Gimmick alert!

My experience with the AT&T shared data plan (AT&T Mobile Share) for a family of 5 smartphones.

Unshared Option

3GB line/mo $30/line/mo = $150 15GB per month for 5 lines. $5/mo unlimited text = $30 per months for 5 lines. $60 700 rollover voice mins family plan (700 is the lowest you can go on voice). On average, we use less than 200 voice minutes per month). Total Cost $240.

Shared Option

$70 per mo "base cost" plus $40/line/mo = $200 for 4GB shared data per month plus unlimited text and voice. Total cost $270.

If like us, you are a heavy data user, the Shared Option would cost $30 more per month and would get you 11GB LESS than the Unshared plan. Unlimited Voice is a "don't care" for us.

Conclusions

First, AT&T Mobile Share is a gimmick. Even though its billed as shared "data", what you're really getting is unlimited Voice (the sales rep conceded).

Second, being charged a minimum $60/mo for 700 mins of voice that we dont use and need is bogus. We, the consumers, are subsidizing AT&T. There should be a no-voice option with 911 only service.

Third, and most significantly, carriers are still stuck on selling voice service and they are hocking it as if it matters.

Read more...

We Have Pi!

It a took some time to gather a few missing parts but last night, finally, Daron and I booted-up our Raspberry Pi Version-B (RPi). It was exhilarating!

I don't remember exactly what got me hooked on the idea, but after months of reading about the RPi in blogs, I placed an order in early July, 2012. The open source nature and the stated missions of RPi to get high schools hands-on and below the hood with boards and OS's topped me over.

Daron, my youngest and high school freshman (RPi target audience) has shown just enough interest along the way to keep me motivated! When the package arrived in early August, I posted a pic of the bare board on Facebook and got a fair number of thumbs-up. I knew this was going to be fun.

Out of Pocket

• We were on the waiting list for several weeks with Newark/Element14. Board plus red plastic enclosure including shipping and handing $53.39
• An HDMI to DVI cable which we got on eBay for $3.43 including shipping.
• We had 2GB microSD card but wanted a larger capacity one so we got an 8GB card on eBay with adapter and free shipping direct from China for $4.94
• Some months back, I recycled a couple of superlong CAT5 cables. Our RPi workbench is quite a distance from the Ethernet router. So we needed a Cable Joiner which we got on eBay a set of 2 (no less) for $0.99 with free shipping direct from China!

Total: $62.75

Initial boot

Plus Ethernet

Reuse

We reused the following items from around the house:

• Apple iPad adapter
• Motorola micro USB charger cable
• BTC 6100C USB keyboard
• Microsoft IntelliMouse Optical USB Mouse
• RJ45 CAT 5 5E Ethernet
• Pair of headphones

The Software

We stated with Raspbian “wheezy” download 2012-07-15-wheezy-raspbian.zip

Daron used these steps and his Windows laptop to create the SD card for the RPi. Worked the first time. The instructions included the following ominous note "Be careful to select the correct drive; if you get the wrong one you can destroy your computer's hard disk!"

Issues and Workarounds

• Pocket Mouse 72114 USB Mouse did not work with the RPi. This one isn't on this list of Problem USB Mouse Devices. Tried registering on the site to add this device to the list but wasn't able to. Thwarted!
• Had to change locale and keyboard mapping using these steps. I found this out when I tried logging into Gmail with my account where the password includes a symbol font. Shift-2 and Shift-3 were mapped to a British variant.
• Had to change timezone to Pacific using these steps.
• As soon as I was browsing, I got excited and jumped into Gmail. Slooow and even crashed once.  I love the CPU indicator on the LXDE (Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment). Its like the RPM indicator on a car. Lets you know when things are maxing the RPi out. At 700MHz and 256MB RAM, maxing out is easy to go but still plenty of potential.

ToDo List

• Buy a Adafruit power supply for more juice. 
• Buy a USB hub.
• Connect a wireless keyboard and mouse.
• Buy a USB Wi-Fi adapter and connect to NahaNet.
• Connect to external audio.

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OS X Mountain Lion musings

I have a trusty MacBook Pro early-2008 model which I upgraded to OSX Mountain Lion recently.

The upgrade went surprisingly smoothly - surprising compared to Windows experiences of years gone by. The laptop had the original 2MB of RAM which it came with. Things slowed down in a scary way (to the point where I was wondering if the upgrade was a good idea).

