The Professional Service Delivery Experts

This blog entry gives step by step instruction to the installation of Trac on Ubuntu 8.04 with an existing SVN repository.

I have joined the cult of twits. However, I'll be in Puerto Rico next week, so don't expect much.

Appcelerator is a web development framework for rich Internet apps. I needed to debug some things. Unfortunately it uses Rake which is really unpleasant to debug the dependencies in. I did it so that you don't have to (you're welcome). Okay.. Pre-requisite: git and ssh and the normal basic stuff is set up.

I bring you "eclipse-osil" package of Eclipse 3.4.341 for Ubuntu. I'm using Intrepid but there is very little reason to think it won't work just as well on other versions (as long as it is the 64-bit Intel/AMD and not the Itanium stuff).

Key features

• Memory is pegged at 512m to 1024m in eclipse.ini
• depends on sun JDK 6 SOLELY (not GCJ or the 100 repackaged jars)
• installs in /opt/eclipse-3.4.341 with a soft link /opt/eclipse
• installs a shortcut under Applications/Other with the planet logo

I'd love feedback.

On Packaging stuff in Ubuntu

After my last MacBook Pro kept blowing up batteries, and my two previous Powerbooks suffered horrible defects which caused the power couplings to rip off the motherboard (the area near the power cord is very weak due to too many ports right next to it, so it is no good for say airplane overhead cargo storage), and obnoxious customer service, I swore off Apple. I buy a new laptop on average every 3 years. I always get the top end because screen resolution is everything. I had planned to buy a Dell this time. For one it is easier to put on our company credit line with them. However, when looking at the top end with the features I wanted, I realized it would cost more than the 17" MBP.

Posted here.

I'll be attending the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco. Matt Asay and Roy Russo recommended that I go. I'm interested in connecting with other members of the Open Source Business community, software developers and in particular those in the financial sector. My email is acoliver at the above domain (osintegrators.com).

On Monday, February 16, 2009, I'm giving a talk on Appcelerator to the Triangle Java Users Group. I hope to see you there.

UPDATE: the slides are attached to this post.

I'm on the way to the Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting (FOSDEM), first for the Open Source Initiative Board meeting and then to Germany on business. Lot's to do before I go. One of those thing that has been really neat is tracking a memory leak for a client.

I noted before that I'd upgraded my MacBookPro to Ubuntu 8.10. In Hardy, I had everything working: suspend, sound, you name it. Ibex broke most of it. You can find out what MacBookPro you have by typing "sudo dmidecode -s system-product-name" and reading this.

To make sound work after searching through a lot of stuff and the lying wiki, I found this post which gave me: