That’s because it was a total piece of crap. Everything about it was bad. The navigation, the way it treated email, the browser, everrrrrrrything. I’ve had a lot of phones in my time, and I’m no idiot. I can configure things perfectly fine. But that phone was a piece.

So… I traveled down to T-mo to pick up a BlackBerry 8100 (Pearl). So far, it’s fannntastic. I’m really impressed. Beyond the fact that I have a BlackBerry again, this thing is super slim and pure sex. Its very light, and feels like a real phone. Not like when a smart phone feels like a phone, but LIKE A PHONE. The screen is great. And best of all, it has all the amenities we’re used to getting on new hip phones. Its got mp3 ringers, an mp3 and video player, which I hear is great, but I haven’t tested it yet. The 1.3 megapixel camera even has a REAL flash on it. I’ve never seen that before.

Now that RIM has licensed PocketMac’s blackberry sync software, not only is it free but its Q & A’d to RIM’s specs. And if you’ve ever dealt with them, they’re harsh. The syncing was flawless, and way better than the version I used when I carried around a 7100.

So far so good. But its only been 3 hours. We’ll see how it goes from here.

I’d like to give my thanks to the entire dev team. They’ve created the greatest media center application. There are plenty to choose from, and they’re watching Xbmc for ideas :)

Really, thanks guys. Xbmc has changed the way I manage and view my content. My wife even thanks you.

So I made use of one of my domain names: simplisticcomplexity.com

I’ll be posting there exclusively about web development, rails, ajax, css, and all that other goodness. I’ve been wanting to do this for a while, and finally got off my butt and did it. It’s using Mephisto, and yeah, Mephisto is written in rails. Its hosted at SteelPixel just like this one is. If you’re looking for some hosting, give these guys some of your money (and tell them I sent you, I could use the good points after wrecking havock to their servers this weekend).

So, if you’ve been sick of the large concentration on Rails, and its deployment, you won’t see it anymore. Unless you subscribe to the SimplisticComplexity feed.

“It has come to our attention that some people want to program in things other than Java.”

-Sun Computational Theologist Gilad Bracha

Wow! Every new Apple computer will ship with the Rails development stack. He also mentioned that they’re going to do their best to get Mongrel in there too. Maybe they can get Apache 1.3 upgraded to 2.2 :)

That’s great news, and Rails Core should be proud. So should the whole Rails community.

Since I was using a few different sources as references while setting this up, I thought I’d post exactly what I did to get everything installed correctly to suit my needs. This won’t go into how to actually DEPLOY your rails app into this environment, but it’ll show you what you need to do to get it all installed and set up.

Deployment Stack

• Ubuntu Linux 6.06 Dapper Drake
• Apache 2.2
• mod_proxy_balancer
• Mongrel

Sources

• The Perfect Rails/Debian/Lighttpd Stack… Ezra Zygmuntowicz
• Rails Stack Install Script

Everything below was taken directly (and sometimes even copied and pasted) from the sources above. They are the real heros here. I”m just the aggregator. I’m pretty sure the “one customer” mentioned in the rimuhosting post is Ezra as well. But I could be mistaken.
Ok, lets start.

Its assumed that you are su’d to root.

Core Essentials

Make sure you remove any version of apache that already exists!

# dpkg --purge apache apache2


Install the GCC compilers and developer tools.
root@aserver:/usr/local/src# apt-get install build-essential

Now we’ll install Ruby and friends:
# apt-get install ruby1.8-dev ruby1.8 ri1.8 rdoc1.8 irb1.8 libreadline-ruby1.8 libruby1.8

Next we need to make some symlinks for basic Ruby commands.

# ln -s /usr/bin/ruby1.8 /usr/local/bin/ruby
# ln -s /usr/bin/ri1.8 /usr/local/bin/ri
# ln -s /usr/bin/rdoc1.8 /usr/local/bin/rdoc
# ln -s /usr/bin/irb1.8 /usr/local/bin/irb


Apache & Pals

Download and compile Zlib

# wget http://www.zlib.net/zlib-1.2.3.tar.gz
# tar -xvf zlib-1.2.3.tar.gz
# ./configure
# make
# make install


Download and compile Apache 2.2

# wget http://apache.rmplc.co.uk/httpd/httpd-2.2.2.tar.gz
# tar -xvf httpd-2.2.2.tar.gz
# ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/apache2 --enable-mods-shared=all --enable-deflate --enable-proxy --enable-proxy-balancer --enable-proxy-http
# make
# make install


MySQL & Postfix

Lets install Postfix here really quick. We will configure it later but if we don’t install it before we install MySQL, apt will pull in Exim as a dependency. We don’t want this so lets pre-empt it by installing Postfix.
# apt-get install postfix

The Postfix installer will ask you a question about what type of server it is. I just chose "Internet Site".

