RSpec View Testing Problems

I've been using RSpec exclusively on my latest project. I'd say I'm still fairly new to it, but it has won me over for the time being. However, the view testing has been a real problem. You can test views quite easily and nicely with RSpec, however, when you do something subtly wrong, it can cause RSpec to fail without any visible error! In fact, Autotest doesn't report a failure at all, and the only way I know it is failing is either I pay close attention to the number of examples it said it ran, or more likely, my cruisecontrol.rb CI server will actually fail (because it detects the commands exit status).

For example, while Autotest says everything is fine, the CI server will show something like this (note for easier reading I've trimmed this a bit):

/widgets/index.html.erb
- should render list of widgets

/bobbles/index.html.erb

Finished in 4.977586 seconds

175 examples, 0 failures
rake aborted!
Command /usr/bin/ruby1.8 -I"/var/cruisecontrolrb/projects/myproject/work/vendor/plugins/rspec/lib"  "/var/cruisecontrolrb/projects/myproject/work/vendor/plugins/rspec/bin/spec" "spec/controllers/bobbles_controller_spec.rb" ... --options /var/cruisecontrolrb/projects/myproject/work/spec/cruisecontrol_rcov.opts failed

(See full trace by running task with --trace)

As you can see, RSpec is reporting 0 failures, yet rake fails. This is because in reality RSpec is returning an exit code of 1 instead of 0. But, looking at the output, it's certainly not revealing. Running with --trace is of no help either.

What I now know to pay attention to in situations like this is the fact that that last spec it ran, the /bobbles/index.html.erb one has no examples listed under it. That is thus the culprit (you can also argue that it's the last thing to "run" and then rake fails, so it's likely in this, etc.).

The real pain comes when you try to figure out what the heck is causing this. You have zero feedback, and no way that I know of to somehow debug or inspect the test to see what's failing. In my experience to date with these, it boils down to some problem in your mocks and stubs, but this can be difficult to figure out. I admit, the one that prompted me to write this blog entry is one I've still yet to figure out, and finally just punted on.

I've been hearing a lot about not testing views, or testing very little of the views. I agree in general on this, and am now looking into using Webrat to do integration testing to really test "view" functionality, and leave the rest of my view testing mostly to testing my helpers, controllers, and models. Here are a couple of blog entries related to all this:

• Err the blog (via comments) discussion on view testing techniques. This is a good read.


• Rubby Russell's blog entry on testing your views with RSpec.


• Integration Testing in Ruby with RSpec's Story Automation Framework by David Chelimsky (PDF)
  

Have Autotest speak to you

Update: the first .autotest I had in here was bogus, sorry about that. The .autotest file contents below work properly with Rspec tests at least.

I make extensive use of ZenTest's Autotest to constantly watch my test suite and ensure my app's tests are passing on my dev box/during development. Historically I've used Growl/growlnotify to get little popup notices indicating if my tests passed or failed. That's nice, and I've done the enhancements that add graphics and style it nicely, etc. But, in reality, I'm not always looking and sometimes don't see the messages. Plus, they can be somewhat distracting.

So, I've switched to using the handy say tool on the Mac (on Linux I think you could use "espeak", no clue on Windows, but then, uh, well, why are you doing dev work on Windows?! ;-)

The speaking is nice - I hear it, but don't get visually distracted. I use different voices for tests passed vs. failed too. This may not work great if you work in a cube farm, or even a cafe, but here at home, or in your own office, I think it's great. Here's my .autotest file as an example:

require 'autotest/redgreen'

module Autotest::Growl
  def self.growl(title, msg, img, pri=0, stick="")
    system "/usr/local/bin/growlnotify -n autotest --image #{img} -p #{pri} -m #{msg.inspect} #{title} #{stick}" 
  end
  
  Autotest.add_hook :ran_command do |at|
    results = at.results.last

    unless results.nil?
      output = results[/(\d+)\s+examples?,\s*(\d+)\s+failures?(,\s*(\d+)\s+pending)?/]
      if output
        failures = $~[2].to_i
        pending = $~[4].to_i
      end

      if failures > 0
        `/usr/bin/say -v Zarvox "you broke the code"`
      elsif pending > 0
        `/usr/bin/say -v Alex "Tests passed, with some pending"`
      else
        unless at.tainted
          `/usr/bin/say -v Victoria "all tests passed"`
        else
          `/usr/bin/say -v Victoria "tests passed"`
        end
      end
    end
  end
end

To see what voices your system has available, open the Speech system preference pane, pull down "System Voice" and select "Show More Voices" to see the full list.

Changelogs and Deployment Notification for Capistrano and Git

Early warning: this is a hack, which doesn't mean it's bad, just that it's not polished. However, I am documenting my solution for myself thus far, as well as figured others might find it useful...

Update: Added my shell command for doing deploys (see end of this post).

I wanted a way to automate a few things around deployments, and integrate this a bit with my continuous integration server. I use CruiseControl for the CI server, and previously blogged about setting up CC.rb with Git. The goals for this next task, and subject of this blog post are:

• Tag the code on successful deploys. My CI server already tags the code anytime it does a successful build, but since I didn't cover that previously, I'll mention it here as well.


• Notify a list of people via email whenever a new deploy happens.


• Generate a changelog, based on Git commit messages (better make sure they're suitable reading for whoever gets your deploy notices!), and include this changelog in the deploy emails.


• Have the CI tag I want to deploy as the only required piece of info/parameter when issuing a deploy command.

Tagging

First, I tag the code on any successful CI run. This tag is what I can then use as the Git tag to deploy. Capistrano supports this via the branch variable (set its value to the tag name). As you can guess, you can use pretty much any Git ID/tag/branch name for this. To do this, add a task to your cruise.rake file (or similar - wherever you define your custom CruiseControl command), and then ensure you run that task during a CruiseControl session. Here's my task:

desc "Tag the code on successful CI build"
task :ci_tag do
  timestamp = Time.now.strftime("%Y%m%d%H%M%S")
  tag_name = "CI_#{timestamp}"
  # Create an empty file with our tag name, so we can easily go grab the tagname
  # from the CI output page and do deploys, etc.
  system("touch #{File.join(ENV['CC_BUILD_ARTIFACTS'], tag_name)}")
  system("git tag -a -m 'Successful continuous integration build on #{timestamp}' #{tag_name}")
  system("git push --tags")
end

From the above, you can see that I'll get tags of the form: CI_timestamp. Next up, I want to tag a successful deploy to indicate which commit/tag actually got deployed and when. This is handled via an after task in my Capistrano deploy.rb:

after "deploy:restart", "tag_last_deploy"
task :tag_last_deploy do
  set :timestamp, Time.now
  set :tag_name, "deployed_to_#{rails_env}_#{timestamp.to_i}"
  `git tag -a -m "Tagging deploy to #{rails_env} at #{timestamp}" #{tag_name} #{branch}`
  `git push --tags`
  puts "Tagged release with #{tag_name}."
end

This will create tags like, deployed_to_staging_1213223458, and works for both staging and production (or any environment you're targeting - note the use of the rails_env variable - you may need to use something else). One thing to pay particular attention to, is that this tag is actually tagging another tag, as defined by the branch variable (mentioned above). In order for this to work though, you need to ensure that your tags are up to date locally. Thus, somewhere in your workflow you'll need to do a git pull --tags, if like me, your CI server is elsewhere and is generating those tags.

