yiic webapp ..\testdrive

Unfortunately, for most users this will result in an error along the lines of “bash: ./yiic: Permission denied” unless you first make yiic executable.

The easiest way to do this is to run the following command in your framework directory:

chmod +x yiic

The x simply means “eXecutable”.

This image makes 60,000 indexed items. A fair whack of that would be email, but far out that’s a lot of information. (It’s not just a count of files on a system, that’s just indexed documents in my home dir, projects workspace, and email accounts)

New laptop arrives Monday morning, and I’m trying to decide if I even want to move everything off this desktop or not! The laptop has half a TB of disc space across 2 drives (17″ monster), so I’m considering it. I purchased it as a desktop replacement system and it is quite capable of that (specs at end of post)! The desktop provides a good backup should the laptop die/get stolen/run over by a bus, but at present the data is organised to be used, not archived.

By “used”, of course, I mean that liberally disorganised but most-recently-used-on-top sort of structure we fall into so easily. So I have a spot of sorting to do to get everything onto the laptop.

My last computer still has some stuff I’d like to get off it (particularly uni work… to the critics, yes, I do still go to uni!) but it’s been in at Youthworks not doing much since we moved offices, but heavy enough I haven’t bothered bringing it home again, since late last year.

The problem with desktops in particular is that they aren’t worth selling for their potential usefulness. My several-years-old computer (2.4GHz/768MB/somethingsomething… Ubuntu) in at Youthworks could maybe just sell for $350 given a clueless enough eBayer. My current desktop (no great slouch, AMD64 X2 4200+/2GB/7600GS) would be worth about the same to someone who knew what they were talking about… or perhaps $750 on eBay!

Even so — it’s useful to have spare machines ‘just in case’ (for production stuff especially). I’d love to be able to swap those two desktops for laptops of similar vintage, but it’s just never going to be cost-effective. When people get rid of laptops, it’s because they suck (falling apart/general abuse, crap battery life, rubbish specs to start with, etc.). Not so with desktops, wherein most faults are redeemable at minimal cost. And even that minimal cost is often negated by the fact that there’s so much in the way of ‘spare’ parts around the place!

On the plus side, I got all system configuration stuff (esp. Samba, which can be a lot more difficult than perhaps it should be at times) worked out last week (i.e. the system was nearly perfect, but for being utterly unable to install even SRPM packages of a more recent Python version), and Michael went through installing everything with me at work… we had to battle Windows a little there, but even it relented. So close. Then I’ll spend heaps of time cutting layouts to markup and seeing them working, and non-Youthworks time taking Satchmo for a spin (which will hopefully lend itself to a certain application very nicely). The lovely thing about all this is I need Django to work for CYIADA, so I’m supported in getting it up and running, but then have enough ‘spare’ hours in the week that I can engage in freelance projects that ultimately mean I know what’s going on with CYIADA and am mildly more competent to make minor modifications as required accordingly.

Some of those projects might even feed back into the project, which would be a bonus — but even if they come to nothing, it’s worthwhile for skills development alone.

Actually, that’s a lie, but I’m feeling a little vitriolic (oxymoron?). Ubuntu didn’t work at all, and of a sudden CentOS did. It’s not quite as polished but I could grow to love it (maybe). I just need to look past this whole RPM thing, which really is ugly compared to the breadth and depth of apt options available. IMO, of course. And the whole ports gig just scares me so I’m gonna stay away from FreeBSD here for a while longer (until this one breaks in another two years?)

I’d forgotten how much work I’d put into making Samba shares behave as well as they had been for the last forever, too. And was convinced there was nothing of value left on the computer (I didn’t delete the home directories, just in case… that was really easy because they’re even on a physically separate volume, it was basically less effort to just leave them there) and consequently (yet again) deleted a MySQL database with StuffOfValue™ in it. In this case a CYIADA survey database I’d built because there were no other options available and (you probably guessed it) I hadn’t sorted out hosting by IT at work yet.

So the aim now is to setup a similarly solid server that’ll last me another two years, barring hardware upgrades (this thing desparately needs more RAM even though it’s got half a gig–I have no idea where it all goes). This time around it’ll be more web-production-esque in its role, which basically means it’ll have more than just being a quiet Samba PDC and file server and web dumping ground on its plate, at least until everything I’ve got planned for it today reaches maturity, or my situation changes to the point that paying for a VPS or real dedicated server somewhere else is a viable option. Loki does, indeed, work quite well, but I can’t screw with it quite as much as some things make me want to (not that I’d want to do that to Loki… in between catastrophic hardware failure it’s amazingly stable and the lack of general screwing-around-ness is probably a big part of that! Probably… :P)

No aspirations surrounding the idea of a media server this time around. Though there’s a possibility I’ll look at maybe building a terabyte RAID server later this year, which would mean rethinking whisper’s role somewhat. It’d probably be relocated to downstairs (it’s cooler there) and replaced by a case with better ventilation and requiring better ventilation. The EPIA board I’ve got isn’t passively cooled, but I reckon it can deal with getting toasty that much more because it’s got a fan stuck to it. It’s a borderline fan requirement, anyway — the hard drives get hotter than the processor (highest I’ve seen the drives is about 62° C, the processor would only hit 55, tops) on forty-something degree Sydney days. If the storage upgrade is called for I’d probably look at getting something with a bit more grunt though, just because if the space requires better ventilation then that lets me stop constraining the system power according to temperature!

