Jared Ottley

I am sure there is something metaphysical going on here…but I am not sure what.

Negative File Delete

I’ve started watching a new summer show on Fox: Mental.  It is has been somewhat intriguing thus far.  It is, however, formulaic:  Dr. solves problems in an “hour”, but can’t solve his own problem(s) during a season or ever on the show. (Think House, another Fox show … which I enjoy because Dr. House is such a jerk.) [You can catch both shows on Hulu.]

In the second episode of this inaugural season of Mental, the two residents are sitting down for lunch in the hospital doctors lounge. As Dr. Suarez sits on the couch next to Dr. Artis, the camera pans to catch the coffee table in front of the couch and this is what we see:

If you didn’t catch that, here is the screen capture:

You may want to click on the image to get a better view, but check out the book.  That’s right …. a 1997 Que, Special Edition of Using Microsoft Visual InterDev.  Now I know there are Drs. out there who have development skills.  In fact, my kids’ pediatrician is one.  He and I have talked about his hacking on his office’s Patient and Records system, customizing and writing extensions.  But why would any prop or set person drop a 1997 Visual InterDev book in this scene?  And even worse the book was horrible, I had it at a previous job. You don’t have take my word for it, check out the reviews on Amazon.

Over the past few weeks I have had the chance to do a couple of presentations.  One at UTOSC on Enterprise Document Management and another as part of the Alfresco Developer Series on building VMWare Appliances with Alfresco.

Links to the slide decks are here and here.

A recording of the VMWare Presentation can be found here.

We are at the first soccer practice of the season. It is awesome to see the vast improvement in Taylor’s and Andrew’s ball handling abilities and listening skills over last year.

Taylor is a bit more serious about playing and Andrew is doing quite well even if he is a bit distracted.

They both have school friends on the team. Andrew gave one of his friends a great big hug when he saw him. Taylor has one of his best friends from last years team and first grade class. The coach is quite serious about the game, which I really like. It is still very early to tell if this will be their sport. One can only hope.

UPDATE:  I am now the assistant coach.

We just finished upgrading our home server. The migration, while it took time, was rather easy. I combined our separate blogs all under a Wordpress MU install to simplfy maintenance. One thing that I am happy about with the upgrade, besides improved performance, is that the iPhone wordpress app now works. I had errors connecting before. One thing that helped in configuring the app is improved error handling in the latest version. The initial release would always just die when trying to connect with no errors. I tried sniffing the connection, but unsuccesfully.

As I contiunue to use the app, I’ll update you on to what I like and don’t like. For now I’m happy!

I keep meaning to post more on the things I read, listen to and watch.

I watched the dramatization of the play My Boy Jack by David Haig.  It is the beautifully told story of Rudyard Kipling and his son Jack.  Jack was extremely myopic, but wanted, like every other young man his age, to join the war effort.  Kipling did all he could to help Jack become an officer after Jack had failed to get in twice.  Jack was declared missing in the Battle of Loos. It was nearly two years before Jack was declared KIA.  It was after this that Kipling wrote the poem My Boy Jack.

My experience with Kipling and author authors of WW I literature goes back to working at the BYU Library.  I was asked by Librarian Robert Means to help create a web site to go along with an exhibit he was putting together as an Anthology of World War I Literature.  While the web site is nothing to yell home about (I was just learning),  the content is great.  I’d recommend anything found on the site.

Errands run, kids in bed, and Krull On Demand. Finally, sometime to put some thoughts down about building the Alfresco Appliance.

Some of what I write here refers back to when I original put together, the first version of the appliance. Some is from revisiting it for this release.

Choosing a distribution

I started playing with building an appliance right about the time that Ubuntu announced their Jeos distribution. I have a strong preference for openSUSE and would have liked to have built the appliance on it. (LimeJEOS answers my concerns, and I am excited to give it a spin. Just a few more things to move off my plate before I can devote time to it.) I tried several different distributions: Fedora, openSUSE, Ubuntu, Puppy Linux, Zen Walk. I liked some, was optimistic about others, and disappointed and frustrated with a couple.

What I wanted was a distribution that provided me a small lightweight base, and gives me the ability to add just the packages I needed to run my application. Most of these came in close to what I wanted, but due to dependencies, grew to be much larger than I wanted. Some didn’t even provide me with a nice clean way to get the applications I was dependent on. Those I dropped immediately. Those with decent package mangers got pluses. I wanted to be to keep base packages up to date.

This brings us to Ubuntu Jeos (Just Enough OS). It gave me the size, the packages, and the manager that met my base criteria for a distribution.

