Alrighty, I'm finally back home and recovering after a marathon of tech and music that was SXSW. I'm sitting down sipping some hot tea and getting ready for a night time cold and flu Alka Seltzer bath. That's right, I brought home lots of tech info and a cold from beautiful Austin, Texas. Hey, if you are gonna do it, you gotta go hard or not at all. At any rate I have one more day of summaries to dispatch before I start something new this year. I will go over each talk I went to into a little more depth, more for the benefit of myself more than anything else, as well as give proper respect to the .

The final day saw me head to Ballroom C in the Austin Convention Center for Hacking RSS: Filtering & Processing Obscene Amounts of Information. This was more of a personal joy than most anything else. I use Google Reader on a daily basis and run through an insane amount of information. Any kind of help is much appreciated. I got here when the lady discussed using Yahoo! Pipes, BackType, and Twitter to jumble around real-time information and tune it to your personal preferences. This is gonna be a fun one to go back over and implement.

I do some side work here and there (http://hoketronics.com), and because of this I decided that I owed that side a bit of love by going to Freelancers: You're Five Products Away From Freedom. The guy who gave the talk is one of the Five Tech Guys in Kilts and also wrote a CodeIgniter book. While geared toward freelancers, I see benefit across the board from this talk. His main idea was that there are tools that cut across so quick to publish and take payments for any type of product, that any idea of fix someone comes up with can be monetized almost instantly. Great stuff there.

My day job does work geared more toward the government side of things. With How Governments are Changing Where Big Ideas Happen, I got a small taste of how governments lure tech companies. Representatives from Louisiana, Europe, Shanghai, and even Austin talked about methods their local governments use to lure talent to their area. It was a refreshing view to see that the public sector is starting to catch up and compete with the private sector in these areas. One thing I didn't know, Facebook opened up their first office outside of California in Austin, Texas.

After snacking some lunch and raking in the schwag from trade show floor, I dipped into the Reid Hoffman Presentation titled, "Data as Web 3.0." Reid was the driving force behind LinkedIn and his discussion revolved around the next iteration of the Internet. With describing Web 1.0 as searching data and retrieving it as well as Web 2.0 as introducing social aspects of relations, Reid presented his thoughts on Web 3.0. He claims that the next step is the processing and making sense out of the huge amounts of data spewed out from the marriage of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. He then ran down his top 10 list for entrepreneurs. Again, all great stuff.

Finally, since I missed all of the keynotes this year, I decided to attend the closing speech by science fiction writer Bruce Sterling. Bruce was the man behind the cyberpunk culture and he gave a great punkish talk to close out the Interactive portion of the conference. Between his musings, ramblings, and one liners, Bruce laid out his biggest problem today. Progress is moving fast and it's up to the youth and it's ability with tech to start taking the lead. I'll never forget him telling the Baby Boomers to stop trying to hold on and get out of the way.

All and all day 5 filled the few gaps left in my puzzle board of needs for SXSW Interactive. I filled it plenty with some hardcore code and design sessions earlier. Now I had some business and a little more government items to pluck right in. Finally, Bruce Sterling was the last inspirational piece to make my puzzle complete. With almost a week out of SXSWi 2011, I'm still feeling complete and basking in the glow.

I'm still catching up but now that I've hit the stride for the music portion (see http://h0key.net), I can catch up a bit in the morning. Day 4 for the Interactive portion of the conference saw myself hit up a PHP themed workshop, a couple of mobile web talks, and some interesting thoughts on authentication and privacy on the web. All in all it was fairly fun, even so some the of night time stuff was a little light.

First up I hit up a workshop about BigData and PHP. Some of the luminaries of the talk included the Mozilla lady that wrote the PHP and MySQL Web Development book I own. The focus for the talk regarded strategies to employ when dealing with BigData. BigData are either large chunks of data, large amount of miniscule data, or tons of processing for data in a short amount of time. The CAP theory made its presence known as well.

