt/svnrepos vsdc1.vital.local(async,no_subtree_check,ro) 192.168.88.62(async,no_subtree_check,rw)

3.execute:
exportfs -ra
/etc/init.d/nfs reload

For the client

ensure that portmap is running (and added as default via rc-update)
then mount ala:


mount vssvn:/var/lib/trac ./vssvn_trac/

lspci is your friend

2006-08-15T16:29:00.000-06:00

when looking up your NIC, easiest to emerge pciutils and then figure out the chipset

Test Driven Development -- Saving Grief and Pain

2006-07-27T16:41:00.000-06:00

I recently inherited two projects at work, both in gloriously coded .NET. The first was a we'll-throw-together-a-CMS-like-web-application. Some simple concepts utilizing the webcomponents and master-template paradigms from Microsoft. Incidentally, another project was to tie into this one as a "component" to provide additional functionality. Both have zero lines of test code. Both have bugs. Both are now on my plate.

Ever since reading Test Driven Development my world is no longer the same. Having spent some time as a quality assurance engineer(2000), I very much appreciated the concepts of this book. As a developer, I feasted upon the notions of overcoming assumptions/fear based on actual test results. Starting simple, refactoring as tests passed and building a solid foundation of functional code. I finished this book months ago and immediately put into practice writing tests first. I began to think in tests and then design from there, things worked out nicely every time.

So, inheriting two development efforts (with their small portion of issues, ~60), neither of which has a lick of test code, my current outlook is a sliver of hope. A hope that, yes, we can fix things as we try to get the projects out the door. But, a serious sense of uncomfortableness pervades my being as I dig through code and fix things here and there. Deadline is approaching far too quickly, there's no time to get a testing framework in place and cram tests through everything. The best we can do is get some automated web testing in place ala Fitnesse and Selenium.

Now that the rant is done, what's the conclusion? Here it is: if you're gonna write code, write the test to go with it. That way you not only ensure the functionality of the immediate task of the code you're writing, you also spare the grief and pain of others when they look/touch/execute it.

sqlserver incremental table dumps

2006-07-21T14:25:00.000-06:00

Very easy using bcp. Using cron, bash and ruby I can dump a given set of tables via cygwin and automate table data commits into subversion.

vnstat

2006-07-13T15:09:00.000-06:00

SonicWall reported that my linux box pumped out "16588800 TBytes" (no explaining what that number is) in a 3 day period. Right. vnstat is a nice handy tracker monitring your NIC traffic.

Gentoo Trac with existing subversion project

2006-06-29T12:04:00.000-06:00


sudo emerge trac sqlite pysqlite
sudo webapp-config -I -d project/trac trac 0.9.5 #this will create the symlinks for the site, http://localhost/project/trac 
sudo trac-admin /var/lib/trac/project/ initenv #sets up the trac environment for the project
sudo chown apache:apache -R /var/lib/trac/project
sudo tracd -8000 /var/lib/trac/project

OR to run in apache


emerge mod_fastcgi
#add "-D FASTCGI" to  /etc/conf.d/apache

#add FastCgiServer /var/www/localhost/cgi-bin/trac.fcgi -idle-timeout 120        -initial-env TRAC_ENV=/var/lib/trac/project -processes 5
# to /etc/apache/httpd.conf

#add 
#          SetEnv TRAC_ENV "/var/lib/trac/project"
#    
# ScriptAlias /project /var/www/localhost/cgi-bin/trac.cgi
# to virtual hosts file

#add users 
sudo htpasswd2 -c /etc/apach2/trac.htpasswd admin

#then add
#
#  AuthType Basic
#  AuthName "Trac"
#  AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/trac.htpasswd
#  Require valid-user
#
#
#
#to virtual hosts file

Parallels vs VMWare 4.x

2006-06-20T14:33:00.000-06:00

I have reason to install Windows under linux, again (sadly). Given my recent experience of trying out Parallels on my MacBook, I thought I'd compare it to VMWare in Linux. I purchased a VMWare 4.x license two years ago and it worked decently enough in Gentoo.

This time around, after emering it, there was network issues that I have heretofore not experienced. Then, for reasons I could not find, it wouldn't boot from the cd in the drive. This is when I decided to emerge Parallels (granted their ebuild is homebrewed, but still). Paraellels workstation is *so* much easier to install and configure, it's just not even funny. It's so simplistic, and it just worked! No network issues, no cd issues, it just worked. Just as simple and fast as on the Mac.

