*scottstuff*

I did a bunch of Typo bug triage this morning, and road to Typo 4.0 finally looks clear. We currently have 8 open Typo 4.0 tickets, and none of them look very difficult. I’m still waiting for more feedback on the Typo Installer, and that’s really the biggest issue keeping Typo 4.0 from being released now. I expect that it’ll take a week or so before I’m comfortable enough with the installer to release it to the general public.

If there’s something that you really want to see in Typo 4.0 that isn’t already in the tree, then this is probably your last chance to speak up.

Hot on the heels of this morning’s Typo 3.99.0 release comes Typo 3.99.1. Somehow, 3.99.0 worked much better on my laptop then it’d work anywhere else in the world. Oops. Give the new version a try if you want to test out the new installer.

I just uploaded a gem for Typo 3.99.0 to Rubyforge. Once it propagates, people should be able to test the new Typo installer by running two simple commands:

    $ gem install typo
    $ typo install /tmp/typo

This is a test release; please don’t overwrite your existing, working Typo build with the new Typo installer.

I’d love to get some feedback from people about the installer, though. If you have a chance, give it a shot and let me know if it works. It should pull in Rails 1.1.4 and Mongrel all on its own, and then freeze the Rails gems into vendor/. I had to write my own Rails freeze code, because rake rails:freeze:gems won’t let you specify which Rails release you’re freezing, and I’d like to allow people to continue to install Typo even on systems that have Rails 1.2.x installed. I could have just bundled all of Rails into the Typo gem, but that’d be an abuse of the packaging system. As it is, it should all ‘just work’.

I still have a few things that I need to do before the installer is complete:

1. Actually write the Apache HTTP proxy instructions (for 1.3 and 2.x)
2. Add lighttpd proxy directions.
3. Figure out how to best have Typo restart on reboot.
4. Handle the ”missing swig” problem better.
5. Figure out of the installer will work on Windows.

We also have a couple issues remaining before Typo itself is ready to be called 4.0.0, but we’re getting pretty close. If a few people could test this pre-release for us, then we should be able to get 4.0 out within a week or two.

Update: Expect 3.99.1 in a few hours. There are a couple substantial installer bugs when running from the .gem file. They aren’t dangerous, but they’ll keep it from working in many situations.

If I’ve learned anything from Typo, it’s that Rails apps are a serious pain for first-time users to install. Here’s what it takes to get Typo (or any open-source Rails app) up and running on a random Unix box today:

• You need a working database, like MySQL or PostgreSQL.
• You need to know how to create at least two databases for Typo.
• You need Ruby 1.8.4
• You need rubygems installed.
• You need Rails 1.1.x
• You need Ruby drivers for your DB.
• You need Ruby FCGI drivers installed
• You need a web server with FCGI installed
• You need to download Typo and figure out how to install it without a useful README.
• You need to configure your web server to run Typo’s FCGI dispatcher.
• You need to get all of the permissions right, especially if your web server runs under a different user ID then you normally use.

Sometimes I’m amazed that Typo has as many users as it does. I’ve been promising to do something about this for months, and it’s finally getting close to working. Here’s what you’ll need to do to get Typo running once I’ve released the installer:

  $ gem install typo
  (installs Typo, Rails, mongrel, sqlite3-ruby, and whatever else we need, as defined by the Gem spec)
  $ typo install /var/www/my_typo_site
  Typo Installer
   Checking for existing Typo install in /var/www/my_typo_site
   Reading files from /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/typo-4.0.0
   Copying 755 new files into /var/www/my_typo_site
    copying /CHANGELOG
    copying /MAINTAINERS
    copying /MIT-LICENSE
    ...
  Creating default database configuration file
  Creating initial Typo SQLite database
  Migrating Typo's database to newest release
  Running tests.  This may take a minute or two
  All tests pass.  Congratulations.
  Starting Typo on port 4936

  Typo is now running on http://scott17.local:4936
  Use 'typo start /var/www/my_typo_site' to restart Typo after boot.
  Look in /var/www/my_typo_site/installer/apache.conf.example to see how to integrate Typo with Apache.

The installer sets up a complete Typo installation from a Ruby Gem in a directory of your choice, and then take care of creating a SQLite database for you. Instead of FastCGI, it uses Mongrel, because it’s easier to do HTTP proxying then FastCGI 95% of the time. The same installer knows how to upgrade an existing Typo install–just run typo install on the same directory again, and it’ll shut down mongrel, back up your database, upgrade all of the files that need changed, run migrations, retest the installation, and then restart Mongrel.

This isn’t the ideal install for everyone, but it should be good enough for most people, and there’s really nothing preventing people from hand-installing Typo. There’s certainly nothing preventing people from using Capistrano or any other heavier-weight management system, but that’s overkill for most personal blogs.

Right now, the installer works for me, but it’s not quite ready for wider use. I still need to add Rails freezing support, as well as a bit of subversion support, and I need to clean up the code a bit more. Once that’s done, I’ll check it all into the Typo trunk and then I’ll start building Typo 3.99.x GEMs for people to test. Once we’re reasonably confident that the installer and the current trunk work for people, I’ll go ahead and release Typo 4.0.0.