The next couple of talks I'll group together. In Mobile Opportunites for the Entrepeneurs in 2011 talked about how developers can build more useful tools for mobile technology. The Future of Mobile Gaming/Entertainment had the Angry Birds guy there talking about how awesome the game was and how it was a crap shoot to begin with. He also stated that mobile gaming needed to be taken seriously, with his game getting almost 2% of the total yearly US viewing average compared to television. Lastly, it was Designing for Mobile Web and it had another Sencha Touch representative there. I'm going to use Sencha Touch with PhoneGap real, real soon.

The last talk of the day was fantastic. OAuth, OpenID, Facebook Connect: Authentication Design Best Practices was more than what I expected. The speaker went though the session pointing out some historical and current issues with authentication and privacy surrounding it. The gist of the talk was, you need to be conservative with the data that you collect so you don't make it feel creepy. Also, please make the login process as simple as possible.

The night time was alright. My girlfriend and I hit up the Wired Happy Hour, which I won a lot of schwag at last year. Unfortunately I didn't win anything this time but I did enjoy Texas' own Lone Star beer. After that, it was time to go the GDGT party and I have to say it kind of stunk. The schwag was drool-worthy and I did get a chance to play with the Motorola Zoom, the line was terrible and inside was too packed for music. So after that, we just hot-footed it to Zen Steakhouse for some tasty Japanese fair.

So that's the quick run down for day 4. I purposefully did not go into detail because I will be talking about each topic on its own after I recover. In the meantime, I've got one more Interactive day to gush about. Look for that tomorrow. Now on to some Irish craziness!

My lovely girlfriend went over her year end review last month and what perked my attention up was a to do list for the entire year.  I never though about doing that, even though I'm clinging on to some form of GTD.  That moment inspired me to create my own year to do list and let me just tell you, I filled that sucker out.  I've already got a good head start on one of the items.  I'm well on my way to creating my very first VST plugin.

What's VST?  It's short for Virtual Studio Technology and it was the brainchild of pro audio software stalwart Steinberg.  It's goal was to enable an interchangeable way for audio processing to be applied to different software hosts.  Think of a VST like what Java is to operating system platform.  VST and its SDK is a ubiquitous way for audio software developers to build applications and have them work across different pro audio software applications.

The SDK itself uses C++, but there are various language implementations out there across the web, including Java and Python.  But being the enterprising fella that I am, I decided that I needed to go over C++ again.  My first real exposure to C++ was in high school of all places.  After my short stint there I didn't really touch it as college focused on Java instead.  It's been fun, needless to say, re-learning C++.  Cplusplus.com has been fantastic in that respect.

So I'm in the midst of knocking out a VST and will hopefully have something turned out by the end of the month.  I haven't decided yet how much coverage I'll give on it here or over on my music blog, Helping Zero Knives Enter You.  The other conundrum so far is finding the right development environment for VST building.  There's plenty of tutorials out there, although somewhat disjointed, that between them require at least 5 different IDEs as well as the good ole command line.  I'm going to pick the one that works with and go with it.

So that's on my plate for now.  I'm really pumped about having a bigger, or 20,000 ft level for all you GTDers out there, in place.  There's more coming down the pike and I'm definitely gonna talk about it here.  In the meantime, please check out some of the sites above, they are tons of fun.

Just thought I'd drop a note and say I'll be at SXSW again next month.  Last year was a blast and a signed up again to ride the wild horse in Austin.  Already there are tons of interactive talks I starred and locked in to my schedule and I'm sure there will be more to come.  The music showcases already have plenty of new and old school bands ready to rock my world.  All in all, I super excited to go and I hope to meet anybody else heading out there next month.

I'm hoping to take away a little bit more this year.   Last year was my first time so my expectations were set mega low.  Of course, those expectations were blown away otherwise I wouldn't be going back.  That said, I'm hoping to build on what learned from last year.  The big thing for me was node.js and I'm anxious to see what others have done with this tasty JavaScript program.  My people skills are way better in a bar than in a conference room so I'm hoping to marry the two together and get to know more peeps.  My place of employment is more into what I'm doing down there so government and technology is big on the list.  All in all it should be another massive sponge soaking of knowledge.