Subversion, Apache2, DAV & SAMBA

2006-06-14T14:19:00.000-06:00

In order to easily facilitate a consolidated nightly backup we decided to mount (via SAMBA) a win2k3 share to store our Subversion repositories (Subversion being on a Gentoo box). Been live a week, today we had our first issue. The following message appeared on the "svn ci" output:


snc: Commit failed:

svn: Can't move '/opt/svn_repos/CrucialConversationsLP/db/current.3.tmp' to '/opt/svn_repos/CrucialConversationsLP/db/current': Text file busy.

svn: MERGE of '/svn/repos/CrucialConversationsLP': 409 Conflict

followed by this (apache2's error-log):


[Wed Jun 14 14:05:04 2006] [error] [client 192.168.88.9] Could not MERGE resource "/svn/repos/CrucialConversationsLP/!svn/act/e920f6b2-3416-0410-b60c-8a4adf2ad0ca" into "/svn/repos/CrucialConversationsLP/courses/Crucial Conversations/slides".  [409, #0]
[Wed Jun 14 14:05:04 2006] [error] [client 192.168.88.9] An error occurred while committing the transaction.  [409, #26]
[Wed Jun 14 14:05:04 2006] [error] [client 192.168.88.9] Can't move '/opt/svn_repos/CrucialConversationsLP/db/current.10.tmp' to '/opt/svn_repos/CrucialConversationsLP/db/current': Text file busy  [409, #26]

lsof did not indicate that the "current" file was open.

The solution to this issue (for the time being) was to unmount the share and remount it. Then commits worked just fine. I also tried adding and committing test files on other projects, no issues there. So if this crops up again we'll consider an alternative backup scheme and perchance go down the NFS road.

macbook RAM

2006-06-05T15:16:00.000-06:00

If you're a developer and you just bought a new MacBook, spare yourself the lag headache and upgrade to 2G RAM (got mine for $160 @ macsolutions.com). I was about to send mine back convinced that something was wrong for how slow it was running. Sure it's warm, but with maxed ourtRAM, it sure hops.

simplified ssh and ssh-agent

2006-06-05T12:52:00.000-06:00

(condensed version of http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/keychain-guide.xml)
ssh-keygen -t dsa
scp ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub server_user@server:~/myhost.pub
ssh server_user@server "cat ~/myhost.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys"

ssh-agent
ssh-add id-dsa

OS X & subversion install: bash: line 1: svnserve: command not found

2006-05-31T21:19:00.000-06:00

Thanks to http://www.tbradshaw.net/archives/2005/03/02/subversion-on-dreamhost/, just symlinked my .profile to .bashrc and now everything works!

oh yeah, why back to Emacs?

2006-05-19T09:34:00.000-06:00

So the new projects I'll be working have a wide range of underlying languages. Decided to give Eclipse, BlueFish & JEdit a whirl (again). I'm on a much faster machine (3Ghz HT, compared to previous 1.7Ghz centrino) w/ 3G of RAM (compared to 2G) and thought these apps would perform quicker (and hence more efficient usage). Wrong.

So Eclipse was still sluggish, still a pain to configure with clicking all over the place. Same with JEdit, a royal pain to get all the plugins needed then configure everything. Worth the time? I'm too impatient since the I can't use my locate db and open files as easily (any file, that is). Bluefish seemed nice, but when I opened a large PHP file with some HTML that was generated the thing slogged my CPU parsing it. That was the end of it.

Took the 10 minutes to get JDE and php-mode up and running on my Emacs and I was back in business. Went 4 days w/o it, and now I'm in heaven again since I'm not bound to the mouse, crappy parsing, slow loading, inefficient file finding, etc.

Oh the glory of Emacs...

Emacs and Ubuntu, finally harmony

2006-05-19T09:25:00.000-06:00

Headache getting my emacs up and running smoothly after transitioning to this new box from my Gentoo laptop. Lesson learned: keep ALL my .el stuff in ~/site-load and don't use emerge/apt-get for new stuff. Thus everything is easily portable.

Secondly, font selection was jacked for some reason and I had to go about updating my .Xdefaults on this new box with a font string that will work. Best tool I found for doing so is "gtkfontsel", makes it very slick (ugly sibling is xfontsel).

