In order to get your application on their service, you need to install their command line tool, which requires Ruby. No problem, just install it all with apt-get and you’re good to go, right? Short answer, yes. Long answer, No. You’ll be using an unsupported version (the version of ruby in the Ubuntu repos is aged), so while it might work now, it may not in the future. If you do like I did, you’ll also end up with 1.8 and 1.9 on your machine, and while that didn’t cause any problems, it seemed silly.

Poking around, I found this article which lays out how to use RVM to both install a newer version of Ruby as well as easily update it in the future. So, here’s the whole shebang:

$ mkdir ~/src
$ cd ~/src
$ sudo apt-get install build-essential libssl-dev git-core git # some dependencies before we start
$ git clone https://github.com/joyent/node.git
$ cd node
$ git checkout v0.4.7 # heroku only support 0.4.7 now, change this as that changes
$ ./configure && make && make install # I opted to use checkinstall, but this keeps it simple # now we move on to RVM and Ruby
$ bash < <(curl -s https://rvm.beginrescueend.com/install/rvm)
$ echo '[[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && source "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm"' >> ~/.bashrc
$ . ~/.bashrc
$ rvm requirements # towards bottom, you will see "Additional Dependencies" and "For Ruby" -- copy everything from apt-get on
$ sudo apt-get install build-essential openssl libreadline6 libreadline6-dev curl git-core zlib1g zlib1g-dev libssl-dev libyaml-dev libsqlite3-0 libsqlite3-dev sqlite3 libxml2-dev libxslt-dev autoconf libc6-dev ncurses-dev automake libtool bison subversion # likely a bit different for you, but you get the idea
$ rvm install 1.9.2
$ rvm --default use 1.9.2
$ ruby -v # make sure ruby is in fact working, should give you some form of 1.9.2
$ gem install heroku

And that’s it. You now have a local version of Ruby and Rubygems for you to use. If you want to keep your version of Node local as well, you can use the –prefix when compiling, as explained in the Node wiki.

Now you’re ready to continue along with the Heroku docs and your Node app deployed on their server.

I was discussing this with my friend Jason and he recommended playing with the font sizes. Sure enough, that did the trick! It seems that the reason everything is so big is that the default font sizes are 10pt. I shrank them down and MAN does it look nice now!

You can edit these values one ways; via gconf-editor or via gconftool-2 on the command line. I won’t post the gconf-editor direction since, if you know your way around it, you can extrapolate the parts you want to edit via the gconftool-2 commands. The following settings worked extremely well for me, but you can adjust the font faces and sizes as you see fit.

gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/metacity/general/titlebar_font "Sans Bold 8"
gconftool-2 --type string --set /desktop/gnome/interface/font_name "Sans 9"
gconftool-2 --type string --set /desktop/gnome/interface/monospace_font_name "Monospace 9"

This will adjust the title bar, all normal window text and all monospace text, respectively. Again, these numbers looked the best to me, but you can make them even smaller (or bigger) to fit your needs. I did these adjustments on my 1680×1050 display as well, and it looks amazing. Then again, I love small text!

Another way to free up screen space is to auto-hide the panel(s) you have. Now, I know this is cumbersome with the default settings because it’s slow to respond and expand, but you can tweak that stuff too. Here’s what I have set:

gconftool-2 --type boolean --set /apps/panel/toplevels/top_panel_screen0/auto_hide 1
gconftool-2 --type boolean --set /apps/panel/toplevels/top_panel_screen0/enable_animations 1
gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/panel/toplevels/top_panel_screen0/animation_speed fast
gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/panel/toplevels/top_panel_screen0/hide_delay 500
gconftool-2 --type string --set /apps/panel/toplevels/top_panel_screen0/unhide_delay 100

Now, it opens much faster, animates much faster and goes away much faster. the hide_delay is fast enough that if I’m sloppy with the pointer, it still doesn’t disappear when I don’t want it to. Still annoying? play around with the hide and unhide delays until it works for you. Still too slow to pop in? Set enable_animations to 0 and it’ll come on the screen instantly.

As an added piece of advice, if your panel is over-crowded with junk, you can add another panel (or 2 or 3…) to separate out tasks. For example, I have a small, hidden, non-expanding panel I keep in the bottom left of the screen on which I have my timer-applet and my hamster-applet. Additionally, if you have something on your panel that you always want to see on your screen, add it to another panel that you don’t hide.

