I don’t know if anyone else would want this crazy set up, but here it is for posterity.

First install apache2 with sudo apt-get install apache2. Test it out in http://localhost/. If it says it works, it works.

Download Coldfusion from the Adobe site. MX7 supposedly has kinks with installing on Linux, so get 8 or 9. I’m using 8. chmod u+x the binary and then run it. Follow the prompts and let it configure apache for you; don’t use the standalone server. The standalone server probably eats resources like mad, though I eschewed it mainly for sanity since I wanted apache to do it all. Feels less dirty.

sudo apt-get install php5. Then aptitude search php | grep apache to get the necessary mods if it’s not installed already.

sudo apt-get install ruby rubygems ruby-dev and also look through aptitude for the necessary mod. You need the ruby-dev to install stuff later with gems.

I’ve stuck my project files in my homedir because I prefer easy access from my homedir. Some peeps say this is not as safe, but for local sandboxy development it’s grood.

Now lets install us some gems. sudo gems install passenger come to mind, and install whatever else it says you need. If it installs stuff to your ~/.gem folder because you didn’t call it with sudo, rm -rf .gems and redo it properly this time, you nonce.

Now to put it all together in your /etc/apache2/ confs:

The CF installer should have written something to the httpd.conf. Again, for sanity’s sake, I moved this into its own file in conf-available then symlinked it in conf-enable.

In the now-blank httpd.conf, put in:

LoadModule passenger_module /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.15/ext/apache2/mod_passenger.so
PassengerRoot /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/passenger-2.2.15
PassengerRuby /usr/bin/ruby
DirectoryIndex index.phtml index.php index.php3 index.shtml index.html index.htm index.cfm

And rig up the necessary aliases in sites-available/default:

RailsBaseURI /redmine
<Directory "/var/www/redmine/">
        Options Indexes ExecCGI FollowSymLinks
        Options -MultiViews
        AllowOverride all
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
</Directory>

Redmine was the only one that I couldn’t get to go just with an alias, so I cheated and symlinked to its ‘public’ directory in /var/www/. I’m not sure why. Ruby had some other fussiness as well. I can’t remember what exactly, though. Just pushed it around until it worked. Look around on google if it gives you error messages; ruby’s good for that. Check stuff inside /var/logs/apache2/error.log to see if you can get more details.

Alias /cf/ and /cf to your coldfusion apps directory. Same goes for your php apps, like my phpmyadmin, which can be symlinked from /etc/phpmyadmin/apache.conf.

Brief synopsis: after upgrading to Lucid, my slicehost server went kaput and couldn’t get up for some time. I tried all the pills I could, but finally declared it unrevivable and nuked it. I thought I could export my blog posts from facebook afterwards but noooo… The RSS feed was broken and there was no guarantee that it would ever come back for the handful of us who care enough to want it. So it was manual copy+paste for the 40 or so posts stuck in facebook neverland.

BUT NOW

WordPress is up running this blog, tracks is up on a subdomain, and squid3 is making life easier at work too!

The main problem I had with tracks today were goofs… First I used the wrong password in database.yml, then I told lighttpd to look for dispatch.fcgi in the wrong place. BUT NOW everything is working and I can start focusing on getting the WP theme to not suck.

W is a sweet boy of six years, which is about 13 or 14 years in human years. He’s quite a dear for trying to rub me off on trees, but otherwise he was fairly laid back and would have to be pushed quite a bit to get up to a good speed. P is the opposite. The chubby girl was raring to go at every chance, and barely needed a nudge to take me on a short canter. Freaked out our hosts. They kept saying I did good.

The part that surprised me was how much Papa knew about horses. Over dinner one night he rambled off all sorts of breeds from around the world, who raced in what races, what awaits a horse when he comes of age… I think I’ve found that bond I need with my father, at last. I wager he’s probably a better rider than I.

I’ve also started riding my bicycle again. It was spurred on by the need to get better at it for my 101 pledge, and again by the peeps who got me into motorcycles. M is en route to getting his motorcycle already and soon I’ll get my gear as well, so I can ride safely on his bike. I wanted to get licensed myself this summer but there isn’t enough time. So I just got a new pedal-bike. Good enough. <rubs hands together>

I started writing on 750words as much as I could to get my writing going again. It’s fun, almost obsessive-compulsive. (Gotta ollect all them badges!) I’ve been griping about not creating enough recently—I’m reading tons of blogs, too many perhaps, and am immersed in social media stuff, again too much perhaps—so the free-writing opportunity was a great place to kick that.

The content of that isn’t too different from my other writing, but I do tend to self-edit more here than there. It’s almost difficult for me to not self-edit as I write. I’m not used to the mechanism of simply writing… it seems the voices in my head quiet down when the spotlight is shone on them.

Anyway, I feel I’m off balance again. Too much consuming not enough creating. I need to rein in from the diaspora.

Not to be confused with the Diaspora, of which I am lucky to backer (albeit a minor one).

I am also a backer of Am I Broken?

I am also loving education blogs. I might become an educator some day, though right now I oughta focus on becoming a shrink.