For now I'm using:
emacs.font: -*-terminus-*-*-normal-*-14-*-72-72-c-80-iso8859-13

.mrxvtrc

2006-05-16T09:56:00.000-06:00

har_encoding: UTF-8
mrxvt*mfont: AR PL New Sung
mrxvt*mfontn: AR PL New Sung
mrxvt*textShadow: black
mrxvt*opacity: 50
mrxvt*OpacityDegree: 1
mrxvt*vt0*saveLines: 10000
mrxvt*initTermNumber: 3
mrxvt*protectSecondary: true
mrxvt*loginShell: true
mrxvt*scrollBar: true
mrxvt*transparent: false
mrxvt*transparentScrollbar: false
mrxvt*transparentTabbar: false
mrxvt*transparentMenubar: false
!mrxvt*foreground: darkgray
!mrxvt*background: white
mrxvt*foreground: white
mrxvt*background: gray19
mrxvt*backgroundFade: 60
mrxvt*fading: 0
!mrxvt*tintColor: darkblue
mrxvt*textShadow: black
mrxvt*textShadowMode: botright
!mrxvt*tabForeground: black
!mrxvt*tabBackground: white
!mrxvt*itabForeground: black
!mrxvt*itabBackground: white
mrxvt*tabForeground: white
mrxvt*tabBackground: black
mrxvt*itabForeground: white
mrxvt*itabBackground: darkblue
mrxvt*tabPixmap: false
mrxvt*syncTabTitle: true
mrxvt*hideTabbar: false
mrxvt*bottomTabbar: true
mrxvt*windowsSwitch: false
mrxvt*showMenu: false
mrxvt*hideButtons: true
mrxvt*xft: true
mrxvt*xftFont: Bitstream Vera Sans Mono
mrxvt*xftmFont: Bitstream Vera Sans Mono
mrxvt*xftAntialias: true
mrxvt*xftWeight: normal
mrxvt*xftSlant: roman
mrxvt*xftHinting: true
mrxvt*xftAutoHint: true
mrxvt*xftGlobalAdvance: true
mrxvt*xftWidth: normal
mrxvt*xftRGBA: rgb
mrxvt*xftSize: 11
mrxvt*cursorBlink: false
!mrxvt*cursorBlinkInterval:500
mrxvt*geometry: 80x25
mrxvt*inputMethod: fcitx
!mrxvt*cursorColor: white
mrxvt*cursorColor: lightblue
mrxvt*color0: black
mrxvt*color1: #40e0d0
mrxvt*color2: #87cefa
mrxvt*color3: #ffff00
mrxvt*color4: #d1eeee
mrxvt*color5: #eed8ae
mrxvt*color6: #b4eeb4
mrxvt*color7: gray
mrxvt*color8: gray40
mrxvt*color9: #ee6363
mrxvt*color10: #c5f779
mrxvt*color11: #fff796
mrxvt*color12: #00b2ee
mrxvt*color13: #cf9ebe
mrxvt*color14: #71bebe
mrxvt*color15: white

VMWare Ubuntu 5.10

2006-05-15T15:55:00.000-06:00

http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?threadID=29227&tstart=0
export CC=/usr/bin/gcc-3.4
ran vmware-install.pl
failed with insmod: error inserting '/tmp/vmware-config0/vmnet.o': -1 Unknown symbol in module
then ran vmware-any-any (http://platan.vc.cvut.cz/ftp/pub/vmware/), no error message
/etc/init.d/vmware stop
sudo rm /etc/vmware/not_configured
vmware

Radeon 9800 Dual-head Ubuntu 5.10

2006-05-15T14:47:00.000-06:00

# File: xorg.conf
# File generated by fglrxconfig (C) ATI Technologies, a substitute for xf86config.

# Note by ATI: the below copyright notice is there for servicing possibly
# pending third party rights on the file format and the instance of this file.
#
# Copyright (c) 1999 by The XFree86 Project, Inc.
#
# Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a
# copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"),
# to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation
# the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense,
# and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the
# Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
#
# The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in
# all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
#
# THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
# IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
# FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL
# THE XFREE86 PROJECT BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY,
# WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF
# OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
# SOFTWARE.
#
# Except as contained in this notice, the name of the XFree86 Project shall
# not be used in advertising or otherwise to promote the sale, use or other
# dealings in this Software without prior written authorization from the
# XFree86 Project.
#

# **********************************************************************
# Refer to the XF86Config(4/5) man page for details about the format of
# this file.
# **********************************************************************