The big issue I had with last year was the hotel location.  My beautiful girlfriend and I fixed that situation.  We're alot closer and will be spending lease in hotel time.  The lines are going to be another big issue so I hope SXSW employs the early ticket line thingy they did last year.   Although, last year was a nightmare trying to get into the Predators preview.  We waited 2 hours and were turned away.  Never again, especially for film.

The film portion does not float our boat so much and that's no big deal.  It would be more appealing if we were able to get into what we wanted to see without 2 hour waits.  The line solution worked great for music but it didn't for the film.  There were two, maybe three films I saw last year and only one of them was mildly entertaining.   I think SXSW knows this because they do not sell an 'Interactive + Music' badge.   They do other types of badges but not for that.  So, if I'm lucky I may catch and enjoy a film.

SXSW is less than three weeks away and I'll be reporting every cool and not so cool thing during my trip.  I may have some extra surprises in store but it will reveal itself in due time.  Oh, and we're driving down again.  Look for some updates on the road as well.  Buckle in buddies, SXSW will more than likely kick me in my ass again and you'll get to witness the destruction.

So at the day job I grew weary working with Windows Vista and decided to do something about it.  I was sitting on a quad-core Intel machine.  The only issue really was the lack of memory.  Well that and it was a 32-bit version of Vista sitting on a 64-bit capable machine.  Upgrades weren't available at the time.  I opted to bump up the machine to a 64-bit install of Ubuntu Linux.  So far it's been great but there have been some bumps.  The surprising thing to me was how easily my workflow transferred over.

The install was a snap.  I chose to install it on a separate partition than to place it within Windows Vista or wipe the whole thing entirely.  I still needed my docs from the other machine.  After about an hour or two, the machine rebooted and I stepped right into my desktop.  I had to add some sources and download some files separately, but the development environment ended up being pretty much the same for me on Windows Vista.  Here's what I did:

• IDE:  I was using NetBeans with a PHP plugin development setup.  I also had some Subversion modules and a tasty Vim keyboard setup plugin.  Instead of keeping the same way, I decided to jump to Eclipse.  Some of my other projects uses the Eclipse environment so I decided to go all in.  I use the Aptana plugin, which is fantastic, and found that Subclipse and vWrapper were great substitutes for revision control and Vim emulation.  Once I got settled in the only real issue I'm still stuck with is that vWrapper is completely polished and I'm finding that vWrapper and some auto complete features created some errant bugs.
• Browser:  Most of the work outside of the IDE is in the browser.  I use Chrome sparingly because of the lack of extension support, but the Chromium browser is a great replacement for it.  Essentially, it is the open source base Google uses to build Chrome off of.  The rest of the heavy lifting is with Firefox.  I use the Add-On Collection plugin and Firefox Sync to keep me up to date with all of my Add-Ons and Tabs.  I'll talk about that later.  Also, the restricted packages set for media and other non-free type libraries should be installed for optimal Firefox usage.
• Communication:  I used Pidgin on the old setup and the new setup has Pidgin as well.  Ubuntu is pushing Empathy but I am much more comfortable with Pidgin.  Also, I ditched Thunderbird altogether.  Evolution is on the setup but I only use it for sending attachments and some templating.  I moved most of my work over to my integrated GMail.  It's just easier for me collect all the email into one bucket.  I do miss Skype/Google Voice capabilities but I never really use it at work.
• LAMP:  I used an all in one solution for LAMP development by the name of XAMPP.  It's great for a default install and run but some of the intricacies needed for real server management go away.  Since we enjoy Linux thoroughly all around, moving to Ubuntu let's me mirror a closer setup to what we deploy on.  That said, I had to do some extra work getting PEAR and our libraries to work nicely.  Also,  it took me running into some bugs to turn on the error reporting that was on in XAMPP.For the database side of things, XAMPP came with phpMyAdmin but I was using a real great application called Datadmin.  It's a .NET binary that handles just about any database type and it could export to different database types rather effortlessly.  I still miss it.  I tried to get it working with Wine but it was too much of a pain.  In its place, I now use phpMyAdmin and Navicat SQL Lite.  It does the basic of what want, which is a desktop binary that lets manage with multiple windows and/or tabs.
• The Rest:  The only other thing I truly require is background music.  I'm a big podcast listener so I latched onto the horrid ITunes on the Windows side of things.  Yes, it stinks for everything else, but there is no better client for podcast management out there.  Once you get the Smart Playlist setup correctly you can have a real nice queue of podcasts updated in real-time.  I still miss it a big but I have a good enough workaround.  I now use VLC and gPodder.  It's shame they are not integrated.  gPodder manages all of the downloading and play management while VLC is the terminal for audio output.  I had to adjust the settings for VLC to run as one instance and then pass a '--plalist-enqueue' command as part of the VLC choice for gPodder to get it to work more smoothly.The remaining thing that I use heavily is terminal access.  On Windows I use the great PuTTy set of applications to do all my terminal work and key management.  Now since I'm on a machine that has terminals built-in by default, the usage is way better.  I did have to work around the format of keys that PuTTy uses and import them into my OpenSSH setup but after that things are going better than before.  I especially see it when I check out and check in from Subversion.