I upgraded memory to 4MB off eBay and things are back to normal. I could have upgraded to 8MB but that was a bit over budget for me.

MySQL O_o

I'm a novice hobbyist software tinkerer. As I started down the path of migrating a Java app to Amazon Web Services, I discovered that MySQL that I have running for years pre-Mountain Lion had stopped working. MySQL would fail to start with the error message "The MySQL Database Server installation was not found. Please make sure the /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqladmin file is present."

Oops

After some searching around, this page from dougr provided the hint, though the original article was for Leopard. It was simple case of a symbolic link to that went missing during the upgrade.

At first, I placed the link under /Users/roupen which turns out was wrong (I did say I am a novice). I placed the link under /usr/local like so sudo ln -s mysql-5.0.51a-osx10.5-x86 mysql

Ahhh yes, finally running

Things are happy again now!

Growl No More

The other thing that I did is remove Growl after some looking around. I'm all in with the Mountain Lion Notifications. When I looked at apps that Growl preferences pannel, there were only a handful of apps listed there are using Growl. Several were old-old apps that I no longer use (and had since uninstalled). I used the Growl Uninstaller listed on this page and bam! done.

Google Music Manager No More

Having taken a break from Android (was always an iPhone user), I also removed Google Music Manager. I didn't realize removing the app from the Applications folder wasn't sufficient. Some additional clean-up was required as listed here. Thank you Google for complete uninstall instructions. Remains to be seen if I will get back to Android and Google Music some day... Android JellyBean was the last flavor of Android for me for now...

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All Strabucks aren't created equal

Some Starbucks stores don't have ovens - not sure why. Doesn't seem to be a "size" thing since the one I'm at this morning is as big as others I've been at. Maybe its a ventilation thing. Note sure.

 
But I know that a multi-grain bagel isn't the same when not toasted; at room temperature, its like eating tasty cardboard.

PS: What's the plural of Strabucks?

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More than a weekend project

I composed this post back in July, 2008, but never clicked Publish.

Since mid-Feb, my good friend Tom and I have been working on a web project: ScoobyDeal.com, is a deal-at-a-time social commerce site for cool gadgets and great deals. We're down to the last week of testing and bugfixing. I think of this project as my Guy Kawasaki how-I-built-a-web-site for under $X.

This is a v1 of ScoobyDeal with plans to add other social features. This post lays it all out for posterity.

We started the project Mid-Feb and have been working with an awesome team distributed globally on the implementation while doing the product/project management and testing State-side. So here is the breakdown.

One-time Costs:

• Corporate entity: $115, DIY at the Secretary of State's office in San Francisco.
• UI Design (mockups and flows): in- house with endless hours with Adobe Illustrator and lots of help from good friends.
• UI Development: $935 Web Cake, Cairo, Egypt. Initial concepts State-side $350.
• Web Development: $24,500 Idea2It, Chennai, India.
• Logo: $125 Ukraine.
• Copy: in-house (the typos are my fault).

Infrastructure:

• PayPal Web Payments Pro for credit card processing.
• Google Maps API.
• Google Custom Search Engine.
• Ruby on Rails 2.0 on Aparche and Mongrel plus MySQL
• ImageMagick.

Ongoing Costs:

• Web Hosting: Virtual Private Server $49.99/mo. Server Point.
• Collaboration: $12/mo. Basecamp Personal Edition.
• Credit Card Processing: $30/mo. PayPal.
• Version Control and Bug Tracking: $49/year ProjectLocker Light Angel Edition.

Special Thanks:

• Kamo Asateryan for help with social marketing.
• Brodey Jenkins for creativitiy.
• Suren Markossian for help with instrastrucutre.
• Sanjay Kapoor for help with Ruby and Rails.
• Alex Chee for the initial design.
• Team Viewer for being such an awesome product.

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Octofeed.com and me

I tried out ocotofeed.com the other week. Octofeed is a cleaner way to read your Facebook Wall and Newsfeed. I liked it and turned my wife to it. She quickly noticed some posts from her feed weren't appearing in Octofeed. I emailed hello@octofeed.com and Daniel Chin-Yee responded promptly.

 It turns out that octofeed, like other apps, is at the mercy of the Facebook API's which don't pump all the content out. Plus, what gets pumped out to other apps varies by your friend's privacy settings. So the layout is great but you may not see everything. We've both cooled off Octofeed since. And here is the rest of it.