Ok, we're all tagged up, let's move on...

Notification

It turns out there's a nifty new plugin called Cap Gun that will take care of emailing a list of folks on deploy. Setup is covered in their README, but the one bit they don't mention, is that you can include a comment in the email message that goes out. I wanted to include a changelog in these emails, so I tapped into this comment attribute, setting it to the text of my changelog. To use the comment, you can either set it via -s comment="my lovely comment" on your Capistrano deploy command, or you can set the comment variable in your Capistrano deploy.rb or included script. More on that in a minute.

Changelogs

My changelog, so far, is very simple, it just pulls the comments for the Git commits that occurred since the last deploy (for the appropriate target), up to the tag specified (which in this case will be the CI tag you are about to deploy). To handle this, I use a small Ruby script, combined with the great Grit gem that lets one manipulate Git via a nice Ruby API. The script simply spits out a simple chunk of text that will be what gets put into the comment Capistrano variable for our deployment notifications. This is in particular where the "hack" comes into play. This script is not robust, does essentially no error checking, etc, etc. Use at your own risk! And with that, here it is:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

require 'rubygems'
require 'mojombo-grit'
include Grit

unless ARGV.length == 2
  puts "Usage: changelog.rb staging|production <commit-or-tag>"
  puts "  where commit-or-tag is the commit ID or tag you are planning to deploy"
  exit -1
end

repo_location = File.expand_path(File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/..')
target = ARGV[0]
about_to_deploy_commit = ARGV[1]
repo = Repo.new(repo_location)

# Find the tag for the last deployed
tags = repo.tags.collect {|tag| tag.name }
tags.delete_if {|tag| !(tag =~ /^deployed_to_#{target}_/)}
tags.sort!
last_deployed_tag = tags[-1]

commits_for_changelog = repo.commits_between(last_deployed_tag, about_to_deploy_commit)
commits_for_changelog.reverse!

puts "Changes since last release:"
commits_for_changelog.each do |commit|
  puts " "
  puts "  #{commit.message}"
end

To run through it briefly, it takes two parameters (and clearly, you can change this for your own deployment targets, etc.): a deployment target, and a tag (which can actually be a tag, a commit ID, branch, etc.). It sets up a repo variable for your Git repository using Grit, and then proceeds to find the last deployed tag for that deployment target. After that, it gets all the commits between that last deployed tag and the tag you specified as the second script argument, and prints out the commit messages.

To integrate this, I added this line to my Capistrano deploy.rb:

set :comment, `script/changelog.rb staging #{branch}`

As you can see, that one is specific to my staging environment, and lives inside my "staging" task in deploy.rb. Same, appropriately edited version goes for production.

Deployment Command

Lastly, I define a simple shell function to do my deploys, which ensures I have done a git pull so I have all the tags, and makes the command easier to remember and get right, etc:

stagemyproject () {
        git pull
        cap -s branch=$1 staging deploy:migrations
}

You would thus have a command line to do a deploy like this:

stagemyproject CI_20080612052417

That's it, and if you've managed to read this far, congrats, and if you've not only managed to read this far, but payed attention and got value out of it, well, cool.

For anyone who uses/adapts this, please do let me know improvements you make, or suggestions, or tweaks/changes, and so on. I've been using this for all of about a half dozen deploys so far. If (more like when) I make improvements, I'll update.

Perforce for CruiseControl.rb now on GitHub

After getting another request for my Perforce implementation for CruiseControl.rb, I've put it up on GitHub (cruisecontrolrb_perforce), and also updated my previous blog entry on the subject.

Just note, I haven't used this since August 2007, so use at your own risk :)

Rails, jQuery, auto-complete, and a New Plugin

Update: I've switched which jQuery autocomplete plugin I use for this, see my newer blog entry.

The other day, I made a whole switch from Prototype & Scriptaculous to jQuery. I've had the bug to do this for a while, and this is a new project, so I went for it. I don't have anything against Prototype, so my main impetus for this was a move towards Unobtrusive JavaScript, and also the speed aspect (the site I'm currently working on, if things go accordingly to plan, will do some pretty serious traffic). But, the unobtrusive JavaScript was the key, and really, my switch is more of a philosophy of approach rather than say a dislike for Prototype, etc. And, of course, it's something new to play with :)

Before I go any further, I'll state right now, I am not a JavaScript expert, and I've been using jQuery now for all of a couple hours.

One of the results of my switch however, was that I hacked DHH's auto_complete Rails plugin, to work for jQuery. Simple change. I tweaked the controller macro, and then gutted the JS helpers, as you just don't need those when using jQuery in this way. It does require the jquery-autocomplete plugin for jQuery. I've published my Rails plugin for this on GitHub as auto_complete_jquery.

Circling back around, here's what I did to get all this going. I did run into one issue (see step 10 below) that I'm still tracking down (easy solution in the interim, but I'd like to understand what's happening, so if you have comments, please let me know):

1. Removed the Prototype and Scriptaculous JS files from the public/javascripts dir of my Rails app. You don't have to do this, but I am no longer using them, so saw no need to keep them there, and it helps ensure I don't mistakenly use something from them or include them in the view. This includes: prototype.js, controls.js, dragdrop.js, and effects.js.


2. Removed the prototype-based Rails auto_complete plugin from vendor/plugins.


3. Installed the latest minified jQuery file in public/javascripts/jquery.


4. Installed the JS files for the jquery-autocomplete plugin, and its dependencies: jquery.templating.js, and jquery.ui.autocomplete.js. (see the jquery-autocomplete plugin for these files).


5. Added the jquery.ui.autocomplete.css file to public/stylesheets.


6. Installed my auto_complete_jquery plugin.


7. Put the proper includes for the CSS file and the JS files in my application layout file:
   
   

   
     <%= stylesheet_link_tag 'jquery.ui.autocomplete' %>
     <%= javascript_include_tag 'jquery/jquery.min', 'jquery/jquery.templating', 'jquery/jquery.ui.autocomplete.ext', 'jquery/jquery.ui.autocomplete', :cache => 'jquery' %>
   

   
   Note that I keep my jQuery JS files in a subdir for organizational purposes, but you can modify as needed.


8. Changed my existing auto-complete text fields that used the Rails Prototype based auto_complete plugin's helpers to just be plain old text fields, such as:
   <%= coffee.text_field :drink, :autocomplete =>"off" %>
   This is doing an auto-complete for the "drink" attribute of the Coffee model.


9. I can simply leave any auto_complete_for calls that existed in my controller, as that works the same. If you had custom versions that were based on the code from the Prototype-based Rails plugin, just go look at the code in my plugin to see the differences, it's a simple change.