Overall, the transition was rather smooth.  It's taken a week for me to get back in the swing of things.  There are no real killer apps I need on the Windows side of things.  Everything I do uses open source so the move to Ubuntu was an obvious one.    It's left me with a good feeling in my stomach.  I now know I can produce professional quality work on an open source stack.  Back in the day I used to use Linux more than have in recent memory.   Making the jump was great and I urge anyone else with the similar environment setup on Windows to make the same move.

A couple of different developments cropped up in the last couple of months that's pulled me away from the blog.  One of them was a job change.  The company I'm working on a contract to hire basis is great and I've had the opportunity to learn many things in my short time there.  I do PHP programming and I had the opportunity to freshen up on PHPDoc.  PHPDoc is a documentation standard much like JavaDoc where you can comment code and drop in identifiers to help with the status of a certain function or class.  One of the identifiers is '@todo.'  After working with the history of the '@' symbol and how it relates in context, especially with GTD,  I came to realize how much this 5 character identifier has affected my life.

The '@todo' identifier states one thing clearly:  The following information is what's left or what's next to do.  It can be compared to the @NextAction context in GTD.  Once that action is completed, there may be another one next and subsequently a '@todo' identifier with that information will be listed.  The difference between that and GTD is that it's left in the code.  But, with a good IDE or a simple awk command, you can compile the list of @todo's for a project thus returning it to a GTD like state.

I'm the kind of person who's insane attention to detail will leave me always uncovering a rock or looking at a problem from all perspectives.  Some people call this being a pefectionist.  One of the major problems with being a perefectionist is that they will refine and tweak themselves into never getting anything done.  Analysis through paralysis is a common phrase for the problem.   And yes, I have that problem.

As some of you may know, a couple of years ago I hit rock bottom in paralysis and have somehow climbed my way step by step by implementing the GTD mehtod (as well as making other life changes).  The perfectionist in me still lives.  The initial mind dump and inbox organization took me about 3 days.  One of the hardest things to do while implementing the methodology was not being sure I was doing it right.  The common voice of the perfectionist.

So I'm slowly learning ot become an almost-perfectionist.  I still do my tweaks and twinges, but set a time limit before sending the product off.  Whenever I do so, there's that voice that doubts whether or not I've done right.  Even when I use a time limit, it reaches out and pulls me down to make sure I double check and triple check everything.  It's going to be with me forever.

Last month, an 'ah-ha' moment came.  And no I'm not talking about jumping up and singing 'Take on Me.'   What I'm talking about is when I started brushing up on PHPDoc, I realized that the '@todo' was the trademark for the perfectionist.  I can roll some code out but appease the perefectionist in me with the simple 5 letter incantonation.  The code is out and I can always come back to it to tweak and twinge.