Read more...

Gems Gems everywhere!

Today, I set out to upgrade my MacBook Pro to a full fledged dev machine. For this, I added XCode Tools and about a dozen 10 Ruby gems plus ImageMagick which proved to be a bit hairy.

Here we go...

Last login: Fri Jun 27 22:14:41 on console
Macintosh-2:RailsProjects roupen$ sudo gem install RubyInline
Updating metadata for 528 gems from http://gems.rubyforge.org/
...............................................................................complete
Successfully installed rubyforge-1.0.0
Successfully installed hoe-1.6.0
Successfully installed RubyInline-3.7.0
3 gems installed
Installing ri documentation for rubyforge-1.0.0...
Installing ri documentation for hoe-1.6.0...
Installing ri documentation for RubyInline-3.7.0...
Installing RDoc documentation for rubyforge-1.0.0...
Installing RDoc documentation for hoe-1.6.0...
Installing RDoc documentation for RubyInline-3.7.0...

Cool, 3 birds with 1 stone.

Macintosh-2:RailsProjects roupen$ gem install log4r
Successfully installed log4r-1.0.5
1 gem installed
Installing ri documentation for log4r-1.0.5...
Installing RDoc documentation for log4r-1.0.5...
Macintosh-2:RailsProjects roupen$ gem install dsl_accessor

Successfully installed activesupport-2.1.0
Successfully installed dsl_accessor-0.1.0
2 gems installed
Installing ri documentation for activesupport-2.1.0...
Installing ri documentation for dsl_accessor-0.1.0...
Installing RDoc documentation for activesupport-2.1.0...
Installing RDoc documentation for dsl_accessor-0.1.0...

Cool, 2 birds with 1 stone.

Next, i installed google-geocode but it turns out I didn’t need it so I uninstalled it (Murali ;-) ).

Macintosh-2:RailsProjects roupen$ gem install google-geocode
ERROR:  While executing gem ... (Gem::FilePermissionError)
    You don't have write permissions into the /usr/bin directory.
Macintosh-2:RailsProjects roupen$ sudo gem install google-geocode
Password:
Successfully installed ZenTest-3.10.0
Successfully installed rc-rest-2.2.1
Successfully installed google-geocode-1.2.1
3 gems installed
Installing ri documentation for ZenTest-3.10.0...
Installing ri documentation for rc-rest-2.2.1...
Installing ri documentation for google-geocode-1.2.1...
Installing RDoc documentation for ZenTest-3.10.0...
Installing RDoc documentation for rc-rest-2.2.1...
Installing RDoc documentation for google-geocode-1.2.1...
Macintosh-2:RailsProjects roupen$ sudo gem uninstall google-geocode
Successfully uninstalled google-geocode-1.2.1
Macintosh-2:RailsProjects roupen$ sudo gem uninstall zentest
ERROR:  While executing gem ... (Gem::InstallError)
    Unknown gem zentest->= 0
Macintosh-2:RailsProjects roupen$ sudo gem uninstall ZenTest

You have requested to uninstall the gem:
ZenTest-3.10.0
rc-rest-2.2.1 depends on [ZenTest (>= 3.4.2)]
If you remove this gems, one or more dependencies will not be met.
Continue with Uninstall? [Yn]  n
ERROR:  While executing gem ... (Gem::DependencyRemovalException)
    Uninstallation aborted due to dependent gem(s)
Macintosh-2:RailsProjects roupen$ sudo gem uninstall rc-rest
Successfully uninstalled rc-rest-2.2.1
Macintosh-2:RailsProjects roupen$ sudo gem uninstall ZenTest
Successfully uninstalled ZenTest-3.10.0
Remove executables:
autotest, multiruby, multiruby_setup, rails_test_audit, unit_diff, zentest

in addition to the gem? [Yn]  Y
Removing autotest
Removing multiruby
Removing multiruby_setup
Removing rails_test_audit
Removing unit_diff
Removing zentest

