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UPDATE: Facebook has moved a couple of things around while “simplifying” their privacy controls. Most of the information here is still valid, though. You want to “customize” your privacy settings and not use one of their defaults for the most control. I was going to try and keep this updated, but it’s almost better if I just make a new post on my new blog.

I get a lot of questions about how to use Facebook’s new (ish) privacy features so I thought I’d go through a quick 101 tutorial on settings things up and using them effectively. I’ll try and keep this as simple and quick as possible but I will also be covering all you really need to know about keeping your Facebook profile and the information you post on it safe.

Where do we start? We need to create some friends Lists. A friends List on Facebook is just a collection of friends for your eyes only. Your friends will never know what lists they are in (unless you tell them) so they’re just for you. If you really WANT to go all out and create that “Assholes” list, feel free without worrying about a thing. Follow the pictures and this should go swimmingly.

Select Account → Edit Friends from the top menu of Facebook

Here is your friends page! This page will recommend friends to you as well as give you various methods of organizing them. We want to view ALL of our friends right now..

Select Friends from the left side under Lists

There we go. Now we have all of our friends to look at. Let’s start organizing them by creating a new list…

Select the button labeled “Create New List”

You’ll get a nice popup that should be easy to understand. It’s asking for a name for this new list and it gives you all your friends to select from already. You can scroll down this list or type in the names of people who you know you want to put in this list. Don’t worry about missing someone. Once you create a list, you can always add and remove people from it at any time.

Name the list and start adding some friends

Like I said, once a list is created, you can modify it any time. This friend I have selected below is already in 1 of my lists, but I want to add her to my Friends list as well. I click the “1 List” button that appears to the right of her and I can see all of my lists. Just select another list and you’ll see a check-mark next to it. Now this person is in 2 of my lists! If you want to remove someone from a list, just click a list that already has a check-mark and the person will be removed.

Select another friend and add or remove them from another list

Now that we have a List of friends, we can venture into actually securing our profile. Your profile is pretty much everything about you on Facebook. It includes your information like your birthday and relationship status. It also includes your wall posts, photo albums you’ve uploaded and pictures that others have tagged of you. Facebook recently dumbed this page down quite a bit to make it much easier to set the privacy exactly as you want it.

Select Account → Privacy Settings

You can explore the other options after this tutorial. I’ll only be covering the Profile Information section. The other sections let you control who can contact you, who can search for you, and what applications have access to your information.

Select Profile Information

You now see about a dozen different items that can be set. There’s a brief description of each item so you know what your controlling. Take your time here. There’s no rush at all. This is your “life”, by the way. Getting your profile to appear exactly as you want it to, to exactly who you want it to is not a 30 second job.

You can tailor every item quite a bit but for the sake of this tutorial, I’ll give you all my personal example which is a “Limited Profile” list. You can call it whatever you like, but I suggest everyone have one. Facebook used to actually have something called “Limited Profile” so I just stuck with that.

Another quick note on the Limited Profile. A while back when Facebook changed some privacy settings, the old “Limited Profile” list lost all it’s “limited-ness”. So make sure you take a look at these settings and set that up again!

Ok, back on track. Let’s select the very first item. It should be called “About Me”

You have a few options here..

Everyone will show off this information to anyone and their mothers. Nothing will be safe with this information. No one has to be your friend to see this. You probably don’t want this for your About Me section, but there are places where you might not care so much. For instance, everyone can see my birthday on Facebook because I really don’t care if they do.

Friends of Friends. The next step down in security. This will make sure not just anyone can see this information and limit it to only friends of your friends. Pretty self explanatory.

Only Friends is also quite self explanatory. Only your friends will be able to see this section of your profile. This might be how you want to do things for parts of your profile, but I feel it’s still a bit too loose for your About Me section.

Custom. Now this is what we want to see. Detailed controls! Custom opens up another option that we’ll be using.

Select Custom

There are now two sections here. I’d suggest you keep your first option set as “Only Friends” to keep this information only visible to people who you accept as a friend. But now you can specify a friend or a friend list to exclude from this section. This is where I put my Limited Profile group.

Now you can Save Settings and proceed to the next item. Set up each of these the way you want based on what your comfortable with. You can lock down or loosen up to your hearts content. A few sections you might want to look at are listed below for you.

Personal Info. This is the section where you put down all the movies, and music and interests you have.

Family and Relationship. You family and relationship status should be listed here.

Photos and Videos of Me. This would be all the things your friends are tagging you in. Since you don’t have a lot of control (aside from removing the tag) over what your friends tag of you, I’d concentrate on keeping this limited to closer friends.