I've accepted the fact that I will never be happy with my work.  I've also accepted that I will always find something wrong with it and attempt to fix it on the spot.  But with the '@todo' action I can drop the noted fix and move on.  I feel much more relieved and am producing more now that I've left @todo's not only in my code, but also in my other projects, my friends, my family, and my life.

Nothing Like A Fresh Subversion Import

Welcome back to part 2 of my Subversion install series.  What we are going to go over is developing the right structure for the repository, importing a website, updating a website, then testing and deploying the website using some of Subversion's command sets.  There were some road blocks along the way and I will talk about that as well as some other thoughts about the process.  After that I'll talk about what's next but first let's setup and deploy some code.

The first step in molding the fresh install of Subversion into something workable, was to decide on what kind of structure I wanted to keep.  Articles online discussed whether or not to keep multiple repositories for projects or maintain a single repository to house multiple projects.  In thinking of how I wanted it implemented, the simplicity of maintaining a single repository won over the cleanliness of revision management in multiple repositories.  Perhaps at a later date I can split it out or even incorporate Git, but for the purpose of getting started I'm going with one repository.

I decided to follow the svnbook's advice of a creating a temporary directory structure to setup the initial framework of the repository.  In my case, there are three major areas I will develop in:  websites, scripts, and home related projects.  I created the structure and imported them in to Subversion using the svn import command.  After which, I deleted the temp directories and verified the structure below.  Here's the output:

hokey@tardis:~/tempdir$ sudo svn import . file:///var/svn/ --message 'Initial Repository Layout'
[sudo] password for hokey:
Adding         scripts
Adding         headquarters
Adding         web
Adding         web/gonzoguys.com
Adding         web/gonzoguys.com/trunk
Adding         web/gonzoguys.com/branches
Adding         web/gonzoguys.com/tags
Adding         web/h0key.net
Adding         web/h0key.net/trunk
Adding         web/h0key.net/branches
Adding         web/h0key.net/tags
Adding         web/hoketronics.net
Adding         web/hoketronics.net/trunk
Adding         web/hoketronics.net/branches
Adding         web/hoketronics.net/tags
Adding         web/kccollegegameday.com
Adding         web/kccollegegameday.com/trunk
Adding         web/kccollegegameday.com/branches
Adding         web/kccollegegameday.com/tags

Committed revision 1.
hokey@tardis:~/tempdir$ svn list --verbose file:///var/svn
1 root                  Nov 18 08:44 headquarters/
1 root                  Nov 18 08:44 scripts/
1 root                  Nov 18 08:44 web/
hokey@tardis:~/tempdir$

It was time to work with local install of my website.  I copied the production code to my home folder on my local webserver.  After setting up the database and changing root path directives, I set about verifying the local page.   It looked good so I then downloaded the latest WordPress package.  Following the directions, I copied the updated code and again verified the website.  The recent point releases didn't affect the database schema, so I was good on that end.

Now that I updated my code to the latest WordPress point release, I imported the website into the Subversion repository.  Using svn add, I recursively added all of the new files from my website.  When it successfully added the file set, I committed the change using svn commit, complete with the initial import message.  Subversion pulls from CVS alot and these two commands reflect that.  It almost felt like I was greasing the code revision bicycle gears and getting back to the smooth ride of code management.

So now that I added the website files to the repository, I did it twice because of another point release in WordPress, it was time to test and deploy the code.  Using the svn export command, I copied the code to the web docs directory on my local webserver.  I decided on doing that instead of checking out the repository on the live site because I'm on a shared hosting platform for production and I didn't want trailing '.svn' folders eating up space.  Plus it adds the benefit of greater security.

hokey@tardis:/var/www/hoketronics.net$ sudo svn export http://localhost/svn/web/hoketronics.net/trunk ./hoketronics.net

The code exported to the local server.  This is where I ran into some issues.  The code portion of the website works well in different directories, but I need to come up with a way to manage dev/test/prod databases for link resolution.  The logon screen for the local test install pointed to the local dev install.  Regardless of that little issue, the code tested out well.  Now it was time to deploy the website to my shared host, minus the config file.

