Derek’s Diary

I have moved my blog from Blogsome to WordPress.com and merged to it my old blog at Bloglines.  Please update your feed reader to the new feed address.

This is the second time that I’ve moved my blog.  I originally hosted it at Bloglines, but then moved it to Blogsome in February, 2006.  Thsi time, I decided to merge both my original blog at Bloglines and my Blogsome blog to WordPress.com because WordPress.com uses a more recent version of WordPress that has better blog editing and management tools and it seems to be more responsive.  For example, I find that WordPress.com saves and updates blog posts much more quickly than does Blogsome.

After having been closed for almost three months from early August to late October, I was happy to learn a little over a week ago (better late than never) that Cinéma du Parc has re-opened its doors to Montreal fans of independent and international film! Though gone are the tattered movie wall posters and the little plush chairs that lent the small theater its quirky and rebellious charm, its new owner, Roland Smith, remains committed to presenting quality alternative films to those Montrealers, like myself, who have grown tired of the endless stream of mostly forgettable and brain-numbing Hollywood blockbusters.

To mark the opening of the theater (and to save some money), Desiree and I each bought a $40 movie card that allows each of us to watch eight movies before April next year. So far, we’ve watched three very different and unique films:

• Nadia’s Journey
• Bobby
• A Year in the Death of Jack Richards

Sadly, when we attended the evening showing of each of these films, most of the seats in the theater were empty. Though I try to remain optimistic that this is just a sign that not many people are yet aware that Cinéma du Parc has re-opened and that this time the theater will have a much longer and successful third life, in the back of my mind, I can’t help but think that the empty seats are a bad omen that the theater may once again just fade away into Montreal repertory movie theater history.

Let’s hope that its fans will not let that happen! Support quality film in Montreal and please buy more tickets to Cinéma du Parc!

Further reading:

• Third time lucky?

Did you know that Grande Bibliothèque (BAnQ) provides Québec residents with free access to Safari Books Online? This service lists books for online reading from publishers such as Addison-Wesley, No Starch, O’Reilly, Peachpit, Prentice Hall PTR, Que, and Sams. I found a few Ruby related O’Reilly titles that I recognized:

• RJS Templates for Rails
• Ruby Cookbook
• Ruby on Rails: Up and Running
• Web Services on Rails

Though the Grande Bibliothèque Safari subscription allows you to search all books and read any book online, unlike a regular Safari subscription, it does not allow you to download individual book chapters for offline reading.

I was a bit premature in declaring my Typo installation a success. Though my Apache Web server virtual host configuration was correct, I was missing one important piece of the solution. In order for http://blog.derekmahar.ca to be accessible to a Web browser on the Internet, I had to add a DNS ‘A’ record to my DNS name servers at ZoneEdit.

Now that my Typo weblog is running and visible on the Web, the next step is to configure its theme and migrate content from my blog sites here at Blogsome and Bloglines. Unfortunately, unlike Wordpress 2.0, Typo does not yet provide a means to copy content from one blog site to a Typo blog site.

Further reading:

• On Switching to Typo (From Wordpress)
• Wordpress vs Typo

I just installed the Typo blog engine on my website in about 45 minutes, which included the time it took to configure the Apache proxy, but did not included content customization or migration from my existing blogs. Even though the installation includes an example Apache proxy configuration template, the proxy configuration took about 80% to 90% of the total installation time. However, installing Typo itself was practically a no-brainer:

$ sudo gem install typo
(answer a few yes/no prompts)
$ sudo typo install /var/www/typo

These two commands install Ruby on Rails (if it’s not already installed), Mongrel, Typo, SQLite3, and some additional Rails plugins. Starting Typo was equally painless:

$ sudo typo start
$ sudo typo start /var/www/typo
Starting Typo on port 4231
$ ps -eaf --width=2000 | grep typo
root 15286 1 5 15:41 ? 00:00:01 /usr/bin/ruby /usr/bin/mongrel_rails start /var/www/typo -d false -e production -P /var/www/typo/tmp/pid.txt -p 4231

The first time that you load the Typo blog URL into your web browser, Typo asks you to enter a user name and password, and then promptly takes you to the Administration page. The Typo Administration page looks pretty slick and provides options similar to those that Wordpress offers, but it’s far more responsive than Wordpress at Blogsome. I’m not sure whether this is because Typo is more performant than Wordpress or because Blogsome has misconfigured Wordpress or their web servers. In any case, my Typo is snappy!

Interestingly, this post took me about 45 minutes to write, or same amount of time that it took me to install Typo. Wow, that’s fast!

Very early this morning, inspired by an article on the Philippines Ruby Users Group mailing list, I started experimenting with RMagick, a Ruby programming interface to Imagemagick, an open source image manipulation toolkit. Using a slightly modified version of the image scaling script from the article, I was able to reduce all of my bloated Philippines travel photos to one quarter of their original size.

