Geoff Garside

iPhone Configuration Utility for Web

Thu, 17 Jul 2008 09:51:19 +0100

Thanks to Tom I today found out that my iPhone does not support S/MIME encrypted emails. This is a bit annoying and hopefully, given its support of SSL, will come in a future update.

In the process of trying to find out this information I took a look at the enterprise iPhone Configuration Utility manual to see if I needed to use that to install the email certificate or something like that. In case you hadn’t worked it out the first time, the answer was no.

I did notice the Web utility version though, the first thing that caught my eye was the url http://localhost:3000/ which instantly popped into my head as the Rails default, a bit more looking and mentions of config/environments/production.rb and ActionMailer.smtp_settings have pretty much confirmed it to me. It makes sense though as Apple included Ruby and Rails support into Leopard when it was released.

"However, the most popular handset in the US for browsing is the Motorola RAZR, whilst in Europe it..."

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 13:22:57 +0100

“However, the most popular handset in the US for browsing is the Motorola RAZR, whilst in Europe it is Nokia’s N95.”

- BBC NEWS | Technology | Mobile web reaches critical mass

Argh!!! 15,000 Improvements and they manage to break a website...

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 15:49:17 +0100

Argh!!! 15,000 Improvements and they manage to break a website which worked fine in Firefox 2. It was fortunately fixable though only though adding clear: both to the CSS which sort of breaks the header. The other method of fixing it is to increase the header height to 6.4em but this then breaks MSIE7 and Safari. Sorry Firefox, two against one. You can look shit while the two obviously superior browsers can happily look cool.

I should note that I’ve not personally tested in MSIE7 but I’m told that it didn’t have this glitch.

Learning how Git works

Sat, 05 Jul 2008 16:54:57 +0100

Since switching to git I’ve found the lack of a library slightly annoying for a couple of reasons. While I never wanted to use the Subversion library it was nice knowing it was around and the Ruby bindings certainly made some apps possible. Git though doesn’t have a library or Ruby bindings. Instead its a veritable hodge-podge of programs which when combined together make up git proper. This makes things harder on people who want to have another program use git as they’ve got to jump through the hoops of parsing STDOUT data to work out what git is doing. This is far from optimal.

Now there is a “libification” project which is working seemingly sporadically to create some nice libs for git. Though apparently the git source itself needs to be doused in Cilit Bang and thoroughly cleaned for a lot of the libification project to really take off.

But all that aside, and I’ve been searching for something to fill the void of my social life, I’ve started working on learning how git works. Mainly by writing code to inspect the various objects in git. As I also wanted to polish up my Cocoa skills I’ve been doing it in that. Rather recursively the project is being tracked with git which means I’ve got a healthy supply of git objects to through at my inspection code.

As I’m going I’m also moving successful inspection code into classes to represent the various git objects so I can just throw the data at one of those classes and then get the nice information back.

It’s also been quite nice learning how to work with zlib and openssl with Cocoa as I’ve not had any call to do either before. But sha1 hashing is quite a substantial part of git. Also all the object files are zlib compressed so adding routines to NSData to do decompression and compression has also been a learning experience.

I feel like I’ve been making good use of my spare time with this and have to say version control from a file system perspective definitely makes sense, git certainly does a lot to prevent itself from having to store multiple instances of the same file data and its sometimes surprising how many times you’ll end up with the same file data or folder structure in multiple places within a project. Of course this also helps across versions as you tend to commit little and often.

Working on Palmtree v1.0.0

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 08:40:31 +0100

Having seen a few people using palmtree for their deployment I’ve decided to do a bit more work on it and polish it up a bit. I’ve begun what will become v1.0.0 in a new branch which restructures the layout of the recipes.

The general intention is that palmtree will be used by direct inclusion of various groups of recipes as are required by the user. Categories of recipes such as Caching, Offloading, Searching and Servers have been created.

Caching

This category will hold recipes related to caching, things like memcached and probably also recipes to kill or generate rails cached items

Offloading

Recipes for BackgrounDRb, Starling and other solutions for offloading work from the main request-response cycle.

Searching

Recipes for managing Ferret, Solr and Sphinx search solutions. I’ve only had past experience with Ferret but I will be using Sphinx in a coming project so expect those two to be done first.

Servers

As well as the usual mongrel recipes, which now support single and cluster variations, ones for Thin, Ebb and Passenger will be added.

I’m also considering adding a Management category for things like God and Monit. A selection of these recipes will also add setup recipes for creating related configuration files.

