Raible Designs

Upgrading to Fedora

I'm in the midst of upgrading my Red Hat 9 machine to Fedora Core 1 (a.k.a. Red Hat 10). So far, I'm very impressed and I haven't even installed it yet. The download was super simple using bittorrent for Fedora Core 1. I took a couple of hours and voila - I had all three ISOs. This is the easiest RedHat download I've ever done. Burning the ISOs was a breeze since I have two CD burners in my Windows box. The first time I tried to install (a few hours ago), it failed with "Not Enough Disk Space." I suspect it's all my kernels in my /boot partition, so I removed them with some advice. The nice thing was that even though the install failed, I was right back where I started - with a working Operating System. I've yet to have a failed install on Windows or OS X that actually reverted back to the previous OS. Attempt #2 coming up shortly.

1/2 Hour Later: Hmmm, it still says I don't have enough disk space. I cleared out all the ISOs from /home, but I doubt that's gonna help. Here's my current usage - looks to be plenty of space (to me):

[root@drevil /]# df -k
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda5               381139    110294    251167  31% /
/dev/hda1                46636      9359     34869  22% /boot
/dev/hda3              4830728     65860   4519476   2% /home
none                    773772         0    773772   0% /dev/shm
/dev/hda2             13203660   3659772   8873176  30% /usr
/dev/hda7               256667    125652    117763  52% /var
/dev/hdb1             19686804  16801136   1885624  90% /data

Need to recover deleted files on OS X

OK, I'm an idiot. I had a symlink in /Users/mraible/Sites that pointed to my application's prototype directory. This was called Sites/appname -> /Users/mraible/dev/appname/prototype. I wanted to change the symlink, and instead of doing "rm appname" - I did "rm -r appname/" - I tabbed-completed it and hit return. So I deleted all the files for the prototype I've been developing. The worst part? My new gig has not set me up with VPN Access (for CVS), so I haven't checked in any of these files. I work from home on Friday and Mondays - and I was just beginning the prototype on Thursday. I thought I'd be able to get the HTML files from the prototype directory, but no luck yet. I have DiskWarrior and when I boot from my iPod and "repair" my hard drive - I get errors at the end and I can't "Preview" the changes. I don't even know if DiskWarrior will work, so I downloaded Virtual Lab and tried it. It doesn't seem to have a setting for HTML files (except for "Microsoft Internet Explorer HTML", which is probably *.htm files).

Even more frustrating is I "should've" had a backup. I just got on a kick last night to make backups of all my machines. I was able to backup Linux (using tar) just fine, but the "Backup" program on OS X kept giving me errors and I gave up after a while. I continue to search for a solution to recover the deleted files - any advice appreciated.

Update: I found the file I spent the most time developing and was able to restore it. How? Certainly not any fancy tools. Just a little searching in Safari's Cache. Apparently it was the only one I opened via an http:// URL - the others I opened with file:// and I don't think it caches those.

Why I don't use My Eclipse IDE

I don't use My Eclipse IDE because I can't. It won't install on Windows XP with the latest JDK (error: "Can't launch executable. Could not load jvm.dll."). Apparently, it's not their fault, it's ZeroG's fault. If I was motivated enough, I could install an older version of the JDK (i.e. 1.4.1), but then I'd have to hack my registry to get the JRE back to 1.4.2. I'll pass - if I can't even install it, it's probably not worth my time.

All the other Eclipse plugins are distributed as zip files that you expand into the plugins directory - why can't this one work the same way?

Problems integrating CVS Spam and CVS NT

I've been trying to post the following question to the CVS Spam mailing list for the past couple of days with no luck (I keep getting undeliverable receipts). I figure posting it here might get me some answers or alternatives to CVS Spam on NT.

At my new gig I'm trying to setup CVS Spam on a Windows 2000 Server machine with CVS NT. I know, it'd be much easier to do on Linux, but it's an NT shop, so I'm trying to workaround the environment as best I can. I tried using the Ruby Installer from SF, but had no luck.

After reading the Archives, I saw that the best way was to install Cygwin and use cygwin/bin/ruby.exe. I tried this and now I'm getting the following error:

Checking in README.txt;
c:/source/apptracker/README.txt,v  <--  README.txt
new revision: 1.9; previous revision: 1.8
done
C:/Source/CVSROOT/COLLEC~1.RB:100:in `process_log': missing data dir
(/tmp/#cvsspam.2632.18-XXXXXX) (RuntimeError)
	from C:/Source/CVSROOT/COLLEC~1.RB:215:in `choose_operation'
	from C:/Source/CVSROOT/COLLEC~1.RB:314

In CVSROOT/commitinfo, I have:

^apptracker c:/Source/CVSROOT/record_lastdir.rb

In CVSROOT/loginfo, I have:

^apptracker c:/Source/CVSROOT/collect_diffs.rb --to [email protected] %{sVv}

I also checked in cvsspam.conf to CVSROOT and uncommented smtp.host to be localhost (required for NT).