When I got it back, I immediately installed Ubuntu’s most current version, 9.10 (Karmic Koala). I was really impressed with it; even more-so than with 9.04 in fact. But I ran in to a problem when I was setting it all up; I couldn’t get the backlight adjustment to work.

I resorted to the original Ubuntu Forums article on it but I quickly found that it no longer worked. LVDS and VGA had been replaced with LVDA1 and VGA1, and changing the command still didn’t work; it complained about something which I no longer remember. But, that error (as well as replies to that thread) lead me to this Launchpad comment about disabling KMS.

Seems KMS is enabled by default for a certain chipset, specifically the Intel i915 chipset. My next questions, of course, were “what is KMS” and “how do I disable it”? Looking around, I found out that KMS, or Kernel Modesetting, could be disabled like so:

Edit: /etc/default/grub
Change: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""
To: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="nomodeset"

Then run

sudo update-grub

Now, reboot and KMS will be disabled. We can now refer back to the original post here, adding the following to the startup applications (or just running it from the command line each time, you’re call I guess).

xrandr --output LVDS --set BACKLIGHT 102 --set BACKLIGHT_CONTROL legacy --output VGA --auto

This still won’t make the brightness buttons on the keyboard work, but it WILL make xbacklight work. As the article points out, you can then set hotkeys for xbacklight commands.

So what do you lose by disabling KMS? Well, according to this article, KMS offloads the graphics initialization from X to the kernel, which has some benefits. But, the fact remains that it doesn’t work on a lot of machines (the Samsung X360, The MacBook and possible MacBook Pro, MSI’s U90, U100, and U120 netbooks and the Asus EeePC, to name a handful), so for users with this hardware, you don’t lose anything ;). I’ve read about some people having success with KMS in newer kernels, but it didn’t work for me so I’m not going to bother posting it. I’m hopeful that this will be fixed when 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) is released, but I haven’t yet tried the beta release to see.

• Toss some laundry in the machine
• Start my lunch and work while it cooks
• Sign for packages when they are delivered

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. However, to make telecommuting possible, there are some technologies I simply MST have working. VPN is a big one, so I can get at the computers back in the office. SSH and FTP access is important to manage servers and files. And of course, I need to communicate with people; for that, we use AIM and Skype. Up until recently, it’s been enough for me to use my Nokia N800 to make my calls back to the office. It’s no good for chatting with video though, so I needed to set it up on my desktop with my camera and, preferably, my headset.

Simple enough task really; both my Logitech webcam and Plantronics headset work out of the box with Ubuntu (at least in 9.04) with nearly zero configuration required. I just plug them in, tweak Skype quickly and I’m up and running. However, with the addition of PulseAudio in the more recent version of Ubuntu, this became a little trickier.

You see, in the new version of Skype, the ONLY option I have for ANY audio, input or output, is simpley PulseAudio. No control for which device to use for different tasks. Enter padevchooser, short for PulseAudio Device Chooser.

It’s a pretty sweet application, and you should have no problem installing it since it’s in the repository (note: I’ve added the Medibunutu repo, and it’s possible it came from there). Once installed, you simply run it, from the command line, the run dialog, gnome-do or whatever method you choose, and you’ll get an icon in the notification area. Click on that, choose Volume Control, and you’re off and running. There are tabs for Playback, Recording, Output Devices, and Input Devices. Any current audio stream will show up in the list in the appropriate tab and you can move them around to different devices.

The easiest way to configure Skype is to place a test call. As soon as you start that call it will show up in the list. Move the “Skype: Output” stream to your headset in the Playback tab, do the same for “Skype: Input” in the Recording tab and you’re off and running. All Skype audio is now sent to your headset for easy chatting. I still haven’t figured out how to make it ring through the speakers and still use the headset for chatting, but this is good enough for now. Padevchooser made living with PulseAudio that much better!

Ultimately, I just wanted a machine that was light, had a long-lasting battery and had a full-size keyboard. The 10-inch netbooks looked like a good buy, but it was difficult to find one that was worth buying. I had been considering the Lenovo S10, and came close to picking one up about a month ago when I found one for just under $300. What stopped me was reading about overheating problems with the machine. I’ve wanted the MSI Wind since it was announced, but it was always over the $400 mark, which I don’t think is a reasonable price for that class of machine. All of the other offerings were either overpriced, lacked some key features or had batteries that just weren’t going to cut it. In most cases, all of these were true.