# **********************************************************************
# DRI Section
# **********************************************************************
Section "dri"
# Access to OpenGL ICD is allowed for all users:
Mode 0666
# Access to OpenGL ICD is restricted to a specific user group:
# Group 100 # users
# Mode 0660
EndSection

# **********************************************************************
# Module section -- this section is used to specify
# which dynamically loadable modules to load.
# **********************************************************************
#
Section "Module"

# This loads the DBE extension module.

Load "dbe" # Double buffer extension

# This loads the miscellaneous extensions module, and disables
# initialisation of the XFree86-DGA extension within that module.
SubSection "extmod"
Option "omit xfree86-dga" # don't initialise the DGA extension
EndSubSection

# This loads the Type1 and FreeType font modules
Load "type1"
Load "freetype"

# This loads the GLX module
Load "glx" # libglx.a
Load "dri" # libdri.a

EndSection

# **********************************************************************
# Files section. This allows default font and rgb paths to be set
# **********************************************************************

Section "Files"

# The location of the RGB database. Note, this is the name of the
# file minus the extension (like ".txt" or ".db"). There is normally
# no need to change the default.

RgbPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb"

# Multiple FontPath entries are allowed (which are concatenated together),
# as well as specifying multiple comma-separated entries in one FontPath
# command (or a combination of both methods)
#
# If you don't have a floating point coprocessor and emacs, Mosaic or other
# programs take long to start up, try moving the Type1 and Speedo directory
# to the end of this list (or comment them out).
#

# FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/local/"
# FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/misc/"
# FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/:unscaled"
# FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/:unscaled"
# FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/"
# FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Speedo/"
# FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/"
# FontPath "/usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/"

# The module search path. The default path is shown here.

# ModulePath "/usr/X11R6/lib/modules"

EndSection

# **********************************************************************
# Server flags section.
# **********************************************************************

Section "ServerFlags"

# Uncomment this to cause a core dump at the spot where a signal is
# received. This may leave the console in an unusable state, but may
# provide a better stack trace in the core dump to aid in debugging

# Option "NoTrapSignals"

# Uncomment this to disable the server abort sequence
# This allows clients to receive this key event.

# Option "DontZap"

# Uncomment this to disable the / mode switching
# sequences. This allows clients to receive these key events.

# Option "Dont Zoom"

# Uncomment this to disable tuning with the xvidtune client. With
# it the client can still run and fetch card and monitor attributes,
# but it will not be allowed to change them. If it tries it will
# receive a protocol error.

# Option "DisableVidModeExtension"

# Uncomment this to enable the use of a non-local xvidtune client.

# Option "AllowNonLocalXvidtune"

# Uncomment this to disable dynamically modifying the input device
# (mouse and keyboard) settings.

# Option "DisableModInDev"

# Uncomment this to enable the use of a non-local client to
# change the keyboard or mouse settings (currently only xset).

# Option "AllowNonLocalModInDev"

EndSection

# **********************************************************************
# Input devices
# **********************************************************************

# **********************************************************************
# Core keyboard's InputDevice section
# **********************************************************************

Section "InputDevice"

Identifier "Keyboard1"
Driver "kbd"
# For most OSs the protocol can be omitted (it defaults to "Standard").
# When using XQUEUE (only for SVR3 and SVR4, but not Solaris),
# uncomment the following line.

# Option "Protocol" "Xqueue"

Option "AutoRepeat" "500 30"

# Specify which keyboard LEDs can be user-controlled (eg, with xset(1))
# Option "Xleds" "1 2 3"

# Option "LeftAlt" "Meta"
# Option "RightAlt" "ModeShift"

# To customise the XKB settings to suit your keyboard, modify the
# lines below (which are the defaults). For example, for a non-U.S.
# keyboard, you will probably want to use:
# Option "XkbModel" "pc102"
# If you have a US Microsoft Natural keyboard, you can use:
# Option "XkbModel" "microsoft"
#
# Then to change the language, change the Layout setting.
# For example, a german layout can be obtained with:
# Option "XkbLayout" "de"
# or:
# Option "XkbLayout" "de"
# Option "XkbVariant" "nodeadkeys"
#
# If you'd like to switch the positions of your capslock and
# control keys, use:
# Option "XkbOptions" "ctrl:swapcaps"

# These are the default XKB settings for XFree86
# Option "XkbRules" "xfree86"
# Option "XkbModel" "pc101"
# Option "XkbLayout" "us"
# Option "XkbVariant" ""
# Option "XkbOptions" ""