A quick visual check…

Macintosh-2:RailsProjects roupen$ gem list

*** LOCAL GEMS ***

actionmailer (2.0.2, 1.3.6)
actionpack (2.0.2, 1.13.6)
actionwebservice (1.2.6)
activerecord (2.0.2, 1.15.6)
activeresource (2.0.2)
activesupport (2.1.0, 2.0.2, 1.4.4)
acts_as_ferret (0.4.1)
capistrano (2.0.0)
cgi_multipart_eof_fix (2.2)
daemons (1.0.7)
dnssd (0.6.0)
dsl_accessor (0.1.0)
fastthread (1.0)
fcgi (0.8.7)
ferret (0.11.4)
gem_plugin (0.2.2)
highline (1.2.9)
hoe (1.6.0)
hpricot (0.6)
libxml-ruby (0.3.8.4)
log4r (1.0.5)
mongrel (1.0.1)
needle (1.3.0)
net-sftp (1.1.0)
net-ssh (1.1.2)
rails (2.0.2, 1.2.6)
rake (0.8.1, 0.7.3)
RedCloth (3.0.4)
ruby-openid (1.1.4)
ruby-yadis (0.3.4)
rubyforge (1.0.0)
rubygems-update (1.1.1)
RubyInline (3.7.0)
rubynode (0.1.3)
sqlite3-ruby (1.2.1)
termios (0.9.4)

Carry on…

Macintosh-2:RailsProjects roupen$ sudo gem install image_science
Password:
Successfully installed image_science-1.1.3
1 gem installed
Installing ri documentation for image_science-1.1.3...
Installing RDoc documentation for image_science-1.1.3...
Macintosh-2:RailsProjects roupen$ 

Time for ImageMagick.

See this go to section about Mac OS X binary release.

Download ImageMagick-universal-apple-darwin9.3.0.tar.gz and copy to /Users/roupen or somewhere permanent because you’re going to point environment variables to here.

tar xvfz ImageMagick-universal-apple-darwin9.3.0.tar.gz
rm ImageMagick-universal-apple-darwin9.3.0.tar.gz

You should see a new dir /Users/roupen/ImageMagick-6.4.1

Next, set some env variables

export MAGICK_HOME="$HOME/ImageMagick-6.4.1"
export PATH="$MAGICK_HOME/bin:$PATH"
export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH="$MAGICK_HOME/lib"

Run a quick test to make sure ImageMagick is working

Macintosh-2:~ roupen$ cd
Macintosh-2:~ roupen$ pwd
/Users/roupen
Macintosh-2:~ roupen$ convert
Version: ImageMagick 6.4.1 06/12/08 Q16 http://www.imagemagick.org
Copyright: Copyright (C) 1999-2008 ImageMagick Studio LLC

UPDATE

I had some problems getting RMagick going – the issue is well covered in discussions on the web. So I backed away from installing image_magic and then the rmagick gem separately. I deleted the image_magic directory and well rmagick never installed.

The NEW path that paid off is described here using rmagick-osx-installer. Search for How do I install RMagick on OS X? on this page for details.

As described in the README for the rmgaick_osx_installer, I first installed XCode Tools and X11SDK off the MacBook Pro DVD. After that, I installed the script and it took a while but it was very uneventful.

libpng was installed successfully
libjpeg was installed successfully
ghostscript was installed successfully
ghostscript-fonts-std was installed successfully
FreeType was installed successfully
libwmf was installed successfully
ImageMagick was installed successfully
RMagick was installed successfully
Removing rm_install_tmp directory...Done

I think I am done. The convert test passed.

Macintosh-2:rm_install-1.1.1 roupen$ convert
Version: ImageMagick 6.4.2 06/28/08 Q8 http://www.imagemagick.org
Copyright: Copyright (C) 1999-2008 ImageMagick Studio LLC

I got real close to using MacPorts for this last step but didn’t (felt heavy handed).

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Payo who?

Every now and then, a horrible customer service experience comes around that redefines for me what bad customer service actually is. Over the last 24 hours, I have been experiencing just that with Payoneer.com. I set out to transfer some funds (sub $1k) from here to an offshore location using their service. On this end, I am using a credit card.

The only way to reach these people is via chat support on their site where you wait time can vary from a few minutes to half an hour. The help you get over chat is robotic at best. You try calling their main number and "press-2" gets you to support which after telling you to go online actually dead-ends and the call drop right after they tell you to leave a message. You "press-3" to reach sales. Well, yesterday, I left a voice message and no one called back of course. Today, it too was dropping the call. There is no one to talk to.

Finally, it came down to them asking me to FAX over a copy of my drivers license and a copy of the back and front of the credit card I am using (as to why they wanted this is a whole other story of course). This came after I got an email yesterday telling me that the transaction was approved. Today, they decided they needed more "documentation".