Photo Albums. This is the only different setting on the page. It takes you to a list of all your photo albums and allows you to set privacy settings for each of them individually.

Posts By Me. Anything you write on your wall/home page. Links. Photos. Notes. Whatever. You can actually keep this a little looser if you want because right after this, you’re going to learn how to control each and every post you make.

Allow Friends to Post on my Wall. I’m sure there are a couple reasons you wouldn’t want ANY of your friends to be able to write on your wall. But I can’t think of any right now.

Posts by Friends. A better idea than not letting friends write on your wall at all, is controlling who can see what they DO write!

Play around with all the settings here! No really. Go! I’ll wait..

All done? A quick tip for you, now, is the “Preview My Profile…” button on the top of the Profile Information Privacy page. This button is very magical in that it lets you view your profile through the eyes of someone else. You can see how all your hard work tweaking profile settings has paid off by seeing exactly how someone else will see your profile!

Hit the “Preview My Profile…” button on the top of this page and enter the name of a friend who you shouldn’t see a certain section (maybe someone from your Limited Profile list)

We’re going to cover 1 more topic here and then you’re ready for the real world! This is a newer feature that Facebook just released a month or so back. It let’s you have fine-grained control over who sees things you post on Facebook. Head back to your home page and we can post a status to only a certain group of friends.

Click the “lock” icon next to the Share button and you’ll have some options on who will see this post

These options should all look familiar to you so let’s just jump straight into Custom again

This time, instead of selecting “Only Friends” like we did in our Profile Information, we’re going to select Specific People. This will let us type the name of specific friends or lists of friends that we want to see this post. Very straight forward. You may want to include a name or a list in the “Hide This From” section if you have some friends in 2 lists. For example, you want to share with your “People From Work” list, but you wish to hide it from your “Managers From Work” list. This is only necessary if the “Managers From Work” also reside in your “People From Work” list.

Go ahead and save those settings and share your post! You’ll see a tiny little lock sandwiched between the time of the post and the comment link. If you hover over this, it will display who can see this post.

I think that about covers it! Once you understand how the privacy controls work on Facebook, they really aren’t that hard to master. With a little practice, you should be an expert at controlling who sees what on your Facebook page. Now go have fun!

It’s no surprise by now that the iPhone 3G S was announced today. Apples announcement was decent. They couldn’t possibly live up to ALL of the rumors that were going around before the actual event. A faster phone is always welcome and the video recording/editing features looked cool. Voice commands. Compass. Autofocus camera. It’s a decent upgrade. The iPhone OS 3.0 showed really well with some new software that they highlighted. Pretty much, Apple didn’t dazzle with any huge surprises or anything (as far as iPhone is concerned) but they didn’t disappoint either.

AT&T on the other hand was a completely different story. During the event, AT&T was boo’ed at least twice. When it was stated that AT&T would have MMS by ‘late summer’, and when they were left out of the tethering partners announced. Then, shortly after the event, the pricing came out for us iPhone 3G users. Along with the lack of any sort of price cut on their plans that were rumored, AT&T didn’t really do anything to help it’s ‘cash cow’ one bit.Now, I won’t totally get down on AT&T for not wanting to eat $200 per subscriber who upgrades to an iPhone 3G S. I understand that from a business point of view, they aren’t really doing anything different. When everyone upgraded from their iPhone to the iPhone 3G, they paid full price for the first iPhone. So, unless they bought ANOTHER phone and had it subsidized less than 6 months prior to buying the first iPhone, they were well within AT&T’s 18-months between phone subsidization. Same goes here. Those of us who bought the iPhone 3G the day it came out, probably have to wait until December 12 (unless you have some major credit problems or like to not pay your bill very often) just like it’s always been. The illusion really is that AT&T gave 1st generation iPhone users a ‘break’ by letting them upgrade for the subsidized price of the iPhone 3G.

Do I think this is a good business move on AT&T’s part in the long run? Not really. The iPhone 3G S is a nice upgrade but it’s no “OMG, THAT’S SOOO MUCH BETTER THAN MY 3G” kind of upgrade. AT&T just gave a lot of people time to wait. Now that I have 7 months to wait before I can upgrade my phone on the cheap, I can see how Apple’s exclusive deal is going to fair and decide if I want to jump ship when my contract ends next year. I think a lot of iPhone 3G users will be evaluating the same thing.