Anyway. Now I’m a CentOS kid. Which makes me feel kinda dirty inside because of the whole Prominent North American Upstream Provider All In Title Case issue, but I think I can live with myself for the time being.

So I downloaded 6.10 (hence the torrent post) and it didn’t work.

Fine. I downloaded 6.06 LTS (the, you know, meant-to-be-überstable-and-longlasting release) and it hangs loading the kernel. No kernel panic message, it just gets stuck.

This is annoying.

I’m basically going to rebuild this entire server for Django’s sake, because it’s so useful for non-programmers like me to build things that work. This has been an interesting week at church because a whole bunch of new things started/old things restarted and finally I’m in a position to evaluate where we can use technology from an “insider” standpoint with regards to what I’m being paid to do at Youthworks.

I’ve got two smallish (with potential for massive extension) apps that I want to build in under two days for ongoing internal use (one for TACKLES, another for my Switch small group this year) which will essentially form prototypes for revision/replacement as appropriate for use in a CYIADA global context once we get a programmer on board (God willing sometime soon! I’m meeting with someone who will hopefully be helpful in this regard on Friday, please be praying!) and make some more concrete decisions about architecture. I can draw flowcharts until there’s nothing left to flow but that doesn’t get business logic written!

I’m thinking the Ubuntu issue will be some stupid hardware thing that will go away once I take the computer apart. It probably needs a bit of a clean, anyway. I just so don’t have time to spend on sysadminy type stuff these days, only no-one else at work will/is interested in doing it, which is rather annoying — there’s free hosting, but it’s seriously the most vanilla hosting environment you’re likely to find anywhere. It’s a CPanel/WHM gig with zero redundancy, zero backups, PHP4 only, and blah blah blah no-one cares. Generic with a capital G set in Times New Roman. There is, of course, little interest in anything using a non-.Net platform. I’d actually quite happily use MSSQL, but ASP.Net is, by all reports, just gross from a web standards perspective. And whilst I’m slowly being de-radicalised in that regard (partially because I am caring less about standards and more about accessibility, which is bad long term anyway, and also because my viewpoints are becoming less radical as mainstream moves towards where I am now! CSS is the norm, and pure content/presentation separated sites are probably representing 50% of site refreshes at the minute), I’m not quite ready to throw in the towel that much just yet.

Nor should I be.

*soapbox off*

After zero-config, installers work magically, 3d engines function, and everything is generally incredible. I read this on someone’s blog earlier today: “with that I was able to install the latest Wine (0.9.18 at the time of this writing). This comes with better support for HL2 and WoW.” and consequently was afraid the version in non-backports Ubuntu would be ancient, etcetera, and generally useless.

No, the author is correct in saying “better support” — there is intrinsically fantastic support for pretty much everything. It’s incredible. Now I’ve just got to get some time in which to play various games. Linux, apparently, is no longer a barrier to entry, and Loki Games (R.I.P.) would face an ever-diminishing challenge as compatability layers keep growing in their sheer brilliance.

I’ve yet to try productivity applications, but am content with having tentatively embraced the gamer side of geek for one weekend. I’d love to give Dreamweaver a whirl, but am unlikely to be doing enough development work to justify it for the next couple of months. MS Office would be a pleasant addition to the repertoire, though OpenOffice is excellent for most applications. I’d never go back to using Word for preparing real documents, but perhaps for things requiring collaboration/versioning it’s the best choice. I’d probably get MS Office for creating Powerpoint templates/editing other people’s work before I had any real need for it myself, so these things are still pretty unnecessary. It’s just fantastic to think that it is, all of a sudden, a possibility.

The irony of all this is that I’m waxing lyrical about closed-source apps when the actual intent of this post is to extoll the brilliance of F/OSS’s progress. Purists would argue otherwise… but they’re wrong :-)

Noticing a downwards Getting-Stuff-Done trend. Meh. Lecture is cancelled tomorrow so I’ve got more time to try and be productive in. Now I’ve just got to not wake up too late… not even the 372 will save me if it’s not a going-to-uni day (haven’t had one of those in a while now, nice!)

