imeem acquired by myspace - bummer

nothing else to say really, imeem was a great service

I've never liked myspace

Heroku - HTTP 502 Error

This might be helpful to someone?

I was receiving 'App Failed To Respond (HTTP 502) Bad Gateway' errors when deploying my application on Heroku. Reading the error codes page did not help me solve the problem, it took awhile but I was finally able to track it down.

The error was being generated in the browser but checking the rails logs, the requests were returning HTTP 200 success codes, so the problem was being generated at the web server level on the Heroku stack.

Turns out the problem was caused by setting response.header for no browser caching. I was using code similar to this post. Everything worked fine after I removed this line

• response.headers["Expires"] = 0

Heroku - sending email with Gmail

I have been working on deploying a Rails application to Heroku. A couple of gotchas I ran into when following this post "Sending email with Gmail"

• Don't use a dollar sign ($) in your password 
• this can work locally if you put single quotes around the value, but on the heroku server it saved the entire string but at runtime would truncate it at the dollar sign
• for example using the password 'left-side$right-side'
• heroku config:add GMAIL_SMTP_PASSWORD=left-side$right-side
• heroku config returns > GMAIL_SMTP_PASSWORD=left-side$right-side
• heroku console 
• type ENV['GMAIL_SMTP_PASSWORD'] returns > left-side

Heroku is running Ruby 1.8.6, locally I am running Ruby 1.8.7, I made a small hack to the plugin to avoid errors in development mode

./vendor/plugins/gmail_smtp/init.rb
changed the first line to
require 'smtp_tls' if RUBY_VERSION < "1.8.7" 

tls is already handled in 1.8.7 and this code must have been creating some type of conflict

imeem on 64-bit ubuntu

Getting flash to work correctly on 64-bit Ubuntu can be challenging. By following various blog and forum posts I was able to get it to work, but never the flash player for imeem. Every now and again I would try to re-install flash and see if it would work for imeem but until last night I was never successful. 

It turns out that imeem will only work with the 32-bit flash player. After so much work to get the 64-bit player working in Firefox 3.0 and 3.5 I did not want to remove it so I downloaded Opera and installed the 32-bit player under its plugin directory and imeem works great!

• Download and install Opera
• verify that you cannot play music in imeem
• Close Opera
• download the 32-bit flash player in '.tar.gz' format
• extract the libflashplayer.so file from the archive
• then you will need to put this in the directory /usr/lib/opera/plugins/
• you won't have permissions to write to that directory unless you are in sudo mode
• open a terminal and type 'sudo nautilus'
• copy the file into the directory (you could do this from the terminal window also probably 'sudo mv libflashplayer.so /usr/lib/opera/plugins/libflashplayer.so'
• Open Opera
• check the plugins - type opera:plugins in the address bar
• you should see Shockwave Flash and it should be pointing to the libflashplayer.so file under opera plugins, by default my opera installation was pointing to /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/ for the flash plugin, my guess is opera looks for plugins in its own directory and if not found then looks in mozilla directory
• you should now be able to play music with imeem!

I am running Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope by the way. Here are some links that might work to get the 64-bit player working for Firefox

• http://art.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1297385
• http://www.ubuntugeek.com/how-to-install-adobe-flash-player-10-in-ubuntu-804-hardy-heron.html
• http://art.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1292438
• http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/install-flash-10-ubuntu-linux-64bit.html
• this last one is probably the best bet, check the comments there

Factory Girl makes rails testing so much easier

Factory Girl makes rails testing so much easier. I watched a Railscasts on Factory Girl recently but had been putting off trying it out until last week. Glad I gave it a try - now I can say good-bye to fixtures and just write my tests!

• Factory Girl
• Railscast on Factory Girl

Factory Girl is developed by thoughbot; they have some great open source projects, check out Shoulda to make your rails testing even easier.

convert mkv files to dvd with ubuntu

Turns out there is a great program for this - my guess is it works well with other formats such as avi, mpeg, etc...

DeVeDe, if you are running 9.04 (jaunty) or higher it is in the repositories

System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager

enter 'devede' in the search and then install

Procedure sp_droplogin, Line 93 Login is aliased or mapped to a user in one or more database(s)

Trying to remove a MSSQL login from a database server, recieve the following eror

Msg 15175, Level 16, State 1, Procedure sp_droplogin, Line 93
Login 'qa' is aliased or mapped to a user in one or more database(s). Drop the user or alias before dropping the login.

Solution: run this command to determine what alias or groups the login is associated with and then remove those; might be nice if they just added this to the error message?

sp_helpuser 'qa'