I’ve made a minor change to the uni-form rails plugin to enable Ruby 1.9 support.

The code is available at http://github.com/hubsmoke/uni-form

memcache.rb:918:in `raise_on_error_response!’: bad command line format (MemCache::MemCacheError)

…blah blah blah…

from script/starling_status.rb:36

According to a comment from Joshua Krall on a blog post about workling/starling,

“The problem I ran into was related to workling sending a “flush_all” command, which apparently Starling does not support.”

For some reason I was getting a timeout error when doing script/plugin install git://github.com/jkrall/workling.git but I was able to manually download Josh’s fix. I then renamed the plugin’s root folder and unzipped it to RAILS_ROOT/vendor/plugins.

Then I tried to use script/plugin to install workling, but it gave me “plugin not found” or “plugin already installed” errors So, I installed it manually by doing ruby RAILS_ROOT/vendor/plugins/workling/install.rb BUT it complained that RAILS_ROOT wasn’t set.

In a very ugly way I just added RAILS_ROOT=”/path/to/your/rails/app” to the workling install.rb and executed the script. Then I tested it by executing script/starling_status.rb and it seemed to work. Big up to Josh for getting this working.

Honestly, all I think he did was uncomment the call to flush_all in memcache_queue_client.rb, so I probably could have saved the time reinstalling the plugin by simply commenting out that one line, but I wasn’t 100% sure if he had made any other changes. In any case, big thanks to Josh for pointing out the error, and supplying the fix!

Very heavy and bitter, they advertise it as hops^3 because that is just accurate.

Sea Dog Microbew: Blue Paw Wheat Ale

I don’t know why, but I just love blueberries and I think this beer is just the right combination of blueberries and a solid wheat beer. Very big on the blueberry, not so much on the wheat in my opinion.

Rogue Ales: Dead Guy Ale

Big and bitter, but gets really sweet like a honey flavor with a pleasant honey/syrupy mouthfeel after a few minutes of sipping on this, I really like it. The first few swigs are very bitter, but you get used to it and the sweetness really comes out.

Wishlist:

BrewDog Beer: Tactical Nuclear Penguin

Very rare stateside, but it’s packing an incredible amount of alcohol. I’m just curious if it’s drinkable more than anything. At ~$50 (US) for a bottle, I’m just damn curious! An acquaintance of mine requested an order at the local Village Pump in College Park, perhaps they’ll start ordering it, but who knows! If I get some spare cash for this I’d love to try it with a friend.

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Enable some cool 3D effects:
Go to System->Preferences->Appearance then hit Visual Effects and mark Extra

Get Compiz Settings Manager:
sudo apt-get install compizconfig-settings-manager

Then just go to System->Preferences->Compiz Settings Manager to play with and enable any of the plugins you like.

So I ditched the USB and just used Wubi to install Ubuntu onto my Windows drive. Wubi is a great tool. I did a 16gb install, which is way more than enough. The bare minimum is about 3gb, but you should probably go for 5-6gb if possible. I didn’t have to deal with partitioning my drive, which is great because I hate doing that, it’s a very cumbersome process, and not as easy to undo as simply one-click uninstalling Wubi. So I finally have a beautiful Ubuntu 10.4 install that I can use for all of my forking needs. I really love Ubuntu, so much just makes sense in the OS from a design perspective. I was skeptical of the social media integration (see Empathy) but it turned out to be a solid system and I was also able to successfully add all my Facebook, AIM, and Twitter contacts out of the box.

I installed RubyMine as my Rails IDE. It’s a great tool, it integrates all the useful things I need for developing a Rails app, definitely check it out if you’re looking for a good Rails IDE. It’s only a 30 day trial, so I will use this to help motivate me to complete my application within the month. (A lofty goal, but I think this will help me move it along)

So, getting Workling and Starling to work correctly had a slight learning curve, but I was able to get them up and running. I have yet to determine if it will be 100% effective for what I’m going for. I basically need a background process that will run every second to perform some simple business logic and send messages to subscribed clients when certain conditions occur. This is completely possible from what I can tell, but until I actually implement it, I won’t know how effective it will be.

I’m not going to post the steps I took to do these things but I have made a point to document it all (I am very forgetful, I also like to drink a few beers when I code for fun, so I absolutely must write everything down). If you are reading this and are interested in the steps, I can post them no problem. I’ll be quick about it too

Thanks for hangin wit me on dis, be back once I get things going.