Ok, so where do I send it to? They gave me 2 fax numbers non of which worked. Finally, they had the audacity to ask me to scan the 3 pages and send it in. Meanwhile, I had an unpleasnt call with one support rep. And an unpleasant chat with another. WOW! A horrible customer service experience.

I had to use these guys but if you ever have a choice, avoid this one.

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S3 the way to go for backups...

So I'm still a newb with all this web app dev stuff. One of the many worries as we get ready to deploy a real app - with real customer data - is backups.After hashing it over with Suren and Murali and talking with the hosting provider (ServerPoint - who so far haven't been very helpful, so may be x-provider soon).

My spiritual adviser at SpeedyRails, Maykel Rodriguez suggested S3 and he has the data to prove it.

For example, if you transfer 100MB every day to amazon s3, that's 3GB of data transfer-in per month, and then 3GB of storage (considering you only keep one month of backups), let's say you download 1GB per month as well and you have a total of 1000 requests (many http get/post requests)... this is... only 0.93 USD per month! LOL ... pretty cheap eh?

Here, do the math using the S3 cost calculator.

$0.93 BRILLIANT! EUREKA!

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Wazup up with eFax lately?

eFax is one of the very-very first "free" services that I remember coming across in my early days with the internet. So we are talking 10+ years.

It was always a paid and a free model. I signed-up for a free version and got a number. Who uses FAX these days anyway, you ask? I don't receive much but having school-aged kids, they receive homework and stuff from friends now and then...

So I guess this pre-Web 1.0 fixture must be having monitization issues because I have been getting some random emails from them in the last couple of months trying to get me to upgrade. First, it was "hey, your number is changing" GREAT! Its still customary to have a FAX number of business cards and I have used my eFAX number for years. Thanks eFAX! Today, it was an email saying I have received 45 pages in the last 90 days and that I am violating my service agreement.

First, I understand a company has to monitize but is this the best way to go around it with a 10+ year user? Second, in this day and age of VOIP and ad models, isn't there some other ways that eFAX can monitize?

I think I am going to look for an alternative service or just stop including a FAX number in my coordinates. As for the kids, we have an traditional FAX number attached to the phone line, they can start to use that...

UPDATE: I got (yet) another email from eFAX today that I violated their terms of use, yadi yada. This time, I called the sales number in the email (oy vey!). After some classical music, some perky lady answered and after asking for my eFax number she kept reminding me that they have NO infomration about my account (because its free). So then why am I getting these notices? She had no idea. Bottom line: wait until June 25, your old number will expire and we will issue a new one. Ha? That's it? thats it... According to her, they are trying to recover number because they are short (443 area codes? hm, ok). To me, this is just bully-spam to get people to upgrade. Shame on eFAX.

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Smoother than expected

I just got around to upgrading my MacBook Pro to Rails 2.0.2 and the experience was smoother than expected. I figured something was going to blow-up somewhere but it all went smooth. I followed the 4 steps outlined here.

sudo gem update --system
sudo gem install rails
sudo gem update rake
sudo gem update sqlite3-ruby

Step 3 reported that it had nothing to update. Step 4 likewise. I don't use sqlite so I probably did'nt need to do the last step but I did for completeness.

David updated textbull to run on 2.0.2 so it was time to upgrade. I'm now merging Purnima's code in.

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Firefox and gmail not happy

Firefox and gmail not happy
Originally uploaded by roupen

I been using my MacBook Pro happily for the last few months including Firefox 2.0 and Gmail. A couple of days ago, gmail stopped working with Firefox on my machine.

I tried clearing cookies and even reinstalled firefox but the problem wont go away. So for now, I am using Safari to read my gmail, which is not bad but its no firefox :(

Update: I upgraded to FF3 Beta and the problem went away (thanks to Noam for the suggestion). I lost a few plugins along the way that weren't compatible with FF3 but oh well.

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My unintentional hike

So at 3PM Friday I had an appointment to go see an oral surgeon referred by my regular dentist to pull out a wisdom tooth whose time had come. The address I was trying to get to was something California Ave in San Francisco. So I Google mapped it and decided to BART. HAH!