Add the JavaScript that sets up the auto-complete for the given text field. This will typically look like:


$(document).ready(function() {
  $("input#coffee_drink").autocomplete({ ajax: "auto_complete_for_coffee_drink" })
});


Where does this go? It depends. What I've been liking is using the JavaScript auto-include plugin, which creates a Rails-style convention for JavaScript files that pertain to individual actions, or are controller-wide. So in my case, this code would get placed in public/javascripts/views/coffees/new.js, or likely one directory up, as simply coffees.js (so that I can use it in any CoffeesController action that needs to auto-complete on coffee.drink. Without that plugin, you just put it in whatever JS file is appropriately included for the view you're using it in, etc. You can of course put it directly into the view in a script block, but then you aren't doing the whole Unobtrusive JavaScript thing as rigidly.

10. Finally, what I found is that I had to add a route for this. This is the issue I mentioned above. It sort of makes sense, but what I'm unclear on is, why the prior standard/Prototype-based Rails auto_complete plugin didn't require a route. They both seem to use a GET, define the action the same way, and so on. I'm hoping I'm just missing something obvious. So, the route I added is:
    map.connect ':controller/auto_complete_for_coffee_drink', :action => 'auto_complete_for_coffee_drink', :format => 'json'


A bunch of steps, but pretty simple work. The app I'm doing this on is all of a few days old, so I hadn't gotten into use of much else in Prototype and so on, thus making the wholesale switch easy.

If you'd like to learn more about any of these things, and as a comprehensive set of links:

• jQuery site


• jquery-autocomplete plugin on GitHub


• jquery-autocomplete plugin on jQuery plugins site


• Unobtrusive JavaScript


• DHH's auto_complete Rails plugin for use with Prototype


• JavaScript auto-include plugin


• My auto_complete_query Rails plugin

Enjoy!

Update: I removed the jQuery Dimensions JS file and include for it in my layout, as this is now included in the latest jQuery JS file itself.

Update 2: I don't know how the standard auto_complete plugin manages to do without routes, but here is a generic route for all auto-complete actions across controllers:

map.auto_complete ':controller/:action', 
                  :requirements => { :action => /auto_complete_for_\S+/ },
                  :conditions => { :method => :get }

I hesitate to put this into the plugin, as routes can be quite tricky in more complex apps, and I wouldn't want to auto-hose someone :)

Fixing Capistrano 2.3.0 and Git Deploy Problem

If you upgrade to Capistrano 2.3.0, and are doing deploys from a Git repository, you may find that all of a sudden you can no longer deploy. This is the case if you have no tags in your Git repo. Cap 2.3.0 changed one of the Git commands it uses and that apparently doesn't work right if you don't have tags. So, to solve the problem, you can simply create a single tag in your Git repository. The tag does not have to relate to your build at all, you only need one tag in the repo (not one per build or anything like that), etc. Once you create the tag, you can now deploy again.

To create a tag in Git, or, I think the "cooler" kind of tag, an annotated tag, you can do:

git tag -a tag_name

Replace "tag_name" with your tag name of course. The "-a" option says to make it an annotated tag, which lets you enter a comment about the tag. You can put whatever you want in there. I'm liking this potential use with my continuous integration server when it makes tags on successful builds. Lots of possibilities.

Finally, if you deploy from a remote repo, or if you have a remote repo (say on GitHub), you will need to push your tag. This does not automatically occur on a push, you need to add "--tags" option to git-push to include your tags:

git push --tags

Now you'll have your tags on your remote repo, and listed under the "all tags" tab on GitHub.

I'm at RailsConf 2008 This Week

I'll be at RailsConf this week. Looking forward to it, and to time in Portland which I always like. Already scouting out places to eat, which it appears I'll have to watch the time on given there are many BoF's and other sessions in the evenings that sound good. See you there...

Jelly - work at my house

Jelly, what is it? It's not something you spread on toast, or not this kind anyway. Jelly is "casual coworking". It's popping up in different cities, and what it really boils down to is, someone opens up their house/apartment/some space, and folks get together to work. They aren't collaborating (although they could), it's just a way to get that social interaction for folks (like me) who work at home. You get to meet and interact with other interesting folks in your area, maybe do a bit of work, and get that social interaction you miss while working at home.

To learn more, check out this video that NPR did, or Amit Gupta's (who started Jelly) video.

This is pretty interesting to me, and I'm actually thinking I might do it here in Eugene. I'll have to consider whether I want to invite a bunch of strangers (as great as you all might be (hopefully ;-) to overrun my house for the day or not, but it seems pretty interesting. I always have to think about balancing this with privacy and having a bunch of random folks that I'm not directly aquanted with knowing my house/where I live, and so on. I consider it a bit different than say the 20-something single person living in a random apartment in a city. This is my house, and where my family (wfie & kids) live, etc. Still, it intrigues me. Plus, I have the space, WiFi/net, etc. to do it, and the tech folks (shout out to the Django group) I've met here in Eugene are all cool so far.

Monitoring Mongrels on an F5 BigIP

Almost a year after I raised the issue of problems monitoring Mongrel instances on an F5 BigIP, I still get occasional emails asking whether I got it working and how, etc. So, firing off this blog entry to hopefully provide a more findable solution for folks (the mailman mongrel-users archive seems broken, and clearly people find my initial query on the subject, but not the response with the solution).

So, if you need to monitor Mongrel instances with an F5 BigIP, and are doing so with an HTTP monitor health check, you want to set your Send String to be along the lines of the following:

GET /heartbeat/index HTTP/1.1
\r\n
\r\n

The key point here is to have the "\r\n" lines (the "\r" is what I was missing and many folks seem to get tripped up by the proper way to specify the line breaks needed for the HTTP request).

Here's a link to the solution provided by Jason Hoffman of Joyent, on the mongrel-users maiing list.

Note that I haven't worked with F5's since September 2007, so likely can't answer any further questions.

Webcam Recommendations

I'm back to needing recommendations for a webcam. On the site (Basecamp Silverton), we will only show images/stills taken from the camera, probably at some interval in the "minutes" range. The camera will be pointed at the local mountain from a house in town (the mountain is pretty darn close, but still, it's a mountain/in the distance, as compared to say a security or other similar application). We're looking for a camera that can automatically upload images to a server via FTP/SSH/SCP at regular intervals.

Our criteria are the following, and I was hoping folks could make some recommendations:

Requirements:

• video doesn't matter, must be able to produce still images of "reasonable" quality


• lens and such must be sufficient to shoot a pretty high depth of field to maximize focus across long-ish range (I will explain that it'll be pointing at a nearby mountain from house in town, etc.)


• Must do automated image upload via FTP and/or SSH/SCP.


• Controllable interval on automated upload (nothing too fancy, but we may want as fine as say every 2 minutes or every 5 minutes?)


• Wireless/WiFi (in case we want to mount it outside, or just to make it easier inside)


• web/browser based configuration, or configurable via a Mac (we do not have a Windows machine)


• $500 or less. We may have some flexibility here, if for example it includes the outdoor enclosure/is weatherproof.


• Really prefer not to have any separate software solution, other than what's in the camera, but if that is the best way to get the FTP/SCP upload, because we won't have a machine to dedicate to running it.

Nice to haves:

• Ability to be mounted in an outdoor enclosure, or weatherproof itself. This will be in Silverton, Colorado where they routinely see temperatures below zero, and have snow, etc.


