It’s just data
Nearly six years ago, I set up a personal Jabber server using ejabberd. This setup survived the server migration to Ubuntu 8.04 and 10.04. This past weekend, I attempted to migrate that to a server running 12.04 and all I could get out of it was an erlang crash dump.
A quick scan for successors turned up prosody. Configuration was as simple as adding a VirtualHost and setting allow_registration to true.
It didn’t take long for me to outgrow using a shell script for deployment. The new chef solo recipes are considerably more verbose, but can be updated and rerun many times.
My usage is undoubtedly more idiomatic Ruby than idiomatic Chef, and I’m not tapping into the vast Chef ecosystem, but I can now provision a new virtual machine for running tests in under 3 minutes.
Yesterday, I used vagrant for the first time. Within a few hours, I had a reproducible bootstrap that can run my Agile Web Development with Rails tests. For the short term, this is useful for regression testing the Installation chapter. Longer term, hopefully it will make it easier for the rails-core team to reproduce problems.
Armed with my new Mac Mini, I set off to to repeat my testing of various versions of Rails and Ruby. Whereas I have been using, and happy with, RVM on Ubuntu for dealing with Ruby versions; I decided to try rbenv/ruby-build. What I started with was a new machine, a full installation of XCode, the Command Line utilities, and Homebrew.
Five years ago today, I bought a mac mini to do book development. On Wednesday, I bought a new mac mini simply because I’m told that Mountain Lion won’t install on a vintage 2008 mac mini, and because my readers have had problems on Mac OS X 10.8.
Overall, I have continued to be unimpressed, and can’t help but wonder why my open source friends seem attracted to this system.
Scott Hanselman: Plex is the media center software ecosystem I’ve been waiting for
Unhappy with Time Warner Cable, I’ve been exploring netflix, dish, sling, roku, samsung, ffmpeg, handbrake, and cclive. Next up, some form of video capture device... at the moment I’m leaning towards Hauppauge.
I’m not quite prepared to declare Plex as the centerpiece of my home media center, but it certainly has become a key component.
Mike Amundsen: I have the even greater privilege of working with Leonard and Sam on a new book - “RESTful Web APIs”. It’s scheduled for completion by the end of Q1 2013 and should be available soon after.
While I’m formally on this project, I’m not planning on doing any writing beyond possibly an introduction. As Mike put it, this book isn’t merely a 2nd edition, but rather more of a “follow-up” seven years on. I’m very much looking forward to seeing where Mike can help Leonard take this work.
Google has reported feedvalidator.org as being hacked, and people are tweeting and emailing me.
I’ve looked at the markup being returned and it looks clean to me. The .htaccess file looks fine. A git status command shows that none of the files on the server have been modified.
Can somebody identify what is causing Google to be concerned?
Peter Linss: I really want to see the TAG be more involved with the rest of the working groups at the W3C
I’ll come out and say it. I’m a skeptic. I’ll note that the three out of the four of the “TAG reformists” statements do NOT list getting involved with the rest of the working groups at the W3C as a goal. What am I missing?
It started with two notifications we received via postal mail. First Time Warner was going to start charging us rent for an outdated cable modem. Second they were going to drop a number of cable channels, but if I acted now, I could request a digital adapter which would allow me to watch these channels on exactly one TV.
This process has turned a fairly complacent Time Warner customer into one that is actively seeking alternatives. In looking around, I see plenty of promo offers of more service than I have (basic cable and basic internet) for considerably less than I am currently paying. I am OK with waiting an hour or more for an answer, but I am not OK with having to be on hold for that entire time. And I’m definitely not OK with renting a separate box per device simply to get access.
This process has turned a fairly complacent Time Warner customer into one that is actively seeking alternatives. So I am beginning my research: starting with looking for alternatives to cable TV. What I want is a single plan that allows me to watch whatever I want wherever I want. I am OK with upgrading my devices as long as we are talking about a purchase not a lease.
Any pointers people might leave in comments would be appreciated.
I see that Henri Sivonen is once again being snarky without backing his position. I’ll state my position, namely that something like the polyglot specification needs to exist, and why I believe that to be the case.
It makes sense for authors who may produce a handful of pages to be processed by an uncountable number of imperfect tools to agree on restrictions that may go well behond the minimal logical consequences from normative text elsewhere if those restrictions increase the odds of the document produced being correctly processed.
Such restrictions are not a bad thing. In fact, such restrictions are very much a good thing.
Doug Sheppers: WebPlatform.org will have accurate, up-to-date, comprehensive references and tutorials for every part of client-side development and design, with quirks and bugs revealed and explained. It will have in-depth indicators of browser support and interoperability, with links to tests for specific features. It will feature discussions and script libraries for cutting-edge features at various states of implementation or standardization, with the opportunity to give feedback into the process before the features are locked down. It will have features to let you experiment with and share code snippets, examples, and solutions. It will have an API to access the structured information for easy reuse. It will have resources for teachers to help them train their students with critical skills. It will have information you just can’t get anywhere else, and it will have it all in one place.
But it doesn’t. Not yet.
Robin Berjon: Looking at it in terms of rebounds, plot twists, nurtured healing and abandonment, love and betrayal, strife, toil, stunning victories, dispersions and last minute rallies the only thing that distinguishes HTML’s history from a charts-topping teenage fantasy saga seems to be the lack of vampires. And even then, were vampires around I’m not sure we’d notice them for all the action.
Bill McCoy: EPUB in effect takes the Wild, Wild Web and tames it. EPUB for example requires use of the XML serialization of HTML5 (XHTML5), rather than “Tag Soup” aka “Street” HTML. This means that EPUB content, unlike arbitrary web pages, can be reliably created and manipulated with XML tool chains. EPUB defined Reading System conformance more tightly than HTML5 defines for browser User Agents, pinning down things that are under-specified in the union of W3C standards. [via Patrick Mueller]
The interface is a bit low level, but workable:
require 'dbus' # gem install ruby-dbus
bus = DBus::SessionBus.instance
sm = bus.service('org.gnome.SessionManager').object('/org/gnome/SessionManager')
sm.introspect
sm.default_iface = 'org.gnome.SessionManager'
cookie = sm.Inhibit($0, 0, 'inhibiting', 4).first
at_exit { cookie = sm.Uninhibit(cookie) if sm.IsInhibited(4).first }
Note: the call to Uninhibit is optional — it will occur on process exit anyway.
Hat tip to JanuZ.
Jacques Distler: Remarkably, even after a decade of such pain, Unicode is, in 2012, still “cutting edge.”
Ouch.
I previously had installed Ubuntu 12.04 on a NetBook, and my overall impression was simply that it was more stable than its predecessor — particularly for Unity.
For the first time I tried it on a desktop, and to my surprise the following worked:
sudo apt-get install ruby1.9.3
And by worked, I mean not only did it install Ruby 1.9.3, but it made it (and gem, and irc) the default ruby.
For those that still use rvm, (many of the ‘cool kids’ have moved on to rbenv, I noticed a few niggles
Firefox 13 for developers: Support for -moz-border-radius* and -moz-box-shadow has been removed. Authors should use unprefixed border-radius or box-shadow instead. See bug 693510
+1
Dan Webb: The first thing that you might notice is that permalink URLs are now simpler: they no longer use the hashbang (#!). While hashbang-style URLs have a handful of limitations, our primary reason for this change is to improve initial page-load performance.
chat implements a shared textarea field across multiple clients. Demonstrates bi-directional communication.
diskusage is more typical of my usage. The du command produces tabular output that the user may want to sort different ways and yet is may take considerable time to complete.