http://www.fnokd.com Bob Blogs Mon, 18 May 2009 17:42:23 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I announced the TorqueBox project today. It's the coolest platform for your Ruby applications, ever.  Really. http://www.fnokd.com/2009/05/18/announcement-torquebox/ Just a reminder, in case anyone didn't make the jump.. My Ruby/Rails/JBoss blogging is going on over at Odd Thesis these days. That includes this announcement about the 1.0.0-Beta-2 release that just popped. http://www.fnokd.com/2008/12/03/new-jboss-rails-release-reminder/ Over the summer, I relocated to a farming community in southwest Virginia.  Around the middle of August, the Starbucks that'd been under construction finally opened, to much rejoicing.  I've spent many a dollar and hour in that store, enjoying a lovely beverage and the fast internet. Over the Thanksgiving holiday, we ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/12/02/your-neighborhood-starbucks/ Just when I've trained my boss to read this blog to keep up with my status, I go and launch another blog, specifically for my workstuff.  In addition to blogs about JBoss things, it'll include other documentation for building, installing and using the related projects.  The projects are grouped into ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/11/10/workblog/ I did the round-trip from the land of cows to Raleigh to attend the Raleigh RubyCamp over the weekend. I think I heard about 80 folks showed up, but I'm not certain on that. Mark (root@37s) and James did a very nice job of organizing it.  They provided good coffee and donuts ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/10/20/trip-report-raleigh-rubycamp/ Thanks to the typical demo demons, I've been unable to get everything functioning perfect for instantaneous clustering on EC2 by tomorrow. Oh well. But here's the first draft of some slides I'm taking with me to the Raleigh RubyCamp. It's a BarCamp style event, so I anticipate the slides probably changing throughout the ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/10/18/preliminary-slides-rubycamp/ Trying to debug why my init scripts weren't initing on EC2, I checked all the normal places. The chkconfig tool reported that my services should be on at runlevel 3: jboss 0:off   1:off   2:off   3:on    4:off   5:on    6:off My /etc/inittab says I was booting to runlevel 3: id:3:initdefault: Yet the console did not ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/10/17/run-level-run/ On my path towards clustering a Rails app on JBoss on EC2, I stumbled across Bryan Kearney and the other Thincrust guys. With their help, I now have a JBoss AS5 + jboss-rails "appliance" ready to roll. Grab the raw image or the VMWare image, and play along at home. Fire up ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/10/16/boot-up-jboss/ It can sometimes be funny, the paths we take. Once I'd verified that a Rails app deployed on JBoss would indeed cluster, I sat in my farmhouse, looking at my lone little Mac.  Not much of a cluster to play with. So I started looking at Amazon EC2, which is truly very ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/10/11/stumbling-through-technology/ Elasticfox is a nice extension for managing your relationship with EC2 from within Firefox.  It's XUL-based, somewhat homely and odd.  But it's so much nicer than dealing with the ec2-* scripts directly and copying Amazon's wacky hash identifiers hither and thither. But on OSX, the "ssh to this instance" button is ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/10/01/elasticfox-osx-and-iterm/ Don't forget, in a few weeks at the Red Hat offices in Raleigh, there will be an unconference-style Ruby BarCamp on October 18th. My plan is to put together a few clumps of slides, prepare a cluster on EC2, and see if anyone wants to hear about JBoss Rails.  I'll of ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/09/30/reminder-raleighrubycamp/ Rysiek asked me to elucidate my clustering on OSX... By default, it seems that OSX provides exactly 1 localhost address, unlike RHEL.  I normally make use of 127.0.0.1/24 when I'm deploying on Linux, and figured I'd do the same on OSX. To accomplish this, you need to create some new localhost IPs ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/09/29/multiple-instances-of-as-on-osx/ JBoss on Rails will indeed cluster! After modifying and dropping my jboss-rails.deployer into an 'all' configured server of JBoss AS 5, and firing up 3 instances on my localhost (non-trivial on OSX...): 10:43:28,409 INFO [RPCManagerImpl] Received new cluster view: [127.0.0.10:63740|2] [127.0.0.10:63740, 127.0.0.11:63747, 127.0.0.12:63749] 10:43:28,435 INFO [RPCManagerImpl] Cache local address is 127.0.0.12:63749 10:43:28,469 ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/09/29/jbor-will-it-cluster/ Since JBoss AS 5 is built on top of Microcontainer, it's effectively a network of beans just doing their respective jobs.  