• user adjustable zoom

We already had one camera, a TrendNet TV-IP201W, which was nice and cheap, but the thing appears to just have up and stopped working. Plus, we had a lot of problems with it's FTP upload (and weird limitations on length of user login names and so on). Also, this camera seemed to just "crash"/need reboot every so often (often enough that it was annoying).

Bring Light's New Facebook App

At Bring Light, we recently released a Facebook application to serve as a companion to our main site. You can now use the Facebook application to show what projects you've contributed to, what your favorites are, what groups you're in, and tell the world about your philanthropic activities on Bring Light.

If you're already a Bring Light user, you can get to the Facebook application two ways. If you're logged into www.bringlight.com, there is now a Facebook link in the upper right. Or, you can go directly to the app on Facebook, by going to http://apps.facebook.com/bringlight/.

Here's a look at what the wide profile box on Facebook looks like after you add the app:

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Announcing ShipFu!

Have you ever needed to quickly compare UPS and USPS shipping rates, and just wanted a simple web page/app to do it? If so, check out my new ShipFu app. It's incredibly simple. No gratuitous web decoration, no hidden motivation behind it to promote some other product or shipping service, etc., just a simple calculator. Enter your package origin and destination, and dimensions and weight, and voila, you'll be presented with all the rates available for that from the two services.

I built ShipFu to address a need of my own, and the fact that I just didn't seem to like any other solutions out there - seemed to be too many hidden agendas or ungainly UI's, etc. Also, I built this as a bit of an experiment with a few technology aspects. It's a Rails app, and is running on the new-ish Thin server, etc. I plan to have a blog post that goes into a lot more depth on some of the fun things that occurred as part of building this super simple app.

Also, please, by all means, send me feedback (use the feedback link shown near the bottom of the site) if you'd like to see some feature or enhancement or what not. Or, just use it to help you quickly gauge shipping rates.

Movable Type 4 Setup on Ubuntu

I am in the process of consolidating my blogs to a single system, and in doing so, am switching to Movable Type. This blog will eventually move, but the initial impetus was for some other blogs that were running on WordPress where I was having some problems (and spent way too much time trying to fix that - one of the key things I don't want to be doing with my blog system). But, in relation, I found the setup instructions for Movable Type a bit lacking, especially in relation to using multiple blogs, and how this works in terms of Apache and MT setup.

I also want to say a bit thanks to Duncan for showing me his Apache config, and some brief discussion of multiple blogs with MT. The MT docs were really lacking here as said, but Duncan's knowledge made it clear this was pretty easy and a nice way to go. Thanks Duncan, and check out his blog and site, and of course all his great pics on Flickr.

I am using a single installation of Movable Type, supporting multiple blogs, with each blog having their own domain name, and that blog (or really the MT content) living at the root of that domain name (this last part isn't required/essentially for this tutorial, you can easily tweak the Apache config).

So, with that, given that it actually turns out to be relatively simple to set up once you know a few key bits, I figured I'd pass along what I did...

First, I created my standard Ubuntu slice at Slicehost. I host everything with them these days, and as such, I have a base system image that I've built for myself. It's built with their standard Ubuntu 7.10 choice, and then I make tweaks to the SSH setup, add a few bits I need, etc. But, I believe you could simply take pretty much a standard Ubuntu server install and use that. Please let me know if this guide doesn't work for you in that case.

Preparations

In preparation for the move, while my existing blogs were running, I exported their data from WordPress using WordPress' Export feature, which produces a WXR file. Save that to my local machine.

I also made sure I had my domain names secured, and the DNS for them setup. In particular, one thing to note is that Movable Type is sort of a two part system. You have the MT web application, which is a publishing application, but is not what someone hits when visiting your blog(s). MT publishes your blog out as static content (or that's the default option anyway). So, I setup an "mt" subdomain on one of my domains where I will access MT (more on that below).

Apache and Perl Install

Apache 2 and mod_perl were not on my system by default, so I needed to install those. This amounts to:

sudo apt-get install apache2 libapache2-mod-perl2 libapache2-mod-perl2-doc

The above will not only install it, but configure mod_perl for use in Apache, and you can now run Perl based web apps (MT is developed in Perl). Also, depending on how you want to do email, you may need to install Perl's Mail::Sendmail (if using SMTP; if you use sendmail, then you can choose that when setting up MT):

sudo perl -MCPAN -e "install Mail::Sendmail"

Create a Database

I created a database for MT using MySQL. I also setup a specific MySQL user, password, and assigned them rights to that database. You'll need this info later when setting up/configuring MT.

I have been using Navicat for nearly all my DB management. It works really well given it can do SSH tunneling as I don't open the MySQL port on my servers, etc. It is a commercial app, but as a developer who works with DB's often, has proven to be my tool of choice (I've tried many others, and this is the one that's worked best for me).

Apache Configuration

I have a relatively minimal Apache configuration file. The bulk of it is done with a file that sets up my virtual hosts (several domains point to a single machine). The setup for MT has a few critical pieces:

• Setting a ScriptAlias for the "mt" directory, so mod_perl knows to execute .cgi files there.


• Setting an Alias for the "mt-static" directory, which is MT's static content, and which you'll want to be referenced from all your blogs. You can also do this with a symlink, but I've done it with an Apache alias below so that I don't have to worry about a given blog's static content getting wiped out and breaking this (if the static content gets wiped out, you can just republish in MT to restore it, so I prefer to keep that purely maintained by MT).


• Setup the proper options/settings for the MT directory.

Thus, my configuration for my virtual hosts looks like the following (fake domain names used), notes following:

NameVirtualHost *
<VirtualHost *>
        ServerAdmin chris@example.com
        ServerName mt.example.net
        DocumentRoot /var/www/mt

        Alias /mt-static /var/www/mt/mt-static
        <Directory /var/www/mt/mt-static>
                Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
                AllowOverride All
                Order allow,deny
                allow from all
        </Directory>

        ScriptAlias / /var/www/mt/
        <Directory /var/www/mt>
                AllowOverride None
                Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
                Order allow,deny
                Allow from all
        </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *>
        ServerAdmin chris@example.com
        ServerName example.com
        ServerAlias example.com www. example.com
        DocumentRoot /var/www/example

        Alias /mt-static /var/www/mt/mt-static
        <Directory /var/www/mt/mt-static>
                Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
                AllowOverride All
                Order allow,deny
                allow from all
        </Directory>
        Redirect /mt.cgi http://mt.example.net/mt.cgi
</VirtualHost>

The first VirtualHost block sets up where I'll access MT, thus at http://mt.example.com. There you will see both the Alias for mt-static, and also the ScriptAlias for mt. These are critical.

The second Virtual Host block defines one of the actual blogs, which will be accessible at http://example.com or http://www.example.com. For additional blogs, you would add another of these blocks per domain name. The key bits here are the DocumentRoot and the Alias for mt-static. The DocumentRoot is where you will have MT publish your static blog content. Make sure that directory is writable by Apache/MT.

Finally, the Redirect sets things up so that when you are logged in and visit your blog, and see the various links for "Edit this content" that those will actually work (they point to mt.cgi, so this redirects them to whatever domain is serving mt).