I’ll also be adding Highline into a number of the recipes but mainly only for logically interactive recipes.

Any particular requests, or better still recipes, post a comment, send a message on GitHub or fork, add and send me a pull request.

Make Resourceful-ized form_for

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 00:22:26 +0100

One of the problems I’ve had recently is nested form partials in my Rails applications. I’ve got a controller which is always nested under another, it just logically makes sense that way. The problem I was having was that the rails form_for helper wanted to generate an un-nested url which the form would post to.

Now I also use make_resourceful with my controllers. This is important because it provides two routes helpers objects_path and object_path which are properly nested so I wanted form_for to really use these methods when autofilling the :url parameter of the form_for.

It took a bit of fiddling to get it worked out but I now have this

module ApplicationHelper
  include ActionView::Helpers::FormHelper

  def apply_form_for_options_with_make_resourceful!(object_or_array, options)
    object = object_or_array.is_a?(Array) ? object_or_array.last : object_or_array
    if object.respond_to?(:new_record?) && object.new_record?
      options[:url] ||= objects_path
    else
      options[:url] ||= object_path
    end

    apply_form_for_options_without_make_resourceful!(object_or_array, options)
  end

  alias_method_chain :apply_form_for_options!, :make_resourceful  
end

this sets up the :url option to the objects_path or object_path depending on if the model is a new record or not. It then calls the original apply_form_for_options! method for the remaining work to be setup.

This now properly the creates the form_for I require allowing me to completely embed the form in the _form partial and not setup independent forms in the new and edit templates.

Updating the git repos in current dir

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 02:44:11 +0100

I’ve been using more and more git based TextMate bundles of late and updating them can be a bit of a pain. Mainly because you have to remember which ones are git ones, not too bad you can check for a .git directory in the bundles.

So I finally go round to slapping together a small script to do this for me. I give you ~/bin/update-git-repos

#!/bin/sh
find . -name ".git" -depth 2 -type d -print | while read i; do
    pushd "`dirname "$i"`"
    git pull
    popd
done

and this is an I think improvement as it moves the dirname call out of the while

#!/bin/sh
find . -name ".git" -depth 2 -type d -exec dirname {} ";" | while read i; do
    pushd "$i"
    git pull
    popd
done

well I hope that helps some one else. I’m pretty sure I’ve read something like this before for updating your git TextMate bundles but for the life of me I couldn’t find it. Things like find, git, update, repos, pull none of them in assorted combinations turned up what I want. Now with luck they will.

Its the little things

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 13:05:00 +0100

I’ve been forced to start using Thunderbird for my Office email as there is some bizarre incompatibility with SmarterMail and Mail.app. The short of this is I’ve had to start using an app I never wanted to.

I like Mail.app, and its the silly little quirks of Thunderbird which really piss me off.

Deleting an email

I have my most recent emails at the top, its a fairly regular convention I think. When I delete an email in Mail.app the selection bar moves upwards to the next most recent email. If I’ve deleted the top one, the new top one is selected. In contrast Thunderbird moves the selection bar downwards, usually to my most recently read and accepted email.

I read my new emails from bottom to top, it helps me stay on top of how a conversation is unfolding. Now like many people I get spam, some of it is voluntary like mailing lists and some is garden variety useless. So I often want to delete a couple of emails in quick succession. Say I had to delete 3 spam emails from my mailbox. I’ve got loads that I want to keep and just say 5 new emails. So I read the first one, and I want to keep that around. Fine I press up and look at the next one, its spam so I press delete.

In Mail.app I am now looking at the next spam email, so I can press delete again and its gone, same with the next. Thunderbird on the other hand shows me the email I’ve already read. So I’ve got to press up again then delete, and repeat for the next spam message.

This is really annoying.

Sending an Email

Mail.app just stays out of my way, takes my message and sends it on. Thunderbird under default settings will almost always prompt you every single time if you want it in

Plain Text Only
HTML Only
Plain Text and HTML

now I honestly could care less how its sent so long as the person at the other end has a hope in hell of actually being able to read it.

Addressbook

This is more of a cheap gripe and I know its being worked on for the next version of Thunderbird but could they not even have added an importer when you setup Thunderbird like Firefox wants to steal your IE bookmarks and history all the time. I mean there is a nice fairly well documented AddressBook framework in Mac OS, I know, I’ve used it a couple times.

I’ll stop here, I really need to get back to work but I feel better for getting that out of my system.

Corrs Light

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 21:08:16 +0100

Just seen an advert for Corrs Light, apparently its brewed to be light. Given what I know about Corrs Light I can only conclude that Light equates to piss water in the US.