If anyone has setup CVS Spam with CVS NT successfully (on a Windows 2000 server), please let me know. I'd like to use CVS NT over Cygwin's CVS because I think it'll be easier to maintain after I leave. I'm also interested to know if anyone has successfully used other "cvs e-mail" packages with CVS NT.

Update: I finally got through on the mailing list and received a solution from Angus Mezick. To make it easier for everyone, I've made this patched version of CVS Spam for CVS NT available for download. Just a note, these have only been tested with Cygwin's Ruby install. I hope to test these out next week when I get back from Missouri.

What's the best way to setup networked printing?

I made the switch to my new XP box last night - swapping hard drives, CD Burners, etc. from the old to the new. In the process of putting 1.5 GB of RAM into my Linux box, I thought I'd upgrade Samba to 3.0 and setup a shared printer. Samba upgrade - piece of cake. Installing a printer on RedHat - no luck. I've tried it before, but I've never succeeded. I have a HP OfficeJet G85 that is a great printer. My main goal is to setup this printer as a shared printer on Linux or XP and I'll be able to print to it via OS X, Windows XP and RedHat 9. However, I can never get it installed on RedHat - even though I select the right printer (using printconf-gui). It does recognize it as a USB device, but it can't print to it. On Windows XP, the printer installs (and works) just fine, but I can't print to it from OS X or RedHat - it just doesn't work. Here's what happens on both:

• OS X 10.3: I select Windows Printing and I can navigate to my XP Box, but I can't connect. When I try to view the printers, it hangs for a couple of minutes - then I'm prompted for a login and my XP login doesn't work. This same login/password works just fine for connecting to shared drives. I think it's a bug in Panther.
• RedHat 9: I select Queue Type: Networked Windows (SMB) and my Windows box does not show up in the list (just the RedHat box and my PowerBook). If I try to manually enter my server, printer, etc. it just flashes and prompts me again.

I do have a wireless print server that I could probably use, but that's hooked up to our Canon 900 Photo Printer - which only seems to work well if it's plugged into the wireless print server. We've tried to plug it directly into a Windows box and print, and the quality just isn't as good - who knows why. I bought a USB hub for it in hopes of hooking up multiple printers, but that doesn't work either.

I wish I could just give my HP an IP address - then it would probably work for all of them, but alas, all it has is USB.

The fun part of all this switching hard drives? I thought I lost a 20 GB drive of important data this morning - I was up until 2 a.m. last night trying to fix it. Luckily, I got some assistance from Experts-Exchange this morning and didn't lose a thing.

Update: I got this all working using HPOJ and CUPS. I did have to uninstall LPRng and cups from Red Hat 9 - then re-install CUPS from source. I also had to install Ghostscript and all its fonts. Finally, to get it to share the printer via Samba, I had to tweak some Samba config files.

Run Multiple versions of IE on the same Windows OS

This is HUGE in my opinion. It's always been a pain to test multiple versions of IE - you either had to install VMWare, install multiple OS's, or use a separate machine. No longer, my friends. Joe Maddalone of Insert Title Web Designs, has figured out a way to run multiple versions of IE on the same machine. Awesome - thanks Joe!

Thanks to The Scobleizer for the link. I also found these standalone downloads for IE 5.1 and 5.5 from Ryan Parman.

[New Book] Art of Java Web Development: Frameworks and Best Practices

Manning has a new book in the works: Art of Java Web Development: Frameworks and Best Practices. Looks like good stuff - it covers Struts, Tapestry, WebWork, Velocity and Cocoon. Too many books, not enough time. I'm thinking that I should start taking a "studying sabbatical" every year. Maybe 2 weeks at the end of each year where I crank through a few books and solidify my knowledge. The other option is to quit contributing to Open Source and reading weblogs - that'd probably save me 2 weeks between now and the end of the year. ;-)

My Development Environment

To make is easier for folks to use AppFuse and Struts Resume, I put together a page for HowTo Configure your Development Environment. This is how I've configured my environment and it works pretty darn well for me. Really, none of the document is AppFuse specific - it just shows where I put J2SE, J2EE, Ant, Tomcat, and how to setup your environment variables. Comments or other suggestions are welcome.

Tomcat Issues

This site continues to puke and choke - and I believe it's 1) Tomcat or 2) my ISP. Why? Because all the other Roller installs seems to hum along just fine with no issues (i.e. Dave and JRoller). I get OutOfMemory Errors and too many connections open. As of last night, I'm thinking of a new strategy. Netcraft reports that this site is capable of running Resin 3.0.3. Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but it certainly seems like it to me. Now I just need to sit down and 1) figure out how to setup Roller on Resin and 2) do it. Knowing my luck, migrating to Resin won't solve anything, but it's worth a try!

Happy Birthday Abbie!

One year ago today, early this morning at 12:52 a.m. - the best thing that every happened to us was born. Abbie Loo - what a cool kid. I never thought life could be so much fun as a Dad. I knew it would be good, but I never thought it would be this much fun!