You can choose how far you want the rabbit hole to go:
This is the funny part:
This is the serious part:
It looks like Tomboy (A really nice note/wiki Gnome widget) has released a great new feature. As of version 0.8 you can now sync your notes to a remote server. I was kind of doing that already using Subversion - but it never really worked the way I wanted it to.
I ran into a series of problems getting this thing to work. I’ll spare you some pain if you want to follow along.
Gutsy Gibbon Required - not
Ok first hurdle was the issue that the 0.8 package is only out for Gutsy - which hasn’t officially been released yet. I figured in this case it wouldn’t be a big deal. On the other hand, Tomboy is shipped as part of Gnome which gets an upgrade as part of Gutsy so I wasn’t sure if this was going to be an easy package to build.
Enter prevu
It turns out Ubuntu ships a tool that makes your life in backport land very easy. (Following the advice from here)
- sudo apt-get install prevu
- add deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu gutsy main restricted universe multiverse to your /etc/apt/sources.list
- sudo prevu-init
- sudo prevu tomboy
That took a while even on my beefy machine - mostly because Tomboy needs a lot of libraries to build. After that you get the new version of Tomboy in
/var/cache/prevu/fiesty-debs
Pretty cool - I killed Tomboy and then restart it and bam I have 0.8
Not So Fast
Tomboy offers two means of syncing - sshfs and wdfs. Both are fuse based remote file mounting systems. I tried to get sshfs to work - but for some reason it changed the permissions on the mounted directory in a way that didn’t allow my to sync. I would have preferred to go this route because it is way easier to sync via ssh (sshfs) than WebDav (wdfs).
After being thwarted by sshfs ( If someone figures it out let me know), I switched over to wdfs. Unlike most people I happen to have a personal webdrive up that uses WebDav already. Even given that head start it was still annoying.
What Package?
It turns out that wdfs doesn’t exist as a package in Ubuntu. Since I generally prefer packages to anything else I did the CheckInstall dance. (I am a huge fan of check install for this very situation - I can have package to use with other machines and uninstalling is easy). wdfs requires some packages to compile.
- wget http://noedler.de/projekte/wdfs/wdfs-1.4.2.tar.gz
- tar -xzf wdfs-1.4.2.tar.gz
- cd wdfs-1.4.2
- sudo apt-get install libfuse-dev libneon26 libneon26-dev
- ./configure (This makes sure you have everything you need to compile)
- sudo checkinstall
SSL Arggg!
I actually have a personally signed SSL cert on my webdrive. In theory, this makes things a little more secure. Unfortunately, wdfs doesn’t like that non-trusted cert. It turns out that the URL you put into Tomboy is passed without any special kind of escaping. This allowed my to add “-o accet_sslcert” to the url and get it past my cert.
I actually had to manually unmount the wdfs and then tell it to sync and things finally worked.
In the end, it was more work than I expected but at least now it works and since I have packages for both tomboy-0.8 and wdfs putting it on my other Ubuntu boxes should be seriously easy.
Sure this trend is completely over - but one last mash up for the road :)
I been spending a lot of time lately in the land of plugins for Rails. I’m in the process of overhauling a bunch of GUI helpers I wrote a long time ago. One thing that was slowly driving me crazy is that every time I make a change I had to restart the web server to get it to reload everything in development. My old tricks for reloadability just didn’t seem to work.
I had looked for a solution before but came up empty handed. This time I hit pay dirt. Turns out you have to add some small bit of code to you environment.rb and you get reloadability back. Now I can get down to some business.
spotstory ยป Upgrading to Rails 1.2
Ok. I need to reload my plugins. Bleh. Further, this has to happen in environment.rb, not in environments/development.rb. Bleh.
# Array of plugins with Application model dependencies.
reloadable_plugins = ["acts_as_commentable"]
# Force these plugins to reload, avoiding stale object references.
reloadable_plugins.each do |plugin_name|
reloadable_path = RAILS_ROOT “/vendor/plugins/#{plugin_name}/lib”
Dependencies.load_once_paths.delete(reloadable_path)
end
I haven’t used this (yet) but I have to admit it scores well on the current geek hot topic list since it combines a real REST API, MapReduce, and Erlang all in one system.
I was raised on the web in the world of relational databases so it is really hard to bend my brain to understand how and why you would use something like this - but it touches so many topics all in once I’m going to have to fire it up at some point.
