I thought that it might be equally enlightening to “port” the Depot application to Jruby using the Jruby On Rails libraries. I had two basic milestones in mind:

1. Development & Testing – I wanted to be able to develop and test my application just like I did with CRuby, using tools such as mongrel and rake.
2. J2EE Deployment – The most popular process for deploying a Java-based application is to build a WAR file and then deploy it to a Java application server such as Tomcat (which was my choice). I wanted to be able to complete these steps with my RoR application.

The entire process was surprisingly easy. The first milestone, Development and Testing, is covered in this article. The J2EE Deployment milestone will be covered in a different blog article.

Development & Testing

Here are some simple steps that will have your application running with mongrel very quickly.

Please note that I am executing the steps below on a netbook running Ubuntu 9.10. These commands should work on most Linux distributions, however. Also, they should work with a few small adjustments on a Windows machine.

Prepping Your Project Directory

First, you’re not going to want to make these changes to your original version of the Depot code. You will probably want to create a copy of it that is designed to work with Jruby. Here’s how I did it on my machine:

$ cd /home/tom/Dev/ruby
$ cp -r depot depot-jruby

The location of your depot folder will probably be different on your machine, but I’m sure that you can make the necessary adjustments

Also, please note that it is a good idea to “freeze” your rails version now if you have not done so already. You can do this by executing the following command:

$ cd /home/tom/Dev/ruby/depot-jruby
$ jruby -S rake rails:freeze:edge RELEASE=2.2.2

Installing Jruby

Next, you’ll want to install Jruby. There’s a lot of ways of doing this, but this method worked pretty well on my development machine:

$ cd /tmp
$ wget http://jruby.kenai.com/downloads/1.4.0/jruby-bin-1.4.0.tar.gz
$ tar xvfz jruby-bin-1.4.0.tar.gz
$ sudo cp -r jruby-1.4.0 /opt
# please replace tom:tom with your user and group
$ sudo chown -R tom:tom /opt/jruby-1.4.0
$ sudo ln -s /opt/jruby-1.4.0 /opt/jruby

Then simply add /opt/jruby to your PATH, and see if you can execute jirb.

Installing Rails And Other Libraries

This process is just as easy using Jruby as it is using CRuby.

Install the gems using these commands:

$ jruby -S gem install rails --version 2.2.2
$ jruby -S gem install mongrel jruby-openssl jdbc-sqlite3

A few notes on those commands:

• Prepend the gem command with jruby -S to ensure that you are using the right version of the gem command. This also works with any other Jruby command, such as rake.
• Since the example uses the 2.2.2 version of Rails, we’re going to need it too.
• jdbc-sqlite3 is the Java version of the sqlite3 DB driver.
• The jruby-openssl package is nice to have regardless of what you’re installing with rubygems.

Making Depot Safe For JDBC

You can’t use the C-based database drivers with Jruby, but luckily, the Jruby developers have made it very easy to use the JDBC-based equivalents.

First, make sure that you are using version 0.9.2 of the activerecord-jdbc-adapter driver or higher. You can check this by executing the following command:

$ jruby -S gem list | grep activerecord-jdbc-adapter
activerecord-jdbc-adapter (0.9.2)

Next, execute the following command from the root directory of your project:

$ jruby script/generate jdbc
exists  config/initializers
create  config/initializers/jdbc.rb
create  lib/tasks
create  lib/tasks/jdbc.rake

That’s it! Your Depot application is now ready to use Jruby-on-Rails.

Please note that I did not modify my config/database.yml file or hack any part of the Rails libraries to make JDBC work. These steps used to be necessary, but the command listed above gives you a much easier and cleaner way of using JDBC. For more information, please check out this article:

• Fresh 0.9.2 activerecord-jdbc-adapter Release

Test

To test my work, I did the following:

• I ran the mongrel app server and executed some manual tests of the Depot web site. That worked well.
• I execute all of my tests using the rake test command. This also worked as well as it had with the CRuby version of my application.

Success! Now it would be nice to review all of the files that changed or were added. Since I checked my project into my git repository before making any changes, I can get the information that I need pretty easily:

$ git status
# branch master
# Changes to be committed:
#   (use "git reset HEAD <file>..." to unstage)
#
#       new file:   config/initializers/jdbc.rb
#       new file:   lib/tasks/jdbc.rake

That’s it! No code or config changes were necessary.

Conclusion

As you can see, it’s fairly easy to “port” the Depot application to use Java-based versions of mongrel, rails, and the other libraries from the Agile Development With Rails book. In my next article, I will take this application and deploy it on top of a Tomcat server.