You have already probably noticed that it ships with 3 included configurations: minimal, default, and all. Unfortunately, they're awefully far apart along the spectrum of configuration options.  The minimal configuration ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/09/23/jboss-amputation/ When digging through code, I find it's good to print it out, wander off away from the machine, and do some reading. But if you print any reasonable-sized chunk of code from Eclipse, you'll be carrying around several reams of paper, since Eclipse apparently thinks we're all blind illiterates. For the past ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/09/23/print-like-you-mean-it/ Tomorrow is my first real status update call with my boss, Sacha Labourey.  I've been anxious to deliver something, to prove I hadn't gone completely pudding-brained during my tenure as management. This morning, it all finally came together in a pleasing fashion, causing me to hoot and holler loud enough to ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/09/22/jboss-on-rails/ Since I've been back on the job, writing Java code lately, that means I've been testing Java code lately. After living in the land of Ruby with RSpec, thinking about JUnit did not excite me.  Thankfully I found the rspec-maven-plugin, which integrates straight into the maven test process. I like rspec because ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/09/18/maven-java-and-rspec/ In order to deploy a Rails app, I've had to learn the innards of Microcontainer's deployer framework.  After a few wrong turns, I feel like I've finally gotten a handle on it. While we're all used to dropping in an .ear or a .war, and might think in terms of deploying ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/09/17/deployers-in-jboss-microcontainer/ Code comprehension.  It's important when you jump into someone else's code. Eclipse makes it easy, with F3, command-T, and shift-command-G. Very quickly, you can jump through a maze of classes and interfaces, diving into details or seeing the higher hierarchy.  I forgot how nice Eclipse can be.  Particularly if you've got the ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/09/12/f3-is-a-beautiful-thing/ I'm in the process of moving to some farmland in Virginia.  It's out in the boonies. How far in the boonies?  No cable.  No DSL.  GSM is sketchy. Thankfully, I've moved my personal development to Git as noted previously, which works wonderously.  With no TCP in the air, I can still commit, ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/09/05/offline-aint-that-bad/ I woke up and noticed that a memcached mode was announced by Bela Ban, the fantastically Swiss man who jogs waaay too much. There's a lot of things in this world that can take advantage of memcached.  Personally, I find this quite interesting, considering that memcached tends to be the cache-of-choice ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/09/04/jgroups-impersonating-memcached/ For those of you playing along at home, I've added jboss-deployers to my GitHub mirror set.  Like the others, the 'vendor' branch is the one you want. jboss-deployers jbossas microcontainer vfs I'm adding JBoss projects to my mirror set as I trip across the need to browse their source.  If there's a JBoss project you'd ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/08/30/another-jboss-github-repository-mirror/ Back in May, I was a manager. I feebly attempted to direct 8 great guys and gals to further the goals of JBoss.org.  After the Codehaus, you'd think I'd be able to help build an opensource community with fun and flair.  But I came to realize that it's hard to build ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/08/28/and-now-something-slightly-different/ Oh, fortuna! I'm rejoining the Red Hat/JBoss mothership, doing rubyish things, and what do you know, but there's a RubyCamp at the RHT HQ in Raleigh on October 18th. 37signals and Ruby Row are sponsoring the event. Space is limited to 200, but at the time of this posting only 57 have signed ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/08/25/raleigh-rubycamp/ A project I'm working on requires some hard-core monkey-patching of Rails internals. Monkey-patching is a dangerous occupation, and liable to cause new and intriguing bugs into previously-tested sane code. I've been working on a smarter patch-monkey, known as