# Option "XkbDisable"

Option "XkbRules" "xfree86"
Option "XkbModel" "pc104"
Option "XkbLayout" "us"

EndSection

# **********************************************************************
# Core Pointer's InputDevice section
# **********************************************************************

Section "InputDevice"

# Identifier and driver

Identifier "Mouse1"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Protocol" "ImPS/2"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"

# When using XQUEUE, comment out the above two lines, and uncomment
# the following line.

# Option "Protocol" "Xqueue"

# Baudrate and SampleRate are only for some Logitech mice. In
# almost every case these lines should be omitted.

# Option "BaudRate" "9600"
# Option "SampleRate" "150"

# Emulate3Buttons is an option for 2-button Microsoft mice
# Emulate3Timeout is the timeout in milliseconds (default is 50ms)

# Option "Emulate3Buttons"
# Option "Emulate3Timeout" "50"

# ChordMiddle is an option for some 3-button Logitech mice

# Option "ChordMiddle"

EndSection

# **********************************************************************
# Other input device sections
# this is optional and is required only if you
# are using extended input devices. This is for example only. Refer
# to the XF86Config man page for a description of the options.
# **********************************************************************
#
# Section "InputDevice"
# Identifier "Mouse2"
# Driver "mouse"
# Option "Protocol" "MouseMan"
# Option "Device" "/dev/mouse2"
# EndSection
#
# Section "InputDevice"
# Identifier "spaceball"
# Driver "magellan"
# Option "Device" "/dev/cua0"
# EndSection
#
# Section "InputDevice"
# Identifier "spaceball2"
# Driver "spaceorb"
# Option "Device" "/dev/cua0"
# EndSection
#
# Section "InputDevice"
# Identifier "touchscreen0"
# Driver "microtouch"
# Option "Device" "/dev/ttyS0"
# Option "MinX" "1412"
# Option "MaxX" "15184"
# Option "MinY" "15372"
# Option "MaxY" "1230"
# Option "ScreenNumber" "0"
# Option "ReportingMode" "Scaled"
# Option "ButtonNumber" "1"
# Option "SendCoreEvents"
# EndSection
#
# Section "InputDevice"
# Identifier "touchscreen1"
# Driver "elo2300"
# Option "Device" "/dev/ttyS0"
# Option "MinX" "231"
# Option "MaxX" "3868"
# Option "MinY" "3858"
# Option "MaxY" "272"
# Option "ScreenNumber" "0"
# Option "ReportingMode" "Scaled"
# Option "ButtonThreshold" "17"
# Option "ButtonNumber" "1"
# Option "SendCoreEvents"
# EndSection

# **********************************************************************
# Monitor section
# **********************************************************************