The place where AT&T really disappointed everyone has to do with their network and their lack of doing anything about it. it’s not like MMS is a big surprise or anything. It’s been coming for months and you I don’t accept any of your excused on why you can’t ‘flip a switch’ and let me use MMS on June 17. MMS can already be used on any other phone on your network so what’s the hold up? Flip the switch! The tethering thing isn’t a huge deal to me. I probably won’t be getting it. But it just makes me think about another way AT&T is trying to squeeze every last penny out of the users that already spend a fortune on it’s network. I can’t think of any other reason you don’t have a ‘comment’ about that yet. And last but not least, your iPhone plans are a ripoff and a $10 discount or maybe a combined unlimited data + unlimited text plan for a little cheaper than you can get it now would be very nice.

I haven’t written you off yet, AT&T, but I am not happy right now and you’ve just given me some time to consider other options. I’d be happy to pay the ‘early upgrade fee’ as soon as I feel like you get your head out of the clouds and start thinking about more about your best customers and be straight with us instead of pretending like no one already knows that your network just can’t handle the demand of the iPhone. Straighten your network out over the next month or two and I’ll forget all about this awful day. But if things aren’t noticeably better by the end of the year, I won’t have any problems waiting for the NEXT iPhone to come out on Verizon.

I just finished watching the Microsoft press conference for E3 2009 and I have to say that I’m pretty pleased with their offering. They had some really solid looking games coming soon. Social networking ties. Video upgrades. A whole new way to interact with your Xbox360. I’m happy Microsoft is bringing all this to my Xbox 360, but what I thought after I was all done is about how much I respect and will ALWAYS own a Nintendo console. Let me explain real quick..

I can quote the famous South Park episode in which everything ever done is responded to with a simple “Simpsons Did It!”. It just amazes me that every large innovation in video gaming was initiated by Nintendo. I think about the first gamepad most of us played with with the NES and think about where Sega went with it shortly after wards. They made it a little curvier and added an extra button. The basic idea was the same just slightly modified. Then came the N64 which brought a multitude of new innovations to gaming that were soon adopted. That analog stick you see on every major console in production since the N64. Then there was the Rumble Pack that was released for the N64. How many of us gamers have a hard time playing a game without that feedback that was introduced into every console as a standard feature after that? 3D games were also a very big step forward coming into the N64 and now you’ll be hard pressed to find games that aren’t. Now, this is a lot of Nintendo love for 1 paragraph. I’ll admit that I can’t think of much in the world of innovation when it comes to the GameCube, but I also can’t think of anything done by Microsoft or Sony that pretty pushed the envelope either. The latest innovation is getting us lazy gamers up off the couch to actually move around a little bit while we play games. Sony soon tried to follow suit with a really awful implementation in the SixAxis controller and now Microsoft is following suit by offering their own ‘get up off the couch’ solution. One that I’m certain they would not be showing off right now if the Wii wasn’t doing as well as it is. I’m not hating on anyone here. It’s the nature of the beast. You invent something amazing that everyone wants and you’ll find all your competitors trying to one up you. The main point I’m trying to make, is that Nintendo always seems to be ahead of the curve on a very consistent basis. For this reason, I don’t care what their next console is, I will own one. Back to Microsoft..Sorry about that. Microsoft’s game lineup looks really good! Left 4 Dead 2. The Beatles: Rock Band. Halo 3: ODST and Halo: Reach. Forza 3. Alan Wake. Modern Warfare 2. They got game. That’s all the press conference said to me. And this was all the first party partner stuff. That doesn’t include the great games I saw coming from EA and UbiSoft. I’m a huge Halo 3 fan so those games coming from Bungie are quite exciting for me. I’ll be picking up ODST as soon as it ‘drops’ and am even more pleased that I’ll be able to participate in the Halo: Reach multiplayer beta when that gets released in 2010. Most of the games mentioned looked like just ‘better’ versions of that type of game. Alan Wake was my biggest surprise. I can’t say I ever heard of this game before but wow did it look fantastic. Besides the game looking gorgeous, the story and immersion of the game looked like the best parts. I can see myself getting quite lost in it and really can’t wait for it to hit the store shelves now.

