teh_tech

I’m almost set with my Django + mod_wsgi setup. I didn’t use a package manager for any of the dependencies, which I thought would surely get me in trouble. My yum setup is pretty botched but more importantly I found someone who had put the whole thing together on CentOS 5 and followed along line by line.

The docs provided by Google were also quite helpful. As was this, when the same thing happened to me.

I have Hello World going fine, but now it’s time to add in the Django.

-edit: Now check out http://blog.vodenski.com/tasks

Utility Mill is an extremely exciting new site which combines the anonymous community editing process popularized by the wiki movement and web services to give anyone the power to create a hosted web service in Python with a free RESTful API, which supports the XML and JSON data formats. Services can accept an arbitrary number of inputs and have access to the full Python standard library, along with some helpful others. Utility Mill is not huge, and I couldn’t find any especially insightful or useful services, but there is huge potential here. Any of a huge variety of services are possible (the one that brought me to the site is a Python implementation of the Porter stemming algorithm), and the limitation set by the folks behind Utility Mill is that all utilities must be released under the GPL.

I’ve been juicing up the server that powers the vodenski.com network (hosted by OpenHosting). The recent changes include:

1. Cleaning up a messy yum configuration
2. Installing CakePHP
3. Installing phpMyAdmin
4. Creating an SVN (+ mod_dav_svn) repo

This all took a little longer than I thought, but I’ll document the new pieces of knowledge…

1. Apache cannot access folders under /root
2. .htaccess files are not consulted by default; you have to AllowOptions yourself
3. Placing repos under /home does not play nice with DAV

Things are much smoother now, though, and I can finally focus on creating some content.

http://nefariousdesigns.co.uk/archive/2006/05/object-oriented-javascript/

A great Eclipse tip:

Does the following describe you?

“I just wrote a fancy new interface in Java and <some large number> of implementing classes… except that now I need to change the method signature of one of the interface methods and that means I’ll have to make <some large number> of changes to all of the implementing classes. CRAP!”

If so, Eclipse refactoring can help out! Just right click the method name in the interface and choose Refactor->Change method signature. After OK-ing the next dialog, Eclipse will change all of the implementing classes it knows about to support your new signature! Fancy!

In order to turn my Hardy install into a full-fledged dev environment:

• LAMP - DONE
• Eclipse - DONE (+ Sun Java JVM)
• PyDev
• Django - UNDERWAY:
  TODO:
  • mod_python
  • psycopg
  • mysql support
• PostgreSQL
• SVN Client (which one?)

In order to make Hardy more fun:

• Get the mic(s) working
• Get more music software (FL Studio via Wine?)

This is just a short test post (although I think it has a fantastic shot of working) to make sure my set-up of Drivel is correct. Drivel is a GNOME-ready desktop blog poster–it has other features too, but this is the only one I need. It just needs a link to a Wordpress xmlrpc.php file and some authentication information before it’s good and ready to rock. How fancy!

George Schlossnagle has written a fantastic resource for PHP developers. I’m about a third of the way through it, and although a good part of it has been well over my head, I’ve already learned a lot. His chapter on error and exception handling is available through Amazon, and is a great indicator of the book’s readability and depth. Schlossnagle reccommends CVS for version control, which seems dated to me since SVN appears to have replaced CVS as the gold standard, and makes some other outdated references, but his advice and examples are still spot-on. I reccommend the book to anybody looking for a way to move past the hack-and-slash PHP practices encouraged by online resources. As somebody who used to abhor PHP, I especially enjoy the suggestions for proper naming and code maintability practices.

Speaking of PHP best practices, I’ve been told that Object-Relational Mapping can hinder performance in PHP apps, but have never heard this assertion backed up by proof or logic. What do you think of ORM in PHP?

Well, it’s been five long days since I got my new laptop, and I have completely given up on Vista. Alright, let’s back up for a second. About twenty-five minutes after I took it out of the box, I replaced (tried to replace) the loaded-up Vista Home install with a Vista Business I had sitting on a DVD from my MSDNAA ISO. This led to a BSOD on start-up I had seen many times back at WHIT, and I honestly wasn’t in the mood for that kind of thing–after all, I had my Hardy LiveCD beckoning to me. Fast forward through a reinstall of Vista Home (now without all the Dell Crapware©–whoopee! but also without all the Dell drivers–wah wah wah) and a few days of getting more comfy with Ubuntu, and I am now four-ish Vista Business installs deeper and very frustrated. My start-up hung up at crcdisk.sys, which may or may not mean that a driver issue was at fault (I got VBusiness to run for a bit, but a fresh Nvidia driver put me right back in the BSODeathpit), but a look through the top Google results for this issue left me with this short list of possible causes:

• Video Driver
• Wireless Card Driver
• Audio Card Driver
• More system device drivers …
• Still more of those …
• BIOS
• Chipset Driver
• Memory
• Disk errors
• etc.

So I finally threw my hands up in anger and said, “If thousands (tens of thousands?) of other linurds can single-boot *nix and still live their lives like regular people (geeks), why can’t I?” The only things that actually were stopping me was some instability on my Ubuntu install (an erratic JRE, some failures to return from hibernate/sleep) and the fact that I couldn’t get all those pretty Desktop Effects since the Proprietary Hardware Driver manager was unwilling to use my nvidia-new driver, despite my having enabled it.

Magically, almost all of those issues–with the exception of a -5 error by uvcvideo failing to suspend–magically disappeared when I wiped my drive and all of the stupid partitions (recovery, Media Direct, some other ~75MB partition whose point I never figured out) and reinstalled from the LiveCD. Now I have a shiny, stable Hardy install with the fancy effects and all the other good stuff. In fact, thanks to Wine, I even have my dandy WinSCP/Notepad++ combo ready to hack away at any PHP that gets thrown my way.

Long live Linux!