I had also been interested in many of the 13-inch laptops but was often thrown off by their price. They were usually well over the $1,000 mark (sometimes even breaking the $2,000 mark) and I just wasn’t willing to drop that kind of cash. One fateful day last week, Monday to be exact, Aaron tipped me off to the reduced price of the Samsung X360 on Amazon’s Gold Box. It was marked down to $1049 and included a $300 rebate. $749 was a little more than I wanted to spend, but for a laptop of this caliber, it seemed worth considering. Turns out, I wasn’t alone in that thought. In the end, I jumped on it, as did Aaron and Jason.

The machine arrived this past Friday, but sadly, I didn’t have time to play with it until Sunday. I did have time to open it up and take some pictures though, and man was I happy I went for this deal! The machine looks great and it’s so small and light that you really have to handle it to believe it.

The first thing I did was boot up the Xubuntu Live CD image from a USB drive and wipe out the copy of vista that came with the machine. I swore to never touch vista when it was first released, and I wasn’t about to go back on my word. So I blew away the partition the machine came with and set it up to install both XP (in the event I ever NEED windows) and Xubuntu.

The only downside was that many of the things that needed to be tweaked to run on the machine I didn’t know how to do in Xubuntu, so I tried Kubuntu since I read everything worked out of the box on it. In the end, even that turned out to be too much hassle for the moment, so I opted for Ubuntu as I wanted to be using the machine that Monday. I had also planned to install the 64-bit version of XP, but the thing didn’t want to run properly once installed so I ended opting for the 32-bit version. After all, I wasn’t really going to be using it that often (if at all) and I was running the 64-bit version of Linux, so I was OK with the decision.

As you can see, I also pulled all the stickers off the front of the machine (relocating all but the vista sticker to the bottom) for a sleeker look. You can also see a size comparison of the new machine with my old 15-incher. Considerably more portable, to say the least.

So far, I’ve used Skype to make video calls, I’m running all kinds of flashy Compiz goodies and even with constant use I get just over 4 hours of battery life. It’s not the perfect machine, but it’s really, really close, and for the price, I’ve got no regrets. I’ll leave the post at that for now until I have some more time to tweak the machine, but so far it’s running beautifully!

But, I’ve been aware for a while that regardless of how much I back up, I still have everything in one place. If there were a fire or a robbery, I’d be completely SOL. This fact has prompted me to look for some free or very low cost online file storage services. Most of the ones I found required you to run their software for them to work. This wasn’t very desirable for several reasons, the most important being that I run Linux and most of the services didn’t have a Linux client to use. But even more than that, I wanted to be the one in change of the backups, something that would allow me to just set up a cron job that would encrypt my data and ideally use rsync (via this script) to send that data. Unfortunately, I still haven’t found that, but I did find service that is both cheap and easy to use; Amazon’s Simple Storage Service!

To be fair, I didn’t find it, I was tipped off to it by Jason. I had heard of it, but never even considered using it for backups. Looking at the prices though, I couldn’t resist. For just $0.15/month per GB stored and $0.10 per GB transfered, I would theoretically keep weekly incremental backups of 2GB worth of data for $0.70/month or less!

Jay also tipped me off to some pretty handy Firefox extensions s3:// and S3Fox. S3Fox is much cooler than s3://, but using it on my machine was causing X to use 100% of the cpu for some reason, so it wasn’t really usable for me. s3:// suited me just fine, allowing me to create “buckets” and browse, upload and remove my files from those buckets. It also saved the login info so all I need to do is slap the full S3 path in the address bar (like s3://mybucket/) and I was off. Now that was convenient!

Next up, I needed a way to script my backups. I was planning to use the s3fs Fuse library but I thought that might be overkill. Plus, for whatever reason, I’m just not ready to play with Fuse; it’s super cool, but I just didn’t feel like setting it up. Plus, I found s3cmd. Like s3://, it stores your login info to ease login and access of your files, but it offers one more step that is vital (at least to me); encryption!

s3cmd -e put myfile s3://mybucket

This will upload the myfile to my bucket on s3 and encrypt it on the fly. s3cmd uses symetric gpg and stores the password when you configure your AWS login information. Best of all, it transparently decrypts the file(s) when you download them from your s3 account. You don’t even have to tell s3cmd that the file is encrypted, it automatically knows. Amazing!

So, while I wish I had rsync access to the s3 service, I can make it meet my needs with a little tar magic. Since tar has an option to only grab files that have been changed since a specific date, I can leave my huge, base archive up there and just create a weekly tar file of all of the changed files since the last weekly tar file. So, I have my backup from today (2/9) and in a week (2/16) I’ll create a backup of all files that have changed since today (2/9). A week from then (2/23), I’ll create an archive of all the files that have changed since previous week (2/16) and so on. When the incremental backups start to get too large, I’ll simply create a new base backup and start the process all over again. Should work out swimmingly!