I landed at Montgomery street BART - the city was brilliant and sunny. The Google map showed a few blocks on California from Montgomery - no sweat. I was even a half hour early for my 3PM appointment. So I turned on California and noticed the addresses were 300-something hah, I was trying to get ot 3500-something. O-oh. So Google maps was wrong, clearly. I was trying to get to the corner of Spruce and California. I asked a cab driver and he said "couple of miles". So I figured I have time and let me hike it - its a beautiful day. What I didn't take into account is the UPHILLS of San Francisco - haha. Up towards Mason I will breathing from every orafesus on my body. An hour later, I made my way to my destination half hour late. I must have hiked about 40 blocks. The good news is that taking the wisdom tooth out was a breeze!

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Teen influence

My teen influencing my musical taste days.

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Wow - scam-lightening strikes twice

My trusty Sony Cybershot of 3-4 years finally died. So I've been in the market for a new digital still camera. This post is about a couple of internet scams that I have ran into not once - but twice.

Update: I got a box from FotoConnection.com yesterday. I called them today to confirm what was in the box before opening it. They assured me they had sent a rechargeable unit. Against my gut instinct, I opened the box and sure enough, its NOT!. After an irate call with them. I am filling out the RMA. Looking forward to the call to AMEX to dispute the 15% restocking fee. What slime balls!


After looking around for deals at Costco for a new camera, I decided to go online. Checked-in at Sony Style and then did a Google search. The first match that Google returned was FotoConnection.com. So I went online and placed an order.

The next day, I got an email asking me to call some 800 number for "security" reasons. So I called and I found myself talking to a character from The Sopranos with background noise of a some boiler room operation somewhere (I'm guessing) in New York. So the guys goes on into a high pressure up-sell. It turns out that the device that I bought has some 15 minute battery and an overnight charger (meaning it slow charges) that they have put in after market.

The "buttons" for this suit were going to cost an extra $80 (reference to the saying "Oh, you want buttons with the suit?"). When I told the guy to cancel the order, the price kept dropping and dropping to $14. I kept getting random emails from this outfit for another week directing to some site for security verification.

So I then went back on and this time looking for another Cybershot and found another outfit PreferredPhoto.com. And guess what? The same process started repeating. When I asked the guy on the phone if they were associated with FotoConnection.com he claimed no knowledge. So I canceled the order again.

Wow. Talk about bait and switch plus-plus slime. Yuk! A horrible experience. DEFINITELY AVOID!

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Net scammers remind me of ants...

My trusty Sony Cybershot of 3-4 years finally died. So I've been in the market for a new digital still camera. This post is about a couple of internet scams that I have ran into not once - but twice.



A week or so ago I posted an ad on Facebook Marketplace about a license for e-Text for Windows that I wanted to sell. This was the only response I got super late last night and I was excited (someone wants to buy it). The English in the post sounded a bit strange but I didn't pay much attention so I game my email.

Then came the hook - this morning I got an email that said the person is OWED money in the U.S. (not Uganda, as those email scams oft say) and that the cashier's check would be sent to me. I would deduct $25 for the item plus a $40 bonus ;-) and to mail the balance as a check.

What is fascinating here is... first, they have latched on Facebook... second, using Marketplace as the entry (Facebook should add glaring warnings like Craigslist to warn people about such scams -- I didn't think anything of it at first (because, hey, its Facebook)... third, the amounts involved are small enough $25 + $40. My guess is that the fake cashier's check was going to be for under $1k.

So word to the wise... avoid this Kyle Fischer email f_ang_17_23@yahoo.com

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The Leopard, the Noob and MySQL

After much waiting, I go another Macbook Book Pro last week. The machine has 2.4GHz Intel core 2 Duo 2GB RAM 200GB HD and is running Max OS X v 10.5.2. Thanks to Carlos for pitching in the F&F Apple Discount (obrigado muito). After moving documents off the Vaio, next came the decision - to buy or not to buy Microsoft Office. I downloaded OpenOffice for Mac but my experience was so-so. Every time I launched OpenOffice, an X11 console window would pop-up (and an icon would appear in the Doc yuk). Moreover, OpenOffice would timeout (apparently waiting for X11 to start) and then things would work Ok. I read up on it and it turns out this is an issue with OpenOffice and Max OS X until the native version due out "later this year". My faith shaken, I went ahead and ordered MS Office online... Luckly, the following day, Suren clued me on NeoOffice and it is just perfect. So I canceled my order so I am still 100% MS free.

