Get WEBrick and SELinux to play nice while developing Rails applications

So I am learning Ruby on Rails (and absolutely love it by the way) and decided that I wanted to try and get my rails application running on my Fedora 8 VMware Fusion image. As with everyone else the first problem I encountered when trying to access the application on any other machine on the network I hit problems with SELinux not allowing access. Here is the work around that has worked for me.

Open a terminal in Fedora and type

# system-config-securitylevel

This will open the configuration application for SELinux. Now change to the other ports tab and click the ‘Add’ button. Look down for the revelant port number on the list, most likely 3000 and add it. You should now have something along the lines of the image below

Fire up WEBrick and try accessing via another machine on the network and everything should work just fine, at least it did for me.

Back to my learning Rails

Mailplane 2 enters public beta

My favorite Gmail application on the Mac has a new version in public Beta and there is some nice stuff to be had. One very nice feature though has to be the plug-in that will work with OmniGroup’s OmniFocus (my favorite keep me on track application). It will allow you to insert a new item in OmniFocus that links directly back to the email from which your task originated.

Check out all the details here and the OmniFocus Plug-in details here.

I cannot wait to see how this progresses, Mailplane is a fantastic application that I use all the time.

Logic Studio 8 - MainStage, a dream station

As I have mentioned I recently brought an M-Audio Axiom 49 USB Midi Controller, well I have been enjoying it so much that I decided to upgrade my Logic Express 8 to the full Studio version. The Logic application it’s self is not really any different but it does come with a ton of extra sample loops (the full 5 Apple Jam Packs), extra synth plug-ins (some great classic analogs and outstanding sampler) and instrument control strips. However the one thing in the whole suite of tools that has really impressed me way more than I thought it ever would is the MainStage application, this great tool has proven not only to be a good live control box and instrument creator for my keyboard but has replaced my Digitech GNX guitar effects board. The Amp and audio effects are easily on par with the hardware based pedals I have replaced and much more. Although no software solution beats my Bad Horsie 2 Wah pedal!

So the way I have set things up is to create a series of audio patches that I tend to use for my ‘standard’ set of guitar sounds. For example distorted rhythm/lead and a clean rhythm/lead. And due to the outstanding way MainStage works I can use the tap pads on my Axiom 49 keyboard to turn on and off the pedals and change patches. The only problem that remains now is stopping my exploring the endless possibilities of sound creation and use some of them to just play with. What I need to do now is figure out the simplest solution to get my MainStage patch into Logic rather than recording the processed sound into Logic. I have found the list of defaults from MainStage in Logic but have yet to figure out how to get my custom ones to appear.

Thanks to Logic Studio Pro I have now replaced my guitar effects board with a software solution that can be tweaked after recording rather than before and edit the audio easily in Logic to get the recording I was after, because sometimes we all miss the beat a little

Adobe stops GoLive!

Not a surprise to many I’m sure, I said this would happen after they acquired Macromedia and Dreamweaver. I have been a Dreamweaver user since v2 and never used GoLive! for projects just for fun, it had some nice features and I know there are many GoLive! users out there that will feel the pain on this one.

Personally I’m glad Adobe made this move and will focus on the one tool rather than try and figure out how to sell and develop both.

MacWorld has part of the news on this link. Adobe is due to announce the GoDeath tomorrow according to the article.

Is it just me or has Lost become lost in it’s self?

Having watched and own the first 3 series I have to say that series 4 seems like everyone of the writers had a different story line and they tried to get them all into each episode, the flow and character based approach of the first 3 series is lost (please pardon the pun). Series 4 has been nothing short of Sci-Fi nonsense that rivals the Sci-Fi channels worst in house movie productions, it seems the aim is to drop as many famous philosophers and scientists names as possible in the story line whilst jumping around so much in time that it puts Dr. Who to shame. I guess the producers just want us to forget about all the characters they went to great pains to create in the first 3 series with amazing detail and hidden sub-plot.

Sorry, more episodes like tonight’s and I’m walking away from a program that is turning into as much mindless nonsense as everything else on television that it used to be so much better than.

M-Audio Axiom 49 USB Midi controller/keyboard

As you may of noticed by now I am a big music fan and just for fun Guitar player. Well I needed to replace my Midi keyboard and after some research and basic requirements I settled on M-Audio’s Axiom 49 . My first requirement was it had to be USB powered because I really didn’t need another power pack hanging from the wall, the 2nd was that it had to work correctly under OS-X 10.5.2 and the last being it had to work easily without hours of configuration in Logic Express 8. This keyboard suited those requirements and more.

I have to say after using it I am blown away by it, the keys feel good and are touch sensitive, the 8 pads on the top right are essentially tap pads and are great for tapping out a drum loop or triggering sound effects. There is also midi assignable sliders and pots, truly everything you’ll ever need in a midi controller (for many anyway I suspect). Everything can easily be assigned or ‘learned’ on Logic and you are up and running in no time. One very nice feature is the playback controls for moving around the application timeline and just hitting the record button to start laying down the track. I look forward to learning keyboard playing with this thing and as a final surprise it turned out Guitar Center has a sale on it until the end of the month reducing the price by around $30 I believe.