# Any number of monitor sections may be present

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
# === mode lines based on GTF ===
# VGA @ 100Hz
# Modeline "640x480@100" 43.163 640 680 744 848 480 481 484 509 +hsync +vsync
# SVGA @ 100Hz
# Modeline "800x600@100" 68.179 800 848 936 1072 600 601 604 636 +hsync +vsync
# XVGA @ 100Hz
# Modeline "1024x768@100" 113.309 1024 1096 1208 1392 768 769 772 814 +hsync +vsync
# 1152x864 @ 60Hz
# Modeline "1152x864@60" 81.642 1152 1216 1336 1520 864 865 868 895 +hsync +vsync
# 1152x864 @ 85Hz
# Modeline "1152x864@85" 119.651 1152 1224 1352 1552 864 865 868 907 +hsync +vsync
# 1152x864 @ 100Hz
# Modeline "1152x864@100" 143.472 1152 1232 1360 1568 864 865 868 915 +hsync +vsync
# 1280x960 @ 75Hz
# Modeline "1280x960@75" 129.859 1280 1368 1504 1728 960 961 964 1002 +hsync +vsync
# 1280x960 @ 100Hz
# Modeline "1280x960@100" 178.992 1280 1376 1520 1760 960 961 964 1017 +hsync +vsync
# SXGA @ 100Hz
# Modeline "1280x1024@100" 190.960 1280 1376 1520 1760 1024 1025 1028 1085 +hsync +vsync
# SPEA GDM-1950 (60Hz,64kHz,110MHz,-,-): 1280x1024 @ V-freq: 60.00 Hz, H-freq: 63.73 KHz
# Modeline "GDM-1950" 109.62 1280 1336 1472 1720 1024 1024 1026 1062 -hsync -vsync
# 1600x1000 @ 60Hz
# Modeline "1600x1000" 133.142 1600 1704 1872 2144 1000 1001 1004 1035 +hsync +vsync
# 1600x1000 @ 75Hz
# Modeline "1600x1000" 169.128 1600 1704 1880 2160 1000 1001 1004 1044 +hsync +vsync
# 1600x1000 @ 85Hz
# Modeline "1600x1000" 194.202 1600 1712 1888 2176 1000 1001 1004 1050 +hsync +vsync
# 1600x1000 @ 100Hz
# Modeline "1600x1000" 232.133 1600 1720 1896 2192 1000 1001 1004 1059 +hsync +vsync
# 1600x1024 @ 60Hz
# Modeline "1600x1024" 136.385 1600 1704 1872 2144 1024 1027 1030 1060 +hsync +vsync
# 1600x1024 @ 75Hz
# Modeline "1600x1024" 174.416 1600 1712 1888 2176 1024 1025 1028 1069 +hsync +vsync
# 1600x1024 @ 76Hz
# Modeline "1600x1024" 170.450 1600 1632 1792 2096 1024 1027 1030 1070 +hsync +vsync
# 1600x1024 @ 85Hz
# Modeline "1600x1024" 198.832 1600 1712 1888 2176 1024 1027 1030 1075 +hsync +vsync
# 1920x1080 @ 60Hz
# Modeline "1920x1080" 172.798 1920 2040 2248 2576 1080 1081 1084 1118 -hsync -vsync
# 1920x1080 @ 75Hz
# Modeline "1920x1080" 211.436 1920 2056 2264 2608 1080 1081 1084 1126 +hsync +vsync
# 1920x1200 @ 60Hz
# Modeline "1920x1200" 193.156 1920 2048 2256 2592 1200 1201 1203 1242 +hsync +vsync
# 1920x1200 @ 75Hz
# Modeline "1920x1200" 246.590 1920 2064 2272 2624 1200 1201 1203 1253 +hsync +vsync
# 2048x1536 @ 60
# Modeline "2048x1536" 266.952 2048 2200 2424 2800 1536 1537 1540 1589 +hsync +vsync
# 2048x1536 @ 60
# Modeline "2048x1536" 266.952 2048 2200 2424 2800 1536 1537 1540 1589 +hsync +vsync
# 1400x1050 @ 60Hz M9 Laptop mode
# ModeLine "1400x1050" 122.000 1400 1488 1640 1880 1050 1052 1064 1082 +hsync +vsync
# 1920x2400 @ 25Hz for IBM T221, VS VP2290 and compatible display devices
# Modeline "1920x2400@25" 124.620 1920 1928 1980 2048 2400 2401 2403 2434 +hsync +vsync
# 1920x2400 @ 30Hz for IBM T221, VS VP2290 and compatible display devices
# Modeline "1920x2400@30" 149.250 1920 1928 1982 2044 2400 2402 2404 2434 +hsync +vsync