The non-game stuff was pretty simple but still very welcome. Microsoft is relaunching their video service as ‘Zune Video’. I guess they want to push the brand name of their struggling media player as much as they can. I’m almost turned off to the whole service because of the Zune in it’s name, but I’ll over look it, I’m sure. All HD videos are getting upgraded to 1080p with 5.1 surround sound. They’re updating the Netflix application to let you find things you want to watch and add them to your queue or play them directly from your Xbox without needing a computer. Last.fm is going to be providing online music streaming. Not sure if they’re going to incorporate Xbox 360’s music player as well and let users scrobble what they play on their Xbox to Last.fm. Facebook and Twitter close out this round. Both being completely designed for the TV and both looking pretty damned cool. I’m, again, not sure about the level of interaction OUT of the Xbox these services will have. I’d rather just have the ability to let my Xbox tweet or send a message to my Facebook stream every time I get a new achievement or maybe every time I start up a game. These things weren’t mentioned by the somewhat nervous Felicia Day.

The first AutoUpdate for Halo 3 was just released last night (or morning, depending on where you are and what you consider ‘night’) and addressed a few issues people were having with Halo 3. The largest and most noticeable change has to do with the melee system. The short answer says that, in Halo 3 v1.0, if 2 people both tried to melee within 100ms of each other, whoever had the most health would survive and the other person would die. Some cases would seem partially random because if one player took even 1 extra bullet, he would lose the melee contest and the other would walk away. In v1.1, there’s some lea-way that says if you have considerably more health than your opponent, you survive and they die. If the health is too close to call, you both die. I was able to notice this in the first couple of games I played but it really didn’t change much as far as how I play or anything. It’s a good fix. Other than that, not much will be noticed.

Since this update is out of the way, all we can do now is look forward. What still needs to be fixed for the next update? I’ll start my saying that some of these things I was hoping would be resolved in this first update, but I won’t be too picky about that. Bungie does good work and I’ll patiently await v1.2. Please note, these probabilities are just my own little estimates and really have no weight to them at all.1. Spawning! First and foremost! This is one of the things that should have been resolved in 1.1. One of my biggest pet peaves about Halo 3 in general is how random and stupid the respawn system seems to work. I’ll say that it’s not always flawed. A good job is done to try and get you to respawn near your teammates and away from battle, but this isn’t always the case. There has never been a playing session where I can remember not being spawned right in the middle of a battle surrounded by 2 enemies who instantly pick off my sorry, unprepared and startled ass. This is annoying. A system has to be developed that goes through some variables before spawning you. A system that will check to find the best place to respawn you based on where a majority of your team is already and where your not going to end up right in the line of fire. The second (and to me, even more annoying) problem with spawning doesn’t involve spawning in the middle of a battle, but has to do with not being able to hold certain areas as your own. Specifically in High Ground, the beach is a good spot to snipe. It SHOULD be able to be held down by just your sniper. The problem is, that it’s impossible to do this because your enemies will eventually just spawn behind you and have an easy job at taking you out. If bungie fixes ANYTHING for v1.2, it has to be spawning!

Probability: 90%. This is one of the larger complaints out there so I’m going to keep my fingers crossed and hope for the best here.

2. Theatre. The theatre is a great tool. It lets you review what went well and what went wrong in a particular match. You can save clips and screenshots to share with your friends. The current problems I want to see aren’t necessarily problems as they are limitations that I’m pretty sure were designed to be there. A couple things I would love to see improved are as follows.

- First Person mode. You start out viewing the game through the eyes of yourself (or whoever’s film it is). You can either keep this view, or hit Y to exit your body and view things from a 3rd person perspective. This is cool and all for taking pictures and stuff, but what if I want to study someone’s movements and see what they saw while something was happening? What if I wanted to study how that guy sniped me and all of my teammates in the head with 4 bullets? You can’t do this because once you leave your own first person mode, there’s no way to get back to it. I would love to see first-person added to the Y rotation. So rotate from First-person, to free camera, to 3rd person camera, back to first person again.

Probability: 70%. I can’t see this as being all that hard to impliment or ‘fix’. So we’ll file this in ‘why not?’.

- Editing mode. Saving clips is cool and all but is very limited. You can move the camera around a little while recording but that’s the extend of what you can do to set a mood. Anything else you want to do as far as editing is concerned requires your own editing software on your computer and a way to get the footage from the game to your computer. A mode that would allow you to pause recording and readjust the camera would be great. Or maybe just a timeline that would let you take multiple clips and piece them together into a little mini-movie without requiring editing software on your computer. Maybe one more option would be the ability to transcode your film straight to youtube or something so you can share them easier without needing to load up Halo 3.

Probability: 10%. As much as I’d love to see it, I can’t see it being included in the next update. A guy can dream though, can’t he?

3. Skill/EXP cheating. It’s not very common any more. Cheating seems to be quite reduced since the likes of Halo 2, but there are still ways to game the system and it just annoys me when I see a guy at level 47 with 0 EXP.