-Sina (duh)

I was looking into Juggernaut to implement push-server functionality, but there seemed to be issues with its implementation. I never tried it, but I saw complaints about some firewalls blocking the port opened by the Flash player. Although the developer reportedly fixed this by changing the socket connection’s port, I doubted the solution would be fool-proof. I was almost set on trying Juggernaut, but I figured I should keep looking. My thinking being that if there was a chance that the system wouldn’t work for all clients (those behind corporate firewalls, etc), I would be wasting my time implementing a prototype.

So, I kept looking and glanced over two other solutions, AjaxMessaging and shooting_star. The issue with AjaxMessaging is that it seems to require Mongrel to work. I couldn’t be tied down to a specific server, so I searched for a better solution. I looked at shooting_star as well, it seemed like an excellent solution, but I couldn’t find very much documentation and there was no Windows implementation (I’m not going to install Linux just to do this!) so I simply moved along, figuring something better would come along.

So I took a look at CometDaily and checked out some articles on there and was pleasantly surprised to find an excellent tutorial on putting together a push-server system using a STOMP client, a STOMP messaging queue server, and Orbited – a pure Javascript/HTML in-browser socket solution with a Python-based HTTP daemon that listens for requests in the background. This solution seemed as nice as it was going to get for me. No Flash was a big plus, also Orbited runs on both Windows and Linux. I’m deploying on a Unix server, so I need the compatibility. In addition, I’m using a Rails plugin for Orbited that made integration much smoother and saved me some steps from the tutorial. Also, it seemed that some of the tutorial code was either incorrect or outdated, so I fixed these small issues and was able to get it up and running. While I am using MorbidQ for my STOMP messaging queue server, I will definitely use this only for development and then switch to something like ActiveMQ, simply because the MorbidQ developers themselves advocate switching for scalability in production.

Next steps are integrating a background task processor that will intermittently send messages to appropriate clients using this push server implementation. I first looked at BackgroundRB, and I was excited to try it out, but then I found this post and my head became filled with doubts! If accurate, the numbers seem to speak for themselves, BackgroundRB uses way more resources than a Workling and Starling implementation for background task processing in Rails. Granted, that was posted over a year ago, so perhaps the BackgroundRB guys have made some changes since then, but it seems like none of these projects have been updated for at least a year. I will likely go with Workling and Starling to implement scheduled background task processing.

These are my personal notes so that I can keep my head straight when I actually deploy this thing. I made many assumptions in the process of researching these technologies, as I am impatient and I will stop looking at a solution if it seems too difficult to implement. Orbited and MorbidQ were very easy to get up and running. Next up is Workling and Starling, I’ll let you know how it goes.

I’m now affiliated with Binge Records and am actively looking for dubstep talent to sign. If you want to send some tunes in for consideration an avenue of contact is the contact form on this blog. If you prefer, my AIM screenname is “hubsmoke”. This would all be easier with DubFWD…

Which brings me to update that the DubFWD service is coming along nicely. I am nearly feature complete (WiX mentioned a cool idea to me today, so I’m going to have to add that before I consider it feature-complete) Anyhow, soon on to minor GUI fixes, then internal testing, then public testing. Woo! It’s really cool and will smooth out the process of sending people tunes better than any other service out there (and for free!)

Also, DubFWD – Dubstep Radio (formerly The Crackpot: Dubstep Radio) will commence this Sunday morning from 12AM-2AM (Saturday night/Sunday morning!) on WMUC 88.1 FM broadcasting from College Park, MD

Show Profile: http://wmucradio.com/station/shows/876

Listen every Sunday from 0000-0200: http://wmucradio.com/wmuc-high.m3u

Big ups to everyone that has given us support so far for the DUB:FWD show in Bmore! Much respect! 

Big ups to Danny for getting his design portfolio up and running: http://www.coldfrontdesigns.com

Big ups to Steve and Caylan for making shit happen!

Also the day before, Ultrablack, WiX, Coda, and myself will be performing in Philly as part of the Magical Ultrablack + Hubsmoke + WiX + Coda Topless Two Day Tour of Philly and Bmore!

Update (2/19/09): Harrisburg, PA show now confirmed Braptizm @ Spy Club (Friday, March 20th) Flyer on the way.

So all the info:

3/17/09 – EC09 @ Liquid Charm (Philadelphia, PA)

3/18/09 – DUB:FWD @ Club Orpheus (Baltimore, MD)

3/20/09 – Braptizm @ Spy Club (Harrisburg, PA)