The other issue I ran into was the process of updating my shared host with the new code.  I run Linux on the webserver locally but my workstation runs Windows XP.  The best way, I thought at the time, to copy the update was to compress the test folder, copy it to my workstation, and then use Filezilla to copy it up to my shared host.  This proved laborious and it ended up taking more time than I expected due to two reasons: remembering the correct compression one liner and not taking advantage of a command line ftp client on the local webserver.

That said, the production site on the shared host updated with no breaks.  I logged on, verified the version, and inspected both the UI and and the backend files for any issues.  The Subversion process was almost complete.  After I updated the code, I made note to change the initial work flow for updating my site to handle updates from the local webserver to the shared host.  Also, I'll take some time to flesh out different configs for my environments to avoid any path issues the next time around.  Lastly, I'm going to make sure I centralize my one liners for easier access, maybe even using the repository to keep track of additions.

Subversion seems like a great centralized source code management tool.  With my CVS experience under the belt, much of the commands feel familiar and comforting when I invoke them.  Now that I have the repository live, kccollegegameday.com is getting some work.  I'm looking forward to checking the 'diffs' when modifying pages and themes.  Chances are you'll see me talk about that on top of a couple of article ideas due to the roadblocks experienced with this project.

Here we go with the newly decided first part of my Subversion install series.  I decided to break it up into smaller chunks of articles as the first part really is the installation/setup part and the second is the integration/deploying part.  So with this first part we're gonna talk about downloading, verification, repository setup, and Apache integration.  I'll make it short and sweet as possible but grab a cup of joe so we can get started.

When figuring out how I should download Subversion, I weighed many options.  I could either grab the source from their website at Tigris or install from Ubuntu's repository.  The hardcore geek in me wanted to compile from source, but I really wanted to roll out the software quick so I can focus on the blog code.  Also  updates trickle down from Ubuntu with relative automation, so I went with acquiring the binary from Ubuntu.  It really makes sense to knock out the binaries for tools surrounding a project and focus on source for project related code.  Why waste your time setting up a utility when it's the poject you should be working on?

After some research, I decided to follow the steps provided by How-To Geek.  I updated my repository and installed Subversion.  After the packages were downloaded, unpacked, and installed, I verified that it had indeed been setup on my system.  Here's how it happened:

hokey@tardis:~$ sudo apt-get install subversion
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
libneon26 libsvn1
Suggested packages:
subversion-tools db4.4-util
The following NEW packages will be installed:
libneon26 libsvn1 subversion
0 upgraded, 3 newly installed, 0 to remove and 3 not upgraded.
Need to get 964kB of archives.
After unpacking 5128kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?

hokey@tardis:~$ svn --version
svn, version 1.4.4 (r25188)
compiled Sep 28 2007, 10:50:44

Copyright (C) 2000-2006 CollabNet.
Subversion is open source software, see http://subversion.tigris.org/
This product includes software developed by CollabNet (http://www.Collab.Net/).

The following repository access (RA) modules are available:

* ra_dav : Module for accessing a repository via WebDAV (DeltaV) protocol.
- handles 'http' scheme
- handles 'https' scheme
* ra_svn : Module for accessing a repository using the svn network protocol.
- handles 'svn' scheme
* ra_local : Module for accessing a repository on local disk.
- handles 'file' scheme

So after verification it was time to decide on where to create my new repository and setup web access.  Now with anything Linux-wise, you are pretty much left to your own notions as to where to drop a directory for installs.  Companies like Adobe use /opt for their application installs and some programs use /var to store data separate from program files. I figured /var/svn was reasonable enough so I had at it, creating the directory and using the Subversion command create to setup the files:

hokey@tardis:/var$ sudo mkdir svn

hokey@tardis:/var$ sudo svnadmin create /var/svn/

hokey@tardis:/var$ cd svn
hokey@tardis:/var/svn$ ls -lat
total 36
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 4096 2008-11-07 17:54 .
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2008-11-07 17:54 conf
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2008-11-07 17:54 dav
drwxr-sr-x 5 root root 4096 2008-11-07 17:54 db
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 2 2008-11-07 17:54 format
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2008-11-07 17:54 hooks
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2008-11-07 17:54 locks
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 229 2008-11-07 17:54 README.txt
drwxr-xr-x 15 root root 4096 2008-11-07 17:47 ..

