programming with passion

Error when configuring to use the EJB interceptor binding API. JAX-RS EJB support is disabled.

jason — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 19:11:38 +0000

I’ve gotten this error twice while using Glassfish inside eclipse. I’m not sure of the root cause but after hours of searching both times, I thought I should document how to get around this error. After I shut down the glassfish server and restarted eclipse, the error went away.

Native looking Mac apps using Python & wxPython

jason — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 04:59:43 +0000

So, I went down the road of using wxRuby, but it seems that it is a dead or dying code base. Seems most Ruby-ists are interested in Rails, not in desktop applications. I also failed in my attempt at packaging up a ruby desktop app to make it appear native. I kept running into 64bit vs 32bit issues.

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

mysql query tracing

jason — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 05:15:43 +0000

# Turn on logging
set global log_output=FILE;
set global general_log=1;

# Turn off logging
set global general_log=0;

The log file was writing it to mysql/data/{hostname}.log on my machine.

I recently used this to discover why a Rails app was taking 15 seconds to load a page. I know this is also shown in the Rails log, but I wanted to show the impact of the SQL statements alone. It is much easier to look at the MySQL log which isolates the SQL calls.

This application was performing over 600 database operations. I’m amazed at how many developers don’t take the time to truly understand the impact their code has on a database. Sad to say, this kind of crappy code is all over that application. I hate inheriting crap.

Convention over configuration

jason — Mon, 21 Feb 2011 20:55:56 +0000

I think convention over configuration is one positive idea that Ruby had brought to the java world. One of the criticisms that is lobbed at java is that it has too many XML configuration files. I don’t think this is a weakness in the java language as much as it is the desire to make an extremely flexible system that doesn’t require a re-compile to change optional parameters. It centralizes these choices into a configuration file instead of throughout several source code files.

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.

Video Capture with C#

jason — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 03:43:36 +0000

I’m having lots of fun writing a video capture application in C#. Windows Media Foundation is supposed to be the “cool new way” to do this. Unfortunately, there just isn’t a lot of support yet in the drivers and as far as I can tell, Windows Media Foundation does not work with the DirectShow drivers that capture cards use. So, I’ve gone down the rabbit hole of learning how to write a video capture application using C# and DirectShow. There just isn’t much information out there because everyone seems to want to use C++.

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.

command line

jason — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 20:57:58 +0000

One of the things that I love the most about my Mac is the command line. I know the Mac is well known for it’s beautiful user interface, but that doesn’t stop at the graphical user interface. It extends to the command line user interface as well. One of the advantages of being based on unix is that all the command line power that is available on unix is also available on the Mac. I know microsoft has recently upgraded their command line abilities but they can’t really compete with decades of knowledge on command line usage on unix. There were many times that I felt a little helpless on my windows box when I wanted to do something cool. I felt helpless because a lot of the stuff I was interested was for unix only. I do not usually experience that on my Mac. The unix environment is just more naturally geared for the free software world.

Per Project RVM Selection

jason — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 17:39:01 +0000

I work on Rails as a contractor as well as my own projects. My main contract uses rails 2.x and ruby ree 1.8.7. Naturally, I like to use the bleeding edge on my own projects. This causes me problems going back and forth. I found that you can create an .rvmrc file that will set the environment for you when you run ruby in that directory.

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.

Startups

jason — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 04:29:01 +0000

I’m currently working at a startup. One of the things I love about startups is the commitment I see from a lot of developers. I remember when I first moved to Colorado, working at 2am with other developers. It’s sorta like a party. I think it’s why I loved the Rails Rumble so much. It is 10:30pm, I just drank 6 shots of espresso. Another developer and I are planning on working perhaps till people show up in the morning and beyond to get some functionality done. This is so not a corporate thing to do. I love it!

Mac OSX Path

jason — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 18:40:35 +0000

Great post on Mac Paths

http://www.semioticpixels.com/2010/01/path-settings-on-mac-snow-leopard/

Rails Rumble 2010

jason — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 00:50:38 +0000

Wow, that was incredible fun. Andrew Kavanaugh and I holed up in a Vegas hotel for the entire weekend to crank out a Rails application www.transcriptify.com for Rails Rumble. We were http://railsrumble.com/teams/double-down. We were so busy, we still haven’t put one penny in a slot machine yet. This was also my very first rails application. We created an application where you will be able to upload a podcast, video, or whatever and get a transcript back. The user pastes the youtube URL or uploads a video and then we create a bunch of “HIT”s on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk system. A HIT is a Human Intelligence Task where people log into amazon and fulfill these tasks and get paid. We break up a 30min video into 60 chunks and have several people per 30 second clip transcribe it. We then create other HITs to review the transcriptions. Once all 60 chunks of video/audio have been transcribed and reviewed, we assemble them all into one big transcript that can be downloaded to your website .

We were literally down to the last minute trying to get paypal to work and therefore didn’t have much testing. I hope it works Due to time constraints, we have only implemented youtube so far. there are so many things that would need to be done in order to make this an app I’m proud to charge for, but overall I’m quite proud of what we accomplished in 48 hours. We overcame a crippled laptop that had to be exchanged at the Apple Store only to find out that it is a software problem because my new one has the same issue. I had to operate in safe mode the whole weekend which meant no audio. That made it really hard to create a service based on transcribing audio. We had one team member who was unable to devote the time we had hoped for the contest which was also a disappointment.

Only got a few hours of sleep over the last 48 hours, havent eaten all day, but it was an awesome experience with a fellow coder and friend who also loves to code just for the enjoyment of it. It was an experience I would recommend and hope to repeat next year.