Once Typo 4.0 is out, I’ll see what I can to do extract the Typo installer into a generic installer for lightweight Rails apps. I doubt that Typo is the only project that could use something like this.

I just released version 1.0.3 of the Rails Schema Generator. This is a minor release; I added a db/schema_version file. This is needed for the Typo installer, which should appear reasonably shortly.

I’ve been trying to get Typo working with SQLite 3 on my Mac off and on for MONTHS with no success. The root problem was simple:

  a = Article.new
  a.title = 'Testing'

  a.save => true
  a.id => 0

Somehow, the ID wasn’t being updated whenever new ActiveRecord objects were created. They’d end up in the DB just fine, but the new ID wasn’t visible from Ruby. Since this is a really basic feature of any ORM, I was really amazed that it didn’t work. A bit of research shows that SQLite and Rails work fine for most users, but I’m not alone with this problem–there are a few reports of similar problems on the Rails wiki.

For the fun of it, I installed SQLite on one of my Linux boxes, and everything worked fine there. So I tried installing a newer SQLite via DarwinPorts, with no improvement. I spent a couple hours uninstalling and reinstalling things, and nothing changed anything. Digging deeper, the bug was clearly deep inside of sqlite3-ruby–it was telling Rails that the ID number for the latest insert was 0.

I finally figured out the problem here at Gnomedex today while watching to the Gillmor Gang record their latest podcast. It’s simple:

The SQLite bindings for Ruby require SWIG. If SWIG isn’t installed, then they’ll still work, sort of, but they fail to fetch the ID from SQLite.

So, to fix the problem, I just ran port install swig, then gem uninstall sqlite3-ruby and gem install sqlite3-ruby.

There’s probably a endian problem in the non-SWIG SQLite Ruby code, but it’s easier (and probably faster) to just install SWIG.

I just saw a press release that claims that Verizon has started turning up FiOS customers in my neighborhood. I don’t think they’re in my neighborhood quite yet (although there’s been a lot of Verizon work a couple blocks away), but it’s getting closer.

I wouldn’t say no to an extra 3-5x bandwidth for the same price.

Just a quick note–I’m spending today and tomorrow at Gnomedex, Chris Pirillo’s technology conference. This morning’s speakers are Michael Arrington (Tech Crunch), Dave Dederer (The Presidents of the United States of America), and John Edwards (Democratic VP candidate, 2004).

I’ve been looking forward to this for a while. It should be interesting.

NewNewsWire just informed me that Microsoft has bought iView Multimedia, makers of iView Media Pro. I’ve used iView as my primary image cataloging program for over 4 years, so I’m a little disturbed by this. Microsoft claims that they aren’t going to kill the Mac version off, but, well, they’re Microsoft. They have a long history of buying companies and bending their future products towards Microsoft’s strategic needs, ignoring their existing customers.

All in all, I’m really not very worried. I’m still running iView Media Pro 2.x, because I couldn’t see the point in paying $100 or so to upgrade to version 3.x right now. I’ve been using Adobe Lightroom for most of my recent image manipulation needs, and it has enough overlap with iView that I probably won’t end up using iView much longer.

Anyway, congratulations to the iView team on their acquisition, and good luck to iView users everywhere. Hopefully Microsoft will be good for iView and its users.

Don’t get your hopes up too high, but I’ve finally had a bit of time to work on Typo again. Hopefully this will continue, and I’ll be able to fix the current round of bugs and finish the Typo installer that I’ve been promising for months. Once that’s done we’ll finally release 4.0.

I’m a little uncertain how involved I’ll be with Typo after 4.0 ships. On one hand, I have a few things I’d love to add. On the other hand, I’m really a terrible maintainer–I’m much better at adding new features then applying waves of bugfixes week in and week out.

So we’ll see how it goes. There’s a lot of admin work that I’d really like to do, and spam blocking is getting more and more important. And there are some microformat things that I’ve been itching to do for months.

I’m mostly happy with my new Nokia E61, but there are 2 or 3 things about it that have been annoying the heck out of me. The most serious one is power-related: it’s been a royal pain in the neck to charge the phone. When I plug the phone into the charger, it’ll charge for a little while–30 seconds to 10 minutes–and then beep and say “Not charging.” If I unplug and replug the charger, then it’ll charge for a little while longer, but I have to keep doing it over and over again to get a full charge. This isn’t exactly an enjoyable and productive way to spend my days.

Obviously, it isn’t supposed to work this way. From doing a bit of digging online, it looks like I’m not alone with this problem. The general issue seems to be the charger–some third-party chargers (or even older Nokia chargers) don’t put out enough voltage to charge the phone. The phone sees the voltage as too low, so it aborts with the “not charging” message. I can see why this happens with the cheap third-party car charger that came with my phone, but it’s not at all clear why Nokia’s own wall charger does it. Admittedly, the one that came in the box with the phone is a UK model, but it’s supposed to take 100-240V. I just doesn’t quite manage to work right. There’s a slim chance that the vendor that sold me the E61 swapped out an older charger, but that’s kind of weird.

