John Topley’s Weblog

Enterprise Java leads us to a point where choice becomes a bad thing.

I recently added Shaun Inman’s superb Mint statistics package to my AssetGraphed Rails Machine installation. As the installation wasn’t particularly straightforward, I thought I’d write this little guide for others who may be struggling. I should point out that the real credit for the information here goes to Bradley Taylor from Rails Machine who was extremely helpful and persistent.

First of all, I should point out that these instructions cover installing Mint under your /public directory i.e. yoursite.tld/mint/ rather than the subdomain installation method (mint.yoursite.tld). Also note that → indicates that the line has a break in it in the instructions, but in reality it should all be on one line. With that out of the way, here’s what you need to do:

1. Install PHP on your Rails Machine using these instructions. You should have no problems with them if you follow them exactly.
2. Log in to your Rails Machine as your deploy user then become root by using su - root and entering your root password.
3. Edit /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf and search for DirectoryIndex index.html. Add index.php to the end if it’s not present as shown below and save the file:
   
DirectoryIndex index.html index.php
4. Edit /etc/httpd/conf/apps/yourapp.conf and add the following immediately after the RewriteEngine On line:
   
RewriteRule ^/mint/$ /mint/index.php [QSA]
5. Now find the three lines shown below:
   
# Redirect all non-static requests to cluster
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^/(.*)$→
balancer://yourapp_cluster%{REQUEST_URI} [P,QSA,L]—And add the following line immediately before them:

   # Don't redirect requests to /mint
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/mint/(.*)$

6. The full rewrite rules should look like this:
   
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^/mint/?$ /mint/index.php [QSA]# Prevent access to .svn directories
RewriteRule ^(.*/)?\.svn/ - [F,L]
ErrorDocument 403 "Access Forbidden"

   # Check for maintenance file and redirect all requests
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/system/maintenance.html -f
RewriteCond %{SCRIPT_FILENAME} !maintenance.html
RewriteRule ^.*$ /system/maintenance.html [L]

   # Rewrite index to check for static
RewriteRule ^/$ /index.html [QSA]

   # Rewrite to check for Rails cached page
RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ $1.html [QSA]

   # Don't redirect requests to /mint
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/mint/(.*)$

   # Redirect all non-static requests to cluster
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^/(.*)$→
balancer://yourapp_cluster%{REQUEST_URI} [P,QSA,L]

7. Save the file. It’s probably read-only. If you edited it using vi then you can save it even though it’s read-only by using :wq!
8. Finally, restart Apache by using /sbin/service httpd reload and log out completely from your Rails Machine.

You can now install Mint itself by adding it to your working copy directory under /public and adding it to your Subversion repository using svn add ./public/mint. Once you’ve deployed to your Rails Machine you’ll be able to complete the Mint installation by visiting http://yoursite.tld/mint/ and following the instructions.

P.S. I have spent the past several hours wrestling with WordPress trying to get the markup in this post to validate, but I have conceded defeat!

I’m no mobile phone expert. My current phone is a Sony Ericsson Z200 which is a few years old and doesn’t have a camera, FM radio or MP3 player. I bought it because you can make calls with it and because it’s very small and quite robust. I don’t even use it enough to justify having a contract—it’s Pay-As-You-Go all the way with me. So I’m hardly qualified to comment on Apple’s glorious new iPhone, but I’m going to anyway.

1. The iPhone name seems to have caught everyone by surprise, not least because it’s currently owned by Cisco.
2. You’re not going to be able to use an iPhone with a Pay-As-You-Go contract like I have. If you’re not using the device’s Internet features then you’re not getting value from it.
3. The screen lock slider is classic Apple design: eminently practical yet a bit flashy.
4. The user interface is almost entirely software, which means that it’s really easy for Apple to change and enhance.
5. I remember reading about Apple’s patent on the pinch gesture used in the touch screen interface a few years ago. It’s great that it’s finally seen the light of day.
6. The Visual Voicemail feature is really neat. Serial access (i.e. having to scroll through stuff to get to what you want) is so unsatisfying, whether it be voicemail or videotape.
7. I remember watching Star Trek: The Next Generation and seeing crew members walking around with little black tablets with a software interface in their hands. Now we can have them too!
8. People say that $599 is a lot of money for a phone. It is a lot of money, but think of it as a new top-end video iPod—albeit currently without the top-end storage capacity—along with a mobile Internet device that you can also make phone calls with.
9. It’s hard to see how the next iPod can continue with the same form factor now the iPhone has been revealed. People are going to want that flippable screen on their iPod. Software scroll wheel anyone?
10. Can you run OS X’s Terminal.app on it? If you can’t, then someone will find a way.
11. Can you have a message engraved on the back like you can with an iPod?
12. Will the casing be more scratch-resistant than the iPod’s?
13. Hopefully Apple have invented a new type of plastic for the screen that really will be fingerprint resistant and easy to clean. Yeah right. We haven’t even got suction cups that don’t come off the surface they’re supposed to be attached to yet.
14. Expect an open-source project/competition to be announced in June with a prize going to the first person to get Linux running on an iPhone.
15. Expect Amit Singh to write an article about how to make phone calls by typing commands directly into the iPhone’s fireware interface. The commands will be surprisingly intuitive like:
    fs0:\> call 1-800-my-apple
16. The on-screen keyboard looks quite cramped and might be hard to use without any tactile feedback.
17. The iPhone looks too big to fit in a trouser pocket, which is a major problem for me as that’s where I like to keep my phone in the summer when I don’t wear a coat.
18. Expect a galaxy of third-party cases/pouchs/screen protectors, all of which make you look like a dork.
19. There’s no mention of what CPU the iPhone uses.
20. I don’t know anything about mobile phone networks, but from reading people’s reactions to the device, lots of Americans really don’t like Cingular.
21. Expect a plethora of music videos filled with gangsta rappers flashing their iPhones into the camera. Bling!
22. Is the battery replaceable?
23. Every phone I’ve ever used is full of undocumented features that are hidden away in dark crevices of the UI. For example, on my current phone, there’s one called Minute Minder and I have no idea what it is. The iPhone won’t be like that. No dark crevices.
24. How long before the first mugging where the victim was attacked for their iPhone? How long before the first murder?