Granted, I could easily replace WordPress for the sake of my blog here (and probably still will at some point), but that’s not why I was planning to learn it. I wanted something that would allow me to crank out new pages quickly without constantly restarting from scratch. I do have a very weak framework I’ve written to try to achieve this, but every time I start a new site, I feel compelled to re-do at least part of it, so in the end I don’t save any time. In fact, I lose time because I have to re-learn the changes I made for each site when I need to maintain them.

A while back, I started looking into frameworks to use at work. I’m still enthralled with Symfony, but it’s way too hard to just jump in to. In order to take advantage of all of its niceties, there’s a lot you need to learn. It’s almost like learning a new language on its own, which is fine and all, but it doesn’t help me get things done quickly. It’s hard to be motivated to learn new frameworks and techniques unless you have something to work on, and any new projects I have need to be done in a timely manner, so I can’t take too long to jump into something new.

Anyway, one other framework that stood out when I we were doing our research was CodeIgniter. Not because it’s better, but because it has more of an a-la-carte mentality. Don’t want to use the full MVC design pattern? No problem, just use the parts you want to; you can use it as a simple controller mechanism only if you so choose. Don’t feel like getting into a full ORM? Skip it, they have a built-in ActiveRecord style interpreter, which means you don’t need to create your own class for each table in your database. Of course, ou can write your queries completely by hand if you choose to too. Best of all, no command line magic to make your code work, and on top of it all, the entire framework is 3.3MB with the user guide included, under 2MB without it.

I’ve spent a couple nights reading through the documentation (which is pretty well done) and I already have a good understanding of how it all works. And, since it’s almost Christmas again, it’s time to get my annual list manager online again. So, I’ve got a new tool to play with and a simple project to do it with. As a result, Drupal’s on hold while I work on that. I’ll report back on how it goes.

A quick search on Ubuntu Forums yielded this post. Following the link posted, here’s how I got it working from the command line:

$ sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/hardy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d medibuntu.list
$ wget -q http://packages.medibuntu.org/medibuntu-key.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add - && sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install non-free-codecs w32codecs

After that, the videos fired right up without a hitch. Brilliant! One thing to note: these codecs may be illegal in the US. I’ve read warning about them in the past anyway, though I didn’t happen to see any this time around. It’s kind of a legal gray area I guess, and while you’re not likely to get in trouble for using them, it’s something you should probably know. In any event, if you’re having problems playing videos in Linux (especially rm files), give this a shot.

I’ve spent some time reading about Symfony, which looks like an amazing project. I’m positive I can make it do anything I would need, but the learning curve is pretty steep and I’m worried that the time I’d take to learn it wouldn’t really pay off in the end. I like a lot of the concepts, but I’m just not completely sold on it.

So what does that have to do with WordPress? Well, I’ve recently revisited a project that I spent some time with in the past but never really did much with. That project is Drupal.

While it’s not nearly as flexible as Symfony is, it seems like a very useful platform for putting a site together. I followed a quick tutorial last week that outlined just how easy it was, and after reading through their Getting Started guide, I’m pretty sure it can be bent into anything I might need. To me honest, most of the sites I’ve put together didn’t really need much of anything.

But, again, how does this relate to WordPress? Well, I’ve grown tired of WordPress, and it seems like Drupal would make for a great blogging tool. I have no doubt that I could add a lot more than a simple blog should I choose to as well, which makes it that much more appealing. From what I’ve seen, it also runs significantly faster than WordPress does, which is always a nice perk.

So, in an effort to spend more time using and learning Drupal, I’m planning to port all of my WordPress posts to Drupal and use it exclusively to run this site. Worst case scenario, I end up with nothing more than a blog running on Drupal. That’s not too different that the blog I have running on WordPress now, so that’s not too bad of a worst case. Look for the change to happen soon (hopefully this week). You’ll know when it happens as it’s unlikely I’ll spend the time working on a theme just yet, so this site will live in default Drupal mode while I continue my Drupal education. Fun stuff!