Probability: 100%. Bungie always works on cheating the cheaters. So I fully expect them to continue to take measures to ensure their rating systems stay pure and un-gamed.

4. DLC Maps. I’m not sure how this would work. I like the first pack of DLC maps. The problem is, right now they cost money and the only way they get picked in ranked games is when everyone matched has purchased the maps. This happens.. pretty much never in any games with more than 4 total players. I don’t know if it’s possible to push the DLC maps through with an auto-update or if all users would have to download them for free through Xbox Live when they are finally made free. I sure hope so though. It will be nice when everyone HAS to have the maps so they are in regular rotation.

Probability: 80%. This all depends on how the Xbox Live system works. I have no idea, but I’m sure if it’s possible to push the maps through an auto-update, it’ll probably be done once they maps are set free.

I’ve had a lot of requests for some sort of howto for my has_many_friends plugin for rails. I’m not wondrous at making howto’s, but I’ve been trying to rack my brain thinking of things I could demonstrate in a new post about how to use the has_many_friends plugin. So we’ll see what we can do. There won’t be any large code examples. I’ll just include a few snippets here and there, mainly because I wrote has_many_friends to have enough wiggle room so people can incorporate it in a few different ways. So let’s get started…If you’ve followed the README, you should have the plugin installed and you will have already added the has_many_friends line to your User model and generated the friendship model with the included generator. If you haven’t done this yet, look at the README where I’ve included lots of information on installing and using the plugin there.

Now that we have the plugin installed, we need to use it. So let’s first think about a few things we might want to do with friends. Off the top of my head, I can think of requesting friendship, accepting friend requests, listing all my friends, checking to see if I’m friends with someone, and deleting friends. I think that’s a decent enough list as demonstrating how to do these actions with my plugin should give you a pretty nice jump on using any of the methods included. I want to make sure everyone understands that this plugin is just an extension to your User model. It provides the database associations and extra helper methods to your User model. So you use it just like any other model. Let’s request friends. For our examples, I’ll have 2 users stored in variables called fred and wilma.

First thing we need to do, Fred needs to send a friend request to Wilma. This is going to go in a controller method that will be handling friend requests.

fred, wilma = User.find(1), User.find(2) fred.request_friendship_with(wilma)

That’s it. You can set up an observer or do whatever you wish to notify Wilma she has a friend request, but I’m going to leave that up to you. Now Wilma is going to log in and on her dashboard, it’s going to see if she has any pending friends.

wilma = current_user flash[:notice] = "You have a new friend request!" unless wilma.pending_friends_for_me.blank?

Now that we’ve alerted Wilma of her new friend request, she clicks on the ‘friend request’ link and gets to a list of all pending friends from other users.

def list wilma = current_user @pending_friends = wilma.pending_friends_for_me end

You should be able to figure out what to do in your view to display these. The only thing you need to think about is that you need 2 links for each pending friend. One will link to an action to accept the friend request and the other will deny the friend request. Let’s create the accept action first.

def accept_friend fred, wilma = User.find(params[:id]), current_user wilma.accept_friendship_with(fred) flash[:notice] = "Friendship has been accepted with Fred" end

Now Wilma and Fred are friends. Keep in mind that this code is very basic and just to show those who are having trouble understanding how to use this plugin. Your code WILL differ from this but this should give you a general idea of what to do. Now that we have a friendship, Fred logs on because he got the email from your uber cool observer that said that Wilma has accepted his friendship. He’s a happy boy. He heads straight for his friend list to see his new addition. As an example, I usually have a separate controller called friends for this with a list action.

def list fred = current_user @friends = fred.friends end

Again, you know what to do with @friends in the view. Fred now sees Wilma in that list of friends. Let’s say when 2 people are friends, they get to see more from each other. We’ll need to check for this each time a user visits a page. Fred is going to visit a page of Wilma’s right now.

def show fred, wilma = current_user, User.find(params[:id]) flash[:notice] = "Your friends with this person!" if fred.is_friends_with?(wilma) end

As just an example, this will show a nice little message if your friends with the person who owns this page. Use your imagination and you should be able to come up with some fancy ways of using this. Now Fred and Wilma have a really big fight. Punches are thrown and Fred is left with a black eye. He’s angry and he’s hell bent on revenge. He’s going to remove Wilma from his friends list! I intentionally left out the ‘deny friendship’ action above because it’s the same as deleting a friendship.

def delete_friendship fred, wilma = current_user, User.find(params[:id]) fred.delete_friendship_with(wilma) flash[:notice] = "You and Wilma are no longer friends" end

Who wants to log in and go through the hassle of navigating a website when you can type a simple command to get the same thing? Not me! I usually use the MediaPlayerConnectivity Extension which lets me launch streaming media outside of the browser, but I wanted to go a step further and remove the browser completely from my XM Radio listening when I’m outside of my car. I created a nice little Ruby script for doing just that. With the wonderful Mechanize gem it’s quite easy to traverse websites without every looking at them.