Next came the Rails environment. If you're into Raisl and Leopard, you know that Ruby, Rails, Mongrel, Sqlite3 and SVN come pre-installed with Leopard. Its all good and it all worked out of the box. HOWEVER, I wanted to get on MySQL since the others I am collaborating with on a project are also on it... This is where things got interesting.

First, the question was -- which version to install? Answer: Go with v 5.0.51a MySQL 5.0 Community Server - GA release. There is an alpha of version 5.2 and 6.0 but I opted for the GA (Generally Available) release.

The release comes with two packages: 1) mysql-5.0.51a-osx10.5-x86.pkg this is the server 2) MySQLStartupItem.pkg this is a bit which along with MySQL.perfPane that comes in the installation (disk image as its called) allows you to start and stop the server from a graphic interface. This is when the plot thickened.

The first package (server) installed without incidents. I was able to tickle the server using the following command line commands:

shell> cd /usr/local/mysql shell> sudo ./bin/mysqld_safe (ENTER YOUR PASSWORD, IF NECESSARY)(PRESS CONTROL-Z) shell> bg (PRESS CONTROL-D OR ENTER "EXIT" TO EXIT THE SHELL)

Meanwhile, I had been reading blogs and forum posts on the subject and it was becoming clearer that something was up with MySQL and Leopard (people talking about stuff not starting and not being installed properly) I soon found out.The time to install the second package (MySQLStartupItem) which I did and it went ahead through the usual installer wizard steps and congratulated me on a successful installation. But when I tried to use the Startup Item to start MySQL using the command below it was no dice.

shell> sudo /Library/StartupItems/MySQLCOM/MySQLCOM start

It turns out there is nothing under /StartupItems Gaah! The package installs /MySQLCOM under /usr/local/ go figure.

After much reading and pocking around, I came across bug 25008 on the MySQL site. The bug was first opened 12 Dec 2006 (title: Mac OS X's StartupItem does not work) and has been alive since. On Feb 7, 2008, 7 one Andrew Lindley reported the identical problem to mine.

After a few exchanges with one Mattias Jonsson, it turns out that a fix is to 1) move the MySQLCOM directory to the right place 2) Install and use a corrected MySQL.prefPane

However, if you are a newb like me, you may have trouble with the "mv" command. Thanks to Mattias, the correct syntax for this is

sudo mv /usr/local/MySQLCOM /Library/StartupItems/

The other newb thing I couldn't do is add usr/local/mysql/bin to my bash shell PATH so that I could start mysqladmin from the command line. Everything I read assumed that I knew where the said profile file needs to go. So the right thing to do here is create a .bash_profile file under /Users/ Many thanks to Jeff McLeman for guiding me through this.

The contents of the .bash_profile file as follows:

PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/mysql/bin

MANPATH=$MANPATH:/usr/local/mysql/man

The last newb thing I had to figure out is where/what the "Perf Panel" is that you're supposed to use to start/stop the server. Again, thanks to Mattias, it turns out that this is nothing more than good 'ol "System Preferences". If all went well, launch it and you should see a MySQL icon under "Other". See?

Picture 1
Originally uploaded by roupen

So moral of the story :) In 10+ years since I used Unix little has changed in the once analogy I read about Unix in an article title "if airlines were operating systems" . Its still a lot of hacking, haggling, heckling and friends helping friends. In the end, it all worked out and its all open source and $FREE$. Yey!.

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Rock 'n Ruby (on Rails)

Strata @ Sweet's Ballroom :: 09/02/06
Originally uploaded by evolofoto

Met Hrag C, guitarist with Strata, seen here. We're collaborating on textbull.com with Chris, Purnima, and Goerge. An all-volunteer weekend startup army. After a few year touring, Hrag is back in the area going back to finish school. In addition to music, Hrag does front end web dev and is getting into Ruby like the rest of the army.

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How much longer?

fixes
Originally uploaded by roupen

It's been about 48 hours since Flickr stopped showing updates to contact's photos. How much longer I wonder.

Update: 2/29/08 5:22PM Just noticed that this is now fixed.

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100,004 views 2,759 pics

100,004 alltime views 2,759 pics
Originally uploaded by roupen

As of this post, my Flickr stream has 100,004 views on 2,759 pictures. My YouTube with 95 videos is at 85,386 video views.

My wife still doesn't get why I share this stuff -- I'm not sure I have a scientific answer for why I do it either. Seeing the views go up has its own reward (is it a "vitamin" or a "pill" hmm).

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