Now let’s install MySQL and friends.
# apt-get install mysql-server mysql-common mysql-client libmysqlclient15-dev libmysqlclient15off

Install the MySQL bindings.
# apt-get install libmysql-ruby1.8

Now test it:

# irb
irb(main):001:0> require 'mysql'
=> true
irb(main):002:0> exit


Now we will install RubyGems so we can get Rails and all kinds of other Ruby treasures!

# wget http://rubyforge.iasi.roedu.net/files/rubygems/rubygems-0.9.0.tgz
# tar xvzf rubygems*
# cd rubygems*
# ruby setup.rb


Now we’ll install the latest version of Rails.
# gem install rails --include-dependencies

You should see:

Attempting local installation of 'rails'
Local gem file not found: rails*.gem
Attempting remote installation of 'rails'
Updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org
Successfully installed rails-0.14.3
Successfully installed rake-0.6.2
Successfully installed activesupport-1.2.3
Successfully installed activerecord-1.13.0
Successfully installed actionpack-1.11.0
Successfully installed actionmailer-1.1.3
Successfully installed actionwebservice-0.9.3
Installing RDoc documentation for rake-0.6.2...
Installing RDoc documentation for activesupport-1.2.3...
Installing RDoc documentation for activerecord-1.13.0...
lib/active_record.rb:73:64: Skipping require of dynamic string:
"active_record/connection_adapters/#{adapter}_adapter"
Installing RDoc documentation for actionpack-1.11.0...
lib/action_controller/assertions.rb:4:69: Skipping require of dynamic string:
"#{File.dirname(__FILE__)}/vendor/html-scanner/html/document"
Installing RDoc documentation for actionmailer-1.1.3...
Installing RDoc documentation for actionwebservice-0.9.3...


Don’t worry about those couple of errors. That just happens sometimes when building the RDoc documentation. If you look closely, you will see that it says “Successfully installed foobar…” a bunch of times.

Mongrel & Friends

Install mongrel and its supporting software. Make sure when prompted you select the most recent, non mswin32 option.
# gem install daemons gem_plugin mongrel mongrel_cluster --include-dependencies

It was previously advised to install Sendfile in this stack, but apparently it doesn’t serve the static content like it was once suggested. So the speed boost isn’t actually there. This means its just extra software to blow up. So don’t install it.

This comes strait from Coda, which came strait from Zed. And you listen to Zed.

Further Reading

Simply put, go read Coda’s post on how to turn all the elements you just installed into a real working mongrel cluster.

I’m in the process of setting up a shared environment for my pre-production server. So I’ll have this stack working for multiple sites on one computer using virtual hosts. I’ll share the apache conf files when I’ve got them finalized.

Tonight I got my first mongrel cluster up and running from scratch (that means even compiling apache) in less than 4 hours. Nice!

Thanks to these sites I was able to get apache 2.2 compiled and configured, as well as ruby and mongrel working well in Ubuntu.

If you’re looking to figure out how to get this going, check out those sites. Between all of them, you should be able to figure it out. Its pretty trivial really, it a very nice little deployment stack.

On a side note, I’ve only had Ubuntu on my server for about 2 evenings. This is my second night playing with it, and I’m very impressed. I haven’t hit a single snag yet. Its the snags that always left a bad taste in my mouth about Linux. And I’m talking about using it as a desktop.

Linux has always been my server of choice, but desktop wise it stinks. Desktop linux has always felt like a hodgepodge of applications masquerading as a complete operating system. Ubuntu is far from that. It feels like one uniform operating system. I’m truly impressed.

NOTE: I’m not a developer for tv.com. I’m just a lazy programmer that typed a short url for testing.