Setup Movable Type

Next, visit http://mt.example.com/mt.cgi in your browser to begin setting up and configurating Movable Type. It will ask you about your database, and a few other bits, and then prompt you to create the first blog. Make sure the blog URL and directory match what you setup in your Apache configuration above. Beyond this you will need to refer to Movable Type docs for questions. But, you should essentially have a blog running, and will just need to Publish it to have MT write the static files into the directory you've defined.

The last step for me was to import my blog content from my prior WordPress setup, using the WXR dump I created at the beginning of all this. One key note here. When you go into MT's Import page - choose the blog you want to import to (even if you only have one) first. Only then when you pick WXR (if appropriate) for your import will it give you the proper fields for the info it needs for the WXR import. Otherwise it'll set your import type back to MovableType, and claim it has read in your import file fine (but you'll of course have no content).

I'm still tweaking my templates and doing a few bits to the sites I'm moving over, so I'm off to continue on that. Hope this helps someone.

Working at Home, The Zone, and Importance of Equipment

Recently, there was a good writeup at Hivelogic on Offices and the Creativity Zone. This is partially also in response to the Jason Calcanas' post on how to save money, 37 Signals response, and so on. I'm getting around to my thoughts/response, as someone who has been working at home for about 60% of the last 10 years.

I'd like to comment on/respond to a few things, in particular:

• chairs and desks


• pair programming


• "The Creativity Zone", as well as working in coffee shops


• what I think is important for a home office - and in working at home


• passion for your work, and the relation of that and hours put in at startups

Chairs and Desks

First, chairs and desks. As most folks will say, do NOT skimp on a chair. Go straight to a Herman Miller Aeron, or a Human Scale chair, do not pass go. I'll wait. I've had my posterior in an Aeron since I started at Adobe (thank you Adobe!) in 1996. When I moved, and was no longer working in the office, I used their program that allowed employees to buy these chairs at a discount, and picked one up for $500. I'd have gladly paid full price. Additionally, make sure you get the proper size, it makes a huge difference!

Following on that, I completely disagree on getting cheap desks, or doing the door/board on top of a file cabinet approach mentioned in Calcanas' post. I don't think you need to spend a lot on a desk, afterall, you just need a good surface. However, the key here is getting a desk that is the proper height. If you do the file cabinets thing, or buy your average stock desk they are almost always too tall. Take it from me, I'm 6'2" tall, and these desks are still too tall if you properly set your chair height (thighs level, feet flat on ground, forearms level or close to it, etc.). So, I suggest finding adjustable height desks, or if you are building your own, to make sure you figure out the proper height. I've been using Anthro's AnthroBench desks, which are not cheap, but are kick ass. However, the height adjustment is non-trivial, so you mostly have to get it right the first time. I've seen some since, that consumers can buy, that have more of an infinite height adjustment (which is what we had with the desks at Adobe, but I was unable to buy those).

Pair Programming

I'll cut to the chase: I'm not into it. I know folks who are and swear by it (e.g. Pivotal Labs does it the most and best I've ever seen). But, it's not for me. It doesn't fit with the way I think and work. I like a personalized environment, I like things quiet, and I like a bit more free flow. I also don't feel that it is a guarantee of better code quality.

Some of the complications to me are all the personalization developers like to do, whether that be fonts, keyboards, screen arrangements, colors, coding styles, and so on. Some of that can be worked around, but I'm simply not a fan, and don't believe it's the big advantage various others believe it is. But, in the same note, if it works for you, you prefer it, and you find someone/people to pair with that works well, then more power to you.

Also, I have a long history of doing remote work, working with other remote folks, and so on, and that is either impossible, or mostly defeats pair programming (Pivotal may disagree, but I do know they've had some hardships in this area as well). Differing time zones are not friendly to pair programming.

All this also ties into the next topic...

The Creativity Zone

I think Hivelogic nails it with this:

Unfortunately, most people can’t simply step into The Zone. In the very same way you’d want to find the right time and place to read a book, creative types need to setup the specific conditions they need to enter The Zone. For some people, this might mean listening to a certain kind of music. It might be fueled by caffeine and a dark room late at night. Some people work best in the silence of the early morning. It all depends on the person.

As you can guess from my pair programming comments above, I agree about having the right environment, and that you can't just force the work to flow. I've worked with a lot of different folks. Some people like to listen to music, some don't. Those that do range from listening to classical on low volumn to high volumn metal. Some work at night best, others can do the 9-5 thing, etc. This to me is similar to the situation of working in a cafe.

I think working in cafes is not good. I'm ok with popping in for an espresso, having a casual meeting there, or just using it to take a break from the office (whether that be a company office, or home office), and just checking email or reading RSS, or what not. But I don't buy it for serious work, and secondarily, I think you people who do do that suck. Yep, straight up, you suck. You go into a coffee shop, and take up space, and then ignore everyone. Why are you there? And why do you think that's fair? You are in no way contributing to the "cafe culture" or environment of a cafe, you are detracting from it. I was glad to see Ritual take away outlets and such. You shouldn't be sitting there for hours on end leeching from them.

And furthermore, I simply don't buy it as a productive environment, even when you wall yourself off from what is around you - which by definition tells me you don't think it's a productive environment either, otherwise you wouldn't need to bring your headphones and ignore everyone and all that.

Instead, make yourself a nice home office. There are a ton of resources on the web on how to do this if you need some pointers. Which leads me to...

What's Important in a Home Office - And In Working at Home

The above referenced articles already cover some of this, I'll try to be brief. Bring on the bullets:

• Great chair and desk, see above


• Proper lighting. In this I mean both the actual lights, but also how windows affect your workspace. Do not face directly into a window, as much as the view may be awesome. Usually you want windows on the side of you (not in front or back). I have a nice forest, mostly, to look out on my left side window - easy enough when I need a break to just turn my head.


• A separate room. Not everyone can do this, but I feel VERY strongly about this if you plan to do significant amounts of work at home. You need a space that you can go to that is your office, where you can make a shift into work mode, have some isolation, close doors (so phone calls are quiet and so you can work without distraction), etc. It doesn't have to be huge, but make it your office space.


• Good machine and monitor(s). Big monitors are key. I use a MacBook Pro as my main machine, but have an external 24" monitor (I want to go to a 30" when I can) on it as well, and an external keyboard is good too.


• I feel you shouldn't have a beverage bar in your office. Just keep it in the kitchen, save electricity or whatever. But, for me, this is a good way to force me to get up and walk a bit, allows some different thinking time, etc. I almost always have a glass of water on my desk, but I get up to make an espresso, or maybe grab some fruit, or whatever. The break is always good.


• Ok, I used to laugh at this recommendation, but I'm now one who does it, although I don't think it's required... Get up, and take a shower, get dressed, etc. I mention this for the two reasons I need to do it (but if you don't, then no biggy): I am not a morning person. I need to wake up a bit slower, and I prefer less interaction with people when I first get up. So, for me, what I've found is great, is to get up, and go shower. It is my way of having a slower re-entry. But, it also helps shift me into work mode (even if I don't wind up "going to work" for another hour or two. It flips that switch more explicitly for me.

That's all for now, as I want to get on to the last point...

Passion

In some of the referenced articles, and this has grown to be discussed a lot in reference to these, there is mention of whether folks need to be work-a-holics to have a successful startup. 37 Signals says to fire them. Calcanas mostly the opposite. I'm very strongly in the 37 Signals camp on this - to me it all comes down to passion. I believe this beyond startups as well, and it's one reason I just have no interest in working for larger companies anymore, because I feel the logistics simply make it a lot harder to have everyone be passionate. But, in the end, the folks I want to work with are passionate about their work/the project. This is how I want to be with what I'm working on. Sure, there are always parts that aren't as fun, but the overall idea is to have an overarching passion for what you're doing. To me that produces the best result, regardless of actual hours worked. In fact, I'd argue that you will get FAR better results from passionate folks working moderate hours, than simply a box of people putting in massive hours.

I recall we used to joke about how there was this notion that at Oracle (or substitute various others), all the engineers worked 80 hour weeks. That was BS of course. Note, I haven't worked at Oracle, but know folks who did, although that is somewhat beside the point... They may have been at the office 80 hours a week, but there is no way they were productively cranking out great work for all 80 hours. No, they were going to the gym, eating in the cafes, goofing off, or half awake at the keyboard. Recipe for burnout.

Now, as long as you have the passion, that's the key to me. After that, if you want to put in some epic hours because you're so psyched to be moving some great project forward, that's cool. I've done it. I don't think it's something that's sustainable long term, but bursts of this are great, go for it.

Right now, to share a bit, I'm making less money than I have in a long long time, but I'm more psyched than I probably ever have been, on the work I'm doing. I'm hoping the money part changes as the startups I'm working on grow, but I'm just loving it. Working with others who are passionate, working on cool stuff, running the show myself, or being involved at fundamental levels is why I left the mothership, and I really just wish I'd left sooner. I can get into that Creative Zone every day, and I look forward to doing so!

So, I recommend you think hard about your work environment, how you make for a productive and enjoyable environment. But most of all, shoot for the passion, and mold your environment to support and foster that passion.

Shoulda and object_daddy Sitting in a Tree, t-e-s-t-i-n-g

Like some other folks working with Rails, I've been a bit frustrated with Fixtures. Foxy Fixtures, Rathole, and such things, including what is in Rails 2, have helped a lot. However, the two biggest frustrations for me come down to the fragility of fixtures, and knowing what fixtures you have and how they relate to their associated fixtures. I would find myself thinking, "hmm, which user do I use when I want the one with X associations" or what not. Naming your fixtures well helps, but only so much.

Lately, I've come across two plugins that I am really loving. These are Shoulda and object_daddy. Shoulda seems to be gaining in popularity in the Rails community, which doesn't surprise me. It gives you some of the best syntax of RSpec, without having to use RSpec (which I am not all in love with, unlike various others), as well as it gives you some nice "should" methods, and other features I'll get into in a minute.

object_daddy I think is rather obscure. I only found out about it due to Tammer Saleh's presentation (video link) on Shoulda from the 2008 MountainWest RubyConf. object_daddy has improved in its short life, and is quite useful today. What it does, is provide a factory/generator mechanism for creating model objects. I've done this in the past with object constructors or factories, etc., but object_daddy organizes all this, and provides a slick mechanism, called "exemplars", that specify how model attributes are defined when generating objects, and more importantly, when generating multiple objects. Tammer covers this issue in his presentation, which I highly recommend watching.

It's taken me a bit of time/use of Shoulda to get really into it, but like so many things, use it a bit and then the light bulb not only goes off, but seems to erupt with light. The big one here for me was how to leverage contexts, and by that I really mean nested contexts. My tests now not only read better, but can be written in a much nicer fashion, as well as organized in a great way. On the organization front for example, I now often have two top level contexts in a functional test: one for cases where I'm testing actions without a user being logged in, and the other for when a user is logged in. Great way to group them.

But, what's got me most excited lately is the combination of these two testing tools, and what it's done to my tests. First, I've darn near eliminated fixtures on the project I'm using this most with so far. This has removed the fragility, as well as it's just FAR easier to understand a test case's setup/scenario. I use Shoulda's contexts and setup, combined with generated objects from object_daddy to create "scenarios" (to steal the term from the plugin that provides this kind of thing for fixtures). The benefit is that you have all of the info about your test right there in one place in front of you. You don't need to bounce between likely multiple fixture files and your test code file to ascertain what's being used in your test. Plus, you can be very specific about the data being used in that particular test (or tests).

I heartily recommend you try this out. Two other things of note:

• Shoulda can be mixed in with existing TestUnit. So, you can slowly convert to it, or just build new tests with it, etc. Very nice. And, it doesn't require anything special to run the tests (it really is just a method generator for building TestUnit tests).


• Check out Shoulda's "should_eventually" method. I'm making more and more use of this, as I use a Test First approach. So, I go in, and build lots of tests, and do a lot of "should_eventually" as I think of things to test and functionality I need, etc. Then as I determine how to write those tests, and following on from that, write the implementation, you simply remove the "_eventually" and let it rip.

Note, if you are an RSpec fan, you can of course achieve the same as Shoulda for contexts and such (I think anyway), so just pull in object_daddy and leverage that aspect.

And last, but not least, I've forked object_daddy to make one tiny change (a single line, actually, a single method call name change!) that's made a big difference for me (comments very welcome). This change is to, by default, call create in the generate method that object_daddy adds to your ActiveRecord objects, instead of calling new. This avoids what I found to be the common case of doing:

my_new_object = SomeModel.generate
my_new_object.save
my_new_object  # or some use of it

Now, you can simply call SomeModel.generate, and use that inline, knowing it's saved in the DB, etc. I want to take a look at adding options to generate, or additional generate methods that provide the flexibility to use new, or create! or such things, for the cases where those are needed. My fork is hosted on GitHub, and is public, so feel free to check it out: http://github.com/chris/object_daddy.

p.s. For those that wonder why I've "all but eliminated fixtures", as in, what do I still have in fixtures? The only things are standard data, which in my case amounts to a couple specific users, and a couple of Roles and Permissions. These normally get setup in the DB migrations, but I'm working through what Rails does when you run tests and it wipes the DB clean (and thus doesn't pick up seed data from migrations), and other such issues.

Setting up CruiseControl.rb with/for Git Based Projects

[Updated to refer to official ThoughtWorks CC.rb Git repo.]

I have a new Rails project I'm working on and I use Git/GitHub for source control. It was time to setup continuous integration, and my usual weapon of choice for that is CruiseControl.rb. Here's what I did to get my project setup under CruiseControl.rb with Git, on an Ubuntu 7.10 machine...

Setup for accessing GitHub repo

All I needed to do here was generate an SSH key for my account on the host machine, and then add that key to the allowed keys for my GitHub account.

Prerequisites

• I setup a builder@mydomain.com email address which will get used by CruiseControl for sending build related emails/notifications.