And yeah, I’m sure it’s all great quality and magically never crashes and all the rest of that marketing crap. Good for you guys. I’m gonna wander back over the other side of the room here and install Windows on my equally-powerful system for, oh, about 40% of the cost. And don’t get me started on the absurd cost of your monitors. I can pick up an equivalent Dell 30″ for $600 less than your offering… and if I’m content with a meagre 23″ then I can get a 24″ Dell for $400 less! Even the 20″ screens are $500 apart. Seriously, it’s completely unjustifiable and no-one in their right mind should be prepared to spend that much more for a brand.

Sigh.

I need to open a buy-a-new-computer account and start putting money into it. Well not really… I just need a new harddrive and various software licenses I guess. I think I’d miss Ubuntu too much (maybe)… I don’t even know why, nearly everything I can do here I can do in Windows (haha — does anyone else notice the beautiful inversion of that argument? I actually think I’ve been running Linux for too many years now to have posted about it in any currently-stored online blog entries! Crazy) except anything requiring a terminal. That’s almost definitely my greatest frustration, but no matter. I need software that doesn’t run in Linux and is too intensive to work well in virtualized conditions. Best option for me would be to get a whole separate computer, but then… well, this thing can feel flaky after being on for two weeks. Windows I’d probably get that every two days or so, but at least I’d think to reboot. Here, I just kill processes and at worst logout. Kernel patches are the only thing taking this down, basically.

Moral of the story… something like don’t waste your money on a shiny new Mac.

Ubuntu is an African word meaning “I can’t configure Debian”.

It’s funny coz its true :) I got a new (new for me, it’s a Geforce 3 that has VIVO ports) graphics card today and am having a not-fun time trying to get TV-out working for tomorrow evening (!). Ah well. Mostly just coz I’m rather seriously capped right now, having done about 18GB last time I checked (it didn’t start shaping until probably 18.5 or 19GB, so definitely happy this month!)

It must be coz I had exams and was home more, or something.

So… yes. Here ends the blog post. I’m off to break my computer.

Then my computer apparently turned itself off a day or two later, and I was slightly concerned. Being a well-trained tech-monkey, the first thing I did was check power. I’d kicked it out… just.

It was actually still in the power socket, and looking loose enough that it’d probably been moved out over a period of several days. So it occured to me that maybe it was actually so close I could have nudged it that day my hard-drive failed and caused a brown out… which isn’t actually that implausible, if a tad improbable.

Perhaps it’s not just about to die. Perhaps that’s what actually happened… perhaps.

Meanwhile, the computer is still perfectly fast (and would be faster if I gutted and reinstalled Ubuntu) if a little shy on storage space. 40GB is becoming increasingly cramped (even with an additional 10GB drive dedicated to OS + applications), and hard drives are SO CHEAP these days. I’ll probably save up for a bit to get a 250GB drive and a DVD burner, and a new graphics card whilst I’m doing the computer shopping thing (there’s a computer fair at UNSW in two weeks but it was pretty meagre last time I went…).

The graphics card thing is mostly just so I’ve got video-out and a DVI connection. I’m sick of my LCD’s picture flickering/distorting because of the cheap VGA cable I’m using! Ah well. Sometime… I can never be bothered buying computer stuff anymore (unless it’s on eBay ;-)).

josh@whisper:~/public_html/XX/db/migrate$ rake migrate
(in /home/josh/public_html/XX)
rake aborted!
You have an error in your SQL syntax.  Check the manual that corresponds
to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near
'desc varchar(255)) ENGINE=InnoDB' at line 1:
CREATE TABLE courses (id int(11) DEFAULT NULL auto_increment
PRIMARY KEY, name varchar(255), desc varchar(255)) ENGINE=InnoDB
./Rakefile:200

Nyaaaah. I think it’s coz I’m using the only version of Ruby that the Rails team don’t recommend:

We recommend Ruby 1.8.4 for use with Rails. Ruby 1.8.2 is fine too, but version 1.8.3 is not.

Hah. Yeah, I’m using 1.8.3. It’s Ubuntu’s fault! That’s just what happened to be sitting in stupid apt repositories. So now I need to add backports to an otherwise-clean computer. *shudders* Well, I guess the alternative is compiling and trying to stay on top of all that… *Josh is seen hurriedly running to add backports sources*

Well, maybe not tonight. *wanders off to post on τρανσλιτερατιον before sleeping*

So I’ll say it now: Loading JavaScript on a prominent page that builds a link to a non-existent resource is a BadThing. Think ridiculous numbers of 404 errors and partially-defeated statistics tracking! Having said that, I managed to manual work out JS/no-JS support to be even lower than it is on this site — it’s 1.5% non-JS here — which is impressively (pleasingly) low!

AWstats is fun to run on many-gigabyte logfiles… just not multiple times once you’ve realised “Oh, I screwed up and no amount of grepping can save me now!” (First time I’ve absolutely required my dual-boot Ubuntu/XP install at work… because it’s lots easier to watch load on a computer you’re physically on rather than by SSH, and because multiple-GB-logfiles aren’t fun to transfer across networks!)