The first thing (I mean, you obviously need Ruby, so go get that if you don’t have it yet) your going to want to do, is install the mechanize gem.

gem install mechanize -y

If you get permission errors, you probably need to run sudo gem install mechanize -y instead.

After that, you can copy the code below and paste it into your own xmradio.rb file. It’s pretty easy to use too. The first time you run the script, it will ask you a few questions about your login information and what type of media player you want to use. After this, you won’t see that message again unless you delete your ~/.xmradio file. You’ll probably need to make sure to chmod a+x xmradio.rb and you may want to throw the file somewhere like /usr/bin or somewhere that’s in your PATH so that you can execute it easily. The rest is easy!

xmradio.rb 202

The above command will launch the script, connect to listen.xmradio.com, log you in and start your preferred player. The number you specify after the xmradio.rb is the channel you wish to listen to. If you don’t specify a channel, it will play whatever default channel you chose when you first configured. If you ever want to reconfigure the script, either edit ~/.xmradio or just delete it and the next time you launch xmradio.rb, you’ll be asked the same questions again.

In the near future, I think it will be cool to add a couple of features, such as the ability to change channels while the script is running, or maybe the ability to save the stream with certain players. The recommended player is mplayer right now, but I also tested it a little bit with xine. Code is after the jump! Go get it!

#!/usr/bin/env ruby

Filename : xmradio.rm

Author : Steve Ehrenberg

URL : http://blog.dnite.org

listen to xmonline from your command line #

Make sure you install the mechanize gem. This is the only gem

required by this script.

configuration is stored in ~/.xmradio #

This file is a yaml file and needs to stay correctly formatted.

If you edit the file by hand, don’t add any extra spaces or tabs.

You can always just delete ~/.xmradio and this script will prompt

you for all the information again. #

usage: xmradio [channel]

require “fileutils” require “net/http” require “uri” require ‘yaml’ require “rubygems” require “mechanize”

def main

load and parse configuration config = load_config config[‘channel’] = ARGV0 unless ARGV0 == ’’ || ARGV0.nil?

log in to your xmonline account with Mechanize. agent = WWW::Mechanize.new page = agent.get ‘http://listen.xmradio.com’ login_form = page.form(‘login’) login_form.user_id = config[‘email’] login_form.pword = config[‘password’] page = agent.submit(login_form)

exit if the email and password were invalid. exit_now ‘You entered a wrong email and password.’ if page.body =~ /Invalid email and\/or password\./

Display the user’s name just to show we care. puts ‘’, page.search("//td[@class=’tBlack’]//span[@class=‘tDkRed’]").innerHTML, ’’

We’ll find the stream URL below. page = agent.get “http://player.xmradio.com/player/2ft/playMedia.jsp?ch=#{config[‘channel’]}&speed=#{config[‘quality’]}” stream = page.at(“//object[id='xmmediaplayer']//param[name=‘FileName’]”)[‘value’].gsub(/\&/, “\\\\&”) puts “Streaming from #{stream}…”, ’’

Start a new thread with the player in it player = Thread.new(config[‘player’]) do |player| `#{player} #{stream} 2> /dev/null` end

Display the initial information puts ‘Now Listening To…’ print “Artist ::\nTitle ::\nAlbum ::\nChannel ::\n”

Loop while the script stays running and keep fetching song info while true info = now_playing_info( agent.get(“http://player.xmradio.com/padData/pad_data_servlet.jsp?channel=#{config[‘channel’]}”) ) channel = “#{info[‘ch_name’]} | #{info[‘ch_num’]}” print “#{ansi_esc channel} #{ansi_esc info[‘album’]} #{ansi_esc info[‘title’]} #{ansi_esc info[‘artist’]} #{reset_cursor}” $stdout.sync = true sleep 2 trap(“SIGINT”) { exit_now ‘XM online stopped…’ } end end

adds the ansi escape sequences to move up 1 line, go to character 12,

erase the line after character 12, and turn on and off bright. def ansi_esc(string) “\e[A\e[12G\e[K\e[1m#{string}\e[0m” end

turns off bright, moves the cursor down 4 lines and jumps to beginning of line. def reset_cursor “\e[0m\e[4B\e[1G” end

