mike.williamson

Even though Netbeans make things like the Rails development log and the database connections pretty easy to get to, I still have a pretty strong preference for the command line. When I am coding I almost always have a few terminal windows open and stretched nice and big; generally one for mysql, one for the Rails development log and often a third for the Rails console in case I want to experiment with the code I am writing.

The down side to this set up is just that; the set up. Every day I type in the same stuff… mysql -u root blah blah blah.

So last night, after an ill advised post dinner coffee, I set about scripting my morning Rails ritual and on the way learned a bunch about the terminal.

Gnome terminal is the proper name for the program that resides under Applications > Accessories > Terminal. A quick look at the man pages give a pretty nice set of options to play with but I found they required a bit of trial and error to get right.

Cut and paste the ones you want into custom launchers.

Launching Mysql and getting a prompt on a specified database:

gnome-terminal  -e “mysql -u root -ppassword -D myapp_development”

Thats no typo! There can’t be any space between the -p option above and the actual password!

Launching a window with the Rails development log (with a specified Rail environment):

gnome-terminal  –working-directory=/home/mike/projects/myapp -e “script/server -e mikes”

That one is great for me because I am rapidly becoming sick of typing in stuff for custom Rails environments. Now I don’t need to!

Those are pretty fun, but the ultimate in convenience for me would be to have a single tabbed terminal window with everything. So why not combine the two into a single command?

gnome-terminal –geometry=174×46+50+50 –tab-with-profile=Default –title=”Mysql” -e “mysql -u root -ppassword -D myapp_development” –tab-with-profile=Default –working-directory=/home/mike/projects/myapp –title=”Server” -e “script/server -e mikes” –tab-with-profile=Default –working-directory=/home/mike/projects/myapp –title=”Console” -e “script/console mikes”

This is a doozie but it means that my whole morning Rails set up ritual has been reduced to a single click on a launcher. Sweet!

Last weekend was spent installing Ubuntu Karmic on my laptop. Because of all the programming stuff I am working on it just made sense even though I am already missing a few of my favourite Windows programs. As soon as I got Netbeans set up I tried running a JavaFX application I had been working on. The stage icons and the images I had loaded in were nowhere to be seen. I gave this a few days to percolate and sat down this evening to sort it out. I started out thinking that it might be a problem with the file paths being different on *nix but a little experimentation showed that paths were not the problem. It took a little reading before I got a reminder; Sun is not the default JVM on Ubuntu! Grrrr.

After switching to Sun Java away from Open-JDK all my images and stage icons were loading happily and my JavaFX app runs just like it did on Windows. Here is the command:

mike@sleepycat:~$ sudo update-alternatives –config java
There are 2 choices for the alternative java (providing /usr/bin/java).

Selection    Path                                      Priority   Status
————————————————————
* 0            /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/jre/bin/java   1061      auto mode
1            /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/jre/bin/java   1061      manual mode
2            /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/bin/java       63        manual mode

Press enter to keep the current choice[*], or type selection number: 2
update-alternatives: using /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/bin/java to provide /usr/bin/java (java) in manual mode.

Wow its fast.

You can download the deb from here:

• Dev channel (for 32-bit systems): google-chrome-unstable_current_i386.deb
• Dev channel (for 64-bit systems): google-chrome-unstable_current_amd64.deb

It will add the Chromium repository to your software sources automatically as well.

Today I was getting ready to move an application at work over to a staging app that we set up at Heroku. Not wanting to absorb any extra charges for loading up a copy of the entire production database I figured I would empty out the tables that where taking up the most disk space. For that I had to query the information_schema table and add the size of the table to the size of the indexes. All the values are in bytes you have to do a little multiplication to get it displaying in something meaningful to a human like megabytes. Since this is a neat trick that I will likely end up using again I thought I would put it up here as well. Here is the query:

mysql> select table_name, round(((data_length + index_length) / (1024*1024)),2) as “size in megs” from information_schema.tables where table_schema = “myapp_development”;
+———————-+————–+
| table_name           | size in megs |
+———————-+————–+
| messages             |         0.11 |
| organisations        |         0.02 |
| rewards              |         0.02 |
| schema_migrations    |         0.02 |
| selections           |         0.02 |
| senders              |         0.02 |
| sessions             |         0.64 |
| summaries            |        15.52 |
| taggings             |         0.05 |
| tags                 |         0.02 |
| transactions         |         0.03 |
+———————-+————–+
11 rows in set (0.13 sec)

 

Change the where clause to look for the database you want or remove it completely to see all of them.

