Joe’s Amazing Technicolor Weblog

After taking svk out for a spin this week, I’m having trouble thinking of any, beyond “it’s too hard to install because I don’t use a debian-based OS”. Not to say that there aren’t other OSes that it installs on easily, but I’ve only tried it on Ubuntu, which if course required only sudo apt-get install svk.
svk has some serious bennies:

• no more .svn files littered throughout working directories!
• we can keep committing away even when the svn server or network connection goes down, and then push all those commits to the server when things are working again.
• smarter merging (I think; haven’t spent much time with it yet)
• almost nothing to learn; for normal commands, just type svk instead of svn.

Not to say that all is perfect; the docs are a little thin & scattered. The most comprehensive seems to be the online book which is cribbed from subversion’s - in fact, a number of places in the book still read “subversion this & that” instead of “svk this and that”.

So, yeah, I just noticed today that Alexa has some nifty graphs of net traffic. Or, at least, the subset of traffic that is willing to use IE and install the Alexa toolbar.

One of the reasons I went to Guatemala was to get some first-hand experience with what things are like in part of the Global South. One thing that was a little surprising was how widespread and affordable internet access was.

The bigger cities had many, many internet cafes. As many as three a block in a few stretches of Xela. There was a pretty wide variety - some were very slick, had fast connections, new computers, and decent food and coffee; others had a pile of decrepit machines on card tables. The latter also tended to feature US keyboards but Spanish keymappings - good luck with that. The nicer ones all had Spanish keyboards, which is a bit different for the out-of-towner but is at least manageable.

Even out-of-the-way places like Livingston had multiple opportunities to surf the web for about a dollar an hour. This isn’t very surprising when you consider that Livingston gets a large number of tourists, but on the other hand, you can’t even get there by road, so it is pretty remote and there doesn’t seem to be a huge amount of money flowing into the community. My access in Livingston was definitely the funkiest of the bunch - I ended up on a machine running NT 4.0 with IE 4, which fortunately is still capable of pulling firefox down from http://mozilla.com. My hotel in Tikal had a couple computers with a satellite connection, not bad for a place that didn’t even have electricity available around the clock.

As for internet access in people’s homes, it’s definitely out there. My Spanish teacher had a dialup connection at home, which he relied on for communicating with family in the US. There were plenty of ads for cable modems around town, but the rates are out of the question for any but the wealthy (unlike cable TV, which is super cheap compared to what they charge in the US). Plenty of families seemed to have computers in their homes without even dialup, which makes sense given the economics of broadband access there; I’d certainly rather spend $0.50 to do my internet business on a decent machine with a good connection in a cybercafe, if the only other affordable option was dialup.

I’ve been working on a little Ruby on Rails application on and off for a few weeks, and finally have enough together that it made sense to deploy it somewhere other than my laptop. It ended up taking all day; here are some of the high and lowlights, in chronological order.

• When building ruby from source on my Breezy xen slice, I ended up with no zip lib. Gotta download a way old version that says it’s obsolete. This is just one reason why package managers are worth having; too bad there isn’t an acceptable versions of ruby in Breezy. I did blow a few hours trying to upgrade to Edgy yesterday, but bad Xen things happened so I’m stuck on Breezy for now.
• Capistrano needs ruby’s openssl lib, which is part of the core, but if you don’t have the ssl dev libraries around, it doesn’t get built. So, rebuild ruby and that part worked.
• I’ve been using sqlite for development and though it would be nice for production, too, so I had to install libsqlite3-dev & the sqlite3-ruby gem. Started to think about making it work with Capistrano, via ideas here. But even when the permissions all seem to work ( as in the user running the app can write to the file with the sqlite3 command line tool ) rails is only able to read from it - pukes with a generic error when it tries to write. So, mysql it is. Thanks to migrations, switching from sqlite to mysql only took a minute. Cool.
• Not so clear on how capistrano knows what user to run things as - this seems like the main reference, but I’m having trouble finding everything I need in there. Probably need to dig around in the source.
• This app isn’t running on its own domain, and I had an unpleasant time with RAILS_RELATIVE_URL_ROOT & lighttpd. I’m running rails 1.2 RC 2 and haven’t had a chance to dig around the changelogs to see if there are relevant changes in there that would explain the headaches, which are that it only seems to work if you set it in routes.rb as discussed here. That’s lame because you can’t just have it for production then. A better approach seems to be just doing it in lighttpd except that the app doesn’t then write urls correctly.
• Thanks to this lighttpd configuration guide for pointing out that alias.url needs to be set as well for the public/ directory to be properly served in this kind of configuration.

In retrospect, I probably would have been better off taking easier paths with a few things - running the app on its own subdomain, and going right to mysql both would have saved me some trouble. There still would have been a number of annoyances but that’s par for the course deploying software. Definitely not as much fun as writing the actual application.

I was talking to a friend today about our collective sense of dread over climate change. We know it’s happening; we know it’s probably the biggest problem facing any children we may be lucky enough to have, if not ourselves in a few years; and we know that all kinds of things need to be happening both on personal and societal levels to improve the situation.

Given that very recent conversation, it’s interesting to observe that trying to get through Environment Northeast’s recently released Climate Change Roadmap for New England and Eastern Canada gets my eyes glazed over in no time at all. I truly believe that this is vitally important stuff, but I’m sure having a hard time wrapping my head around it.

Part of the problem is that the solutions outlined in this roadmap all require action at a higher level than the individual - legislatures, executives, and other institutions. Not belonging to any such group, it’s a little tough to relate. What I can do, besides the various personal efforts that I will refrain from boring either of my readers with, is nag my elected officials. According to this Globe article, the Patrick administration is on board with the roadmap, so I’m planning to start bugging my elected officials to see what they’ve committed to on this issue.

As soon as I make it through the roadmap.