• You'll need to determine a port you want CruiseControl to run on, and your strategy for accessing it. For example, I run mine on a port other than port 80, and other than the default 3333. I then proxy that via Nginx, and also use Nginx to password protect access to it (since this is not a public project, etc. This will affect the CC dashboard URL setting specified below. Some notes on this:




• I did my initial Nginx configuration using err's Nginx config generator. However, this makes a lot of path assumptions, and various other things, so you'll definitely want to go through the resulting file closely. I had a few sites on this server, so it was relatively useful to use this as a base starting point, and then just fix up paths to the access and error logs, and the PID file.


• Here's a quicky on how to add password protection to an Nginx server (and a specific location).

Install CruiseControl and Do Site Configuration

1. Cloned the Git version of CruiseControl.rb in location I wanted it (you could also simply download it and expand the tarball): git clone git://github.com/benburkert/cruisecontrolrb.git


2. The DEPENDENCIES file indicated I needed to have the grit and mime-types gems, so installed those.


3. Where your projects get stored for CruiseControl.rb is now defined by the CRUISE_DATA_ROOT environment variable, and if you don't set this, it defaults to $HOME/.cruise. I personally changed this to be /var/cruisecontrolrb.
   
4. Edit the config/site_configuration.rb (probably need to rename the example version accordingly) to set site-wide settings, such as your email config and so on.
   
   
   
   • For email setup, I use Gmail for domains, so I have a block like this:
     

     
     ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = {
       :address =>        "smtp.gmail.com",
       :port =>           587,
       :domain =>         "mydomain.com",
       :authentication => :plain,
       :user_name =>      "builder@ mydomain.com",
       :password =>       "password"
     }

   
   
   • You'll want to specify the Configuration.dashboard_url setting so URL's work properly.
   
   
   • There are a variety of other settings available in the file that you may want to tweak.
   
   
   
   

Add Project and Configure

1. Did the usual usual cruise add command to add my project, but with the Git variant: ./cruise add MyProjectName --git-url git@github.com:mylogin/myproject.git (modify the Git project URL for your Git repo of course). Note that you can see all the options by doing a ./cruise add


2. Create the test database for your project. The easiest way is just to go into $CRUISE_DATA_ROOT/projects/MyProjectName/work and do a rake db:create RAILS_ENV=test. Your first build will have already failed because this hasn't been made, this step hopefully fixes that.


3. If your log directory isn't in Git, you'll need to go mkdir it, so something like:mkdir $CRUISE_DATA_ROOT/projects/MyProjectName/work/log.

Setup CruiseControl.rb Service/Daemon

1. Copy the cruisecontrolrb file into /etc/init.d.


2. I set the port for CruiseControl.rb to run on in the above /etc/init.d/cruisecontrolrb daemon file, by adding "--port 1234" (for example) to the DAEMON_ARGS variable.
   
3. Start the CruiseControl.rb daemon as appropriate for your system (e.g. "sudo /etc/init.d/cruisecontrolrb start").

Finally, surf to your cc.rb site on the web and see how your build has done. If you run into build problems, you'll want to look at the cc.rb build logs (if it was your project test/build that failed) which are in the $CRUISE_DATA_ROOT/projects/MyProjectName directory (or rather, the subdirectory in there for the particular build). And Enjoy!

Steak and Chard

My wife is visiting friends with the kids this week, during my daughter's first week of spring break. I'm home doing a lot of work, but it's also a real rarity that I'm home when I'm away from my family (usually it's me who's traveling). Anyway, I'm definitely doing some cooking, as well as will investigate one or two "sketchy" Mexican taco places (I scout them out, and then take the fam if good :) They're sketchy in appearance (hopefully not in food). But, for me, the sketchier, usually means the better. But I digress...

Tonight I made probably the best steak I've made in a long time, definitely one of my best ever. Not a new recipe, but just perfectly executed, if I do say so myself. Combined with it was an experiment with chard; recipe of my own on-the-fly creation.

The Steak

First I went and got an absolutely top quality ribeye from my local meat market (Long's, here in Eugene). A Roughly 1lb beauty. Then I ground up some fresh Blue Bottle Roman Espresso coffee (ground at a setting approx between drip and French Press, so on the course side, but not huge chunks). It is absolutely key to use fresh coffee beans, and grind them, none of this canned or pre-ground crap. Also, the better the coffee, the better the result. I could go on a long time here, but I won't (because I'm working on a blog entry about Blue Bottle :) Next, combine that with a pinch or three of either kosher salt or Fleur de Sel or similar salt of your choice. And then, add fresh ground pepper to the mix - about 1/3rd as much as you have coffee (more or less to taste I suppose - but don't put so much that you drown out the coffee). Liberally coat your steak with that - hide the steak in it.

I then recommend grilling the steak over a very hot grill. I use a gas BBQ, with my burners all on high - about 500 degrees on average. For the thickness of steak I had tonight (1.25"?), I cooked it just short of 11 minutes - about 5 minutes a side or so. This yields a medium-rare steak, and I mean truly medium-RARE, plenty of pink, but not bleeding. Once done grilling, pull it off and let it rest a few minutes. Stellar.

The Chard

I'm a big fan of chard, usually sautéed. Tonight I had some organic red chard. At Long's I'd also picked up some prosciutto, although a last minute decision to try something new, yielded some green peppercorn infused prosciutto cotto (cooked). First I sautéed some chopped red onion, with a pinch of Napa herbs, fresh ground pepper, and a bit of the helpful chunky grey garlic sea salt (go light here, this is not a garlic thing). A bit of red wine (a bottle I had open, oddly enough a tempranillo-syrah blend). Saute and fry that prosciutto up a bit.

Next, I separated the stalks from the chard, as they need to cook longer. Toss those in with the above mixture and steam/saute a bit to soften the stalks up. Then, put the chard leaves in, and essentially steam until done. Doesn't take long. Given that I made this up while I was cooking it, it worked out really well. Of course, most things with prosciutto do :)

Drink

I went with the easy choice here, although unexpected. I think most people would expect a nice bold red wine, and I do have some nice ones in the wine fridge. But, when I'm alone and not at a restaurant (thus not opening a bottle, or ordering by the glass) I'll go with a cocktail. My standard favorite is gin rocks with onions. Tonight this was Zuidam dry gin (battling for top spot with my usual favorite No. Ten by Tanqueray), and the best cocktail onions, Sable and Rosenfeld Tipsy Onions. I prefer my gin over just a couple large cubes of ice, so that it's not so cold as to take away flavor. Good botanical gin has a myriad of wonderful flavors, and I think shaking it with ice just kills some of that - No Ten is FAR better just slightly cooled over a couple cubes of ice.

All this, while listening to some great jazz (not typical for me, but "completed" the evening), and sitting at the bar-counter in our house. I felt like I was in a great restaurant, eating a wonderful meal at the bar, only it was in the comfort of my own home, relaxing, and loving it. I guess it was my own great restaurant; how nice!

Creating Sparkle Appcast via Rake Tasks

I have a RubyCocoa application that self-updates using Sparkle. To do so, you need to create an "appcast" file which contains the version and download information for your application, as well as creating the zip file that holds your app. Then, you of course have to upload this to the server and location that you have specified in the SUFeedURL key value in your Info.plist file of your app. For general instructions on using Sparkle and setting it up, see their Basic Instructions page.