EndSection

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor1"
# === mode lines based on GTF ===
# VGA @ 100Hz
# Modeline "640x480@100" 43.163 640 680 744 848 480 481 484 509 +hsync +vsync
# SVGA @ 100Hz
# Modeline "800x600@100" 68.179 800 848 936 1072 600 601 604 636 +hsync +vsync
# XVGA @ 100Hz
# Modeline "1024x768@100" 113.309 1024 1096 1208 1392 768 769 772 814 +hsync +vsync
# 1152x864 @ 60Hz
# Modeline "1152x864@60" 81.642 1152 1216 1336 1520 864 865 868 895 +hsync +vsync
# 1152x864 @ 85Hz
# Modeline "1152x864@85" 119.651 1152 1224 1352 1552 864 865 868 907 +hsync +vsync
# 1152x864 @ 100Hz
# Modeline "1152x864@100" 143.472 1152 1232 1360 1568 864 865 868 915 +hsync +vsync
# 1280x960 @ 75Hz
# Modeline "1280x960@75" 129.859 1280 1368 1504 1728 960 961 964 1002 +hsync +vsync
# 1280x960 @ 100Hz
# Modeline "1280x960@100" 178.992 1280 1376 1520 1760 960 961 964 1017 +hsync +vsync
# SXGA @ 100Hz
# Modeline "1280x1024@100" 190.960 1280 1376 1520 1760 1024 1025 1028 1085 +hsync +vsync
# SPEA GDM-1950 (60Hz,64kHz,110MHz,-,-): 1280x1024 @ V-freq: 60.00 Hz, H-freq: 63.73 KHz
# Modeline "GDM-1950" 109.62 1280 1336 1472 1720 1024 1024 1026 1062 -hsync -vsync
# 1600x1000 @ 60Hz
# Modeline "1600x1000" 133.142 1600 1704 1872 2144 1000 1001 1004 1035 +hsync +vsync
# 1600x1000 @ 75Hz
# Modeline "1600x1000" 169.128 1600 1704 1880 2160 1000 1001 1004 1044 +hsync +vsync
# 1600x1000 @ 85Hz
# Modeline "1600x1000" 194.202 1600 1712 1888 2176 1000 1001 1004 1050 +hsync +vsync
# 1600x1000 @ 100Hz
# Modeline "1600x1000" 232.133 1600 1720 1896 2192 1000 1001 1004 1059 +hsync +vsync
# 1600x1024 @ 60Hz
# Modeline "1600x1024" 136.385 1600 1704 1872 2144 1024 1027 1030 1060 +hsync +vsync
# 1600x1024 @ 75Hz
# Modeline "1600x1024" 174.416 1600 1712 1888 2176 1024 1025 1028 1069 +hsync +vsync
# 1600x1024 @ 76Hz
# Modeline "1600x1024" 170.450 1600 1632 1792 2096 1024 1027 1030 1070 +hsync +vsync
# 1600x1024 @ 85Hz
# Modeline "1600x1024" 198.832 1600 1712 1888 2176 1024 1027 1030 1075 +hsync +vsync
# 1920x1080 @ 60Hz
# Modeline "1920x1080" 172.798 1920 2040 2248 2576 1080 1081 1084 1118 -hsync -vsync
# 1920x1080 @ 75Hz
# Modeline "1920x1080" 211.436 1920 2056 2264 2608 1080 1081 1084 1126 +hsync +vsync
# 1920x1200 @ 60Hz
# Modeline "1920x1200" 193.156 1920 2048 2256 2592 1200 1201 1203 1242 +hsync +vsync
# 1920x1200 @ 75Hz
# Modeline "1920x1200" 246.590 1920 2064 2272 2624 1200 1201 1203 1253 +hsync +vsync
# 2048x1536 @ 60
# Modeline "2048x1536" 266.952 2048 2200 2424 2800 1536 1537 1540 1589 +hsync +vsync
# 2048x1536 @ 60
# Modeline "2048x1536" 266.952 2048 2200 2424 2800 1536 1537 1540 1589 +hsync +vsync
# 1400x1050 @ 60Hz M9 Laptop mode
# ModeLine "1400x1050" 122.000 1400 1488 1640 1880 1050 1052 1064 1082 +hsync +vsync
# 1920x2400 @ 25Hz for IBM T221, VS VP2290 and compatible display devices
# Modeline "1920x2400@25" 124.620 1920 1928 1980 2048 2400 2401 2403 2434 +hsync +vsync
# 1920x2400 @ 30Hz for IBM T221, VS VP2290 and compatible display devices
# Modeline "1920x2400@30" 149.250 1920 1928 1982 2044 2400 2402 2404 2434 +hsync +vsync

EndSection

# **********************************************************************
# Graphics device section
# **********************************************************************

# Any number of graphics device sections may be present

# Standard VGA Device:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Standard VGA"
VendorName "Unknown"
BoardName "Unknown"

# The chipset line is optional in most cases. It can be used to override
# the driver's chipset detection, and should not normally be specified.

# Chipset "generic"

# The Driver line must be present. When using run-time loadable driver
# modules, this line instructs the server to load the specified driver
# module. Even when not using loadable driver modules, this line
# indicates which driver should interpret the information in this section.

Driver "vga"
# The BusID line is used to specify which of possibly multiple devices
# this section is intended for. When this line isn't present, a device
# section can only match up with the primary video device. For PCI
# devices a line like the following could be used. This line should not
# normally be included unless there is more than one video device
# installed.

