Anyway, after quite a few months break from my project, I decided it made more sense to develop my blenderfarmers render farm client application using Python. Blender itself uses Python to perform all it’s scripting tasks. This would guarantee that Python is installed on every computer that is running Blender.

Turns out, it doesn’t even matter if python is on the target machine because built into Python is the ability to bake the python application into an executable. Ruby has this ability too, but I just never could get it working. In one hour, I was able to create a shell wxPython window and “freeze” it to a native Mac package that behaves just like a native app. Beautiful!

I know this is Mac centric, I need to test on Windows too, but my experience is it is harder to get working on my Mac, than my Windows virtual machine.

Great page that helped:  Optimizing for Mac OS X

This configuration file explosion isn’t exclusive to java.  I’ve seen it in rails applications too.  The only difference that I can tell is that Rails uses a more terse file format known as YML.  The production Rails app that I am working with has dozens of these configuration files.  Frankly, it looks no different to me than other production java projects I’ve been on.

YML may be easier for a developer due to the terseness of it, but I don’t think it is any better for the folks who are expected to maintain these configuration files (the production support teams).  In fact, I would think XML would have an advantage in this area because of the ability to validate an xml document based on a schema.  I am not aware of these sorts of tools for YML.

After opening Microsoft’s sample C++ app to do video capture, I’ve come to the conclusion that Microsoft COM C++ just makes me feel stupid.  It’s always made me feel stupid.  I used to think it was me.  I know now, that it’s just an ugly API and you have to be able to think in strange ways to do COM.  I’ve learned so many languages and libraries now that I can say, it’s just one ugly mess.  I’m glad they’ve been going down the CLR route.

I’m using http://directshownet.sourceforge.net/ to handle the interop layer.  I have it capturing video from my Intensity Pro capture card.  My super fast hard drive and SATA3 system is just barely able to keep up with the uncompressed AVI file that I’m capturing.  I could compress it, but I don’t want to lose ANY color information as we will be using this footage for green screen magic.

You just put the same command you would normally type at the prompt to switch RVM environments in the .rvmrc file and it works!

echo "rvm ree@global" > .rvmrc

This will enable you to simply change directories and not have to think about which version of ruby and gemset you are using. cd into that directory, type ruby –version to verify it loading the right ruby version.

Rackspace

I first tried Rackspace because I already have an account there.  I setup Ubuntu 64bit and installed the 2.49b 64bit version of Blender.  I downloaded the test.blend file from http://www.eofw.org/bench/ and executed it with the following command:

/usr/local/blender/2.49b/blender -b test.blend -o //test. -F PNG -t 0 -f 1

It returned in 47 seconds.

I then ran the 2.5.3 beta version of blender with the same command and it returned in 18 seconds but exited with Segmentation fault.  I can reproduce that segmentation fault on my Mac with the same version of Blender.

Amazon EC2

I then created Amazon’s micro on-demand server.  I only had Fedora as a choice from the prepackaged ones.  There are over 5000 pre-built images from the public though I didn’t see Ubunto v 10.  Also, the micro version only allows 32 bit computers.  The nice thing about Fedora is that I installed a headless blender by simply typing:

yum blender

It installed 2.48.  It took 17 minutes and 10 seconds to render that same frame!  What in the world!  I’m not sure why it takes so long on the Amazon server compared to the Rackspace server, but Rackspace is cheaper AND faster for rendering frames in Blender.

ssh -i register.pem username@myamazonserver.amazonaws.com

I got this error message:

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@         WARNING: UNPROTECTED PRIVATE KEY FILE!          @
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
Permissions 0644 for 'tmn_register.pem' are too open.
It is recommended that your private key files are NOT accessible by others.
This private key will be ignored.
bad permissions: ignore key: tmn_register.pem
Permission denied (publickey).

Apparently, the permissions on the filesystem for the key file that was given to me were too secure.  I changed the permissions to disallow all access except me and all was well.

chmod 600 register.pem

export JAVA_HOME=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Home

http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/

The Rails 2.x has felt… hacky to me.  When I’ve looked at some of the code that has been generated, I’ve been turned off by the inline javascript I’ve seen.  I want the code that my framework creates to be extremely clean and standards oriented.  Inline javascript just doesn’t cut it for me.  Another thing that has bugged me is the disregard for other points of view.  In “Agile Web Development with Rails” book I read, the authors decided to denigrate the importance of having a very clean ORM layer because Rails didn’t have it.  It has felt that the Rails core team didn’t really care about correctness, they seemed hacky.  The merb team seemed to care about correctness in implementation which is why they were creating a lightweight, flexible foundation.  Because of this, Rails 3.0 excites me.

I’ve decided to do all my Rails development using 3.0.  I have no plans on releasing my software any time soon, and I really want to use the new bundler and the new routing features.  In order to do this, I want to be able to run multiple versions of Ruby on my machine.  My good friend Andrew Kavanaugh pointed me to RVM (Ruby Version Manager).

RVM Installation

I had no trouble following the directions to install RVM.  It installed without errors.  I encountered an error when I went to install a different Ruby version.  Inside the configure.error.log file, I had this line: “configure: error: C compiler cannot create executables”  Inside the configure.log file, I had “checking whether the C compiler works… no.”   When I upgraded to Snow Leopard, I didn’t upgrade my dev tools.  Once I installed Xcode 3.2.1, I had no problems installing my ruby versions.

RVM Usage

Install a new version of Ruby:

rvm install 1.9.2

List installed versions of Ruby:

rvm list

Change version of Ruby

rvm 1.9.2
rvm system

Change default

rvm 1.9.1 --default
rvm system --default