• Rails Powered by the GlassFish Application Server – Nice overview of RoR on top of the Glassfish J2EE server, but it’s a bit dated.
• Gnome 3 – A Quick Visual Tour – A few of my nerdy friends are pretty excited about this.  I’ve been using Gnome on-and-off for about 8 years now, and am pretty happy with it, so I hope the new revision doesn’t break any of my favorite features.
• Web Browser History – First, Early – This is a cool link courtesy of the Myths Of Innovation book by Scott Berkun.  I’m surprised by the total number, and that I had never heard of most of them.

Solaris Zones

I learned late last week that Solaris Zones use different monitoring tools than any other Unix or Linux distribution, so I spent a good portion of this week learning about them.

• Monitoring Memory and Disk usage [Joyent Wiki] – This has some nice information on using prstat from within a Zone.
• The Joyent Community / How to check my zone size? – Another great post on Zones from the Joyent web sites. This article discusses the differences between RSS and SIZE/SWAP on Solaris.
• Slightly Skeptical View on Solaris Zones – This is a good, general overview of Solaris Zone technology.

RoR Deployment With Capistrano

I get the impression that a lot of people have a love/hate relationship with Capistrano, and I believe that I’m joining those ranks. When your recipe finally works, it works very well, but getting to that point can be very frustrating. Here are some links that helped me figure things out:

• Capistrano Home Page – This is a good starting point, but it’s lacking much advanced information.
• Streaming Capistrano — err.the_blog – A nice little tip if you want to monitor remote command-line streams using Capistrano.

Heroku + Toto

I discovered the Toto blogging “engine” this week, which led me to Heroku. It’s a very interesting deployment and hosting model for Ruby web applications, and I look forward to learning more about it.

• Deploy A Free, Ruby Powered Blog In 5 Minutes with Toto and Heroku – The title really says it all.
• My Toto Test Blog – An interesting test, but I don’t think that it will replace my WordPress blog any time soon.
• UsabilityPost – Blogging Simplified – A cool Toto blog with a great CSS stylesheet.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Overall, this book had a lot of very good information, and it was very helpful to me as I deployed my first Ruby-On-Rails application into a “Production” environment.

Here’s the high points:

• Lots of good information on tools such as Capistrano, MySQL, Mongrel, Apache, and nginx.
• The authors clearly know what they are talking about.
• It’s helpful if you’re deploying a “toy” application (like I am) and if you’re deploying a large, clustered application.
• It doesn’t assume that you’re already an expert on either Web app deployment or Ruby-On-Rails.

Here are some of the things that could be better:

• This book was published over a year ago, and it already feels out-of-date. For example, there isn’t one mention of Phusion Passenger, even though this tool seems to be the new standard app server for Ruby-On-Rails in Production environments.
• This is very subjective, but I feel like the information could have been organized a little better. I felt as if the author jumped around a bit sometimes.
• Also, some of the passages were a little difficult to read due to their incorrect sentence structure. My writing isn’t perfect either, but I believe that the editor should have fixed more of these mistakes.

If you’re deploying a Ruby app in any setting, then this is a good book to get. I just don’t know if I would actually buy it.

View all my reviews >>

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
In general, this book does a fairly good job of helping you create a rails-based application. Part 3 includes some great in-depth information on the topics that are briefly discussed in Part 2.

I only have one real gripe about this book. It packs in lots of topics (e.g. db theory, AJAX, unit testing, security, deployment), but it doesn’t really tell you much about them. Therefore, if you have a problem, then good luck figuring it out using the content in the book.

A good example is the final chapter which covers deployment. The chapter devotes only a few small paragraphs to configuring Apache for passenger. To me, this section was completely useless unless you were already an expert with Apache configuration. I ended that chapter with a broken Apache server and no resources (from the book) to begin fixing it.

Another problem that I had with that chapter is that it really didn’t follow the pattern that the chapters in Part 2 used. In those chapters, the authors would should you how to do something relatively small, show you how to test it, and then provide some troubleshooting information if the task was particularly complex. The deployment chapter gave you a *very brief and generalized* tutorial in each section, and then just assumed that everything went perfectly. It didn’t show you how to test anything, and it didn’t help you troubleshoot any possible problems.

Don’t get me wrong. I know that no book will provide all of the information that I would ever need about a subject, and thank goodness for the internet in these situations. I was just hoping that all of the chapters in a book that I actually bought would provide better information than some person’s blog.

