Archive for the Category ◊ Mono ◊

LinuxWorld – ABCs of Desktop Linux
Wednesday, March 29th, 2006 | Author: kevin

Next week I’ll be in Boston attending my first LinuxWorld conference. were I’ll be giving to presentation/demonstrations a day, plus plenty of public and vendor meet and greet. It should be insane. I’m pretty excited about doing a good job, but as usual I’m still not quite prepared. I’ve got to go through my slides and demonstrations a few times. Plus on Monday we have to install Linux on some loaner machines and test some tricks I have planned.

Then over all of that, I have to try to do some serious on-the-spot journalist stories to help cover some of my costs. Looking forward I want to cover:

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Category: Internet, Linux, Mono, Open Source, Opportunity  | Comments off
Ohh, the agony
Sunday, March 20th, 2005 | Author: kevin

On Thursday Paco helped me fix the last problem with my Mono installation. In the httpd.conf file to configure Apache with mod_mono, besides the usual Alias, MonoApplications I needed to have the following lines in the directoy tags:

Order allow,deny # Security issue with mod_mono
Allow from all # Provided by Paco Martinez

This fixed the problem I was having, which was security related. I was receiving a 403 forbidden message from Apache.

So all was right with the world until Friday after lunch SuSE started freaking out. I started getting error messages while reading OpenOffice files and finally was unable to proceed. I restarted Linux (In the open source and Linux communities we say restart instead of reboot. It makes us believe that we’re above the old Windows creed, “If windows is freaking out, just reboot” That will fix it! In the end it is same thing.) and then all hell broke loose. I got a strange message during the boot that there was an error reading or mounting the reiser file system, which seemed bad, really bad. Linux automatically rebooted and then more weirdness ensued. To cut a bad story short, after trying a few things with PJ Cabrera’s (my partner at SNAP) help, we concluded that the filesystem had been turned read-only and there was no way (among us mortals) to remove the setting.

After spending three weeks and probably 25 to 30 hours working on my Mono installation for the LJ article, I had to re-install SuSE. What a blow! Looking back I have no clear idea what happened, but my best guess is that I let the battery get too low on Thursday night.

I had attended the first workshop for the EnterprizePR 2005 business plan competitionand used the laptop. I wanted to generate some buzz about open source and Linux so I took notes on the laptop during the presentation, hoping someone would ask about . I got a warning at 10% battery remaining and proceeded to suspend to disk. Everything looked fine after plugging in Friday morning and working for a few hours. Later after another unsuspend from disk, Linux was operating very slow and then wham, disaster. I’m not sure if I could have done anything different; It would be all second guessing. Luckily I was able to get my most recent data off of the machine but Mono was lost.

Frankly I’m at a loss to share any grand insight I learned from the experience. I would have to say simply “When Linux works, it works great. When things go wrong, they go really wrong. There doesn’t seem to be much middle ground.” As with all computing, when your pushing the envelope you have to expect to crash sometimes. So always be prepared for the worst.

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Innovation lust
Tuesday, March 15th, 2005 | Author: kevin

Mono setup

It has been an intense few days. Through the weekend I continued work on my Mono configuration for the Linux Journal article. I had to admit it finally, I was stuck. I called up Paco, and he was his usually gracious self. We walked through some issues he knew would cause problems. In the end he advised and I agreed to switch the configuration attempt to my laptop which is running SuSE Linux 9.2. We agreed to teleconference on Sunday morning. I spent most of Saturday night trying to get things going. That ended up being a waste of my time. So Sunday we went through installing Red Carpet, updating SuSE, and then diving into building Mono. When we finished I had a working Mono environment, but I was still missing MonoDevelop, XSP, and mod_mono.

I’ve finished MonoDevelop and XSP and both are working well, however, I can’t get mod_mono working. Through this entire experience I’ve been trying to share my frustration. (Editors note: But people don’t won’t to hear about sad endings. They want everything to end rosy with no loose ends.) It has been especially frustrating trying to find definitive sources of information on the web. I’ve found about 5 or 6 ways to configure mod_mono and even one article that has multiple conflicting versions.

