Been messing around with Postfix / SASL / Courier and the dk and dkim milters recently (due to mail being dropped by various large ISP’s) and one of the most useful things I found were the reflector services for checking the signing:
I will probably document the issues I had setting it all up, as to be honest it was a pain…….
If you have seen this sort of thing:
ActionView::TemplateError: Expected image.rb to define Image
or this:
SystemExit (exit):
/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/RubyInline-3.6.5/lib/inline.rb:70:in `exit'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/RubyInline-3.6.5/lib/inline.rb:70:in `rootdir'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/RubyInline-3.6.5/lib/inline.rb:84:in `directory'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/RubyInline-3.6.5/lib/inline.rb:258:in `so_name'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/RubyInline-3.6.5/lib/inline.rb:294:in `load_cache'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/RubyInline-3.6.5/lib/inline.rb:678:in `inline'
/usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/image_science-1.1.3/lib/image_science.rb:84
in your log files when using ImageScience you may well of been a bit confused and frustrated – I was.
I was looking for a neat way to crop images last night and had originally planned to use the excellent jsCropper library from Dave Spurr, which I have used on projects before. When, during a bit of googling about I came across Kropper from Jonathon Wolke. It takes a slightly different approach to Cropper with the crop area staying put and the image moving under the crop area, but also includes a neat zooming feature and some pretty slick design. Another plus, from a Rails perspective, is that the code comes in an example Rails app!!! Makes it very easy to integrate.
Its taken a long time (well about a year) and a lot of messing about with Skype, but the first site from the Cominded stable is open for invitations to join the beta. Yabb is a social utility based on conversation, “talk more, type less” being the motto. So go along and sign up, I look forward to chatting with you online.
It has to be said integrating with the Skype API is an experience, and not usually a particularly consistent one!! Anyway now we are out of stealth mode I guess it ok to start sharing some of the issues we came up against and how we solved them.
Oh and Nothing is doing quite well, 627 installs in 27 countries in 8 days. I know its not exactly explosive growth. But, its not in the directory and lets face it it does actually do nothing.
Ben Smith who I work with over at Cominded has put up a good article on getting your site to work with the iPhone. Definitely worth a read (as is much of his blog), now all I need to do is find a way to get one – I knew I shouldn’t of been tempted by the N95 (its spent more time being fixed than anything else)!!!!
I have just completed (well apart from moving any assets over) the switch from Typo to Mephisto. It was fairly painless. There was one :dependent declaration that needed fixing in the converter code and other than that pretty much everything I needed to know was in these two posts.
How I converted Type to Mephisto
The solution given for fixing your routes found in the later of these I found also needed this line:
Mephisto::Routing.redirect '/articles' => '/'
to get all my permalinks to work. The result on my memory usage is pretty dramatic and hopefully I won’t get as much spam…..
I have been messing around with Facebook apps recently and I found a couple of articles to be very helpful:
Tutorial On Developing A Facebook Platform Application With Ruby on Rails
Further to the DDOS attack turns out that they had managed to create 43,046 trackbacks before it was stopped – so much for Akismet, or is it Typo – actually thats probably a little unfair considering I haven’t updated in a while!!
Anyway its still going on, I’ve just turned them off on the blog and set the server to deny all access to any url containing ‘trackback’. What a pain in the arse these bots / people are.
Apologies to anyone who found this blog down over the last couple of days. For some reason I was subject to a DDOS attack!!! Wouldn’t really of thought of myself as a entertaining target really, but there you go…..
I have released a new version of the FCKeditor plugin, it contains a few fixes, a couple of new features and the 2.5 beta version of the editor itself. I chose to use that version as it comes with support for Safari!!
One of the changes is a new rake task (based on code from David Jones over at Resolve Digital. This provides the ability to download and install any version of the editor you like (including the nightly builds). Simply run
rake fckeditor:download VERSION='2.4.3'
VERSION can be any of the existing versions (2.5b, 2.4.2, etc) or if left blank the nightly build will be installed. The version printed out of the currently installed version of the editor is actually hardcoded (I realised having created the release!!) so please ignore that for now.
Other fixes include fixing the file upload to check for StringIO as well as Tempfiles, and a load of tiding and some fixes (including the basis of the code to allow the use of the text area helper without instantiating an object) from Hongli Lai. There are a couple of issues I have noticed with the editor itself but I will post them a little later.
The plugin is available from Ruby Forge or by doing this:
ruby script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org//var/svn/fckeditorp/trunk/fckeditor
There is also a demo