So in general, I guess I would have to say that this was a very good book with some bad chapters that were tacked-on at the end.

View all my reviews >>

One of my goals for 2010 is to gain a decent understanding of the Ruby On Rails framework.  I don’t think that this knowledge will directly help me with my current job (as a FileNet P8 administrator), but I do think that it will provide some good benefits.

First, learning about something that’s a little bit outside of your comfort zone can often help you with your day-to-day tasks.  For example, if you teach yourself the basics of Java development, then you will know how to read a stack trace.  Having this knowledge is very important if you want to administer software written in Java.

Also,  it’s just fun.  Creating something useful out of a few lines of text never ceases to amaze me.  Also, I find that learning new technical skills is good for your brain.

Finally, who knows what the future may bring?  It never hurts to know as much as you can about popular technologies in general when you work in IT.

So to get started, I purchased a copy of Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition from the Pragmatic Programmers’ web site.  This book seems to be one of the best for beginners, and I really love that you can buy DRM-free ebooks from the Pragmatic Programmers’ web site.

Installing Ubuntu Packages

So enough background information.  Here’s how I set up my system to get started with Rails development.  First, I installed all of the necessary software on my Ubuntu 9.10 machine that was  available as an Ubuntu package:

sudo apt-get install rails ruby-full rubygems rake mongrel git-core sqlite3

Here’s why I installed more than just the rails and ruby pacakges.  When you install Ruby from source on a Linux machine, you get a lot of software.  In addition to the Ruby runtime, you get fun tools like irb, rubygems, rdoc, ri, and rake.  However, when you install the ruby package on Ubuntu and Debian, you just get the Ruby runtime along with a a couple of libraries.  Since I’m lazy efficient guy, I decided to install the ruby-full package instead to save a few keystrokes.  Unfortunately, the ruby-full package still doesn’t include rake or rubygems, so I installed those manually.

Mongrel is a developer’s web server that is designed to work very well with Ruby on Rails development.  Since I am also impatient, I wanted a web server that would work a little faster than WEBrick.

Finally, I installed git because I wanted to share code between two different computers.  Git is a version control system that is very popular with Ruby developers, so I figured that I would use the most popular Ruby-related tools while I’m learning about Ruby.

Installing Software Without apt-get

Natrually, you can’t install everything that you need with apt-get.  For starters, the version of rails that is used in Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition is 2.2.2, so let’s install that using rubygems:

sudo gem install rails --version 2.2.2

This operation took a little while (~ 7 minutes) on my machine for some reason.

Note: For some reason, this bog

Next, I’m a Vim user, so I would like to see if the rails.vim plugin would help me at all.  There is an official Ubuntu package for this plugin called vim-rails, but when I try to install it using apt-get, I get the following error:

Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
vim-rails: Depends: vim-full but it is not installable
E: Broken packages

When I tried to install the vim-full package on my machine, I got this error:

Package vim-full is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source
E: Package vim-full has no installation candidate

Ok, so after all of that, let’s just install it the easy way:

(Download the latest version of rails.zip from the rails.vim download page)

$ cp rails.zip ~/.vim

$ cd ~/.vim

$ unzip rails.zip

Finally, open vim or gvim and execute the following command:

:helptags ~/.vim/doc

In case your interested, here are the other Vim-related packages that I have installed on my machine:

• vim-common
• vim-gnome
• vim-gui-commom
• vim-runtime
• vim-tiny

Conclusion

And that’s it!  I now appear to have everything that I need to complete the beginning examples in Agile Web Development with Rails using Ubuntu 9.10 and Vim.

Update (1/20/10) – I added the sqlite3 package to the apt-get line above.  This package is necessary if you want to query your database manually.

Another requirement that I had was that I wanted the phone to work with the T-Mobile pre-paid service. I’m actually a really big fan of T-Mobile’s price and network coverage

The closest thing I could find was the Nokia 2760. On occasion, it would be available on th T-Mobile web site, but it couldn’t be found when my phone died. I therefore checked the Walgreens and Radio Shack stores in my town until I found one at “The Shack” (as the employees seem to be forced to call it). It was $40 plus tax, which means that I won’t lose any sleep if my daughter tries to flush it down the toilet.

To “activate” the phone, I simply took the SIM card out of my old phone and placed it in the new one. 20 seconds later, I was able to receive calls using my mobile number. I didn’t have to contact T-Mobile even once, and my old “plan” seems to work with the new phone very well.

