ZenLinux Blog

Do you need your monthly dose of hanging out with Ruby and Rails developers and learning cool stuff? Well lucky for you, the next NHRuby.org meeting is in just a couple of days. Nick and I will be giving “lightning talks” on a number of topics. One of mine will be on writing an AIM bot to send you instant messages from your web application. Meeting details and directions can be found on the wiki.

I recently updated my Rails deployment server from CentOS 4 to CentOS 5, and immediately ran into the following error when deploying my apps using vlad:

sudo: sorry, you must have a tty to run sudo

Thus apache wasn’t being restarted after my mongrel instances. It turns out that RHEL/CentOS 5 includes added restrictions in its default sudo configuration. Simply comment out the following line in /etc/sudoers:

#Defaults requiretty

to resolve the problem.

Jared Spool, a founder of User Interface Engineering, will be speaking at the University of New Hampshire this coming Thursday, January 24. His topic is “What Makes a Design Seem Intuitive?” Jared is a true guru of usability and this is a rare opportunity to see him present in this area. The meeting is being sponsored by the New Hampshire Usability Professionals Association (UPA). You must RSVP to attend because seats are limited. RSVP to info at nhupa dot org.

Be sure to swing by RMC Research in Portsmouth next Tuesday for the first NHRuby.org meeting of 2008. Nick Plante and I will be presenting on a couple of Rails-related topics. Nick will show you how to add OpenID goodness to your Rails app of choice, and I’ll be discussing the ins and outs of ActionMailer, which handles sending and receiving e-mail in Rails.

More details and directions to the meeting can be found, as usual, on the NHRuby wiki. We could really use some new guest speakers for upcoming meetings, so if you’re interested please drop me a line – scottruby at zenlinux dot com.

Vlad the Deployer is currently broken with rake v0.8. You can either downgrade the rake gem and stick with v0.7, or make the following change in the vlad gem’s lib/rake_remote_task.rb on line 108:

def execute(rake_t)

Thanks to Brian Palmer for this workaround. I hope the vlad crew will get around to another release soon.

Update: vlad 1.2.0 has been released and now works with both rake 0.8 and 0.7. Thanks guys!

I’m not a big fan of New Year’s Resolutions (the geek in me can’t ignore how arbitrary the calendar system we’re using is), but I do have some goals for the calendar year related to cycling.

As I checked out my stats from riding in 2007, I’m really surprised. For my first year back on the bike (a year which started in mid-May, I might add), I rode over 1,600 miles, including my first century. I’d be happy just to repeat that!

But to give myself some goals to work toward, I would like to top 2k miles in 2008, and ride at least two centuries. I commuted to work by bike a couple dozen times last year, and I’d like to top that significantly.

Unfortunately my 2008 riding won’t be starting anytime soon, as New England is covered with plenty of snow right now. Over the next 24 hours we’re expected to get another foot of the white stuff in my neck of the woods. Well, at least I can enjoy my snowshoes…

As a long time user of VMWare’s Workstation virtualization software, I’ve always had a way to run WindowsXP or other operating systems on top of my Ubuntu Linux environment without any problems. However, late last year I heard that Parallels Desktop for OS X had an intriguing new feature, which allowed you to run windows from your VM directly in your host desktop environment.

This means that for doing cross-browser web application testing, you could pop up Internet Explorer or various other Windows browsers and run them side-by-side with your hosts’ native browser(s). Very, very useful. This was a killer feature that I was hoping VMWare would introduce. It appears that version 6 of VMWare Workstation didn’t include it, so I didn’t even bother upgrading from v5.5, since I was happy with how it ran in every other sense.

My wait for this feature is now over, and even better, is being offered by an open source software project called VirtualBox. VirtualBox works with the same operating systems I use, and has the killer feature I described above, which they call “seamless mode.” I’ve been using it for a few days now and love it. On top of that, the performance of the virtual machine even seems a bit faster than VMWare Workstation 5.5. Oh, and you can even use VMWare disk files with VirtualBox, though I haven’t tried that myself.

VMWare Workstation is a more mature product and has some other features that VirtualBox currently lacks, but I have no need for those features. I’m thrilled to be able to use VirtualBox as an alternative, and I think for anyone wanting to speed up their cross-browser web development, this is a great setup to use. Give it a try.

NetBeans 6.0 final (my Ruby/Rails/C/C++ IDE of choice) was released a couple of days ago. Pat Eyler posted on his blog an interview with Tor Norbye, which outlines many of the spiffy features of NetBeans 6 and some of the challenges in writing IDE tools for a dynamic language such as Ruby.