Its probably not dissimilar to piß wasser as advertised in GTA:IV.

FreeBSD 7.0 Installation with 8GB of RAM

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 18:23:53 +0100

I was installing a server for a client earlier today which had four 2GB RAM sticks in totalling 8GB of RAM. Bizarrely when trying to boot it, either via PXE or CD, irrespective of ACPI being disabled it would hang at

/stand/sysinstall running as init on vty0

when ACPI was enabled and at

Trying to mount root ufs:/dev/md0

with ACPI disabled. The latter case was worse as it would require an APC reboot rather than just a three fingered salute.

After tying a few other combinations unsuccessfully I finally wondered if the RAM might might be an issue. Not the sticks themselves but rather the quantity of it. The boot loader and installer are after all 32-bit and not 64-bit. So I opened up the server, pulled out 3 of the RAM sticks and tried again…

Success

So it would seem that the sysinstall program can’t quite cope with very large quantities of RAM when installing. The solution is to install with a smaller quantity of RAM and then upgrade the server once its running.

Christian Idiocy (via Geoff Garside)

Fri, 30 May 2008 18:46:58 +0100

Christian Idiocy (via Geoff Garside)

Palmtree

Tue, 27 May 2008 14:07:31 +0100

Can still hardly believe it. I’m one of those people that might write some code, but never really expect anyone besides himself to use it.

As such I was recently shocked and amazed when I went back to Robby Russell’s article about Interactive Capistrano and when checking the pastie example saw at the very top

require "palmtree/recipes/mongrel_cluster"

mainly because palmtree is a small gem of capistrano recipes I put together when capistrano 2.0 was coming out and the previous sets of mongrel cluster recipes wouldn’t work.

I also included ferret, backgroundrb (old style, might still work though) and memcached recipes as well.

I mentioned this to my boss Chris earlier today and he sent me a link to a google search which shows more people using palmtree.

As of a couple weeks ago I replicated the project on github so others can hack at it if they want, but I think once I’ve reached the deployment stage of the current project I’m working on I’ll put some more work into it and brush up some of the recipes.

I also really need to get the tail recipes working properly as they’ve not worked for quite a while now.

Xbox 360 and Connect360

Fri, 23 May 2008 14:31:17 +0100

The other day my Xbox 360 finally arrived, despite telling Chitty-link 3 times, once even before the first delivery attempt and twice after, to call me as the intercom system doesn’t work they still didn’t. Fortunately the caretaker of the property must have been outside as he was able to let the delivery guy in through the gate and into the block of flats, so I got it delivered straight to my door.

So rather unsurprisingly I spent most of yesterday evening playing GTA:IV. Its very fun and I’m getting the hang of driving with the 360’s controller.

Anyway this morning after a nice pzizz induced slumber I awoke at half past seven and started messing about with the Xbox again. I recalled that Dave had once mentioned the ability to do the Media Extender type stuff for the Xbox from a Mac. Thankfully his search box worked very well and I found his post about Connect360 which I promptly gave a go and was dead chuffed at my ability to stream not only iTunes music and iPhoto picture to the Xbox but also video files in my Movies folder. This is probably the best feature of all. I’ve recorded and transcoded some TV shows from my TV Mini device and I can now watch them on the TV at my leisure. How sweet is that.

I’ve not tried playing iTunes TV shows through the 360, but if that works then the 360 is certainly a nice alternative to the Apple TV. Never thought I’d have said that.

Geni.com

Wed, 21 May 2008 18:25:23 +0100

While reading through a book earlier today a site called geni.com was held up as a good example of Gradual Engagement. I was quite intrigued by this as genealogy is something I find quite interesting and I’ve always wondered about the history of what is now my family. That said I’ve never aggressively perused this. I’ve not been digging through census records or anything like that, but it has still interested me.

At any rate I signed up, rather pleasantly I might add, and added some of my family members though their flash based interface. It is very pleasant to work with and I later found myself on the phone to my mother working my way back up the tree.

Have to say, this is definitely a web application that its worth getting the whole family involved in.

Dara O'Briain @ Hammersmith Apollo

Wed, 21 May 2008 18:17:00 +0100

Last Friday I went to go and see Dara O’Briain at the Hammersmith Apollo thanks to a birthday present of two tickets from my sister. Sadly being afflicted with ineptitude and stupidity I was unable to find a guest to take with me to experience this event.

