What's up with Hatim?

I had been running on Ubuntu 7.10 since Feb 2008. After my typo svn instllation hit a road block I had an opportunity to move to latest Ubuntu and do things right from scratch. So I made a new installation and I am loving it now. The following tips may help any one who would like to run a Ubuntu server with postfix email and any ruby on rails application.

First I just installed Ubuntu 8.10. Unfortuntaley the 64 bit version was not supported on the Xen box on which my VPS currently runs so I had to be content with 32 bit for now. I followed part of an excellent HowToFourge The Perfect Server - Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex (Ubuntu 8.10) guide (for Postfix and IMAP)

Next up was the installation of RoR 2.2 on Ubuntu 8.10. Based on a recomendation I first did the following two

(since update_rubygems is a ruby gem it's self, it has to lie in a directory which is under you $PATH (or you can directly ./ it. On my Ubuntu 8.10 box it is at /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin )

But I did run into trouble when apprently the currently installed rails version had some conflicts. I couldn't simply gem uninstall it. So after some searching I found a simple solution as recommended here (basically give the gem it's installation directoy). So I uninstalled the rails gem and after that installing different gems including rails, mongrel and mongrel_cluster was a piece of cake.

To install mysql gem one has to have libraries of mysql as well as all essential buld tools (like make, gcc etc).I also needed nginx for being the proxy front (in case i want to run other server like php or jetty) The following takes care of these dependencies.

I had already taken database dump of my previous typo installation through mysqldump and had gotten typo from it's git repository. I didn't notice it firstly but one has to git-pull some submodules of typo as well. One thing which I always forget in doing a rake database migration without specifiying the environment. So if you are running a production website in RoR this is some thing to watcch out for.

Then I only needed to replace my previously tweaked mysql configuration file and I was good to go and start my nginx cluster. I did the following two in the typo folder

So right now the clutser is started in screen instead of with /etc/init.d script. That's next on my task. I will also try to post configuration files for mysql and nginx (I basically reroute http://name.com/blog/pages/home to http://name.com/ and some other fancy proxy stuff)

I finally took some time to upgrade my typo installation to latest revision of SVN. After updating the code base I found out that my website had broken. As usual I panikly logged onto irc.freenode on channel #typo. I found neuro` (typo dev) there who told me to 'reke db:migrate'. When that didn't work he told me to get rcov gem. The hosting company which I use manages ruby gems by them selves. so I postd a request for gem. Lucky for me this request was honoured within minutes. I then did a successful db migration. But my blog was still broken. I read some where that It was probably a older dispatch.fcgi is still running. While I was figuring this out, my website came online by it' self.

The reason I switched to typo was to learn ruby and rails (and perhaps work on typo). I need to get my act straight and start coding :)

I found one bug in typo, when sorting posts by dat in manage, it does not sort entries according to the dates visible in view (i suspect it sorts by date of actul post). So perhaps I can start by looking into this bug.

One of the primary reason I have my blog on a personal domain-name/server is that I don't have to deal with arbitrary outages to blog services. Blogger was banned in my country after the cartoon scandal in early 2006. I can understand why my government would ban some blogs, but an unconditional block on all blogs is plain absurd. Now with my own websapce and domain name I have more control over my web presence.

I have many tasks for my new blog. Most important of them is to import entries from blogger. My current plan is to manually post stuff one by one. This way I will be able to clean stuff from around 260 posts I have done on blogger. I have looked into RSS based migrations from Blogger to Type, but since my previous entries are unstructured I definitely need a migration_by_hand

I did try to post an entry with dates of publishing for Dec 2006 (by manually changing MySQL for contents table of Typo),but It didn't work as it was expected to. It would definitely be a great help to me If I get hold of a desktop publishing client for Typo which can also manipulate date of blog posting.

I had been contemplating this for a very long time, but its done now. I had bought domain name from GoDaddy.com three months ago and I finally took the time to buy my self a nice hosting plan with a site called RailsPlayGround.com. As the name suggests this site is meant for Ruby on Rails developers to play with their rails applications.

First thing I have done on this site is to Install Typo as my primary blog engine. It would be nice to build my own blog engine one day, but meanwhile I can post my blog entries here and migrate(clean) blog entries from blogger.