gmcdonald

I’ve only been using it for a day really, and this post is more a test of my WLW setup, but first impressions of the Dell Vostro and Window 7 are pretty good.

What I’m looking forward to more is actually wiping my old Dell Inspiron 6000 and putting either Ubuntu or FreeBSD on it, undecided which.

(The keyboard on this Vostro is a little springy, better get used to that.)

For those of you in Australia, you'll know what I mean right away, for others the title might make you think of other things.

 A company hires out camper vans called 'Wicked Campers' - they usually have funny sayings written on the back (hand painted usually) along with hand painted drawings on  the rest of the van , a great way to save money on their fleet of cheap hire vehicles which are usually aimed at the backpacker type of customer.

Anyway, the point of this post, I think the best saying on the back of a van I've seen for a while :

'Nice Legs - what time do they open'

Was that worth my 2nd blog post in the same day, your call!

A summary of just some of the things the ASF Buildbot can do for your project:

• Perform per commit build & test runs for your project
• Not just svn! - Buildbot can pull in from your Git/Mercurial branches too!
• Build and Deploy your website to a staging area for review
• Build and Deploy your website to mino (people) for syncing live
• Automatically Build and Deploy Snapshots to Nexus staging area.
• Create Nightly and historical zipped/tarred snapshot builds for download
• Builds can be triggered manually from within your own freenode #IRC Channel
• An IRCBot can report on success/failures of a build instantly
• Build Success/Failures can go to your dev/notification mailing list
• Perform multiple builds of an svn/git commit on multiple platforms asyncronously
• ASF Buildbot uses the latest RAT build to check for license header issues for all your files.
• RAT Reports are published live instantly to ci.apache.org/$project/rat-report.[txt|html]
• As indicated above, plain text or html versions of RAT reports are published.
• [Coming Soon] - RAT Reports sent to your dev list, only new failures will be listed.
• [Coming Soon] - Email a patch with inserted ASL 2.0 Headers into your failed files!!
• Currently Buildbot has Ubuntu 8.04, 9.04 and Windows Server 2008 Slaves
• [Coming Soon] - ASF Buildbot will soon have Solaris, FreeBSD 8 and Windows 7 Slaves

Dont see a feature that you need? Join the builds.at.apache.org mailing list and request it now, or file a Jira Ticket.

Help is always on hand on the builds.at.apache.org mailing list for any problems or build configuration issues/requests. Or try the #asftest channel on irc.freenode.net for live support.

So now you want your project to use Buildbot? No problem, best way is to file a Jira Ticket. and count to 10 (well maybe a bit longer but it wont be long before you are up and running).

For those of you wanting to attend the 10th Anniversary of ApacheCon coming up in Oakland this 2nd – 6th November 2009.

Applications will be open for those wanting financial assistance to attend ApacheCon US 2009 between 27th July 2009 and 17th August 2009.

Anyone who is involved in Open Source as a developer/committer are welcome to apply.

For more details and how to apply see http://www.apache.org/travel/index.html. Other sites to note are the http://tac-apply.apache.org online application area and http://cwiki.apache.org/TAC/ – the Travel Assistance Wiki.

Spread the word!

As the title indicates, themes made for Roller 4 work fine in Roller 5 (currently) and the method of applying them is the same for both versions.

To get started, there are individual themes or a bundled all in one archive of all themes at RollerWeblogger on java.net so download whichever ones you want.

Then extract them into your $CATALINA_HOME/webapps/roller/themes directory. (where $CATALINA_HOME is the root directory of your Tomcat installation)
        Redeploy roller or restart tomcat and all the themes should now be available for selection in the admin/themes area of your blog. Note that ‘allow custom themes’ should be enabled in the global admin area for individual blogs to be able to choose a new theme.

This upgrade advice is unofficial in a number of ways.

• 5.0-dev itself is Unofficial
• I’m no Roller expert and not involved with the project what-so-ever
• I’m not responsible if you break it or lose any information
• Use at your own risk and don’t come crying to me

I assuming you have Roller 4.0.1 installed running under Tomcat 6.

1. Backup your roller database – $ mysqldump -uroot -p rollerdb > rollerdb.dump
2. Enter password when promted
3. Backup your roller directories
4. Double Triple Check you backup up ok!!
5. Download and extract Roller 5.0-dev somewhere
6. Edit roller-custom.properties and change from manual to auto
7. open tomcat manager in web browser and Undeploy current /roller
8. create a new webcontext /roller5 and point it to new Roller 5 /webapp/roller directory
9. Deploy new /roller5 webapp
10. navigate to yoursite.com/roller5
11. roller wlll ask confirmation to upgrade database table, click yes.
12. Edit roller-custom.properties and change to auto.
13. Job done if all went well.