The biggest questions that I had when I bought this phone were “what was missing from my old phone” and “what did I need to buy”. Here’s the results:

Missing

• This phone doesn’t have any buttons on the outside like my old one did. I really liked having a volume and F-you button on the outside of the phone. The 2760 forces you to open the button to silence an incoming call, and I have yet to figure out how to adjust call volume without 5 button clicks.
• I can’t record video on this phone like I could with the old phone. This isn’t really a bad thing, however, since the old phone’s videos were just god-awful.
• Apparently, Nokia phones no longer come with a ringtone that sounds like a phone ringing. And I guess noticing that makes me some type of old fogie who can’t figure out why stores no longer carry Lawrence Welk LP’s. I tried to buy one from T-Mobile’s ringtone shop, but I couldn’t find one.
• The 2760 doesn’t have a little antenna nub sticking out of the top.

Different & New

• Bluetooth! I know I am the last person in America to buy a bluetooth-enabled phone, but I’m really enjoying it so far. On my 6101, I actually purchased the compatible serial cable from Nokia, which was around $50 if I remember correctly. I hate that I have to basically throw away that investment, but I am loving how easy it is to use bluetooth. Also, I purchased this bluetooth adapter from Newegg for $15, and it works very well on both XP and Ubuntu 9.04.
• The software interface has changed a little bit, but it’s nothing too revolutionary. If you’re used to your old phone’s interface, then this one should be very intuitive.
• I can now add MP3 ringtones from my MP3 collection. Sweet! Now I just need to find an MP3 of a phone ringing
• I can log into Gmail with this phone, which I couldn’t do on my old phone for some reason. That’s nice, but the interface and network speed are nothing to write home about.
• The battery model changed. My old phone’s battery model was BL-4C, and my new phone’s battery model is BL-4B. I don’t yet know if the two models are interchangeable, but I doubt they are.

What Hasn’t Changed

• The wall AC adapter looks like it’s identical. Based on that, it doesn’t look like I need to buy another car charger.
• The photo quality appears to be identical.
• The phone still has a ridiculously small amount of storage. I think the official amount is 11 MB. Oh well, I already have a digital camera and an MP3 player, so I guess I don’t need a phone that does all of that too.

Conclusion

If you like little Nokia flip phones, then this one seems to be as good as its predecessors. I’m pretty happy with it so far, and it’s hard to beat the price.

MythTv

The OS upgrade included an upgrade of MythTv from 0.21 to 0.22, so I was a little nervous about how well mythbackend and all of my MythTv-related applications (like mythweb and nuvexport) would work. To my surprise, mythbackend and mythweb both upgraded flawlessly. This is a really impressive feat, and it reflects the hard work that the MythTv package maintainers put into each Ubuntu release.

The nuvexport package is broken for me, but I think that’s because I compiled a customized version of ffmpeg. Oh well, this seems to be a common hurdle when I upgrade Ubuntu.

One little thing that I did have to fix after the upgrade was my MySQL configuration. The upgrade laid down the default version of the /etc/mysql/my.cnf file (after asking, of course). This file was configured to block any computer from using MySQL over the network. This is bad for me, because I like to watch my MythTv movies from other computers using mythfrontend.

To fix this, I simply commented out the following line in my.cnf on my MythTv server by placing a # in front of it:

 bind-address            = 127.0.0.1

After that, I simply restarted MySQL and I was able to use mythfrontend from my other computers.

VirtualBox

I run Windows XP in a VirtualBox VM for work, so it’s very important that both VirtualBox and my XP image work properly at all times. Again, to my surprise, everything worked perfectly after the upgrade. I didn’t even need to re-install VirtualBox. The VirtualBox kernel module was automatically re-compiled during the upgrade process, so I didn’t even have to do that.

Please note that I was using the absolute latest stable version of VirtualBox (3.0.12) before I started the upgrade. Your mileage may vary if you are using an older version.

Overall

Again, I am very impressed by how well everything went. I don’t see why I would ever choose to do a fresh installation of Ubuntu again on this machine.

Caveat Emptor

The automatic upgrade process is far from perfect, and your results may be different. Before you start any major upgrade, make sure that you perform the following steps:

1. Make a backup of all of your important files – I use rsnapshot to back up my important files daily, and it has saved my bacon more than a couple of times. Also, it’s a good idea to store this backup on a separate disk from the boot disk.
2. Download the current and target versions of Ubuntu and burn them to CD’s – If things do go south, then you will want to be able to either reinstall the current working version of Ubuntu or the target version. Having the actual ISO’s available on a CD may save you a ton of time and grief.

