Up to Something

Typo is a Rails app. Rails is a Ghetto. While I’m not sure what it has to do with torturing the Jewish people, I think that Zed might be a Jew. I digress.

Rails is clearly caught in a ghetto. It’s strange and suffers from strange documentation. One example of something well-known only to Rails people are the DB Migration steps:

• 1. backup your db
• 2. Install your update / new instance / whatever
• 3. issue “rake db:migrate”

It wasn’t known to me. Apparently it wasn’t known to most of the Internet. How did I find the magical command “db:migrate”? I found it with the same steps I used to find almost all things about Typo: I crawled through blogs and groups and everything else. I have never found a single site that had concise documentation. Everything is simply people blogging about how a particular problem was solved. I have never found any upgrade guides. This search also found me another goodie: purge your sessions table before the 5.0.3 startup.

I think that the entire Rails documentation process is based on hype. Either you pay attention to the hype, or you’re doomed. The way to understand it is to use it. The way to use it is either bloody or all-consuming. The hype is how the word is spread. Once I knew how to use the secret db:migrate, I found TONS about it.

Typo is the child of Rails. I couldn’t find an upgrade guide, but I did find an upgrade guy. David, the Nihilist, Gibbons. He is my Typo/Rails upgrade guy. He has worked with Rails and for a while was the best sysadmin that PlanetArgon ever had. David has helped me with more simple problems than I can count.

The last problem which I had was errant notifiers in Typo. I tried (and failed) to post comments. I tried to see what was failing. I turned on debug mode. Nothing. Not a damn thing. I went into settings attempted to disable notification. It didn’t work, but I didn’t notice. Still no debug messages.

Well, at length David did a little SQL magic.

update users set notify_via_jabber='f';
update users set notify_via_email='f';

Wow. Well, his history with Typo gave him something that I didn’t have: a mistrust for the admin interface. I don’t blame the Typo people for this crap, but I do blame the lack of docs for everything else. I guess it’s time to get out of the ghetto.

I don’t use Ruby much. I use PostgreSQL quite a bit. My blog pisses me off - lots of slow load times, lots of serious lag. Today, I did a “control-R” refresh in Firefox. Eleven (11) Seconds to load the page! It was awful.

Here is what I did….

• VACUUM
• REINDEX

embassy site-packages # vacuumdb -U superpg  -d jmstypo
VACUUM
embassy site-packages # psql -U superpg -d jmstypo \
                  -c "reindex database jmstypo;"
NOTICE:  table ......... was reindexed
....
REINDEX

Full load time: 3 Seconds

Referesh time: 1.5 seconds.

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I am moving this blog in the next month or two. I want to put ruby onto a faster box. A 1ghz p3 just doesn’t buy what it used to.

My Typo is aging a bit, and I have some strange problems. I have seen all my problems as closed tickets in the Typo Trac site. Everytime I try to update though, I get horrible rake errors, etc.

My good friend Nihilist gave me a hot tip that r761 was fairly stable. This seems to have been a good thing.

I also decided to update lighttpd. Gentoo Portage doesn't have 1.4.11, so I had to bump the ebuild, add it to Asylumware Portage and add it myself. No problem. I also put in a couple extras

xXxX@embassy ~/public_html/typo.r761 $ svn export -r761 svn://typosphere.org/typo/trunk
xXxX@embassy ~/public_html/typo.r761 $ rake migrate
....[excess trimmed]......
Extending content table
Converting pages
Updating all articles
Adding podcast metadata fields
Adding Redirect Table
NOTICE:  CREATE TABLE will create implicit sequence "redirects_id_seq" for serial column "redirects.id"
NOTICE:  CREATE TABLE / PRIMARY KEY will create implicit index "redirects_pkey" for table "redirects"
Setting published flag on each comment
xXxX@embassy ~/public_html/typo.r761 $