Simeon Says

Then you might just have  a shot at seeing me all over this fall.  I am very excited that I get to present 2 topics at 360 Flex next week in Seattle.  I will be presenting on Developing Flex applications with Rails as well as doing a talk on DeepLinking your Flex applications.

Then in September I get to attend the RailsConf Europe conference where I will also be presenting on “Developing Rich Internet Applications with Flex and Ruby on Rails”.  I am really excited about this because it will be my first opportunity to travel to Europe.  My wife and I will be taking a little vacation and enjoying some of the countries over there.

Then, only 4 days after I get back from Europe I will be taking off again to go to MAX 2007 in Chicago.  I am presenting at MAX on ColdFusion development with Eclipse.  This is a topic I am very familiar with as I have been giving that presentation for several years.  This year however i get the added benefit of speaking about Adobe’s new debugger and other wonderful tools for Eclipse.

And if that was not enough I am also teaching a class on Open Source Flex in November in Virginia.  If you have been thinking about getting flex training I definitely recommend this class.  The format is unique and offers you an opportunity to learn both the basics and get some specialized training regarding your project.

technorati tags:Flex, Rails, RailsConf, MAX2007, 360Flex, CFEclipse

I was really impressed to find out that Apple had filed for UNIX 03 certification. I think this is one of those things that really doesnt make any difference to 99% of their customers. The fact that unix is under the hood is 90% of why I switched to mac’s 4 years ago, but this step really signifies something special. Apple is now one of a very few companies that have certified unix releases (just Sun, IBM and HP).

In the end this really doesnt make any difference to the end user, but I think it really ups the geek cred. And their dedication to the specification will ensure that many existing unix applications can be ported to OS X 10.5 with just a simple recompile.

Via [TUAW](http://weblog.infoworld.com/enterprisemac/archives/2007/07/leopard_gets_un.html)

I got sucked into the vortex that YouTube tonight, and I decided I should try my hand at video blogging. So I logged in and fired up the ole webcam and … Somehow talking to my self on the computer didnt seem so fun anymore.

I watch these videos and I really want to contribute. The problem is I am a performer, I really get going when I interact with people. And sitting here by myself, that is just not happening. So what do you do? My first thought is to get a buddy on video chat and try to record our conversation. But from my few podcast attempts I realized that there may not be enough interaction in that either. So what do I do? Set up a room at my house and have tech buddies over to BS so I can feel comfortable enough to actually say something funny?

Is pretending you have a crowd a trait that can be learned? I just dont know. I just need my buddy Randy from Bend to come around. He always gets my fired up. I need a poster board cut out of Randy that I can shoot the shit with. Hmmm…. I think i am gonna have to run that by him and see what he thinks To bad he is not answering his IM right now. That would save me some trouble. Now what will I do. I think I am going to try to record the content of this post as a vlog.

We will see how that goes

I am sorry, what was that? You didnt realize that Flex was covered at oscon this year? Oh, well then you my dear friend have been mistaken. I had the pleasure of attending oscon last week and spreading the gospel of Flex and the Flash platform with many folks. Now I did not do this alone, Adobe’s own [Ryan Stewart](http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com/) and [James Ward](http://www.jamesward.org/wordpress/) where there in an official capacity to spread the love.

So what was the over all effect? I had the pleasure of leading several informal discussion groups in the expo hall talking about the Flash platform and the new technologies available in AIR. In general I think these things were very well received. Developers who are interested in building reliable solutions have good questions that fostered great discussion. People had many questions about what Tamarin was and how it related to flash. People were very interested to find out that they would soon be able to develop and deploy desktop applications using technology that they are already using every day.

But the real indicator of the interest level in flex came during a RIA Panel in which James was one of the presenters. On the panel was a lady presenting JavaFX, James was presenting on Flex and then no one bothered to represent Silverlight. Each of the presenters spent a bit of time doing a presentation and then the mic was opened for questions. I would say it would be a safe bet that 90% of the questions were directed to James. He did a great job answering those folks and even after the session he as bombarded by even more people with questions who didnt want to ask in front of the crowd. Being a proponent of Flex already I didnt really expect to get much out of the panel. However I did learn something I didnt expect. Of the few questions that were directed at JavaFX, the answer was mostly “How would you like that to happen”. Although JavaFX is being presented as a solution to compete with Flex and Silverlight, the product is no where near a stable revision. Everything is still up in the air. This is great if you want to commit the next year to helping design the tools you will be using in 2 years, but the easy choice is to use one of the alternatives already established. In fact on that note I cant think of any reason you would not want to use the platform that has been established for many years and who’s plugin is readily available on most computers. But now I am starting to let my headstrong opinions lead my statements.

In the end it was obvious that although the open source community is a new market for Flex, the developers are ready for a solution that can help them build exciting applications. And the fact that Flex is being open sourced did nothing but help open doors with the folks I talked to.

My only regret was that Adobe didnt have a booth at the conference so that more people could have been reached. But the good news is there is always next year! And maybe then we can have a real panel to compare Flex and JavaFX.

I am setting up a new server for our office. It is going to host many things for us including the SVN and Trac for several OS Community Projects. But one of the things it needs to do right now is act as a load balance for a Rails site we are hosting internally. I was excited that Centos 5 comes with Apache 2.2 so I could use the Apache Proxy Balancer to proxy to a pack of mongrel servers. I got the requisite apache configuration stuff done but then I was presented with a forwarding error. Actually apache told me that it couldnt do what i wanted right now, which is the friendly error message meaning something went wrong. So I went and checked my logs and I noticed that I was receiving errors for all my mongrel instances.

[error] (13)Permission denied: proxy: HTTP: attempt to connect to 192.168.1.150:4000 (192.168.1.150) failed
[Wed Aug 01 09:30:59 2007] [error] ap_proxy_connect_backend disabling worker for (192.168.1.150)

And I got this error for each of my mongrel instances. A quick google of my error turned up this post on How to use re-write module of Apache web server 2.2.3 on FC6 Which explained how to fix the problem on Fedora Core 6. The problem is that he used the GUI to change the setting and Centos 5 has a bug that doesnt allow the modify settings section to display. So I went to digging and found out how to make that change without the gui. In the Centos 5 Documentation is a section called 44.2.6. Enabling or Disabling Enforcement which outlines the commands. I ran `sestatus -b | grep httpd` to get the list of boolean flags regarding httpd. After comparing the names of those to what was visible in the GUI in Mukul’s entry above. I decided that the flag I was looking for was the “httpd_can_network_connect” option. I then toggled its value by executing `togglesebool httpd_can_network_connect` and tested that all was working. Wooo Hoo I had a winner. ToggleSEBool command does not make any boot time configuration changes though, it only changes the runtime. So next time I rebooted the server everything would have gone back to broken. So to update the configuration files I ran `setsebool -P httpd_can_network_connect=1`

Now my server can forward and I am a happy guy. Thanks to the folks who posted the original fixes. I could not have done it without out

technorati tags:selinux, centos, apache, proxybalancer, mongrel