Good luck!

I’ve been using an Asus EEE PC 900 netbook for about a year now, and have used it mostly for light word processing and web browsing. I also have a MythTV server running in my basement on an old Duron-based system. I can do almost all of my personal daily work on the EEE PC, but when I need to do anything MythTV-related, I’m forced to switch machines.

This can be a pain, so I decided to try running the “frontend” for MythTV on my EEE PC. To my surprise, everything is working very well. It only took me about 5 minutes to install and configure the frontend software, and after that, I was able to do the following on my netbook:

• Watch live tv
• Watch recorded shows
• Edit shows (i.e. cut out commercials)

And the best part is that it’s all working very well over my wireless G network. Your results may vary, but at least it’s nice to know that this configuration works for some people.

Here’s some more information about my setup in case you want to try this yourself:

• My netbook has a 900 Mhz processor, 1 GB of RAM, and a solid-state hard drive
• I am using the integrated graphics card made by Intel. Apparently, it uses the i810 chipset.
• I am serving up standard-definition television

And finally, a few caveats:

• I don’t know the limits of the video card that comes with my netbook. The highest resolution that I’ve tried is 1280×1024 on a 17″ monitor, and it looked pretty good. I have no idea how it would look at a higher resolution on a more regular-sized TV.
• I have heard that his netbook simply can’t display HD recordings. I’m not an expert on this type of thing (since I don’t have an HD TV or monitor), however.
• As with any hardware purchase, don’t buy anything based solely on a blog post or product review. This system worked well for me, but it could work terribly for you for a variety of reasons. Do a decent amount of research before you spend any money. For example, the MythTV wiki and mailing list are great places to do exactly this type of research.

Another thing that I initially liked about the Zen was how well it worked with Ubuntu Linux 8.04. From Amarok, I could add and manage files as easily as I could with my old iPod.

Then I updated my OS to use Ubuntu 9.04. The Zen would mount automatically when you plugged it in, but I couldn’t access it using any music player such as Amarok, RhythmBox, or Banshee. And if I could access the player using one of those apps, the connection was always very flaky. I might be able to move one or two songs, but eventually, something would crash and I would have to start over again.

This thread on the Ubuntu forums shows that many other Zen users were having the same problem:

• http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1146528

The basic advice was to unmount the Zen after it was automatically mounted, and then access it using your favorite music player. This only worked for me sporadically at first. And if that wasn’t weird enough, the Amarok maintainers decided to do the following:

• Completely change the Amarok GUI interface
• Completely change the way you copy music to an MP3 player.

I figured almost everything out eventually, so I thought I would share it here.

1. First, plug your Zen into your computer. You should now see a Zen icon on your desktop.
   • 
2. Next, right-click on that icon and choose the Unmount Volume option. This may seem counter-intuitive, but it’s what you need to do.
3. Next, open Amarok. If you don’t see the Amarok window after a minute, then look for the howling wolf icon in your task tray. You will need to right-click on it and choose Restore.
   • Note: This process may work with other music players, but I haven’t tested it.
4. After Amarok opens, you should see the following items in Amarok:
   1. An MP3 player icon with a red X and green + next to it.
      • 
   2. Your Zen listed on the left-hand side of the screen.
      • 
   3. If you don’t see it at first, then make sure that you have clicked on the Collection button on the left-hand side of the screen.
   4. Also, If you see the MP3 player icon but your player isn’t listed on the left-hand side of the screen, then click on the green + button.

Now you can copy individual songs from your Local Collection by right-clicking on a song or album and choosing Copy To Collection -> Creative Zen. That should do it. I’ve had pretty good luck with this system as long as I didn’t try to move over 6 albums’ worth of MP3’s at once.

And here are some of the differences that you need to get used to when using the 2.x version of Amarok:

• You can no longer copy playlists over to your Zen. This is a big disappointment to me, and I can’t figure out why the Amarok maintainers took this functionality away.
• You can no longer “queue” up MP3’s that you want to copy to your Zen and then copy them all over at once. Again, another great feature that was taken away for some mysterious reason.
• Album covers are no longer copied to your Zen. This isn’t a huge disappointment, but it was always a nice feature of the pre-2.x version of Amarok.

In the end, I’m very appreciative that Canonical, the Gnome group, and the Amarok maintainers provide such excellent software that makes my life so much more enjoyable. And I’m glad that I finally figured out a somewhat-reliable process for copying MP3’s from my hard drive to my Zen.