As Dara explained during his show comedy gigs are really one of those things were you actually have to be there to get it all. This is in stark contrast to that thing your friend was explaining pitifully in the pub last night and in order to dismiss your bewildered expression finally states that you just had to be there.

So anyway, the evening began with my fleeing the office despirately needing to get back to my flat so I could grab something to eat and head back out. The Hammersmith & City line was apparently not running in top form that night so I gauged an extra 20 minutes on the journey to compensate. Unfortunately the DLR was not to save my plans of food before I went out. So when I go back to my flat I had enough time to have a quick pee, grab my tickets and set off for the tube station.

The journey to Hammersmith was fairly uneventful, and I arrived at about 18.00, 30 minutes before my ticket said I needed to be there. Turns out 18.30 was only the time at which the doors would open. So I wandered off in search of sustenance and happily found myself a Subway and procured myself a toasted Meatball Marinara sandwich, pure bliss. I’d also brought a bottle of water with me from home as I’d been having some problems with mild nausea, dizziness and general topsy-turvy feelings when moving. Expecting to go straight into the Apollo and sit down at 18.30 when the doors opened I took the last of my painkillers at 18.15 to give them enough time to take effect before my sides would be stretched to splitting. Once I was in the door I made my way up to the second floor as I had a circle ticket. This actually seemed to be a pooling area where the audience could water, feed and relieve themselves, I took advantage of the latter two, not wanting to drink due to the painkillers.

At 19.30 the doors to the seating area were opened and I made my way to my seats. The seats slowly filled and the dull chatter of people talking increased with it. As the clock struck 20.00 Dara emerged from behind the curtains. From that point on, until the intermission, any feelings of social exclusion I had been feeling due the aforementioned lack of buddy disappeared. The audience became linked in laughter, it was brilliant.

Now I could go into the jokes and gags and all the hilarity of the event but unlike your friend in the pub last night I truely can say you just had to be there.

That said I will leave you with some things to ponder on. Given our state in the war on bacteria, 99.9% domination if reports are to be believed, and with a number of good bacteria being won to our side through a parallel propaganda war. I ask you this, what would happen if you poured Dettol into a Yakult? Does a company need to do anything more than chain together the words max, fusion, power and stealth in ever more elaborate ways to sell products to men? Is it ever possible when on the phone and needing to convey a letter phonetically to not completely blank all the words beginning with that letter with the exception of all the dirty ones?

Added comment support

Sun, 11 May 2008 16:52:34 +0100

I’ve added Disqus comments to this tumblog now. I’ll see if its useful at all.

Delerium in London

Fri, 09 May 2008 12:01:00 +0100

I went to see Delerium last night at the Islington Carling Academy. Was absolutely brilliant.

It took a little while to fill up so I managed to snag a nice spot near the front and grab a quick pint to whet the whistle. The pint at £3.35 was quite fairly priced for London.

Met I couple other people while I was there, rather unsurprisingly there were quite a few who had come from far a field, well further a field than I. Birmingham and Peterborough I have to admit aren’t that far a field but still.

Once the support acts came on things got a bit more interesting, don’t they always. Sadly I can’t remember either of the support acts names but the first was very good. It started off a bit flat but picked up as it went which was good. The second support act was basically just a DJ and while quite good did drag on a bit longer than it probably should have. A short break in his set might well have helped.

Then finally Delerium came on, I’m currently listening through the over 100 tracks I have of them to work out what the first song was. The second though was After All when their vocalist Kristy Thirsk magically pranced out from the back. It was absolutely great especially hearing both Silence and Incantation live. They are two absolutely amazing tracks.

My thanks to Facebook adverts for telling me of the event.

Unobtrusive JavaScript with jQuery

Wed, 07 May 2008 12:37:43 +0100

Unobtrusive JavaScript with jQuery: Note to self READ this

Code Monkey AMV (via Kagatoamv) Matt sent me this via email...

Wed, 07 May 2008 10:18:00 +0100

Code Monkey AMV (via Kagatoamv)

Matt sent me this via email this morning. Classic.

Windows Airport drivers improved

Mon, 05 May 2008 12:17:55 +0100

Seems like the Airport drivers provided for Vista x64, either the OS drivers or simply the 2.1 update, are far improved over the ones I was using in Windows XP.

With the XP drivers you had to be extremely careful not to let the machine enter any form of standby and closing the lid was just madness. Disabling the interface through a “Repair Network Connection” was also a big no-no.

Now though with these drivers I was able to safely close up my MacBook Pro and open it again a few hours later and be greeted with the internet at my fingertips.

Short Version: w00t I can use Windows properly on my MBP now.