I am working on a new installer skeleton (if you will) which will allow you to very simply create a fully functional installer for your slightly complicated web applications.

Basically, you can provide the user with different modules. Modules are either required or optional. Modules can define what forms they will show to the user. When a modules form is shown to a user, it gets the chance to run code (via a function in the module’s include file) to both before the user is asked to input any data and after. Also, a separate function can be used to validate that the user has entered correct code.

The installer is (almost) completely modular. I should have an awesome release over the next coming weeks… here is a sneak peak.

When I moved here, I already knew about Synergy, it’s great software.

My setup is comprised of a Windows XP (32-bit) machine, Kubuntu [7.04] Intrepid (32-bit) machine and a Kubuntu [9.04] Jaunty (64-bit) machine. The machine that runs all my applications that I write is the new Kubuntu 9.04 machine. To allow my keyboard and mouse to be used over all three of these machines, I have the Windows XP machine run the Synergy server, and all the Linux machines run the client. The reason I have Windows XP run the server is because it’s usually the machine that’s off. That might sound strange, but I do alot of work from home, and it seems useless to have a server running that is not needed to be on the machine.

One thing that really used to annoy me with this setup however was the Windows machine would detect all keyboard repeats, but the Linux machines would not detect up, down, page up and page down repeated key presses. You could imagine as a programmer that this could get quite annoying while writing code.

This morning I got frustrated at the Linux machines and I decided it was time to go and compile my own version, with a few patches I found around the net to fix this issue.

Being the package Nazi that I am, I don’t really like to install anything, unless it’s installed with some sort of package management. This is how to rebuild Synergy, and get a perfect .deb that you can install

# wget 'http://internode.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/synergy2/synergy-1.3.1.tar.gz'
# tar -xvf synergy-1.3.1.tar.gz
# wget http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/s/synergy/synergy_1.3.1-5.diff.gz
# gunzip synergy_1.3.1-5.diff.gz
# wget http://coderazzi.net/linux/synergy.patch/synergy-coderazzi.patch
# patch -P0 <../synergy-coderazzi.patch
# sudo apt-get install patch build-essential
# cd synergy-1.3.1/
# patch -p0 <../synergy-coderazzi.patch
# chmod +x debian/rules debian/control

Edit debian/rules and after the line that says:
CFLAGS="$(CFLAGS)" CXXFLAGS="$(CXXFLAGS)"
Add the following line:
find . -type f -name Makefile | xargs perl -pi -e "s/-Werror//g"

# sudo dpkg-buildpackage
# cd ../
# dpkg -i synergy_1.3.1-5*.deb

After doing this, and restarting the Synery clients, you will have perfect key responses between all the machines.

Thanks to http://coderazzi.net/linux/synergy.patch/index.htm for providing the great patch for this post.

I was talking to Tim Post, about a project that I was completing for ShareSource2. Basically, the conversation came to the point where I said that I was using OpenVZ for my server virtualization. Tim then came to me and said “Why don’t you just use Xen”.

Well, I was not born yesterday – I did tell him that I had tried Xen, and that when I tried it – it just refused to work.

Then Tim pointed me to Xen unstable, a mercurial repository containing a version of Xen that does not need a new CPU to actually boot up.

Xen unstable, the version I checked out yesterday, is actually tagged as being “3.2.0-rc4″, which probably means that it is coming it’s way to becoming a nice stable Xen product that people other then me have actually been able to use.

This is what I used on my Debian to be able to install a Xen-enabled kernel:

~# mkdir Xen
~# cd Xen
~# hg clone http://xenbits.xensource.com/xen-unstable.hg
[[ wait for around 3 minutes while it grabs Xen's history
~# cd xen-unstable.hg
~# apt-get install bin86 bcc
~# make world
[[ Note: this step will also check out a 2.6.18.8-xen kernel ]]
~# sudo make install

Then I had to add an entry to my /boot/grub/menu.lst which looked like this:

title Xen 3.2 / XenLinux 2.6
kernel /boot/xen-3.gz console=vga
module /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18.8-xen root=UUID=66559e96-e405-4a1d-be28-b8caf5b5b89d ro console=tty0
module /boot/initrd-2.6.18.8-xen.img

Reboot, select my new kernel, and faster then you can say “WOW IT WORKS” it was booting me into a brand new (well, actually, my OpenVZ kernel was 2.6.20 – so a brand old) kernel

To try Xen out, just go over to http://jailtime.org and download an image of a nice operating system (I chose CentOS 5.1). When you have downloaded your image, do the following:

tar -xvf {downloaded image name}
ls -lar
xen create -c {smallest file (usually)}

and Voila! First thing you should be introduced to is a nice Grub screen welcoming you to your Xen experience.

I am still as of today yet to actually have built my own Archlinux or Frugalware Xen image. If anyone knows how to do this successfully, please drop me a line or leave a comment!

The last version of Ruby I tried was either version 1.7 or 1.8, and it was not really something that I would say rocked my boat. It was slow, and just plain did not do (at that time what I though) I wanted.

Me being a version freak – and a speed freak, decided that I would go to the Ruby, check out their CVS repository out (seriously, these guys need to update to mercurial, just like Mozilla has!) and compiled Ruby’s latest trunk version.

The speed speaks for it’s self. A basic “Hello World” Ruby on Rails app does 700 requests a second, while a basic “Hello World” in PHP does 800. For this use case, yes, PHP is faster, but what you have to remember is that Ruby on Rails is much, much, much more sophisticated in terms of functionality.

I recently rewrote a page that is on ShareSource.org, and it is almost twice as fast. The difference here, is that the Ruby rewrite had no cache. Every single hit with Apache benchmark was generated on demand, while the PHP version of the ShareSource.org page in question was kept in cache for five minutes.

Aaaahhh, I am loving Ruby already.

We had to build a database system, which implemented relational databases, and I thought, well, I could make my very own banking software, and fulfil one of my many dreams: to run my own bank.

The software, written in PHP was a testing ground for many new things that I have wanted to go and try, but never really had a project to try them out on.

I must say that MyBanco would have to be the first application that I have written with the mindset of handling around 700 transactions every second.

MyBanco uses a backend for it’s database which I have dubbed ‘MyInfo’. MyInfo is a JSON-RPC like protocol, which is easy to use, and can send multiple packets (I just thought then it might have been better to call these chunks… hmmmm) all at once, and get a response from all those packets. Think of it as a easy to read and faster to pharse version of XML-RPC.

I will chat at MyBanco a little more later, when the time is right, but for the moment this post will do

(hope you like the new blog!)