Check it out here

MacHeist current bundle sales figures add up, but Ethical behavior?

OK First up, I brought one of the previous MacHeist bundles and have no problem with what they are doing. I believe I’ve been over that before.

However my problem is that their current ‘best of’ bundle sales were very VERY slow, this is to be expected really since it is not a new bundle and most purchasers of said bundle probably have the previous and no need for the new one. What really gets me though is that they now claim the bundles sold count was wrong and was supposed to show the count of total sales bundles from MacHeist bundle 1,2 and now 3. Now they state this so there is no misrepresentation here. But we all know that the idea here is people will look at the big number that jumped over 60,000 in one night since they ‘corrected it’ and think wow.

You can argue that this move is to counter the very well selling bundle over at mupromo.com (another great bundle site) and is obviously going to sell better since it has the latest Parallels in it for running Windows on the Mac.

As I state, I have no problem with MacHeist and we all know the controversy it has created over the years (which is by design and helps sales as we all know). But this latest move is questionable at best, and certainly has left a sour taste in the mouth of even MacHeist fans. It’s not wrong, but I think Ethical behavior went out the window at the MacHeist office this time around and they should be ashamed of themselves over this move. I just don’t by that they made a ‘5 day old mistake’ on the count since they always go to great lengths to set these things up with meticulous detail.

Adobe Media Player, promising idea but terrible performance

I eagerly installed the Adobe Media Player 1.0 release (built on Adobe AIR by the way). I have to say that it shows promise, and some of the ideas in there are nice but the performance is amazingly bad considering I’m running it on a Mac Book Pro with 4gb of RAM and well spec’d video card / CPU.

At first I thought it was that it was having some issues downloading the files or maybe my system was doing something to give it problems, but nope that was not it. Navigating the interface is an exercise in frustration as it clearly has that ‘we animated this because we could rather should’ feel to it. Sure you can go into the options and turn off the animations but even then it’s slow. Now I’m wondering if the terrible performance is due to it having to download data every time you click on something like navigating around the catalog?

I will keep trying to like it but if this is Adobe’s idea of a challenge to iTunes then they better rethink it fast before they have another failed media playback system on their hands, iTunes is wonderfully fast on any system including my very old Toshiba laptop with XP, but if this is the performance on a well spec’d current system then users will switch off Adobe Media Player fast.

And what about content? So far most of the stuff I have found is just the same content that appears in Podcasts on iTunes and web sites, I am sure Adobe is pushing hard on media content companies like TV networks to deliver content that is only found on the Adobe player, but it always comes down to the same thing, why would I want another tool delivering the same content I already get in a tool I already have and works well?

Adobe Media Player is perhaps best said to be a demonstration of the Adobe AIR concepts but not it’s performance as a platform.

My new Flash based Blog viewer BETA live at last.

I have been trying to find a way to get my RSS feed into a flash based viewer and have finally figured it out, the BETA is now on the front page of my web site www.evolutiondata.com my last hurdle was getting around a Flash Player Sandbox issue. The problem is pulling data from one location into another, the player is never happy about that. But thanks to my good friend Dylan at Trifold Designs (www.trifolddesigns.com) and his php skills he figured out a way to get a page acting as a proxy for it, please take the time to view Dylan’s work he is one of the best designers I have seen in a long time.

There is much work to be done on it still but I wanted to use it as an excuse to play with the E4X handling in ActionScript 3.0 and so far I’m way impressed with the simple approach they have taken and the powerful fast access you get from the E4X ways of searching xml.

One problem I need to fix is when the text render reaches the del.ico.us link it bugs out for some reason, I need to find a way to either splice the content and remove it or get it rendering properly, my early guess is there is an escape problem in there somewhere I am not handling correctly.

Is Adobe just asleep at the wheel? Mac 64 Bit Photoshop CS4…not

So after spending so much time porting Photoshop for Universal and using that as the reason for a loooooong delay before the Universal release, it now turns out they ported to Carbon so no 64 bit version because you need Cocoa for 64 bit applications on the Mac (According to what I’ve read and been told).

…Is Adobe even paying attention anymore to the community that made them all their money in the first place, or are the developers so out of touch with todays systems they never stopped to think “Maybe we should port it once to Cocoa and be done with it” rather than now having to port it again for CS5…

Tsk Tsk Adobe, get it togeher and stop this bickering with Apple before it starts to hurt your bottomline.

Mind you, 8-12% speed improvement from 64bit over 32…can’t say I’d even notice it. But given the features in the extended edition aimed at the analysis market I can see them loading huge images that requires the extra memory that only 64 bit can take advantage of.