I encountered two minor obstacles in trying to run the script:

• Installing the RMagick gem before Imagemagick. I used RubyGems to install the RMagick gem, but after my first attempt, I quickly learned that RMagick requires the Imagemagick package and its various library dependencies. Without these, the RMagick native extensions fail to compile. After successfully installing Imagemagick, my second attempt to install RMagick again failed because, as the RMagick configuration log file (config.log) reported, I was missing the freetype font library. After installing freetype, my RMagick installation completed successfully.
• Loading the RMagick gem. To get the Ruby interpreter to load the gem, the script must include the line requires 'rubygems'; you must specify -r rubygems on the Ruby command line, or you must assign string rubygems to environment variable RUBYOPT. The RubyGems User Guide explains in detail how to use one of these three environment options.

Once I managed to overcome these obstacles, I wrote a one line Bash script to apply the image scaling Ruby script to my images:

for file in Photos/Travel/Philippines/*.JPG; do sudo -u apache ./reduce_photo.rb $file; done

Et voila! Smaller Philippines photos!

A few weeks ago, I finished reading Ship It! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects from The Pragmatic Programmers. Drawn from the authors’ numerous years of experience developing software at SAS Software, Ship It! is a book full of advice, tips, and techniques that can help managers and developers alike improve their software development process. The book examines software development from three interrelated perspectives: infrastructure, techniques, and process. In particular, it discusses the iterative and agile Tracer Bullet software development process.

Two important lessons that I learned from Ship It! is that I should perform more code reviews and automated testing!

Other Ship It! reviews:

• Javaddicts
• Shahay’s Perspectives
• TechBookReport
• UKUUG

Google Reader has improved considerably since I last used the blog reader and aggregator several months ago. Google Reader is a lot like Rojo, but much more responsive. Like Rojo, Reader does a fine job of weaving together (or aggregating) multiple feeds, interleaving their posts into a single virtual feed. I also like how Google Reader and Rojo both allow you to tag a feed with multiple labels. Contrast this with Bloglines, which still uses an antiquated and oh-so-Web-1.0 (or un-Web-2.0) folder hierarchy to organize feeds.

Google Reader, like Bloglines, has a handy set of keyboard shortcuts to help you more quickly navigate through articles and feeds and its menu items at the top of the page allow you to filter your reading list. Though Reader and Bloglines both have a ‘Keep Unread’ checkbox to allow you to preserve the unread status of an article, unlike Reader, Blogines provides no means for reading those flagged articles without also ‘reading’ newly unread articles. (This is one of my biggest Bloglines pet-peeves.) Like Rojo, Google Reader provides a ‘Star’ flag which also marks an article for later re-reading, but unlike ‘Keep Unread’, does not mark the article as permanently unread. The behaviour is subtly different, but there is an obvious overlap between the two flags, so I’m not too sure why Reader provides both. Nevertheless, Google Reader, like Rojo, makes reading previously read articles and articles of particular interest, much easier than does Bloglines.

One standard feature that is missing from Google Reader, but that most readers share, is the prominent display of feed subscriptions along with the number of unread articles in that feed. Unfortunately, since Google Reader doesn’t give you an ‘at-a-glance’ feed summary, you must randomly pick feeds to find out which ones have unread articles. This is a pain.

Google Reader can also improve in its responsiveness and useability. Though quicker than Rojo in loading and displaying articles, it still doesn’t come close to Bloglines, which is very fast. Navigating articles in Google Reader, though made easier with the keyboard shortcuts, is still awkward and imprecise. Jumping to the next article with the j key should jump immediately to the next article without delay, but instead, can sometimes leave you between articles, which is odd.

Despite Google Reader’s weaknesses, it has improved considerably and like Gmail, should continue to improve with time.

To switch between Rojo, Bloglines, or Google Reader (or use them all), all readers allow you to export and import your feed list as an Outline Processor Markup Language (OPML) file.

About three months ago, I bought a Sandisk Sansa audio player and since then I’ve become an avid listener of mostly science and technology related podcasts. My favourites of these are IT Conversations, Agile Toolkit, and Quirks and Quarks.

Tonight was Cinema du Parc’s closing night. To celebrate CDP’s five years in business and to enjoy one last week of repertory movies, Desiree and I have seen six movies at the CDP since last Friday:

• Amores perros (Love’s a Bitch or Loves Dogs)
• Trainspotting
• La Mala educación (The Bad Education)
• Girl With a Pearl Earring
• Lost in Translation
• Clean

Tonight we had also wanted to see Eraserhead, their last show of the evening (and forever), but unfortunately, by the time we got there, it was sold out.

Despite this last disappointment, I was mostly pleased with the movies that we did get to see. Of these, I particularly enjoyed Amores Perros and Girl With a Pearl Earring, but was unimpressed with Lost in Translation. Coincidentally, Scarlett Johannson played in both Girl With a Pearl Earring and Lost in Translation. Though it had its humorous moments, Lost in Translation had a dull and mostly pointless story in which Bill Murray and Scarlett Johannson were a very unlikely and mismatched pair. Girl With a Pearl Earring was a much more interesting film for which Johannson was a perfect fit.