I’m thrilled to announce I am no longer a prisoner of an oppressive firewall. I’m currently working at a clients site for the next *year* give or take, which has been great, but one of the things that has really irked is the fact that their firewall is downright oppressive. Corporate policies prevent anything other than 80/443 out onto the net and stop webmail from working (to protect from viruses). This is a problem for me because I keep 2-3 dedictated linux servers for various reasons, obviously I can get to the hosted webapps just fine, but sshing in the change something on them is not possible due to the above mentioned firewall.

Thats where corkscrew comes in. its a tool that allows you to change the clientside settings for OpenSSH to tunnel over the HTTP Proxy. Of course you still have to make sure that the SSH server is listening on either 80 or 443, however this is easy to accomplish if either one or both of those ports are spare or alternately you can assign and extra ip address and avoid apache/etc listening on */0.0.0.0

I’ll leave it to the other corkscrew guides as to the particular setup. And yes its probably possible for them to block this, which is why I won’t scream to loudly. Just remember if you’re one of those people trying to prevent people from using this that I’m not trying to do anything nefarious, i’m simply a geek who needs/loves port 22.

If you’re running rails applications on Windows then you’ll be interested in or already use the mongrel_service gem. When I recently (today) tried to install it on a new computer I had trouble because it didn’t want to install the dependencies. Apparently it requires a version of the win32-service gem >= 0.5.2 but < 0.6.0

Microsoft Windows XP [Version 5.1.2600] (C) Copyright 1985-2001 Microsoft Corp.  C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator>gem install win32-service -v 0.5.2 C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator>gem install mongrel_service

should do the trick

UPDATE: Apparently using w32-service causes problems whenever you have defined a class named service. Just be aware that its going to cause it to use w32-services service class rather than you’re own, regardless of whether you’re running mongrel as a service (it won’t happen if you don’t run mongrel).

I found this question as a quote on slashdot, and couldn’t resist responding.

Lemmings? Lemmings as popularised by the game by the same name are supposedly creatures that follow each other and just keep going regardless of dangers enroute to their destination. Being a lemming is equated to being one of the Herd or not thinking for yourself. This is an unfair and baseless accusation. Linux users by their very minority are not followers, until recently there were no computers that came with linux installed by default. Clearly if you wanted to run Linux you had to leave the Herd.

Well-engineered commercial software? That would be a stretch considering the issues that Microsoft has had over the decades since it started working with operating systems. I’m not saying that Linux has it all worked out, because it most assuredly doesn’t, but the difference is that if you’re not happy with something in Linux you have the power to do something about it. With all commercial software you are at the mercy of the company that owns the software to be dilligent.

Now I’m not saying that Windows doesn’t have good things, on the contrary there are features that I miss very much when using Linux, but the downsides are far outweighed by the benefits of an extremely stable OS. More importantly Linux is an OS that given enough time and dedication will run rings around anything Microsoft can field to compete with it.

I have a lost iPod currently staying with me. It was waiting at the front door when I went down stairs to collect the Thai order that was to be friday nights dinner. There just outside the door on a little ledge was a iPod that looked so lonely and confused. I can only assume that it had wandered away from its owner and then not been sure how to get back. A sign has been placed in the notice board in the lobby since it would seem likely that the owner might walk past that point. If the owner doesn’t then I will have to take more drastic measures to get the iPod home. In the meantime i’m not sure whether I should feed it or not, and if I did feed it would the owner be angry when they got it back or just grateful that I’d taken care of the iPod. Finally should I just feed it mp3s or spoil it with videos?

hadn’t really noticed it until recently but I was reading a post on RubyInside about RubyMine – a preview release of a Rails IDE by the people that brought IntelliJ IDEA to the java IDE market. Later on the same day I googled RubyMine and discovered much to my surprise that there was now a multitude of other blog posts out there about the same topic. Its all very well to want to share this type of information but it gets a bit tedious reading the same thing over and over and over. If you’re not the first person to share the information in a given community at least have the sense to make sure that you’re blog post is different to the last one.

I believe that JRubyOnRails is paving the way for ruby and rails to be integrated into enterprise rather than being the sole domain of cutting edge developers. Perhaps its important that enterprise realises the power of rails or perhaps not (it might be better to keep it for ourselves). Regardless the ability to run ruby on rails applications on Java Application Servers is a big step towards acceptence in the enterprise.

For those that aren’t familiar with this ability google ‘warbler’  and run through the tutorial. It is a little more complex to get a larger project to run on a Java Application Server but not so much that would deterr people. It will likely be a long path before its a mainstream technology but it’s a good first step.

It’s also not necessarily a good thing to be tied to java, but when enterprise is so slow to embrace new technologies and better ways of doing things it is important to compensate to some degree. Not making them completely replace the Java application server that they paid to much for in the first place may make that admission and acceptence a little easier.

UPDATE: I’ve since started following @headius on twitter, the primary force behind JRuby. He is outstanding, and his belief in getting ruby accepted in the enterprise is inspirational.

The following comes in very hand when you’re trying to troubleshoot authentication problems. Go into DA and find the Administrative Methods; there should be one called ‘SET_OPTIONS’  which allows you to put in trace_authentication and set it to true. All authentication attempts will then be logged to the docbase log.

A few notes:

• If you have a clustered setup you’ll need to make sure it gets turned on for both content servers (you can specify which you’re connecting to when you login)
• Make sure you turn it off when you’re done troubleshooting, it adds a performance overhead not to mention chewing up log space.
• Restarting the content server will cause it to turn off…to turn it off without restarting the content server just set it to false in the same place you turned it on.