Now that the repository was created, I needed to figure out how to get web access up. Welp, thanks to the How-To Geek and the original coders of the module, there was one available to tie it all together. Using libapache2_svn, a client can connect via Apache to a Subversion repository and write to it using DAV. This was a perfect setup, even though the security isn't the greatest, for me to develop locally before deploying my sites to my host. So here's how I did it:

hokey@tardis:/etc/apache2/mods-available$ sudo apt-get install libapache2-svn
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Suggested packages:
db4.4-util
The following NEW packages will be installed:
libapache2-svn
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 136kB of archives.
After unpacking 344kB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com gutsy/main libapache2-svn 1.4.4dfsg1-1ubuntu3 [136kB]
Fetched 136kB in 1s (126kB/s)
Selecting previously deselected package libapache2-svn.
(Reading database ... 30761 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking libapache2-svn (from .../libapache2-svn_1.4.4dfsg1-1ubuntu3_i386.deb) ...
Setting up libapache2-svn (1.4.4dfsg1-1ubuntu3) ...
Enabling dav as a dependency
Module dav installed; run /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload to enable.
Module dav_svn installed; run /etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload to enable.

After I installed the module, I had to edit the dav_svn.conf file to point to my settings. Following the instructions, I removed the comments for configuration which included:

• Setting the repository location:Location /var/svn
• Uncommenting DAV svn
• Setting the SVNPath: SVNPath /var/svn
• And ucommenting the authority settings:
  AuthType Basic
AuthName "Subversion Repository"
AuthUserFile XXXXXX
Require valid-user

I then setup the authentication:
hokey@tardis:/etc/apache2/mods-enabled$sudo htpasswd -cm /etc/apache2/dav_svn.passwd hokey
New password:
Re-type new password:
Adding password for user hokey

After doing a quick restart: hokey@tardis:/etc/apache2/mods-enabled$ sudo apache2ctl restart, I got this:

The wrong Location

What was wrong? I set the Location for Apache as /var/svn. What I was shooting for was to have /svn as the root. Doh!  The SVNPath already tells Apache where to look for the repository. The Location tag and attribute in the configuration tell Apache where to display it on the web server. So I made the change and restarted. After testing authentication, I was ready to rock. Stay tuned for Part 2 of my swankiness as I look to integrate Subversion with a project and deploy it back to my host.

It's been awhile since I worked with Java.  Well, more specifically, I last seriously worked with Java around the beginning of the century.  I figured, well why not set it up on the server and see what's going on nowadays?  I knew that the package install for the Java platform is sticky on linux machines.  So a quick cache search yielded me lots of results, with Iced Tea being the most interesting one.

As I was eyeballing the search results, IcedTea stuck out in my head.  I remembered over the summer an episode of FLOSS Weekly briefly touching upon IcedTead.  Dalibor Topic and Bruno Souza from OpenJDK were interviewed about IcedTea and the satus of OpenJDK altogether.  It was very nice to see a fully open sourced implementation of the Sun Java platform.

OpenJDK is an open sourced implementation the Java Platform, Standard Edition.  Sun just in 2006 decided to open source Java and this year some traction took hold.  IcedTea (and OpenJDK) is the first to pass the Technology Compatibility Kit tests and can claim to be a fully compatible Java 6 implementation.  It showed up on Fedora but I forgot that it was on Ubuntu too.