# BusID "PCI:0:10:0"

# VideoRam 256

# Clocks 25.2 28.3

EndSection

# === ATI device section ===

Section "Device"
Identifier "ATI Graphics Adapter connector 0"
Driver "fglrx"
# ### generic DRI settings ###
# === disable PnP Monitor ===
#Option "NoDDC"
# === disable/enable XAA/DRI ===
Option "no_accel" "no"
Option "no_dri" "no"
# === misc DRI settings ===
Option "mtrr" "off" # disable DRI mtrr mapper, driver has its own code for mtrr
# ### FireGL DDX driver module specific settings ###
# === Screen Management ===
Option "DesktopSetup" "(null)"
Option "ScreenOverlap" "0"
Option "GammaCorrectionI" "0x00000000"
Option "GammaCorrectionII" "0x00000000"
# === OpenGL specific profiles/settings ===
Option "Capabilities" "0x00000000"
Option "CapabilitiesEx" "0x00000000"
# === Video Overlay for the Xv extension ===
Option "VideoOverlay" "on"
# === OpenGL Overlay ===
# Note: When OpenGL Overlay is enabled, Video Overlay
# will be disabled automatically
Option "OpenGLOverlay" "off"
# === Center Mode (Laptops only) ===
Option "CenterMode" "off"
# === Pseudo Color Visuals (8-bit visuals) ===
Option "PseudoColorVisuals" "off"
# === QBS Management ===
Option "Stereo" "off"
Option "StereoSyncEnable" "1"
# === FSAA Management ===
Option "FSAAEnable" "no"
Option "FSAAScale" "1"
Option "FSAADisableGamma" "no"
Option "FSAACustomizeMSPos" "no"
Option "FSAAMSPosX0" "0.000000"
Option "FSAAMSPosY0" "0.000000"
Option "FSAAMSPosX1" "0.000000"
Option "FSAAMSPosY1" "0.000000"
Option "FSAAMSPosX2" "0.000000"
Option "FSAAMSPosY2" "0.000000"
Option "FSAAMSPosX3" "0.000000"
Option "FSAAMSPosY3" "0.000000"
Option "FSAAMSPosX4" "0.000000"
Option "FSAAMSPosY4" "0.000000"
Option "FSAAMSPosX5" "0.000000"
Option "FSAAMSPosY5" "0.000000"
# === Misc Options ===
Option "UseFastTLS" "0"
Option "BlockSignalsOnLock" "on"
Option "UseInternalAGPGART" "yes"
Option "ForceGenericCPU" "no"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0" # vendor=1002, device=4e48
Screen 0
EndSection

Section "Device"
Identifier "ATI Graphics Adapter connector 1"
Driver "fglrx"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0" # vendor=1002, device=4e48
Screen 1
EndSection

# **********************************************************************
# Screen sections
# **********************************************************************

# Any number of screen sections may be present. Each describes
# the configuration of a single screen. A single specific screen section
# may be specified from the X server command line with the "-screen"
# option.
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen0"
Device "ATI Graphics Adapter connector 0"
Monitor "Monitor0"
DefaultDepth 24
#Option "backingstore"

Subsection "Display"
Depth 24
Modes "1600x1200"
ViewPort 0 0 # initial origin if mode is smaller than desktop
# Virtual 1280 1024
EndSubsection
EndSection

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen1"
Device "ATI Graphics Adapter connector 1"
Monitor "Monitor1"
DefaultDepth 24
#Option "backingstore"

Subsection "Display"
Depth 24
Modes "1600x1200"
ViewPort 0 0 # initial origin if mode is smaller than desktop
# Virtual 1280 1024
EndSubsection
EndSection

# **********************************************************************
# ServerLayout sections.
# **********************************************************************

# Any number of ServerLayout sections may be present. Each describes
# the way multiple screens are organised. A specific ServerLayout
# section may be specified from the X server command line with the
# "-layout" option. In the absence of this, the first section is used.
# When now ServerLayout section is present, the first Screen section
# is used alone.

Section "ServerLayout"

# The Identifier line must be present
Identifier "Server Layout"

# Each Screen line specifies a Screen section name, and optionally
# the relative position of other screens. The four names after
# primary screen name are the screens to the top, bottom, left and right
# of the primary screen.

Screen "Screen0"
Screen "Screen1" LeftOf "Screen0"

# Each InputDevice line specifies an InputDevice section name and
# optionally some options to specify the way the device is to be
# used. Those options include "CorePointer", "CoreKeyboard" and
# "SendCoreEvents".

InputDevice "Mouse1" "CorePointer"
InputDevice "Keyboard1" "CoreKeyboard"

EndSection

### EOF ###

Ubuntu Radeon

2006-05-15T13:36:00.000-06:00

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BinaryDriverHowto/ATI
completed 1-5