Raible Designs

Open Source Web Frameworks' Mailing List Traffic - June 2007

Who knows if these stats mean anything, but it does make a pretty graph. Current mailing list traffic leaders in the web framework space: Rails, Flex and GWT. For those frameworks with dev and users lists, these stats are from the users lists. If you find these numbers to be inaccurate, please let me know.

Here's the numbers in case you want to create your own graphs:

• Rails: 4056
• Flex: 3558
• GWT: 2305
• Django: 1951
• Wicket: 1718
• Struts: 1689
• Grails: 1307
• MyFaces: 1283
• Tapestry: 1268
• TurbyGears: 797
• Stripes: 206
• OpenLaszlo: 189

Subversion Hosting

In years past, I never had much of a need for source control outside of open source projects I worked on. Now, as I create more and more training materials and presentations - it's essential. While I could host a Subversion repository myself, it doesn't seem like it's worth the hassle. I'd prefer to have it hosted (and backed up regularly) outside of my house. This week I'm looking to setup svn.raibledesigns.com.

I'm not really looking to get my own Linux box hosted somewhere. I pay around $60/month to KGB Internet for raibledesigns.com, demo.appfuse.org and appfuse.org. To get my own "managed" box is somewhere around $300/month. When I say "managed", I mean Contegix-style where I can say "install this", "do that" and they handle all the sys-admin for you. So all I'm looking for is a reasonable SVN hosting provider that'll give me 1-2 GB for a reasonable price. What's reasonable? I'd say $25-50 per month.

I did some googling and there's a lot of Subversion hosting providers. I e-mailed a few of them with my main question - "can I point my subdomain at your servers?" A few of them have gotten back to me, but now I'm curious to hear from folks using these services. Are you using a Subversion hosting provider for your business? If so, which one?

I'm more interested in bad reviews than good ones - but if you're happy with a service, I'd love to hear about it.

The cheapest one I found is SVNRepository.com. However, it's been an hour since I e-mailed them and I haven't had a response. Nevertheless, $10/month for 5 GB, unlimited repositories, Trac instances, etc. sounds pretty nice.

Update August 2, 2007: I ended up going with SVNRepository.com (Level Two - $6.95/month) and I've been very happy with them. I'm using them for Raible Designs' artifacts (presentations, training materials) so I don't use it on a daily basis - more like monthly.

Upgrading to Ubuntu 7.0.4

You have to love how easy they make this.

The time doesn't seem accurate as it originally told me it'd be about an hour. Regardless, I love how easy it is to upgrade Ubuntu from one version to the next. I wish openSUSE had a similar feature.

Update - 3.5 hours later: This might take a while...

Update - during FAC: It's failed twice now and left my OS in a corrupted state both times. I suspect the MADM (or whatever it's called) prompt at the end of the download. I've entered "all" and "none" and it's failed with both values. VMWare rocks - I'm so glad I didn't ruin a working system. I'll be sticking with 6.10 for a month or so.

... and Country Bry is right - calling it by it's code name vs. the version number is pretty cheesy.

OSCON: A beautiful time of year in Portland

It's that time of year again for the excellent OSCON conference. Last year's show was great, but I spent far too much time in the conference, and not enough time enjoying summertime in Portland. I have a fondness for Oregon in the summer. I spent my last two years of high school in Salem (40 miles south of Portland) and remember loving life in August. This was likely due to the fact that it rained most of the rest of the year.

This year, I'm determined to enjoy Oregon more, and attend the conference less. I have a pass, and I'm doing a short 20-minute talk on "7 Simple Reasons to use AppFuse" (2:00 Wednesday in the Expo Hall). But that's about it. The rest of the week, I hope to enjoy myself and not be pummeled with any new technology or buzzwords. I might end up getting sucked into a session or two, but I'm hoping I don't. With any luck, I hope to visit both Edgefield and the Oregon Brewers Festival. Edgefield on Wednesday, Brewers Festival on Friday.

On Thursday, we're throwing another party at the Red Lion along with a host of other companies. Last year, we had a SourceBeat/Virtuas party at the Red Lion on the patio. The views of Portland were spectacular and it was definitely a good time. This year, it's a Geronimo Live! party. To register, please click on the image below.

Thanks to the many sponsors of this event - we appreciate your support.

Raible Road Trip #10 begins this Sunday. With any luck, I'll be able to snap some pics along the way and blog about our trip as we go.

[DeRailed] Denver Rails User Group Meeting

Last night, Francis (Virtuas' Operations Manager) and I went to the local Rails User Group meeting, better known as "DeRailed". This group was started by a good friend of mine, Fernand Galiana, who obviously doesn't know how to blog. Since Virtuas is a sponsor, and I really like Rails technology, I felt like it'd be a fun meeting to attend. I wasn't disappointed.

The meeting was held 3 blocks from our offices at the downtown Tattered Cover. The first presentation was by Doug Fales, and he talked about his new soon-to-be-launched site called WalkingBoss. With this site, he integrates GPS Data (GPX files) and Flickr photosets to allow you to easily plot your trips on a map. It looks very easy to use, and somewhat inspired me to get a GPS device, and possibly a new (smaller) camera. Doug's blog has more in his most recent post. Unfortunately, I don't see that his blog has permalinks, so this might be hard to find in the coming weeks.