Right after the upgrade you may hit the 500 error (planet not bootstrapped) if you previously had aggregation turned on for your front page. Go into your Global Admin area and disable it. The  your blog front page should show up. If you need aggregation on your blogs into the front page you’ll need to follow the install guide section 9.1.

IF things did not go well and you want to roll back.

1. Swear like a trooper
2. Open tomcat manager and undeploy your new /roller5
3. Restore database with – $ mysql –uroot –p rollerdb < rollerdb.dump
4. in tomcat manager recreate your original webcontext /roller and point to your old Roller 4.0.1 /webapp/roller directory
5. in your web browser go to yoursite.com/roller and breath a sigh of relief

All of the above, both the upgrade and the restore in neccessary should first be performed in a test environment.
At any step anywhere above you may need to restart tomcat for a change to take effect. (hit & miss with me whether it needed to or not)

The Official documentation for upgrading Roller is in the v4.0.1 Installation Guide (Section 9.4 for manual table upgrade, Section 10.2 for auto upgrade)

Anyway hope it was of some use.

Just for the hell of testing it out, I installed Windows Live Writer (WLW) so I could blog from a desktop app and try out the Roller weblog API.

First off, in the global admin config, tick the ‘Enable Blogger / MetaWeblog API’ option and save. Then in the blog config ‘Enable weblog client support’.

Open WLW and goto Blogs –> Add Blog Account. Choose ‘Other Blog Service’. Add in your blogs homepage, your username and password to that blog, click next, give it a nickname and then Finish. Now you can start blogging from within the comfort (?) of WLW.

So, you have a twitter account, and you want to tweet to your faithful flock that you have just made a blog post. Goto Tools –> Options –> Plugins and click on ‘Add new plugin’. Your browser will open and take you to someone on gallery.live.com where you can download the twitter notify extension.Double Click to install it, restart WLW and goto Tools –> Options –> Plugins and tick the box to enable twitter plugin (something I failed to do first time around thinking installing it would enable it by default!)

Now, create your blog post as normal in WLW and hit Publish. The first time you do this a box will pop up asking for your twitter login details, after which it is automatic (but still with a confirmation that you wish to tweet that post). And there you have it, a small snippet of the blog intro with a tinyurl to your blog post. Neat. (for the easily pleased at least) And yes, this post was made this way, dogfood blah blah.

So I bit the bullet and have moved away from MovableType (though my old posts are still available until I can import them into Roller). And I decided to try out the unofficial snapshot available here so I can test a few things out.

Installation was fine (in combination with Tomcat 6, Java 6 and mySQL 5) so basically follow the Roller 4.01 install guide.

A few things I noticed :-

1. After creating an account, creating a weblog and setting the front page theme, I got a 500 error from Tomcat instead of the front page. I found that having the ‘Enable aggregated site-wide frontpage’ checkbox ticked causes the error – which complained that the Planet had not yet been bootstrapped. This error does not occur in Roller 4.0.1 and aggregation works fine with this setting on (as blogs.apache.org shows). I guess I need to configure the planet feed aggregator (section 9.1 of the 4.0.1 docs) in order for this to work in 5.0-dev, but that's a guess and if true then 4.0.1 is buggy for allowing it. Un-ticking the checkbox and my front page worked fine (after a fight with Tomcat and jsvc to redeploy, see point 2 below)
2. When re-deploying Roller 5.0-dev in the Tomcat manager it tends to hang. Checking it out found that jsvc was eating between 90% and 130% CPU (really!). I left it for a few minutes before killing it off and restarting tomcat. All worked fine after that. Doing the same in Tomcat 6 with Roller 4.0.1 had no such problems (so far touch wood, but it does give PermGen Out Of Memory errors every now and then)
3. There is now an option built in to disable user accounts from creating their own weblogs, yay! (and is disabled by default which is good).
4. oauth support is built in (though experimental I believe) and have yet to try it. When the session fixation attack exploit is fixed I might :)
5. Support is built in for the AtomPub protocol (which I will try when point 4 above is fixed)

I will keep testing over the next little while and see how things go.

Take 2, enabled twitter plugin in Windows Live Writer, now I get to Blog & Tweet in one hit