My Rake tasks do not create the zip file. I may enhance it to do this at some point, but so far I haven't needed to, and have had cases where I need to create it myself for various reasons. What the tasks do is to build an appcast.xml file from a YAML file that contains all the necessary information. Note that the name of my app is "Linker", so you'll see that in various spots. The tasks do rely on a simple directory structure:

• Your app root directory




• Rakefile


• appcast




• version_info.yml


• build




• Your app zip files go here (e.g. Linker_0.8.zip, Linker_0.9.zip, etc.)


• Rake task will create the linker_appcast.xml file here

So, you have a spot you drop your zip files into, and this same dir is where the Rake tasks create the appcast file. The version_info.yml file is where you put the info needed to generate the appcast. It looks like this:

linker-04:
  title: Linker 0.4
  filename: Linker_0.4.zip
  description: Added Sparkle updating mechanism.

linker-05:
  title: Linker 0.5
  filename: Linker_0.5.zip
  description: Added help (see Help menu).  Added bookmarklet support/custom URL protocol handling.  See the new help for information on how to use the bookmarklet.

Note that you can put HTML into the "description" field, and my Rake task will deal with and preserve that.

Finally, I have two Rake tasks, one for building the appcast, and the other for uploading it and the latest zip file to the server. These each are simply one liners that call a parallel Ruby method within the Rakefile:

namespace :appcast do
  desc "Create/update the appcast file"
  task :build do
    make_appcast
  end
  
  desc "Upload the appcast file to the server"
  task :upload do
    upload_appcast
  end
end

The two methods rely on you defining a couple of variables in your Rakefile, adjust these as desired:

APPCAST_SERVER        = 'your_appcast_server.com'
APPCAST_URL           = "http://#{APPCAST_SERVER}"
APPCAST_FILENAME      = 'linker_appcast.xml'

Here are the methods, first the one that builds the appcast, which you'll need to modify for your app:

def make_appcast
  begin
    versions = YAML.load_file("appcast/version_info.yml")
  rescue Exception => e
    raise StandardError, "appcast/version_info.yml could not be loaded: #{e.message}"
  end
  
  appcast = File.open("appcast/build/#{APPCAST_FILENAME}", 'w')

  xml = Builder::XmlMarkup.new(:target => appcast, :indent => 2)

  xml.instruct!
  xml.rss('xmlns:atom' => "http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom",
          'xmlns:sparkle' => "http://www.andymatuschak.org/xml-namespaces/sparkle", 
          :version => "2.0") do
    xml.channel do
      xml.title('BWA Linker')
      xml.link(APPCAST_URL)
      xml.description('Linker app updates')
      xml.language('en')
      xml.pubDate(Time.now.rfc822)
      xml.lastBuildDate(Time.now.rfc822)
      xml.atom(:link, :href => "#{APPCAST_URL}/#{APPCAST_FILENAME}", 
               :rel => "self", :type => "application/rss+xml")

      versions.each do |version|
        guid = version.first
        items = version[1]
        file = "appcast/build/#{items['filename']}"
        
        xml.item do
          xml.title(items['title'])
          xml.description { xml << "          xml.pubDate(File.mtime(file))
          xml.enclosure(:url => "#{APPCAST_URL}/#{items['filename']}", 
                        :length => "#{File.size(file)}", :type => "application/zip")
          xml.guid(guid, :isPermaLink => "false")
        end
      end
    end
  end
end

Looking through that above, you'll want to modify the title and description at least. Now on to the uploader method:

def upload_appcast
  remote_dir = "/var/www/apps/bwa/shared/public/updaters/"

  Net::SSH.start( APPCAST_SERVER, 'deploy' ) do |session|
    cwd = Dir.pwd
    Dir.chdir('appcast/build')

    shell = session.shell.sync

    begin
      out = shell.cd remote_dir
      raise "Failed to change to proper remote directory." unless out.status == 0  

      out = shell.ls("-1")
      raise "Failed to get directory listing." unless out.status == 0

      files = Array.new
      out.stdout.each { |file| files << file.strip }

      # Look through the list of files and see what we need to upload, as 
      # compared to what we have locally - but always upload the appcast itself
      local_files = Dir.glob('*')
      files.delete(APPCAST_FILENAME)  # we always upload this
      local_files.each do |local_file|
        unless files.include?(local_file)
          print "Uploading: #{local_file}... "
          `scp #{local_file} deploy@#{APPCAST_SERVER}:#{remote_dir}`
          puts $?.exitstatus == 0 ? "done." : "FAILED!"
        end
      end
    rescue => e
      puts "Failed: #{e.message}"
    ensure
      Dir.chdir(cwd)
      shell.exit  
    end
  end
end

You will of course want to modify the remote_dir, and the login credentials towards the bottom (where it does the scp command). This also relies on you having your SSH keys set up, so you don't have to enter a password when it does the scp.

You could further generalize this obviously, but this is what I have, it works fine, and I haven't needed to extract anything out further. Posting here as per a request, and hopefully it saves someone else a few minutes.

Webcam Recommendations?

I setup the site Basecamp Silverton for a friend, and he's wanting to add a webcam to it, to show what the mountain and a bit of town look like at a fairly frequent interval. He had gotten what looked like a relatively decent web cam - the optics are fairly good for the price, but the thing's software is atrocious and it only does FTP in terms of sending images out (it does provide a live feed, but we're not after that). So, I'm seeking recommendations.

What we want is a networked webcam with the following characterisitcs:

• A decent enough lens to point it from his house in town up at the mountains (which are right there - as in less than a mile away).


• It should be low cost (preferably under $300, over that will be considered, but there has to be a good reason).


• Support SFTP preferably (FTP is ok), as a way to send images at regular intervals from the camera to a server.


• RSS Feed for the images is an acceptable alternative to FTP/SFTP.


• Be easy to configure and manage.


• WiFi is ideal, but not required.


• Must be configurable from a Mac or a Mac browser (Safari or Firefox).


• Multiple mounting options would be good - bolt on, simply sit on a desk/shelf, etc.


• No special networking requirements.


• Exported image size of about 500 pixels wide or more. e.g. something with reasonable size to provide reasonable detail.


• Exported images in JPEG, PNG, or GIF.

Anyway, let me know your recommendations.

Update: It turned out that there was a network configuration issue with the camera we have. I was luckily able to figure this out within literally 1 minute of logging into the configuration web app for the camera, after Matt opened up a hole in his firewall so I could remotely access the camera. There still seems to be some problems with the FTP, but this got us closer, and I suspect we'll be staying with this camera afterall. Of course, don't hesitate to recommend what you like, may be useful later on (and we may do a second camera if this one proves as successful as the demand has indicated so far).

Tech Books for Free

I have some tech books that I will be donating to the local library, unless someone wants any of them. If you would like one or more of these books, I'm happy to send them to you for the price of shipping. Click through to the Flickr page and message me, or leave a comment on my blog (make sure you include your email address (which doesn't get published) in your comment, so I can reply. The books are primarily cover Java and Linux, but also Python, Jabber, Mozilla, Emacs, etc.



Also, not in the picture, but most likely available is, "Object Oriented Perl" by Damian Conway, from Manning Press. It's on eBay, but doesn't appear it'll sell.