asiel’s scratchpad

For some reason Windows Vista enables IPv6 by default. Why? I wasn’t aware of this so I ended up troubleshooting a non-problem with PHPUnit. I have unit tests that connect to the web server to test a web service. The URL my tests were using was “localhost”. Because vista was resolving localhost to ::1 the tests couldn’t make a socket connection.

All I had to do to fix the problem was disable IPv6 and comment out the localhost ::1 line in my hosts file. This took a significant amount of troubleshooting to figure out though. I thought there was some type of problem with PHPUnit or php itself. Luckily I was finally able to solve the problem.

It seems like a really bad idea for Microsoft to enable IPv6 by default and additionally put it higher in the resolution order than IPv4 addresses. Based on the number of active IPv6 networks this can’t be a good default decision. Supporting IPv6 is a good idea, but it shouldn’t be the default method of resolving addresses. Windows should have knowledge that you are connected to an IPv4 network and disable or lower the priority of IPv6 accordingly.

I have been using skype as my sole landline-type telephone service for a couple months now. I have been highly impressed overall. It has been unfortunate to be having problems today. It seems like the worst part about it is that everything except for login/authentication is working properly. From the users perspective though if login doesn’t work nothing works. Hopefully they’ll be able to get this fixed soon since so many people including myself rely on skype every day.

I recently did a presentation on PEAR. This presentation mainly goes over basic PEAR usage and installing PEAR on windows. If you have any suggestions for improvement let me know.

I was asked how to detect if the flash plugin is installed. I found some pretty good info adobe puts out on this.

There are several useful articles here

http://www.adobe.com/support/flash/detection.html

This one is particularly applicable to detecting if the flash player is installed.

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/knowledgebase/index.cfm?id=tn_14526

I’m glad they have this information because although most browsers do have flash installed developers should still play nice with those who don’t and they should espicially make sure that the user has the correct version for any newer features of flash that they are using.

It is almost hard to convey how nice it is to have useful error messages. This can be the difference between spending hours tracking down a problem and being able to solve a problem in five minutes.

I was trying to get ruby on rails setup on a new machine that didn’t have it setup originally and got it working except it was continually running my app in webrick instead of lighttpd. So I manually run ./script/server lighttpd. After doing this I get the useful message:

=> Booting lighttpd (use ‘script/server webrick’ to force WEBrick)
PROBLEM: Lighttpd requires that the FCGI Ruby bindings are installed on the system

So to fix the problem I simply have to run: apt-get install libfcgi-ruby1.8

This is a great example of why ruby on rails is great. Useful error message make a huge difference when you’re trying to solve problems.

On the same note though they still have room for improvement. The path to ruby was incorrect in my dispatch.fcgi file and the error message displayed makes it look like there was a problem with fcgi somehow rather than the path to ruby being incorrect.

I found another really neat firefox extension. Its called minutes used and it tracks the number of minutes you have used and then gives you detail on whether the minutes are in-network, peak, off peak, etc. It even gives you the ability the make the number red when it goes over a certain threshold.This is really neat and well done extension to make sure you don’t go over your minutes. I got the one for verizon since my phone is verizon. It looks like there is an extension for TMobile too though. Go see for yourself here.

It is now over and what an experience it was. I competed in Rails Day 2006 with some great teammates. We wrote a web app called HugTracker. I thought of the concept to have a tracking system that was opposite of a bug tracker so you could tell someone how good of a job they are doing. I am very excited about what we were able to create in under 24 hours. That isn’t really much time and yet we have a fairly useful app I think. The more I use Ruby on Rails the more impressed I am. It is truly the first framework I’ve seen that does so many things so well right out of the gate. When you use the features of the framework doing things that are normally fairly difficult become very easy. A great example of this is the ActiveRecord validations and rjs templates. Let me know what you think about our entry. Check it out

Microsoft says they are worried about taking down the internet with the beta release of Vista.

See here

Why are they worried about this? As stated in the article this could easily be handled with a standard bittorrent client or even their own modified bittorrent client. It is too bad they are worried about using a technology such as this to their advantage. These are the types of problems that should be solved quickly if they aren’t already because online movie downloads will be commonplace before we know it.

I decided to move the server back to apache from lighttpd. This was mainly due to having more RAM on the server now. The other reason is that everything relies on apache. You don’t really realize this until you move away from it. All the open source packages though just expect that you have apache functionality for things like auth. Without these features it requires hacking for almost everything you want to install. I didn’t really want to hack these apps anymore just to get them to run. So this is why I moved back to apache. So far it has been a really easy move due to the vhost module I was able to install with. Everything just seems to work and the performane is still good too.

I’m writing my first rails app and learning a bit of ruby at the same time. Here are some good ruby resources that I was told about.

http://www.ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/
http://www.ruby-doc.org/core/
http://www.ruby-doc.org/stdlib/

http://tryruby.hobix.com/

http://poignantguide.net/ruby/chapter-1.html

http://www.ilovejackdaniels.com/ruby-on-rails/ruby-on-rails-cheat-sheet/