John Topley’s Weblog

I’m pleased to report that my AssetsGraphed Ruby on Rails application has been running continuously for over two hundred days now, as the screenshot below taken from my installation of monit shows. Okay, so AssetsGraphed isn’t exactly getting hammered like Facebook, but this level of reliability supports my decision to choose Rails Machine for hosting my Rails applications. Their choice of running Xen-based VPSs on Linux would appear to be a wise one and I know that 37signals themselves are moving in this direction.

The next milestone will be a year’s continuous uptime—let’s hope that posting this isn’t the kiss of death that takes AssetsGraphed offline! Happy New Year everyone.

It’s something of a secret that you can configure the source code repositories the Rails plugin manager searches when you instruct it to install a plugin. This can be handy if you’re installing several plugins from the same author. Such as this one. Or this one.

To add a repository to the plugin manager:

./script/plugin source http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/plugins/

To remove a repository from the plugin manager:

./script/plugin unsource http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/plugins/

To list repositories registered with the plugin manager:

./script/plugin sources

To discover and list repositories without adding them:

./script/plugin discover -l

My partner recently wanted to download a track from HMV Digital. The following is a true account of the process we had to go through before we could play the purchased music. By the way, the HMV Digital website only works with IE 6 or greater, so Firefox, Safari or Opera wasn’t an option. I know, party like it’s 1999!

1. Click to download the purchased track.
2. Tell IE to enable popups for the site.
3. The HMV Download Manager opens.
4. Tell IE to enable ActiveX controls for this window.
5. The download starts but craps out after a few seconds with an obscure “DispInfo” error. I know that this sounds like COM-speak, but what’s a non-programmer to think?
6. Switch to my clean installation of Windows XP running under Parallels on the Mac.
7. Close the Desktop Cleanup Wizard balloon.
8. Log in to the HMV Digital site. Click to download the purchased track.
9. Close the Desktop Cleanup Wizard balloon again.
10. Tell IE to enable popups for the site.
11. The HMV Download Manager opens.
12. Tell IE to enable ActiveX controls for this window.
13. The download starts but craps out after a few seconds. It’s a different error this time: “The client does not have the DRM security update”.
14. Do a Google search on the error text. End up at a Virgin Digital Music Help page. Follow the link to Microsoft to upgrade the security component.
15. Click to download the purchased track. It works this time but is really slow because in the meantime Windows has decided to download this week’s updates.
16. Click to install the updates.
17. Click the balloon to see what updates Windows is installing.
18. Windows Update prompts for a reboot. Ignore it because you haven’t transferred the downloaded track out of the virtual machine yet.
19. Reboot Windows to finish installing the updates.
20. Copy the track to the PC. Double-click it to play it.
21. Windows Media Player 10 warns that some security components are missing. Click to install them.
22. The installation fails.
23. Double-click the file again. Nothing happens. Windows Media Player doesn’t start.
24. Check for updates from within Windows Media Player. Update to the latest version.
25. Windows Media Player can’t play the track because the licence is missing.
26. Re-download the licence file from HMV.

Purchasing Music Online, Apple Style

1. Open iTunes.
2. Click the iTunes Store.
3. Browse or search for what you want.
4. Click Buy Song.