While working on Sunday, Paco and I discussed this. It’s especially rewarding working with people who grok the bigger picture. Paco is one of these people. His response was exactly what I needed to hear. Many of the developers in the Mono community are acutely aware of the challenges and that is exactly why they continue to work thanklessly on improving the Mono experience. For him, there is no use complaining, the only thing worth focusing on is making it better.

O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference

My mind is really abuzz with what I have seen so far at this year’s conference, and I’m not even there! Well I should be clear and say really that it isn’t the content that I’m psyched about; it is what I have found trolling the site Wiki. I had heard of Technorati before, but it took Seth Godin’sblog to thump me over the head and open my eyes to what was going on over there. Then I learned about a collaboration that is emerging between Flickr, Technorati, and Delicous. This collboration is called tags: the real-time web, organized by you. I’ve already setup X-cito to participate. Thus I have added several new categories: Business, Computer, Internet, Linux, and Random. To participate in this aggregation all I have to do now is just select the appropriate categories and I’m co-lab-O-rating. Pretty awesome. But wait there’s more. While researching the Technorati web site and Tags I learned that they want other sites to better integrate with Technorati. Smells like an API or web service to me.

Tim’s vision is blossoming

Speaking of web services, they’re popping up every where I look. Another site I found was Flickr. They have a public API, and developers are starting to use it. In fact, I found that there is a WordPress plug-in for Flickr. This certainly smashes open my plans to implement photo-blogging. I’ve already downloaded the plug-in and I’ll be installing it ASAP.

All of these sites and collaboration has me just mentally punishing myself. Internet web services is exploding right now. I’ve been thinking of two ideas concerning web services. One of these ideas I’ll be submitting to the business idea competition. I’ll be getting neck deep into that when I get back from San Francisco. At the Emerging Technology Conference Wiki I discovered the Attention Stream. This is the collaboration I mentioned between Technorati, Flickr, and Delicous. It is totally fascinating. Seeing the aggregation between these three websites is very interesting. The other idea I have is a web service directory. It could list all of the web sites offering web services and sample code to access and use each. If anyone is interested, drop me a line at APIIndex at x-cito dot com.

A final note. Seeing all of the fantastic conference pictures on Flickr cetainly has got me pumped up for OSBC and OSCON.

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Agony and Ecstasy
Tuesday, March 08th, 2005 | Author: kevin

Still struggling with Mono on SuSe 9.1.

Mostly I’m reminded that developing software is complicated. Developing software on Linux is extremely complicated. The mental anguish I’ve went through the last few days is more than most Windows programmers would be willing to suffer. It also makes me appreciate with much more significance the elegance and simplicity that Paco brings to the Mono Windows Installer. Of course building is one thing and installing from source is quite another. However, Red Carpet is supposed to be the pain free method for installing on Linux. Yes, it was painless and Mono worked fine after words. Unfortunately, the installation for MonoDevelop, MonoDoc, XSP, and mod_mono apparently was not quite as successful. From there I ventured off the beaten path and tried to build everything myself.

Now I’m using YaST Online Update to update SuSE 9.1. I’ve got a vague hope that the update will resolve something that is missing and I’ll avoid my next recourse. The next step if I can’t get things settled is to build the entire Gtk+2 and Glib2 libraries and then rebuild Mono. Think of the great learning experience I’m having! I never knew just how messy this could get. O.k., I get it. It’s pretty disgusting and I’m very appreciative that there are people like Paco who are working to make things less messy. Now could I finish up and move on to the next preparation step?

A golden lining

Once again eternal optimism proves its point. Today I received an approval e-mail message for a proposal I made with Paco for this years O’Reilly Open Source Conference. After unsuccessful attempts for last years conference and the upcoming MySQL conference, I upped the ante and submitted four proposals for this conference. I’m really thankful for the opportunity and owe a lot to Paco for his support. I’m still hoping that some of the other sessions are still alive. Even if they are not, this will be the first time I get the honor to present at a major conference, so I feel truly blessed.

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