In an effort to avoid having to return the phone, I picked up a Nokia AC-3U charger from CompUSA on the way home today. The AC-3U is the travel charger that Nokia lists on their website for the E61. It uses the right connector for the phone (unlike the charger that came with the phone–it needs an adapter), and it’s quite a bit smaller then the original charger, too.

I plugged it in and the phone charged for about a half hour before “not charging” showed up. That’s a new record, but more importantly, it claimed to be fully charged at that point. So, most likely, the AC-3U does the trick. I’ll give it another shot tomorrow once it’s drained down a bit, but I think it’ll be okay.

This is just a quick test–does the open-source version of KABLOG work with the E61 and Typo?

Answer: mostly. It posted okay, but died in the middle, presumably because I received a phone call and the GPRS service was disconnected during the call. I can’t add keywords (hence no tags in Typo) and I can’t disable trackbacks (which are too spammy to be useful anymore). But I’m able to post, which is a step in the right direction.

Does anyone have any suggestions on blog editing software for the Nokia E61, or any Series 60 third edition phone?

For whatever it’s worth, the built-in web browser in my Nokia E61 uses this user-agent string:

Mozilla/5.0 (SymbianOS/9.1; U; en-us) AppleWebKit/413 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/413 UP.Link/6.3.0.0.0

I knew that the browser is derived from Apple’s open-source webkit tree, but I didn’t expect it to call itself Safari in the user-agent header.

For what it’s worth, here’s the most recent Safari build that I’ve seen in my logs:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/418 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/417.9.3

Given the version numbers, it doesn’t look like Nokia’s lagging very far behind Apple right now.

I’ve mentioned a few times that I was an old AT&T Wireless customer, which means that I was paying Cingular a lot of money every month to be a second-class citizen. With an AT&T account, I couldn’t buy a new Cingular phone (they’re locked to Cingular’s network) or add features (like a wireless data plan) to my account without trading in my old AT&T account for a shiny new Cingular plan. And I didn’t want to do that for a few reasons:

1. I have a family plan, which means that I’d have to switch both lines at the same time. Which means that I’d have to buy a pair of new phones.

2. I had a reasonably cheap plan with AT&T, and comperable Cingular plans cost more and provide less.

3. Finally, switching plans means that I’d be stuck with at least a 1-year contract extension.

So, basically, it meant that it was a pain to change phones. If I wanted to get a new phone and have some sort of unmetered network service, then I was going to have to pay more for basic phone service and I’d have to replace my wife’s phone. Which is a pain. So I’d been putting it off until just the right phone came along.

Well, with the E61 on the way Friday, it was finally time. I needed to turn on a data plan for the E61, but I didn’t want to pay more for basic phone service. In general, normal customer service reps are helpless to do anything about this sort of complaint, so I decided to bite the bullet and threaten to cancel; the retention department at most carriers is able to make deals, but you need to be willing to actually cancel and switch carriers if you can’t make a deal. So I called Cingular’s customer service and asked the to transfer me straight to the retension department. Once I had a rentention rep on the line, I told her that I’d been with Cingular for years and I was going to switch to T-Mobile if I couldn’t get a deal.

Amazingly enough, she didn’t even blink, and offered me an extra 100 minutes per month for the same price I was already paying, and threw in a decent discount on phones. So, all in all, I’m happy. I feel kind of mercenary, but I figure I can live that if it saves me $400 or so over the next couple years.

[FWIW, I actually wrote this on the E61 and then mailed it to my Mac for posting. I need to find a decent web editor for S60. Any suggestions?]

I love FedEx–they somehow managed to deliver my new Nokia E61 today instead of Monday, so I have the whole weekend to play with it.

A few first impressions:

1. It’s much more solid then it appears on the website. It has a metal case, and everything about it feels well-made.
2. The screen is wonderful. It’s big, bright, and easy to read. While doesn’t have as many pixels as some of the other models in Nokia’s latest lineup, I have nothing to complain about. The text fonts for the browser and office apps are small enough that it’ll fit a lot of text on the screen.
3. It seems to work fine with Asterisk. I was able to make and receive a few VoIP phone calls over WiFi without any problems.
4. The built-in web browser works well enough. I was able to check gmail and look up a few directions without a problem. Strangely, the only site that hasn’t worked for me is http://www.google.com. I think Google’s trying to feed the phone a WAP page or something, while the phone is expecting HTML. It shouldn’t be hard to fix.
5. Google Maps for Mobile phones works great. That’s half of the reason that I wanted a new phone :-).
6. The audio quality is better then my old T616.
7. The keyboard is good. I’m not used to the layout yet, and it’s weird having to hit a shift key to get numbers, but it’s better then Graffiti.
8. I’ve had some weird problems when copying large files using the USB cable. For some reason, the transfer locks up from time to time. Unplugging the cable solves the problem without rebooting either end, but it’s annoying. I should probably find a USB-to-SD adapter; it’ll be faster.

I’ll post more later, once I’ve had a chance to really break it in.