Parse the page and throw the information into a hash def now_playing_info(page) info = { ‘title’ => page.at(‘songtitle’).innerHTML, ‘artist’ => page.at(‘artist’).innerHTML, ‘album’ => page.at(‘album’).innerHTML, ‘ch_num’ => page.at(‘channelnumber’).innerHTML, ‘ch_name’ => page.at(‘channelname’).innerHTML } end

Load the config from ~/.xmradio or start creation of a new config. def load_config new_config unless FileTest.exist?(“#{ENV[‘HOME’]}/.xmradio”) config = open(“#{ENV[‘HOME’]}/.xmradio”) { |f| YAML.load(f) } rescue exit_now ‘Problem loading your config..’ end

Save the configuration to ~/.xmradio def save_config(config) config.to_yaml return true if open(“#{ENV[‘HOME’]}/.xmradio”, ‘w’) { |f| YAML.dump(config, f) } false end

A very user friendly configuration method. Asks the user all the

questions it needs very nicely and sends the information over to

be saved. def new_config puts ‘Looks like this is your first time running this script. I need’,‘a few small bits of information to get your started.’,‘’,’You need to have a valid account for listen.xmradio.com to use’,‘this. What\’s the email address you use to login? [REQUIRED]’ email = $stdin.gets.chomp exit_now ‘You have to enter an email address to continue’ if email == ‘’ puts ’’, ‘Ok, how about the password? [REQUIRED]’ password = $stdin.gets.chomp exit_now ‘You need to enter your password to continue’ if password == ‘’ puts ’’, ‘Great. XMonline allows you to listen to either a low’,‘quality stream, or high. Which one would you like? high/low? [default: high]’ quality = $stdin.gets.chomp quality = quality =~ /^l/i ? ‘low’ : ‘high’ puts ‘’, ’Almost done. What media player would you like to use to’,‘stream XMonline? [mplayer/xine/xmms/alsaplayer] [default: mplayer]’ player = $stdin.gets.chomp exit_now “You need to specify a valid player.\nSupported played are mplayer, xine, xmms and alsaplayer.” unless player =~ /^m/i || player =~ /^xi/i || player =~ /^xm/i || player =~ /^a/i || player == ‘’ player = ’mplayer -msglevel all=-1 -playlist’ if player =~ /^m/i || player == ‘’ player = ’xine -I —no-logo’ if player =~ /^xi/i player = ‘xmms’ if player =~ /^xm/i player = ‘alsaplayer’ if player =~ /^a/i puts ‘’, ’Last question. This script allows you to use a default channel’,‘that will always start when you don\’t enter a different channel’,‘at the command line. What\’s your favorite XM channel? [default: 202]’ channel = $stdin.gets.chomp channel = ‘202’ if channel == ‘’ config = {’email’ => email, ‘password’ => password, ‘quality’ => quality, ‘player’ => player, ‘channel’ => channel} return puts(‘’,’All done with your setup! Enjoy XMonline!‘) if save_config config exit_now ’There was a problem saving your config.’ end

Display an error message and exit. def exit_now(message=“error!”) puts ‘’,message,’’ exit end

main

I’m a simple person. I don’t need much when it comes to burning CD’s. Which is why I don’t really care that the CD burning support in linux isn’t all that spectacular. If there’s one thing that Ubuntu doesn’t do well, it’s burn CD’s. For their own sake, I hope they fix up Serpentine for the release of Feisty, because right now it’s terrible. It takes 10 minutes just to import a few mp3’s and then another 10 minutes to convert them.. and then we have to cross our fingers and hope the burn works or that Ubuntu see’s the blank CD that’s in the CDRW.