I just checked the Apple Store and noticed that it’s down for updating. They always do this just before a Steve Jobs keynote when he announces lots of new goodies for Apple fanboys like me to spend our hard-earned cash on. I’m excited, particularly if the long-rumoured Apple phone is going to be announced. It’s about time there was a properly designed mobile phone.

UPDATE: Looks like I’m not going to be disappointed!—

You may recall that a while ago I mentioned The Rails Way, which is a site where Rails core team members Jamis Buck and Michael Koziarski review code submissions and illustrate Rails best practices. Well, the big news is that they’ve started reviewing my code! I submitted a subset of the code from the AssetsGraphed application and the first article about it was posted yesterday. Incidentally, in case you’re wondering what I didn’t submit, it’s the code for the Reports feature and for the hidden administration interface that I use to manage users and currencies within the system etc.

The first part of the series is about removing a lot of duplicated code around the incomings and outgoings that each asset has. I always knew that having so much identical code was totally evil, but I wasn’t quite sure how to go about removing it. As is often the way with these things, it does seem kind of obvious now! I have to admit that it’s quite nerve-wracking having my early fumblings with Ruby and Rails subjected to public scrutiny, but it’s also a great way to learn, which is why I’m doing it. I intend to implement all of the improvements featured, although some of them may be more challenging to do than meets the eye because I have the added problem of having to preserve the existing data. I don’t know how many articles are going to be in the series, but there’s certainly lots of areas that I know could be done better.

I’ve also just launched the AssetsGraphed Forums where you can post any feature requests or bug reports or just generally hang out. I’m using Josh Goebel’s and Rick Olson’s Beast forum software. Go take a look!

I’ve just finished moving AssetsGraphed over to Rails Machine. The application was originally hosted by TextDrive, on the same server as this site. I don’t have any complaints about TextDrive but it was clear that I needed something more substantial for AssetsGraphed. I have lifetime hosting with TextDrive which is fine for websites but problematic for Ruby on Rails applications, as you’re limited to 48 MB resident memory and 80 MB virtual memory. If your application exceeds those limits—which are pretty generous for a shared hosting environment—then your Ruby process gets terminated without warning and it’s goodnight to your app. This was proving to be a problem for AssetsGraphed, which is fairly memory intensive due to the image processing required for the graphs.

I did consider TextDrive’s other plans, in particular their Accelerator Hosting plans whereby you get a proportion of a Solaris box and root access. It sounded great but a bit too DIY for me. I don’t mind the odd bit of system administration but I’d rather be writing code with my developer’s hat on. Enter Rails Machine. I’d read good things about them and watched the demo movie on their site. The thing that appealed to me was that they make it really very easy to set everything up and deploy your application, leaving you free to spend your brain power on development. You use their Rails Machine RubyGem and custom Capistrano recipe and it all just works, as if by magic.

I went for a three VPS set up, as shown below. One virtual server is given over entirely to the AssetsGraphed Rails application, a second one will host the forthcoming AssetsGraphed forum and blog and the third is the MySQL database server that all the applications use. It’s a nice, tidy set up:

One of the things that I didn’t appreciate from the Rails Machine site is that the don’t provide any DNS services, so you have to bring your own. I signed up for the cheapest account from DNS Made Easy and all I had to do was go into my GoDaddy domain control panel and enter the names of the nameservers that DNS Made Easy provided me with. Then, in the DNS Made Easy control panel I set up the records for the assetsgraphed.com domain so that they pointed to the IP addresses of my Rails Machine virtual servers.

Because I went for a multiple VPS arrangement, I did have a few configuration problems where my set up deviated from the instructions on the Rails Machine site, which assumes a single VPS per app. For example, something that caught me out was that when I initially set up the Rails Machine for AssetsGraphed, the assetsgraphed.com domain was still pointing to TextDrive, so I set the domain variable in the Capistrano recipe (deploy.rb) to the non-friendly server address assigned to me by Rails Machine. When I did switch the domain over and accessed the application, all I saw was a Welcome to Rails Machine! holding page. That was fixed by setting the domain variable to assetsgraphed.com and then running:

cap setup_web
cap reload_web

—To configure Apache correctly. I should stress that I got excellent help with this and the other issues that I had by dropping in to the Rails Machine Campfire chat and talking directly to Bradley Taylor, who has always been friendly and quick to help, no matter what else he was occupied with at the time!

If you come to Rails Machine from other hosting providers like I did, then you may find it a bit bare-bones at first. As well as no DNS service, there’s no Web-based control panel. It’s all driven through Capistrano and the command line. However, don’t let that put you off because once you wrap your brain around it then it all works extremely well. What you do get for your money is a high performance Rails hosting solution, with the emphasis being on solution. All the hard work of setting up a Subversion repository, importing your code into it and deploying and running your application has been done for you. Highly recommended.