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Firefox 3 - With Colour Profiling Support!

a tear in the fabric, originally uploaded by chuck.bergeron

Just wanted to let you in a little (big) secret. Firefox 3 is out! It’s effin’ insanely good, I can’t even believe it. http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/

To get the full colour profile support, after downloading and installing open up a tab and instead of typing in http://whatever, type in about:config and press enter. It’ll warn you that you can screw things up, but just ignore the warning and continue on. Here’s where you can configure EVERYTHING about the browser. In the “filter” bar near the top, type in gfx and double-click the gfx.color_management.enabled option so that it’s value is set to true. Restart Firefox. Now your photos and everyone elses will look the way they should (no more desaturation on Flickr!) – wooo!

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Upgrading to Capistrano 2.0

This past week I finally took the time to update my deploy recipe to the new Capistrano 2.0 format. It’s amazing how DRY the new namespaces feature is. I was able to take all of my custom tasks used for our Apis Networks shared hosting packages and separate them into their own plugin. This way, I’m no longer clobbering the default Capistrano deployment strategy.

It’s as easy as creating a two folders in your vendor/plugins directory. One for the name of the plugin, and one dubbed ‘recipes’. Here’s a typical directory tree:

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-- rails_app
 -- vendor
  -- plugins
   -- your_cap_plugin
    -- recipes

Then, create a file in the recipes directory using any filename you like. Capistrano 2.0 will automatically load any tasks inside this file. Begin naming your deployment recipe inside it’s own namespace, like so:

recipes/tasks.rb

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namespace :my_tasks do
  namespace :deploy do
    desc "Restart the FCGI ruby process"
    task :restart, :roles => :app do
      puts "Restarting the ruby processes..."
      # Ignore this confusing unix syntax, it's just for examples sake
      run "ps lx | grep ruby | grep -v grep | awk '{print $3}' | xargs --no-run-if-empty kill -9"
    end
  end
end

To hook your custom tasks into your deployment strategy, add before and after filters to your config/deploy.rb.

config/deploy.rb

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namespace :deploy do
  # After restarting the ruby process, run the default cleanup task
  # and run my custom 'post_live' task
  after "deploy:restart", "deploy:cleanup", "my_tasks:deploy:post_live"

  desc "This overrides the default Capistrano deploy:restart task"
  task :restart, :roles => :app do
    my_tasks.deploy.restart
  end  
end

Re-usable plugin code, fun for every project!

Welcome to 10.5! Migrating Your Tiger MySQL Databases to Leopard

After quite a bit of deliberation, I’ve decided to move up from Tiger to Leopard. Thankfully, the path to Rails w/ MySQL has been much easier than it ever was on Tiger.

So far, my greatest obstacle has been installing MySQL and bringing my old databases over from my backup. The gracious folks over at Hivelogic have created a brilliant, line-by-line tutorial for building MySQL on Leopard.

After getting MySQL up and running successfully, I completely overlooked the fact that my databases would be wiped clean. I realized the easiest thing to do would be to copy the databases from my Tiger backup.

Note: Both of my MySQL installs are Version 5, so I crossed my fingers hoping they’d be compatible and so far there’s been no problems.

Step 1. Make sure to turn off your current Leopard MySQL install. The command for this in the tutorial is: sudo launchctl unload -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.mysql.mysqld.plist which sends the unload command to your plist file.

Step 2. Locate the “data” or “var” folder in your MySQL backup directory. For instance, mine was in /usr/local/mysql on my Tiger install.

Step 3. sudo cp -rf /Volumes/Backup/usr/local/mysql/data /usr/local/mysql Or substitute the paths for the proper source and destination. This will copy the database folder from your Tiger backup to your fresh Leopard MySQL install.

Step 4. sudo chown -R mysql /usr/local/mysql/data mysql Give ownership of the database directory to the mysql user.

Step 5. Start up the server and you should be good to go!

Happy Leopard’ing.

Weak Apple Keyboards

Today, my gal mentioned that for the third time in a year, something was amiss with her Macbook keyboard. This time it’s starting to crack a bit, which will only get worse as we all know. The first time the “V” key didn’t work at all, and the second the spacebar wasn’t registering properly on one side. Of course, all she has to do is take it to the Mac store on campus and they’ll fix it up for her under warranty at no cost, but it’s more of an annoyance than anything.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Apple & I’ve had much more luck with my Macbook. Still, I feel the need to dedicate this video to Apple and their shoddy laptop keyboards:

Max / MSP

I believe I’ll be skipping a post on Rails this week, as I’ve been sidetracked by a new toy:

Max / MSP is a graphical programming language for audio, and it looks like it. The interface isn’t pretty, but it’s insides provide you with the powerful ability to create whatever your digital heart desires. This program has been around for over 15 years now, and has been used by quite a few artists I highly regard. The best part is, it’s extensible using C, Java and JavaScript! If you’re interested in both sound & programming, make sure to check it out. (wiki)