Several of my apps keep crashing. Particularly nastily is the fact that Mail.app is crashing every time I update the junk mail status of a message. Most annoying. All the crashes seem to be an invalid memory error:
The suggested setup routine for MT 3.1's dynamic publishing gives instructions for use with .htaccess files. If, like me, you've got root access to some variety of unix box then you might well want to do your setup using an apache config file and not a .htaccess file: The performance of mod_rewrite processing rewrite rules in a config file is much better than rules in a .htaccess file.
So, I've been meaning to do this for about nine months now. I have a Debian box at home which is, in fact, an old PowerMac 7300. It has fans, and makes noise. Since we moved to London the box has had to live on the bookshelf in the lounge. It takes up excessive amounts of space and is noisy, so the components for a fanless mini-itx system were bought, and constructed. But I haven't gotten around to migrating things over until now for many reasons, most of which concerned lack of spare time and the conceptual difference in handling virtual mail hosts delivering to local users.
This is a despatch-less despatch. Written in the absence of email. You're reading this after the fact. How far after I don't know, since I haven't sent it yet.
So, I've finally shipped a new version of reprocessed.org. It's essentially a prototype -- I did the least possible work to get something up and running, so there's a load of stuff missing (comments, primarily), but hopefully I've got a platform to build the fun and interesting things I've wanted to build but couldn't make Movable Type do (at least, do easily enough).
For those of you who subscribe to the feeds...
It looks like a lot of feed readers don't follow permanent redirects sent by servers, and I changed the location of my feeds and used permanent redirects to tell your feed readers about the change, which I thought would make the transition seamless, and I would be able to bask in the glory of having done something right for a change...
Alas, this doesn't seem to be the case. Please update your feed readers. They should be able to automatically find the correct address if you visit http://reprocessed.org/. If not, then the new feed is at http://feeds.feedburner.com/reprocessed.
Thanks, and sorry for the hassle.
Something I found myself wrestling with a lot towards the end of my time at the BBC, and something I've been thinking a lot about since, is the deployment of entire servers, not just the deployment of software onto servers. I've spent nearly ten years working with Linux distributions and their OS package management systems, primarily Red Hat and Debian-based systems (Ubuntu, lately). I've also spent a lot of time working with Python and Ruby's OS-independent packaging systems (Distutils, a tiny bit of Setuptools, and Rubygems).
Well, it's been a couple more weeks than I promised (that Christmas, it gets everywhere), but here's the first follow-up from my dpkg-tools from December.
I've got a longer post about setting up your Cucumber/Selenium environment coming, but since this is a hot issue I'd thought I'd address it. In short: There's a problem running the firefox.sh script on Mac OS X 10.6, which is the definitive way for things to invoke Firefox. [Selenium RC] [1] runs firefox.sh to run tests, and Cucumber in turn uses Selenium RC. The result is that if you use Cucumber with Selenium and upgrade to 10.6, all your Selenium tests fail. The problem is detailed in Firefox's [Bugzilla bug #513747] [2] and Selenium's [bug SRC-743] [2a]. After a bit of poking about, I found a workaround. It's not great but it does get you going again...
For a long time I've thought that it would be a good idea to have a Continuous Integration server that could run all the tests for a project on checkin to source control. Until I started making use of Cucumber I didn't really have a full test run that took long enough to make buying a separate CI server feel more like an investment than an indulgence.