Right now right now I oughta go to bed…

In The True Cost of Things, I compared American Express (credit card company) with banks; huge commitment of fallacy!

Preamble: I have an ubuntu host and a Windows XP virtual machine. I prefer doing most of my development in linux and it works out OK when I’m physically connected to the work network, but because a) I’m too lazy to copy over the MS SQL Server database to work locally somehow and 2) I don’t have a linux VPN client I have to do pretty much everything through VirtualBox. That is the way of the world. So here’s what I do—I can think of only one other person who might want this, but I’ll jot this down for posterity anyway:

1) Make everything work in ubuntu first—get all the needed tools (git, vim, etc.) and mappings in CFIDE working. Installing ColdFusion 8+ with Apache2 in ubuntu is a piece of cake nowadays.

1a) Little quirky step that’s just for me: symlink ~/Public to /var/www so I can do my development all inside my homedir.

2) Share ~/Public with the Windows virtual machine.

3) Install all the necessary tools in the Windows VM: git, vim, xampp, and ColdFusion. Make CF use Apache instead of the standalone server.

4) Fix up apache’s conf to include the UNC path (//vboxsvr/public) as an alias (to /public)

5) Map everything in CF Administrator with the UNC path, NOT THE MOUNTED PATH, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.

If I want to add a file to the index to be committed and then don’t commit it, and then want to pull a newer version of the file from remote, well uh, I can’t do that. Git will say “you have changes to this file that you didn’t commit! commit or stash it first plz.”

Do: git reset HEAD and unstage the file.

Don’t: git checkout over and over and hit the return carriage with rage because it doesn’t really fix anything.

Still not sure why I had to chown the wp-content directory to make auto-updates work, though. Everything got chgrp‘d to www-data and g+w was on wp-content.

Also, I need to fix the css bits for code.

“Definitely not free-range,” says Uncle B. “They’d get sick and start nodding their heads, and we’d kill them to eat. What! It’s true. Gai wun… is real. (Chicken pandemic, maybe something like avian flu now or perhaps not as serious.) They say jung wun gai (nodding-pandemic-chicken, usually refers to a person who bumps into other people while walking, either due to carelessness or franticness). But we ate them, and look at us!” Secretly I can only think of his recent seizure, but he smirks like he meant it anyway.

Did you sell the surplus eggs? “Yes, and we slaughtered and ate or sold the ones that came of age.”

I asked about the story of my papa, as a kid, going up to the rooftop to fetch a chicken. He caught one (remarkable considering how feisty they can be, but if it’s a wun gai then it’s probably easier…), carried it down by the feet. By the time it got to grandma the chicken was dead from being hung upside down. Probably induced a stroke in the poor gal.

“Our first fridge, what d’you think we put in it? Only water! You open the fridge and it’s filled with rows of water bottles,” says Uncle B, his face red and taut with mirth.

“And Vitasoy,” adds my papa.

“Bottles and bottles of vitasoy. Back then, sold in glass bottles. In the summer, it’s the best. Oh! What did you think we put our water in?” For some reason the image in my head was Dasani, blue and cool, but Dasani didn’t exist then. I shake my head. “Johnny Walker bottles! The blocky square-square bottles were great for stacking…”

“I don’t know where they found them, they found so many,” says grandma.

“We could get cold Vitasoy from the store. The stores were so clever then. In the same icebox they serve cold Vitasoy in the summer, and warm soy in the winter…”

“Leh, like those glass fridges now…”

“Only with a block of ice inside! People back then were so clever…”

“We were so poor, but so happy,” says grandma. “We were poor but had everything we needed. Clothes were easy! Your grandpa gets a free uniform tailored for him every year. What would we do with that many uniforms! So every other year” — she points to dad and Uncle B — “their school uniforms got made instead. What a great employer! No such go zai cheung now.” (No little-song-to-sing; the whole phrase can be translated as “these [good] things don’t exist anymore” or sometimes “this is why we can’t have good things”.)

“It’s true, employers were nicer, more compassionate.” Uncle B gestures at Aunt M with his chopsticks. “Her father, working hard, working hard, so hard he had a stroke… they paid his salary for years and years, while he rested at home, until he said to them, ‘it’s OK, all my kids have gone to school now, there is no need…’”

I call this “The Scattering.” which is both a reference to the period of chaos and unrest in Frank Herbert’s Dune saga following Leto’s death, and to the sort of energy I’m feeling at the moment. There’s a number of ways I could look at this but essentially I got some pent up creativity that I wanted to release. Hmm!

Some of it got turned into undesired outcomes, such as checking out an old facebook app. Some of it was fruitful, using tumblr to collect things from various corners of the web. Some of it I’m still ambivalent about, like “playing” foursquare.

Time to hone it all back down to essentials though. It’s a bit messy using identi.ca/twitter, AND a tumblelog, AND a blog. Deciding what content falls into where is a bit hazy for me. I also share articles with Google Reader, which overlaps with the tumblelog but feedly seriously lacks with the distinguishing-by-type bit.

Or do I even need that at all?

Email notifications are sort of essential when I work at home, though now that my boss got me a cellphone I could probably safely turn it back off.

Hmm!