Arbormatic - Australian Startup
November 22nd, 2011Arbormatic is a independent Melbourne-based startup specialising in improving the productivity-to-paperwork balance of Arborists.
Rails 3 on Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty)
February 17th, 2011What a pain! I needed to install a rails app onto a local VPS (for local latency speed reasons) and the only thing available was Ubuntu 9.04. My app was developed in Rails 3 within Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) LTS.
As there weren’t any VPS’s around offering similar rates in this country, I decided to go with the option offering Jaunty.
I needed rails 3, apache 2, phusion passenger, and working mysql with connectors.
There was nothing definitive out there in the googlesphere which would tell me what was too old for rails 3. So here’s the summary:=.
The components I had to install from scratch were git (my solution uses git/capistrano to deploy) and sqlite3. (Jaunty’s sqlite3 is too old)
Packages
The following seemed to be the bare minimum in terms of packages (i no, rite!?):
apt-get install apache2 mysql-server mysql-client screen bind9 dnsutils php5 build-essential ruby-full rake libxml2-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev apache2-threaded-dev
Sqlite3
Jaunty’s sqlite v3.6.10 is too old for Rails 3.
Make sure packages sqlite3 and libsqlite3-dev are ABSENT (apt-get remove them to be sure).
Then, grab the newest version of sqlite 3.7 with autoconf from http://www.sqlite.org/download.html - for example: wget http://www.sqlite.org/sqlite-autoconf-3070500.tar.gz
untar it ; ./configure ; make ; sudo make install
then,
gem install sqlite3
(there should be no issues)
Rubygems
Jaunty’s rubygems is too old to even consider here. Let’s grab it from source:
wget http://production.cf.rubygems.org/rubygems/rubygems-1.3.6.tgz (or a newer one if you prefer)
untar; sudo ruby setup.rb ; ln -s /usr/bin/gem1.8 /usr/bin/gem
Rails 3
Install it using rubygems, now that we have a working ruby gems:
gem install rails
easy!
Passenger
We use rubygems again:
gem install passenger
then, to compile and install the module
sudo ./passenger-install-apache2-module
(this script will verify a number of dependencies and show them in green if you’ve followed my previous steps).
Follow the steps required at the end of the script - that is, insert the LoadModule statements into /etc/apache2/httpd.conf.
Now restart apache, set up your virtualhosts, and you should be ready to rock!
Microsoft’s Interpretation of RTF landscape tags in Word
February 14th, 2011I have a rails application which generates RTF files based on site content. One of the data tables used in this report required that part of the report show in landscape mode in Microsoft Word.
There are a few documented RTF tags that should do this:
\landscape
\lndscpsxn
etc.
Word generally ignores both on their own, unless other some other elements in the RTF are perfect.
To start learning what Word actually requires to get landscape RTF pages within other pages, I created a basic RTF in word with two lines of text
“This is in a portrait page”
“This is in a landscape page”
Saved this in RTF format. 32k of junk!
After about an hour of pruning everything I could find that would not break the way the document appeared, I ended up with simply:
{\rtf1\ansi
{This is some text in portrait}
{\sect }
\pard \sectd \lndscpsxn\pgwsxn16840\pghsxn11901
{This is some text in landscape }
}
Voila!
Adjusted my app to manually force the following RTF tags in:
{\sect } \sectd \lndscpsxn\pgwsxn\pghsxn
prior to the page break and we were good!
This post is intended to save some googlers the 3 hours that I just wasted on it.
Sony BDP-s370 with DLNA Review
October 27th, 2010If returning this player is not an option for you anymore, then you may not want to read beyond this point.
Note: This testing was performed on firmware version M03.R.694. It’s possible that future versions will fix some of the issues I ran into.
This player does a couple of things really well. First and foremost, it’s a great Bluray player, exhibiting features of many more higher end models. And the DVD upscaling is great. Very few artifacts and sharp lines.
But the DLNA support, despite officially being released in July firmware, is not ready for real use. A number of popular formats are supported, but buggy firmware code keeps it from being a real media player.
This is why I’m returning it.
5 popular DLNA media servers (run on Mac OS X in this example) were interfaced:
- TVMobli - Works the best - and out of the box. An efficient core helped avoid some skipping, and helped highlight issues that were really within the player. Transcoding options are limited to global settings, though.
- Serviio - Works okay. Suffers performance/processing issues when peak bandwidth is required. Also takes about 80 seconds to start on a 2.4ghz quad core. Lots of format-specific transcoding options which can come in handy for unpopular formats.
- Mediatomb - After setting it up with playstation 3 settings, the directory structure is readable and images work. I could not get video to work - there’s some inner incompatibility with DLNA SOAP envelopes which prevent it from working. I would have really preferred this, as it’s the free open source option. I took many tcpdumps to try and diagnose the incompatibility to attempt to build a patch before giving up. This is indicative of a core fault of DLNA itself: it uses SOAP - bloatware that is a product of ‘design by committee’.
- PS3 Media Server - Some people have made this work with the Sony BDP series, but not me. As it’s development is effectively stalled, it’s not really a contender.
- Twonky - Similar experience to mediatomb, but closed source.
Almost all formats are supported over USB, and a small subset of these are not supported over DLNA. Unfortunately the ones that are supported still exhibited problems. Often, with both TVMobli and Serviio, I could not play two 1080p videos back to back without hitting a dreaded pink screen of death, unless the firmware was reset. The pink screen of death was also encountered intermittently when playing things for the first time - videos that would work on other occasions.
The most annoying part is, when a crash occurs, one must hold down the power button for 10 seconds to reset the device - either that, or pull the plug and put it back in. When it crashes, as it often does, it crashes hard. A full bootup takes a good 40 seconds or so as well. So every time you crash (which is often), you’ll be waiting 90 seconds.
And here’s the major deal breaker - consistent buggy fast forward and rewind functionality. While it is supported, and the device attempts it, fast forwarding and rewinding HD content (720p/1080p) consistently will cause video to stutter and hang after the ffwd/rwd process is done. The symptoms are as if video does not stream fast enough, as if hitting a bandwidth limitation. This was tested over both 100mb, 802.11N, and gigabit eithernet connectivity. The skipping will not recover until the video is stopped and restarted from the beginning - so be prepared to view any movies in a single sitting. I’ve confirmed this to be a problem with the Sony BDP-s370, as it occurred with every DLNA media server tested above where video was playable.
So after about 3 days of attempting to get the BDP-s370 DLNA functionality to work as promoted, I had to give up and return it, as well as its proprietary wifi adapter.
I’ll be using they money on a Boxee Box, due to be released in a week or so. I don’t have much of a need to play Bluray media anyway.
Vogon Cucumber Test Scenario
October 27th, 2010Feature: smunt grablefleck
In order to fowl a gastric cavity
As a leeching greasclotting snorfblort
i want to expectorate berzonvlick ploog
given that i have a puissant spach,
and i have a glooby gungerwurt
when i glep a depeckled gleebthung
the result should be putrid
Twitter Updates for 2009-12-04
December 4th, 2009- RT @failberg dear interweb: please get right on producing some hilarious parodies of those omnipresent tiger woods/accenture ads immediately #
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Twitter Updates for 2009-10-21
October 21st, 2009- NOZOMI SUPER-EXPRESS shinkansen to Kyoto! looking out the window is making me dizzy. california is lucky it’s getting these. #
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MEL > SIN > ICN > SFO
December 13th, 2008MEL > SIN > ICN > SFO