About a year ago, Aaron tipped me off to the magic of Javascript toolkits, specifically Dojo. For a while, I was a proponent of it, opting to use it exclusively to drive an internal application that I had written from the ground up at work. It’s an extremely powerful toolkit which has been steadily adding more functionality as it ages to that point that it’s arguably the most powerful toolkit on the market. Unfortunately, I’ve also found it to be one of the most poorly documented toolkits available as well, which I’m sure was due in part to my lackluster understanding of some of the more advanced Javascript concepts. Still, looking at some of the more advanced Dojo examples I’ve seen from Aaron and other sources online, most of the syntax escapes me completely, even as I continue to learn more and more about Javascript.

At the time I started using it, I was working with version 0.4.1, and as anyone with some Dojo experience can attest, it’s a far cry from where the 0.9 and and later branches ended up. I’ve since upgraded to 0.4.3, but porting everything over to the 1.0 branch would have taken about as much time as moving over to a completely different library. The 0.9+ branches also officially did not support Safari 2, which was a huge problem considering we’re an all-Mac shop. It also meant that production-side adaptation was pretty much out of the question as it’s a safe assumption that the majority of people using any software are drastically behind on their updates, if they ever even choose to perform them. For a company that makes most of its money by sales through the website, we just can’t afford to exclude and entire sector of people like that.

With all that in mind, I decided I’d poke around and see what else was out there as a possible Dojo replacement. A couple months ago, Aaron tipped me off to MooTools, which seemed like a nice mix of Prototype and the Scriptaculous animation library that was built on top of it. I had passed it on to my boss as something to check out but it was kind of left at that, though I did plan to learn it on my own time.

About a month after that, we hired a new designer at work, mostly so my boss could focus more on PHP and MySQL code and not just the design of both the site and various ads (which had become a full-time job). During his first week there, the new guy happened to stumble across the MooTools library on his own and suggested that we use some of the animations in the library to spruce up the site a little, though he knew absolutely nothing about Javascript. Of course, being the resident Javascript guru in the office, I was asked to look into what it would take to make it work.

I had spent a little time the previous week sifting through the APIs and docs of various other toolkits and libraries to try and narrow them down into a proper replacement for my aging Dojo code. I had actually planned to start making use of the Ext toolkit since it was a good compromise for Dojo; the code and feature set were very similar and their API and documentation was much easier to follow than that of Dojo. But, it wasn’t enough for me to consider introducing yet another Javascript library into the code base, and it made no guarantee about working with Safari 2.

Of the two other programmers in the office, one had been using jQuery for about as long as I had been using Dojo while the other had just started to implement MooTools into another piece of software he had written from the ground up. Since those two were already in out code base, they scored extra points and earned my attention over some of the other libraries.

Since MooTools was called for in the case of this particular animation, I spent a little time reading through the API and the Mootorial and picking apart some of the demos available on the MooTools site. To my surprise, it started to make sense very quickly; their API is extremely well put together (with a few fringe exceptions), I found the code and syntax very easy to comprehend, and best of all, I managed to get the animation working in only a few hours having never worked with the library in the past.

I then proceeded to port all of my Dojo code to MooTools, and in about two days time I was done. I even added some snappy fading and scrolling animations to the system with gave it a really nice polish. It all loads significantly faster to boot! I took another day and a half and added some drag-and-drop functionality that I had been planning since very early on in the project, something I still don’t even know how to approach with Dojo but made quick work of with MooTools, even adding heavy modifications to meet my specific needs. I’ve also learned a ton more about Javascript, written my own MooTools menu class from scratch (mostly as a learning experience) and rolled out some cool new things to our production website. I’ve drunk the milk and now I’m hooked. I can’t imagine ever working with raw Javascript again to be honest.

But, MooTools isn’t for everyone. It’s meant to be more of a core library that you extend and use to build your applications quickly. It also has one very significant downside; like Prototype, it extends the base Javascript prototype, meaning it could break existing code you have. It’s probably rare that it would (I haven’t run into it personally), but it’s a consideration. It also doesn’t play well with other libraries and toolkits as a result.

The point of this long-winded post is simply that I have become a huge MooTools fan, and if you have a project that would benefit from a well-documented, cross-browser library with some really easy animations and extremely useful functionality, you may too. Check it out, I think it’ll be worth your time.

One note I want to make is that I wrote this before MooTools 1.2 was released. For the record, I love the changes that were made; it’s much faster, there are a lot of cool tweaks that make it easier to use and it adds a lot of very useful new methods. That said, I think their new documentation page and demos page are just terrible! In addition, they’ve completely disabled their forums in favor of Google Groups, which means any old discussions and examples now only live in Google’s cache despite them coming up in their search very often. Those of you look for 1.11 docs and demos, see here and here, respectively.