I went the one liner route and installed IcedTea the quick and easy route:

hokey@tardis:~$ sudo apt-get install icedtea-java7-jdk

Which yielded me a bunch of other recommended packages, which I'll revisit later, but I was ready to hit the big 'Y':

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
icedtea-java7-bin icedtea-java7-jre
Suggested packages:
binfmt-support icedtea-java7-demo icedtea-java7-source icedtea-java7-plugin sun-java6-fonts ttf-baekmuk ttf-unfonts ttf-unfonts-core
ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sazanami-gothic ttf-kochi-mincho ttf-sazanami-mincho ttf-arphic-uming
Recommended packages:
liblcms1 lesstif2 libgnome2-0 libgnomevfs2-0 libgconf2-4 libgl1-mesa-glx
The following NEW packages will be installed:
icedtea-java7-bin icedtea-java7-jdk icedtea-java7-jre
0 upgraded, 3 newly installed, 0 to remove and 3 not upgraded.
Need to get 36.8MB of archives.
After unpacking 117MB of additional disk space will be used.

After installing the package a quick test verified its install:

hokey@tardis:~$ java -version
java version "1.7.0"
IcedTea Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0-b21)
IcedTea Client VM (build 1.7.0-b21, mixed mode, sharing)

It's nice to get back to my Java roots using something completely open source and Java 6 compatible.  I've read up on a couple of things like JavaFX that I play around with and this is a good first step.  Plus, it's helping me dust some cobwebs that have been lurking in my head for a couple of years.  Who knows?  Once I get knuckle deep back into Java I might turn out some projects or maybe even something enterprise for headquaters.   At any rate, the Java mixes well with my morning coffee addiction and IcedTea mixes will with my afternoon green tea addiction.

Before I rolled out the relaunch, I spent a good month trying to figure out the right kind of development environment for tools the I had available.  I have three laptops but all of the batteries are toast and the motherboard on one of them has gone the way of the dodo.  I convinced myself to develop exclusively off of a big ole Western Digital 80 GB Passport USB external drive.  First step done.  After doing some research I decided on XAMMP to drive my environment.  It was nice but there were some issues.

My real focus for this development environment setup was to be able to plug in the hard drive and code directly off of it.  I work off of multiple platforms at home and at the office.  Almost all of the apps do not have a single application to launch.  I already run some portable apps that support clients in Windows, Mac, and Linux flavors, like KeePass.  XAMMP advertised clients for each platform so I decided to give it a try.

XAMMP is a fully integrated web application development server.  The purpose of XAMMP is to roll out a fully workable, out of the box *AMP stack.  The packages include an Apache2 server, PHP version 4 or 5, MySQL 5, and a torrent of management utilities and open soruce libraries/modules.  There are some differences between platforms for the package set, however.  The beauty behind it is that you can pick and choose what you want and start work within minutes.

At first, I wanted to setup all of the platform packages on the flash drive.  Due to the desire for cleanliness on the drive, however, I tried to install the software locally on all of my workstations.  Most of my time is spent on these machines anyway.  Linux was the easiest to turn out, mainly because it just dropped everything into the '/opt' directory.  I could change the doc and database links and move forward from there.  Windows was also a snap as I could modify configuration and turn services on and off with the included XAMMP control panel.  The Mac OS X client was not so easy.

The installer package for the Mac does not allow for choice.  It scans you computer to see if it's okay to run on and then drops it straight to the Applications folder.  The folder it installs to is not entirely encapsulated.  When the configuration points to the database files on the flash drive,  the service will crash upon startup.  I've already been exposed to issues on lock file management on Mac OS X Server, and the workaround didn't work for this issue.  The Apple puts the lock file in a directory other than the MySQL default setup.  When I symbolically linked the lock file, the database would start up.  This was not working with XAMMP.

After spending some small time here and there for about two weeks on it, I ended up just letting it go.  Attempts to find out on their forums page led me nowhere.  Also in my research on this topic, I discovered a Portable Apps version of Xammp but it is Windows only.  Not much help there.  Maybe one day the devs on the project will look for better portable support.  Until then, I'm focusing on version management and working off my lil server in my apartment.

I'm still coming to terms with getting distracted on small setup roadblocks.  I really didn't need to waste the time figuring this out when what I really needed to do was to turn out this blog and other projects.  Struggling with Xammp taught me that sometimes the perfect environment will trickle down from actually working on things first rather than focusing on a perfect setup for work that hasn't started yet.  Plus it's alot more fun when you actually have projects in progress instead of dreaming of working on projects.