Lemur. The goal is to allow monkey-patched methods (currently only instance methods are supported) to ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/08/24/be-a-smarter-patch-monkey/ In addition to the previously-mentioned JRuby mirror from Codehaus SVN to GitHub, I'm now also mirroring: JBoss Microcontainer JBoss AS5 JRuby All are trunk-only mirrors, not picking up branches or tags. Since the JBoss repository path has about 77,000 subversion revisions, and at one point held any and all JBoss software ever written, ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/08/21/github-mirrors-for-some-jboss-projects/ So, I'm gearing up to work on some Java+Ruby (via JRuby) stuff. The Java world still seems fairly entrenched in the cult of Subversion, while the Rubyists have gone with Git lately. I'm still wrapping my mind around Git, but with GitHub, it's fairly easy and straight-forward. I paid ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/08/20/mirroring-svn-repository-to-github/ If you've spent time around a child as he's developed language, you'll notice how he starts with a string of similar statements: I saw a dog I saw a cat I saw a bee I saw another dog I saw Don Henley After a while, that can get a tad annoying, and you become grateful when ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/08/13/conjunction-something/ I've been noticing lately, it seems that "heirloom" is popping up everywhere. There are heirloom vegetables, of course. The tasty varieties of tomatoes your grandparents grew up on, instead of the red/orange globes that taste like nothing. Then I noticed a store selling "heirloom sewing supplies". Some dictionary defines "heirloom" as A valued ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/08/09/ye-olde-retro-heirloom-shoppe-vintage-edition/ As my summer winds down, Lance and I are proud to launch Food Jaunt, a directory of local-food providers with reviews, ratings, and maps. Plus, we point out locavore news as we see it. For my non-American readers, the US has a tendency to eat food that was grown at ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/08/01/grab-a-snack-take-a-jaunt/ I imagine word has gotten around some already, but I'm on sabbatical from my gig at JBoss/Red Hat. I stepped down from my role at JBoss.org because I found that I wasn't very good at it. I gave the idea of "management" the ol' college try and have decided it ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/06/11/how-im-spending-my-summer-vacation/ It's summer, which means no school for the kid. Which means I now have relatively cheap day-labor available for yard-work. I am a capitalist, so I intend to pay my son for the work he does. Growing up, mom got me a physical paper ledger, where I'd record the $15 I ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/06/01/online-banking-for-kids/ Today, I took the wife on a lunch date to the newly opened restaurant Nine Mile in Asheville. I'd give a link, but their web designer is apparently slack. The restaurant is run by Aaron, husband of my web-designer friend June. The atmosphere was excellent, mellow with some reggae ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/05/16/nine-mile-dining-in-asheville/ Francois, the guy who leads up the support group for JBoss, let us know that his excellent team is expanding even further. If you've got the chops to support customers, write tutorials, and maybe even fix some bugs, JBoss is looking for you. Two different jobs are available. There's the SEG ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/04/24/open-positions-at-jboss/ Gavin King recently gave a talk down in Canberra, Australia. The kindly folks from Red Hat down there organized some filming. Many thanks to our upside-down friends with the Queen Mother on their money. Gavin provides an exceptionally nice walk-through behind not just how Web Beans works, but why ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/04/17/nearly-60-minutes-about-web-beans/ Tonight, the fine folks on the JBoss.org team managed to reach a significant milestone. In fact, JBoss.org is now actually hosted at http://jboss.org/. Imagine that! We'd been satisfied living at http://labs.jboss.com/ for quite a while, so this is a nice change. Additionally, http://wiki.jboss.org/ has been moved off the ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/04/04/jbossorg-is-jbossorg-is-jbossorg/ Today is the day to make sure you've filed your GSoC application if you're a student hoping to participate in this year's Google Summer of Code. We've got our ideas page up still, or feel free to invent some great project of your own related to JBoss. We're open to ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/03/31/reminder-gsoc-jboss/ Google selected the combined Fedora+JBoss.org group as a mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code 2008. The JBoss guys have started gathering project ideas. If you're hoping to participate in the GSoC, take a look, and maybe you'll see something that'll inspire you. If you're a student, the GSoC is ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/03/19/google-summer-of-code-and-jboss/ Just a couple of quick notes: Max and the JBoss Tools team have released version 2.01. What I personally find exciting is that this release sees bundles for OSX. The JBoss Tools project is what ultimately feeds into the JBoss Developer Studio, so you know it's good stuff. Also, Tom, Koen ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/03/19/jboss-round-up/ JBoss World kicked off today around noon, with people pouring in to pick up their badges, bags and thumbdrives. The first sessions of the day were packed and standing-room-only. People were spilling out of the JBoss Clustering talk presented by Bela Ban and Brian Stansberry. Greg Hinkle presented the ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/02/14/jboss-world-day-1/ I've started streaming up photos from JBoss World to Flickr. http://www.fnokd.com/2008/02/14/eyeballs/ JBoss reached a nice milestone in time for JBoss World. At the keynote today, Craig Muzilla, the co-GM of JBoss Division, let us know that we've seen over 20,000,000 downloads, now. That breaks down to about 10 million before the acquisition (5 years), and about 10 million since ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/02/13/20-million-downloads/ Started today in Georgia, I think, as I was still en route to Orlando. Arrived around 4am. Awoke and joined the JBoss Developer's Conference (the conference for JBoss developers, before JBoss World) this morning. Met the normal assortment of JBoss guys you'd expect to find at such a gathering. ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/02/13/jboss-world-day-0/ I'm packing up the grocery-getter and about to roll down to Orlando to get ready for JBoss World. Rebecca Goldstein has worked her fingers to the nub to ensure that this year's JBoss World conference will be awesome. I'll be working with Karsten Wade of Red Hat Dev-Fu to produce ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/02/11/jboss-world-this-week/ Manik Surtani, the stealthy party-crashing lead of JBoss Cache, has once again announced a Month of Bugs. Yes, yes, I know it's surprising that the superstars at JBoss might possibly write some buggy code. But we don't always get a full 8 hours of sleep and a complete, nutritious breakfast. ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/01/16/jboss-cache-mob-rule/ As mentioned previously, at the JBoss World 2008 conference in Orlando, we'll be running a Hackathon. Now's the time to head over to the Hackathon wiki, and start making some plans. If you haven't bought your pass to JBoss World yet, you need to jump on that, also. There's less ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/01/15/jboss-world-hackathon-wiki-is-live/ Some days, there's a rhythm to the universe, where one idea keeps bubbling to the surface, trying to make itself known. Today is one of those days. And the idea is bacon. It started when I was reading some Apple rumor site about tomorrow's keynote. The sidebar had a ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/01/14/six-degrees-of-bacon/ Got a Garmin GPS? Got a Toyota Matrix? Apparently the two companies have stealthily conspired to make their products snap-in compatible. While driving to-and-fro between Asheville and Raleigh, I got tired of having to pick up the GPS from the passenger seat to marvel at my progress. On a whim, ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/01/14/pimp-my-matrix/ I've been working on compiling JIRA plugins lately, with maven-2. And I see this go scrolling by: [WARNING] *** CHECKSUM FAILED - Error retrieving checksum file for webwork/jars/webwork-30Apr07-jiratld.jar - IGNORING In that single line, I get confused, as there are 4 hot words right there. WARNING: Hey, something bad happened, but it's not ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/01/14/well-which-is-it/ Tomorrow, I'm trekking down from my mountain to the flatlands, destined for Raleigh. FUDCon Raleigh 2008 is taking place. In the interest of Red Hat open-source communities playing friendly and synergizing, I've been invited to join the Fedora Board. This means I've also installed VMWare Fusion and have built a ... http://www.fnokd.com/2008/01/11/going-down-to-fudcon-and-other-updates/