re: Delanotes.com

Sep 24

Now with infinitely more Audio Content

I’ve added a new section to Delanotes.com: audio content. These are audio clips of mostly conversations but also other sounds like music shows and ambient noise. I explain them a little further on the about page.

# This is a DJ

                  @=====@                                  
                #=@       @=#_                             
               # \/\/\/\/\/\ #\                            
               @@|  _   _  |@@(                            
               @@|\|_|-|_|/|@@ )                           
                @|    /\   |@ (                            
                 |  \~~~~/ |   )                           
                 |   ~~~~  |   |                           
                  \_______/    |                           
           _________|   |_______(____                      
          /         \   /      (     `\                    
         /  / |  fvk \ /      |-\---,  \                   
 _______/  /__|_______@_______|__)___\  \________          
|\      \  \___   ______________#     |  |__     \         
|\\      /\ \  ', |\ # W W W W @@ \   /ooo  `,    \        
||\\    '  ooo   \\#\ # W W W W @@ \ '        \    \       
|| \\    \       ; \#\___o_o_o_o____\ \       ;     \      
\|_|\\    `,_____/  \|______________|  `,_____/      \     
     \\                                               \    
      \\                                               \   
       \\_______________________________________________\  
        \  ___________________________________________  |  
        || |                                         || |  
        || |                                         || |  
        || |                                         || |  
        \|_|                                         \|_|

Sep 01

Delanotes is here

I made Delanotes.com live today along with a description of what it is.

# This is an SR-71 (Blackbird). 

                 .                             .                        
                //                             \\                       
               //                               \\                      
              //                                 \\                     
             //                _._                \\                    
          .---.              .//|\\.              .---.                 
________ / .-. \_________..-~ _.-._ ~-..________ / .-. \_________ -sr   
         \ ~-~ /   /H-     `-=.___.=-'     -H\   \ ~-~ /                
           ~~~    / H          [H]          H \    ~~~                  
                 / _H_         _H_         _H_ \                        
                   UUU         UUU         UUU

Aug 24

Installing Ruby Gems on DreamHost (slight return)

Installing gems on a DreamHost (“DH”) machine is not easy. It’s neither simple nor easy. After you’ve gone through the process of setting up gem to install into your home directory, you’ve probably seen this:

$ gem install warwick
Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org

Killed

or more recently, this slightly more helpful message:

$ gem install warwick
Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org

Yikes! One of your processes (gem, pid 11112) was just killed because your
processes are, as a whole, consuming too much memory. If you believe you've
received this message in error, please contact Support.  

Killed

Either way, the gem did not get installed because the process is being killed by the DreamHost Police (their words).

Why is this happening??????????

When you run gem install in verbose, you see something like this:

$ gem install -V warwick
missing 15248 gems
Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org

Killed

So for whatever reason gem wants to install a bunch of gems and to do so requires more memory and CPU time than DH will allow. (Note: I assume it wants to install these gems because we’re starting off with an empty gems directory)

Ahhhh, this sucks. I just want to use warwick!

I know, I know. I want to use warwick too. There are a few solutions.

Be nice

DH recommends on their RubyGems to be nice: alias gem="nice -n19 ~/bin/gem". When you add this to your .bash_profile, every time you run gem you’re actually running nice -n19 ~/bin/gem.

Major CON: This solves the CPU resource problem by forcing the gem process to only grab cycles when no other process wants it but it doesn’t solve the memory issue. IOW: it takes forever and then the process gets killed anyway.

Install gems manually

Download the .gem file to your DreamHost machine and run: gem install -V --local --no-rdoc --no-ri [.gem path]. You can also install a gem directly to your vendor directory:

$ cd vendor
$ gem unpack [.gem path]

Major CON: Dependencies. You have to install all dependencies manually.

Replicate your local gems repository

Follow the same setup procedure on your local machine and copy it to your DH account:

[local:~]$ gem install warwick
...
[local:~]$ rsync -a --stats --progress ~/.gems yourmachine.com:~/gems-local
[local:~]$ ssh -v yourmachine.com
[yourmachine.com:~]$ mv .gems gems-remote-1
[yourmachine.com:~]$ mv gems-local .gems

Major CON: This won’t work for gems that contains platform specific code (anything that links to C libraries for example) unless your local environment is sufficiently similar to your DH machine (i.e. 32-bit, Linux kernel version, compiled library versions, etc…)

Conclusion

Never run with scissors.

P.S. Please send all feedback to infoATdelanotesDOTcom.