My first mistake was probably typing:

$ sudo aptitude install imagemagick

And assuming that it would give me the development headers. It didn’t. Then I tried to find the libmagick10-dev package, which doesn’t exist. Eventually, after much trial, error, and increasing familiarity with aptitude, I found this combination:

$ sudo aptitude install libmagick9-dev
$ sudo gem install rmagick

Success.

For starters, the RMagick 2.x series requires ImageMagick 6.3.0 (which came out in early 2006). Of course, CentOS5 ships with ImageMagick 6.2.28. I understand the need for stability. But what’s a developer to do if COBOL isn’t a viable solution?

David Bock’s website suggests to try the older version. Which worked, kinda. However, the rmagick build threw up while running sanity checks. The issue is that I didn’t have the Microsoft True Type Fonts installed. Now to find an easy way to install them.

More googleing lead me to Corefonts, which has the installation instructions. I followed these directions and tried again.

Same error.

The finally step is to link the directory with the fonts to where ImageMagick wants them to be.

ln -s /usr/share/fonts/msttcorefonts /usr/share/fonts/default/TrueType

One more gem install and everything is happy.

As rock-solid as Centos is, I’m getting very reluctant to recommend it anymore because of issues like this. Unless you’re running software that’s older or from a commercial vendor, it’s just not worth it. Eventually you’re going to want a library, a major upgrade or a snazzy new language that’s going to make you jump through all sorts of crazy hoops.

The Dutch have come to our rescue with Passenger (aka mod_rails). Passenger allows you to run your Rails apps natively within Apache. No need for proxies, mongrel clusters or anything else. They even claim that it recovers from server errors.

The best part is that it’s brain-dead simple. If you can execute a few lines on a command line and add a virtual host to Apache, you can host your Rails app in Passenger.

• It didn’t break my existing theme
• The overall feel of the admin interface is cleaner
• The visual editor sucks less
•  Built in tag support
• The comment moderation page shows which post the comment is on

Stuff I don’t like as much:

• Aksimet doesn’t have a ‘recheck queue for spam’ button on the comment moderation page
• The save/publish buttons are un-intuitively to the left of the post. (years of web use have taught me that these belong on the bottom)
• Tags and categories are under the post.  While it gives them more space, they become somewhat hidden.
• The checkbox for categories is at the bottom, but it still a scrolling list one-column wide.  If you’re going to move it, at least use the extra horizontal space.

Overall, I like it a lot better, but I think most of that is the colors are softer and the interface is brighter.  For my standard tasks for writing something and marking comments as spam, the experience is only moderately improved.  

Along with the icons, I added some contextual text, made the images look right in IE, and fixed that weird off by 1 px bug in safari. The slideshow should work better now as well. First there’s an icon that reduces the level of mystery meat navigation. I also changed the background from the dark gray to white, and added sensible defaults for image size and time. The moral of that story is changing other people’s Javascript gets a lot easier when that’s what you do for a living.

1. shut down the VM’s (might have been optional)
2. open the OpenSUSE lvm tool
3. allocate more space
4. hit finish
5. marvel at the fact that I don’t have a space problem

I’ve always heard about the power of LVM. I just never realized how powerful it was.

The VMWare Server team wants to fix the injustice to the word “beta” and bring it back to it’s roots. Therefore, the VMWare Server 2.0 is not very good. They’ve replaced the quite usable and responsive thick client that only works on Windows and Linux, with a buggy, unresponsive, slow-to update, web-client that only works in Windows. Huh? I thought the point of using the web is platform-independence. Apparently, VMWare wants to buck that trend as well.

Then you’ve got the hosting component. One of our VM’s kept crashing. The guest was Centos5. Thinking that it was just the guest os, we downgraded to Centos4, since the VM that is basically used for running queries was pretty stable. Nope, same problem. Apparently, it just has issues with a VM that needs to both read and write from a disk.

In an effort to be a good beta-testing citizen, I filled out a bug report, included some log files and sent it on it’s way. I got an email a few weeks later asking for more information. I dutifully ran the scripts they asked me to run. One of the commands told me to contact VMware support for an FTP account, since the generated information was too large for their webform. I emailed back, and I’m still waiting.

We’ve since downgraded to Server 1.04, in what might be a vain hope that since VMWare knows the traditional definition of “Beta,” they may know the traditional definition of “Production Ready.”

All in all, the server was down for maybe 5 minutes and my logged in session didn’t even hiccup. It’s always nice when software just works.

It turns out that a few months ago, no doubt in a moment of “why the fuck is this running?” I turned off the postfix service. Oops. Turned it back on and watched the stream of emails show up in my inbox. Without fail, comment response and moderation time should be a lot better now.

This is why I don’t maintain production systems.

To pull the files from the computer with current source to older source navigate to your source directory and type:
rsync -avuz new.source.machine:workspacedir/sourcedir . (don’t forget the .)

To put new changes back, it’s just:
rsync -avuz . new.source.machine:workspacedir/sourcedir

You also might want to add the --delete option if you’ve been doing a lot of refactoring.

Another thing I ran into is that Eclipse doesn’t really like adding new projects directly to the workspace. The work around I’ve found is to make sure the project exists within Eclipse on the machine you want to work on before attempting to rsync.