Getting Started

While the base install is already fairly small, there still are many packages that I was going to need and not need. This takes some time, but go through the installed packages and identify what you aren’t and are going to need. Make a list and develop a script to remove the ones you don’t need. Another to add the ones you need. You may like to have some of the packages around while developing your appliance, but when you go to deliver it they may add more weight than what you would like, or give tools that just aren’t need by your appliance, or your end users. Keep them installed until you are sure they aren’t needed any more. My list includes: man pages, wireless-tools, sound packages, laptop packages, different editors, hardware utilities, etc. Your list will vary. Sometimes you may want to force remove dependent packages if you know their functionality is not needed. Don’t be afraid to take them out.

I know my list is not perfect, but over time it will improve. Some of this will come with trial and error. Don’t expect to get it right the first time.

Once I narrowed the package list, I started to add my dependent packages. Some of these could require you to re-add removed packages. That is why I suggest leaving packages installed until you have all your dependencies installed.

One of the cornerstones of an appliance is zero configuration. You want people to be able to just deploy the appliance, start it and use the appliance. In the case of Alfresco, it needs Tomcat to be started at boot time. For this I needed an init script. (Mine can be found here.) I use the init script to start Tomcat, start needed services, and perform runtime configurations.

Alfresco is a web-based application, so I need a way to provide the URL needed by users to access the application. For an appliance this can be changed from install to install. There are several ways to handle this, eventual, you will want to have a static address or use Dynamic DNS to update IP to name mappings. My appliances is primarily for evaluation. It is not really ideal to play with DNS or static IPs. I have kept the implementation simple, I’ve created a script that updates the /etc/issue file with runtime URL. (The script I use is here.) The major issue I faced was when the script was to be run. I placed the script in /etc/network/if-up.d. I fully expected it to be run when the interface came up. The script did run when I manually ran ifup. But it didn’t run in every case, especially the most import, at boot time. I tried several different things to work through this. I added a reference to the script into /etc/network/interfaces using the post-up directive. (in openSUSE, you would add a POST_UP_SCRIPT=”<name of your script>” to the interface file in /etc/sysconfig/network and put the script in /etc/sysconfig/network/scripts). This added a bit more power, but did quite fix my problem. I finally narrowed it down to udev. The interface was being brought up by udev, but when /etc/init.d/networking is run, it runs ifup with a -a option (all interfaces marked auto). The problem with this is if the interface is already up, the associated scripts won’t be run. I haven’t found an appropriate fix for this yet. (Any ideas?) So I just disabled the udev rule for the network interfaces . rPath has a good solution for this, they change /etc/issue file in an init script. I like this idea, but didn’t want to write another init script or pollute my existing alfresco init script with this.

Plans for the Future

One of the things that I want to do is provide some Alfresco branding to the appliance. I also want to create some more production ready appliances that use MySQL and point at an external virtual drive to store content and the indexes.

What is Missing

One of the big things that is missing in a management interface for the appliance. rPath provides a very nice extensible web-based administrative interface. It is extensible both for function and branding. But it is rPath specific. I’d like to see an open source cross distro solution. One that was not only extensible but adds CIM based management features. This would make it easy to administer the CIM instrumented applications on the appliance, but also could allow it to be managed externally, but CIM enabled management tools. This would allow the appliance to play nicely in the data center. This is something that Xen is working toward.

Update: Those who downloaded the appliance, may have noticed a packaging problem (ie part of it was missing! :()  I have fixed that as well as done a little tunning and a few modifications.  I’ll post about those later.

Available now! I’ve just finished the latest evaluation version of the VMware based Alfresco Appliance built on the latest Alfresco Enterprise release 2.1.2. This is a full 30-day trial release. It comes with the core Document Management Repository and Web Content Management pre-installed.

This is based on my previous work using Ubuntu Jeos. (I am, however, keen to try out LimeJeos based on openSUSE.)

A couple notes:

• When it first starts, Alfresco will take a few minutes to come up fully. It is creating the initial DB. Subsequent restarts are quicker.
• This is an evaluation appliance. So once you start it, you have 30-days before the trial expires.
• When the appliance first starts it will ask you if you copied or moved the appliance. The correct answer is moved it.

Look for other (community) appliances in the next month or so. I also have some RPMs for Alfresco Community in the works (using the openSUSE Build Serivce). I’ll post more this evening about what I learned since the last time I built the appliance.

Today is World Autism Awareness Day, and as the father of an aspie, I’d like to encourage everyone to take a moment to learn a little more about Autism. 1 in 150 children are diagnosed with Autism.

There are some great resources out there to learn more about Austism:

• www.autismspeaks.org
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger_syndrome

Wired had a great article in February. CNN is doing a full day of coverage. And the Sundance Channel will be showing Autism Everyday.