After beavering away on a Rails app for the last little while I wanted to put it up somewhere so the rest of the world can see it. I signed up with Heroku since they specialise in hosting Rails apps. Their database setup is kind of confusing. It turns out that they totally ignore your database configuration (database.yml is not used.) They just use the schema.rb to create the database that your app needs in their Postgres database. You just run your rake task to set it up. Thats pretty cool, but there is something cooler; can copy your entire local database with data and everything over to their server with the command:

heroku db:push

The only problem for me was that on Ubuntu (jaunty) the command failed telling me that I needed to intall Taps. More aggravating still was the fact that my attempt to install Taps also failed because its dependent on Sqlite3:

mike@jauntyjackalope:~$ sudo gem install taps
[sudo] password for mike:
Building native extensions.  This could take a while…
ERROR:  Error installing taps:
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

/usr/bin/ruby1.8 extconf.rb install taps
checking for fdatasync() in -lrt… yes
checking for sqlite3.h… no
*** extconf.rb failed ***
Could not create Makefile due to some reason, probably lack of
necessary libraries and/or headers.  Check the mkmf.log file for more
details.  You may need configuration options.

Provided configuration options:
–with-opt-dir
–without-opt-dir
–with-opt-include
–without-opt-include=${opt-dir}/include
–with-opt-lib
–without-opt-lib=${opt-dir}/lib
–with-make-prog
–without-make-prog
–srcdir=.
–curdir
–ruby=/usr/bin/ruby1.8
–with-sqlite3-dir
–without-sqlite3-dir
–with-sqlite3-include
–without-sqlite3-include=${sqlite3-dir}/include
–with-sqlite3-lib
–without-sqlite3-lib=${sqlite3-dir}/lib
–with-rtlib
–without-rtlib

Gem files will remain installed in /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/sqlite3-ruby-1.2.5 for inspection.
Results logged to /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/sqlite3-ruby-1.2.5/ext/sqlite3_api/gem_make.out

This was pretty annoying. Worse still installing sqlite3 didn’t fix it. It took some googling to figure out what needed to be installed to make Taps and therefore Heroku happy. It turns out that sqlite.h lives in the package libsqlite3-dev:

mike@jauntyjackalope:~$ sudo aptitude install libsqlite3-dev
mike@jauntyjackalope:~$ sudo aptitude install libsqlite3-doc

mike@jauntyjackalope:~$ sudo gem install taps
Building native extensions.  This could take a while…
Successfully installed sqlite3-ruby-1.2.5
Successfully installed taps-0.2.19
2 gems installed

mike@jauntyjackalope:~/dexterchief$ heroku db:push
Auto-detected local database
Sending schema
Sending data
6 tables, 53 records
comments:      100% |==========================================| Time: 00:00:01
posts:         100% |==========================================| Time: 00:00:01
roles:         100% |==========================================| Time: 00:00:00
roles_users:   100% |==========================================| Time: 00:00:00
schema_migrat: 100% |==========================================| Time: 00:00:01
users:         100% |==========================================| Time: 00:00:00
Sending indexes
Resetting sequences

Finally!

I switched from Windows XP to Ubuntu in 2007. I used Ubuntu exclusively  for tw0 years with my only real complaints being the inability to play games like Portal or run Photoshop . The purchase of a nice new Canon EOS 40D a few months ago made native Photoshop support a necessity.

When I started shopping for a laptop it quickly became apparent that I was going to be forced to purchase Windows Vista. Dell had some systems with Ubuntu preinstalled but saved their best for Vista. I held my nose and ordered.

Truth be told, after a brief adjustment, I found I kind of liked Vista. Sure it has its foibles but none of them seem so bad when you are upgrading from a seven year old computer (running the latest Ubuntu!) to a shit hot new laptop with enough power to make even Vista seem snappy.

But something had happened in those two years of Ubuntu usage. I had become accustomed to thinking this was MY computer. It was not a sales platform for some Silicon Valley company that wanted to upsell me to a “pro version”. It was not something I was allowed to use as long as I submitted to being served up advertising (like in MSN or Yahoo messenger). There was no corporate agenda being surreptitiously advanced through default settings (like ripping to Windows Media Format or Apples AAC by default just to propagate the format) or bundling programs together (iTunes).

Internet Explorer 8 appeared a several weeks ago as an “Important Update” in my Windows updates.  With IE8 struggling to get beyond a single digit slice of the browser market, it was obvious who the update was important for. Microsoft was chastised for the scummy practise at the time and I decided to deal with it by choosing the “hide this update” option and assumed that would be the end of it.

Checking out the details of a subsequent batch of updates gave me a bit of a start:

IE8 again? Didn’t I just say no to this? I guess technically I said “hide this update” but its the closest to “NO” that Microsoft allows. Once again I chose “hide this update” and hoped Microsoft would respect my wishes. After all, this is supposed to be MY computer right?

So here I am again, a new update and once again, IE8 is listed as an “Important” update. This is now my third time telling it to “hide this update”, when will Microsoft learn that NO MEANS NO!