The 2nd talk was Ruby Meta Programming and was presented by Ara Howard. Since I don't know a whole lot about Ruby, this talk was over my head, but somewhat interesting nevertheless. There was about 20-25 people that showed up for this meeting and I found it to be a much younger and more down-to-earth group than the local DJUG. Furthermore, almost everyone went out for beers at the Rock Bottom afterwards, which is a lot different than DJUG (10-15 out of 75-100 usually go). Good meeting, good group of guys. Thanks Fernand!

Getting ready for the Sun Fire T2000 Server

Like Jeff, Bill and Bruce, I signed up for the free 60 day trial of the Sun Fire T2000 Server. Why? Because I heard you can get one for free if you blog about it enough. My plans are to setup continous integration environments for AppFuse and Roller using CruiseControl. I also hope to do some performance tests b/w Java persistence and web frameworks. Finally, I'd like to some single-server vs. clustered server performance tests using Tomcat.

When we built our house way back in 2004, we had it wired with fiber. Even though we still aren't using the fiber, I also had them install ethernet throughout. Today, I finally took advantage of it. I moved my cable modem downstairs and hooked up RJ45 connectors on both ends, so I can now plug my office network into an ethernet outlet on the wall. Good thing my Dad is a network guy - he made it all pretty damn easy.

It was a great afternoon in Denver: 85 degrees, cold Fat Tires in the fridge, kids running around playing in the kiddie pool - and I got my house re-wired in under 30 minutes. The "old basement" will soon become a server room. Now I need a rack - for the T2000 as well as an old Dell Dimension Fedora box. Any suggestions?

RE: Marketing is the billion dollar question in open source

Dana Blankenhorn has an interesting post titled Marketing is the billion dollar question in open source. I definitely agree with this. Good marketing of a project can make it successful, and bad marketing can kill it. It really is the hardest part of being an open source developer. Sure it's fun to work on this stuff until the wee hours of the morning, but if no one (including yourself) appreciates your project (due to your lack of marketing), it really worth it? Compare that to wild enthusiasm by your users and people writing articles about your project. There's a stark contrast there.

Some of the hottest open source projects are driven by marketing. Read more (and comment) on my Virtuas blog.

Denver Tech Meetup on March 9th

Stephen O'Grady:

Ok, I know I dragged this out far too long - mostly due to travel concerns - but let's just pick a date and run with it. So the date for the next Denver Tech Meetup is now officially March 9th.
...
Venue will be - barring unforeseen circumstances - the same as last time, the Wazee Supper Club. It's easy to get to, close to some of the downtown offices, and most importantly, is my favorite.

If you don't know what the Tech Meetup is all about, I like to describe it as a User Group meeting without the User Group; there's no common affiliation other than we're all in tech (and even that rule can be bent , and no technical meetings - just the after-meeting beers/cocktails (and maybe food).

This meeting was a lot of fun last time. Matt Filios and I enjoyed talking to guys doing PHP, Rails and even some developers from the OpenSolaris project. I highly recommend attending.

OpenSuse 10.0 vs. Ubuntu 5.10

Ever since I got a new HP Pavilion, I've been planning what's next for my Dell Dimension 8300. I decided it's probably best to retire my somewhat hosed Fedora Core 3 box (Dimension 8100) and replace it with a new Linux server. After talking with a good friend, I decided to go with OpenSuse 10.0 or Ubuntu 5.10. Steve was a good enough friend to burn me DVDs of both. Yesterday, I bought a new 160GB hard drive and last night I tried to install Ubuntu. I went w/ Ubuntu b/c Steve tried them both and said he liked Ubuntu a lot better. I've never used Ubuntu, and I have used Suse a fair bit - so I figured I'd try something new.

When I started installing Ubuntu last night, I figured it'd be a breeze. I have a DVI KVM Switch hooked up to a Logitech cordless keyboard/mouse, and Ubuntu immediately recognized them both. However, at 44%, it failed to install gstreamer0.8-jpeg and the installation bailed out. I was able to login to the desktop and (seemingly) get stuff working, but I'm always a bit leary about a failure in the middle of an OS install. After an hour of futzing with it, I tried again and got the same error. Around 1 a.m., I said "screw this" and threw in the Suse DVD.

I had the same good results with Suse, where my keyboard and mouse were recognized. However, when I got prompted for the root password, my keyboard quit working and I was up shit creek. I started the re-install process before going to bed at 2 and picked it up again this afternoon - after a beautiful day of skiing at Copper. I got almost everything working on Suse this afternoon, and just as I was about to call things good - the keyboard problem came back. Pretty disappointing since I'd just gotten my Apple Cinema Display to work.

As I speak, I'm trying Ubuntu again, without the KVM switch. I suspect there's probably a piece of hardware I have that's causing the failure, so hopefully unplugging things will solve the problem. If I don't get it figured out in the next hour or two, I'll probably just go with Suse, setup VNC - and get a wired keyboard for when I need direct access.

24 hours later: It's interesting to see that almost the commentors on this post are recommending Ubuntu. After posting this, and receiving a comment from Brett, I tried the Ubuntu Live DVD. What I found was that Ubuntu recognized my cinema display, but it entered into a non-stop flickering loop that I couldn't solve. Therefore, I threw in the Suse DVD and tried again. This time, Suse recognized everything flawlessly (including my HP OfficeJet G85). So I'm sticking with Suse - mainly because it seems to recognize my cinema display, printer and DVI KVM switch the best. With apt-get working on Suse, it's been a breeze to get everything setup.

January Denver Tech Meetup

Hey Stephen, when's the next Denver Tech Meetup? I propose next Thursday the 12th. Whaddya think?