Welcome back to part 2 of my Subversion install series. What we are going to go over is developing the right structure for the repository, importing a website, updating a website, then testing and deploying the website using some of Subversion’s command sets. There were some road blocks along the way and I will talk about that as well as some other thoughts about the process. After that I’ll talk about what’s next but first let’s setup and deploy some code.
So Wednesday I scrolled through the Google Reader roll and I found out, thanks to OStatic, that the Theora video codec reached the 1.0 release. What is Theora? It’s part of the same community at Xiph.org that hosts the the Vorbis codec for audio. What is Vorbis? It’s a completely open source audio compression technology brought up in response to Fraunhofer Gesellschaft’s announcement of charging for the license of the MP3 codec. So Theora follows in that same tradition and is a completely open sourced video codec.
Usually when projects from work come down my pike, I use ffmpeg to transcode video between formats. I don’t get that much exposure to the high powered equipment that the producers use to export video. But when some deadlines must be met, I usually get the task of taking some media, whether it’s from Beta, DVD, or others, and spitting it out to their requirements.
The two machines that compete for my time is a Windows 2000 workstation and a build of Ubuntu Studio Linux. The nice thing about the W2k build is that I can capture video from Beta with relative ease. For moving media around bitwise, the Linux build with ffmpeg works out way better. Batch processing on the Linux machine makes it a snap to script up custom projects and let them roll. What I haven’t had to opportunity to do is to work with Theora.
Theora and Vorbis haven’t had the kind of uptake MP3 has had in the media arena, mainly due to being late in the game. When I take on projects, I’ll still probably stick with ffmpeg. My interest is piqueued however, and I may just drop in the new 1.0 release of Theora to see if I can gain any improvements compared to my other methods of turning out video. That’s the great thing about open source, you’re free to work with and it gives you room for improvement for a low cost.
It’s been awhile since I worked with Java. Well, more specifically, I last seriously worked with Java around the beginning of the century. I figured, well why not set it up on the server and see what’s going on nowadays? I knew that the package install for the Java platform is sticky on linux machines. So a quick cache search yielded me lots of results, with Iced Tea being the most interesting one.
As I was eyeballing the search results, IcedTea stuck out in my head. I remembered over the summer an episode of FLOSS Weekly briefly touching upon IcedTead. Dalibor Topic and Bruno Souza from OpenJDK were interviewed about IcedTea and the satus of OpenJDK altogether. It was very nice to see a fully open sourced implementation of the Sun Java platform.
OpenJDK is an open sourced implementation the Java Platform, Standard Edition. Sun just in 2006 decided to open source Java and this year some traction took hold. IcedTea (and OpenJDK) is the first to pass the Technology Compatibility Kit tests and can claim to be a fully compatible Java 6 implementation. It showed up on Fedora but I forgot that it was on Ubuntu too.
I went the one liner route and installed IcedTea the quick and easy route:
hokey@tardis:~$ sudo apt-get install icedtea-java7-jdk
Which yielded me a bunch of other recommended packages, which I’ll revisit later, but I was ready to hit the big ‘Y’:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
icedtea-java7-bin icedtea-java7-jre
Suggested packages:
binfmt-support icedtea-java7-demo icedtea-java7-source icedtea-java7-plugin sun-java6-fonts ttf-baekmuk ttf-unfonts ttf-unfonts-core
ttf-kochi-gothic ttf-sazanami-gothic ttf-kochi-mincho ttf-sazanami-mincho ttf-arphic-uming
Recommended packages:
liblcms1 lesstif2 libgnome2-0 libgnomevfs2-0 libgconf2-4 libgl1-mesa-glx
The following NEW packages will be installed:
icedtea-java7-bin icedtea-java7-jdk icedtea-java7-jre
0 upgraded, 3 newly installed, 0 to remove and 3 not upgraded.
Need to get 36.8MB of archives.
After unpacking 117MB of additional disk space will be used.
After installing the package a quick test verified its install:
hokey@tardis:~$ java -version
java version "1.7.0"
IcedTea Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0-b21)
IcedTea Client VM (build 1.7.0-b21, mixed mode, sharing)
It’s nice to get back to my Java roots using something completely open source and Java 6 compatible. I’ve read up on a couple of things like JavaFX that I play around with and this is a good first step. Plus, it’s helping me dust some cobwebs that have been lurking in my head for a couple of years. Who knows? Once I get knuckle deep back into Java I might turn out some projects or maybe even something enterprise for headquaters. At any rate, the Java mixes well with my morning coffee addiction and IcedTea mixes will with my afternoon green tea addiction.
Before I rolled out the relaunch, I spent a good month trying to figure out the right kind of development environment for tools the I had available. I have three laptops but all of the batteries are toast and the motherboard on one of them has gone the way of the dodo. I convinced myself to develop exclusively off of a big ole Western Digital 80 GB Passport USB external drive. First step done. After doing some research I decided on XAMMP to drive my environment. It was nice but there were some issues.
My real focus for this development environment setup was to be able to plug in the hard drive and code directly off of it. I work off of multiple platforms at home and at the office. Almost all of the apps do not have a single application to launch. I already run some portable apps that support clients in Windows, Mac, and Linux flavors, like KeePass. XAMMP advertised clients for each platform so I decided to give it a try.
XAMMP is a fully integrated web application development server. The purpose of XAMMP is to roll out a fully workable, out of the box *AMP stack. The packages include an Apache2 server, PHP version 4 or 5, MySQL 5, and a torrent of management utilities and open soruce libraries/modules. There are some differences between platforms for the package set, however. The beauty behind it is that you can pick and choose what you want and start work within minutes.
At first, I wanted to setup all of the platform packages on the flash drive. Due to the desire for cleanliness on the drive, however, I tried to install the software locally on all of my workstations. Most of my time is spent on these machines anyway. Linux was the easiest to turn out, mainly because it just dropped everything into the ‘/opt’ directory. I could change the doc and database links and move forward from there. Windows was also a snap as I could modify configuration and turn services on and off with the included XAMMP control panel. The Mac OS X client was not so easy.
The installer package for the Mac does not allow for choice. It scans you computer to see if it’s okay to run on and then drops it straight to the Applications folder. The folder it installs to is not entirely encapsulated. When the configuration points to the database files on the flash drive, the service will crash upon startup. I’ve already been exposed to issues on lock file management on Mac OS X Server, and the workaround didn’t work for this issue. The Apple puts the lock file in a directory other than the MySQL default setup. When I symbolically linked the lock file, the database would start up. This was not working with XAMMP.
After spending some small time here and there for about two weeks on it, I ended up just letting it go. Attempts to find out on their forums page led me nowhere. Also in my research on this topic, I discovered a Portable Apps version of Xammp but it is Windows only. Not much help there. Maybe one day the devs on the project will look for better portable support. Until then, I’m focusing on version management and working off my lil server in my apartment.
I’m still coming to terms with getting distracted on small setup roadblocks. I really didn’t need to waste the time figuring this out when what I really needed to do was to turn out this blog and other projects. Struggling with Xammp taught me that sometimes the perfect environment will trickle down from actually working on things first rather than focusing on a perfect setup for work that hasn’t started yet. Plus it’s alot more fun when you actually have projects in progress instead of dreaming of working on projects.