Luckily, this is the only thing I really use a CD burner for. Sometimes I need to burn some songs to an audio CD to listen to in the car. Since I was tired or working with Rails for an evening, I took a couple of hours to code a small script in Ruby that automates the process for me. There’s no GUI. It’s very simple. But it doesn’t need to be complicated, so who cares? It requires Ruby (of course) and the ruby-mp3info ruby gem. It also requires cdrdao. Which I’m pretty sure is standard in most Ubuntu systems, but I could be wrong about that.

gem install ruby-mp3info

Here’s the code. Have fun with it. Maybe I’ll slap a GUI on it when I feel like playing with Ruby and GTK some day. This shouldn’t have any problems running on any linux disto that has cdrao, ruby, and ruby-mp3info installed.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby #

Burn a folder of MP3’s to an audio CD

-—————————————————

This script requires the ruby-mp3info

gem. install it with gem install. #

burn_audiocd /path/to/mp3/files #

Change this if you don’t have permissions TempDir = “/tmp/burn_audiocd”

require “rubygems” require “mp3info” require “ftools”

def main dir = parse_directory(ARGV0) calculate_time(dir) prepare_temp(dir) convert_to_wav(dir) prepare_cue_sheet(dir) burn_cd end

Display some help. def output_help puts ‘burn_audiocd: USAGE: burn_audiocd ’ exit end

Simple checks to make sure the directory has MP3 files in it. def parse_directory(dir) output_help if dir.nil? || dir == "" || !File.directory?(dir) print ‘Checking Directory… ’ num_mp3s = 0 Dir.foreach(dir) {|filename| num_mp3s += 1 if filename =~ /\.mp3$/i} if num_mp3s == 0 puts ’No mp3 files found!’ exit end puts “#{num_mp3s} mp3 files found.” return dir end

We want to see how long the MP3’s are (roughly) so we know

if we want to add more songs or not. def calculate_time(dir) puts ‘Estimating total number of minutes for this CD…’ time = 0 Dir.foreach(dir) { |filename| Mp3Info.open(“#{dir}/#{filename}”) {|mp3info| time += mp3info.length} if filename =~ /\.mp3$/i } if time/60 > 80 printf “Total CD Time is estimated at %5.2f minutes.\nThis will not fit on a regular 80 minute CD.”, time/60 exit end printf "Estimated CD Time: %5.2f minutes\nContinue? [n/Y] ", time/60 exit if $stdin.gets =~ /n|no/i true end

We’ll store all the converted files in a temp dir. So we’ll

have to create it. def prepare_temp(dir) if File.directory?(TempDir) puts ‘Cleaning Up Temporary Directory…’ FileUtils.rm Dir[“#{TempDir}/*”] else puts ‘Creating Temporary Directory…’ Dir.mkdir(TempDir) end end

Convert the mp3 files to .wav files so they can be burned as

an audio cd. def convert_to_wav(dir) puts ‘Converting Files…’ Dir.foreach(dir) { |filename| if filename =~ /\.mp3$/i puts " #{filename}" `lame —quiet —decode #{dir.escape_spaces}/#{filename.escape_spaces} #{TempDir}/#{File.basename(filename.downcase.convert_spaces, “.mp3”)}.wav 2>/dev/null` end } end

Create the file that will be used as a cue sheet def prepare_cue_sheet(dir) puts ‘Creating a CUE sheet…’ cue = File.new(“#{TempDir}/cuesheet.toc”, “w+”) cue << “CD_DA\nCD_TEXT {\n LANGUAGE_MAP {\n 0 : EN\n }\n LANGUAGE 0 {\n TITLE \”Ruby Created CD!\“\n }\n}\n\n” Dir.foreach(dir) { |filename| if filename =~ /\.mp3$/ cue << "TRACK AUDIO\nCD_TEXT {\n LANGUAGE 0 {\n " Mp3Info.open(“#{dir}/#{filename}”) {|mp3info| cue << “TITLE \”#{mp3info.tag.title}\"\n " cue << “PERFORMER \”#{mp3info.tag.artist}\“\n }\n}\n\n” } cue << “FILE \”#{TempDir}/#{File.basename(filename.downcase.convert_spaces, “.mp3”)}.wav\" 0\n" end } cue.close end

Actually burn the CD. def burn_cd puts ‘Starting Burn Process…’ `cdrdao write #{TempDir}/cuesheet.toc` puts ‘Cleaning up Temporary Files…’ FileUtils.rm Dir[“#{TempDir}/*”] puts ‘CD Creation Complete!’ end

class String def escape_spaces self.gsub(/\s/, ’\ ’) end

def convert_spaces self.gsub(/\s+/, ‘_’) end

end

NOTE : This article is an update to an older wordpress blog I did. Since then I learned a few new tricks and thought this page could use a refresh. Enjoy teh Vim!

I wrote an article not too long ago about installing Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu quickly and easily. The one section I left pretty ‘in the air’ was definitely the IDE. I feel that Linux has the biggest choice when it comes to editor options.

If your using Windows, you’ll probably use RadRails. It’s feature rich. It does everything you need. And windows Java machine just seems to work more efficiently, in my experience, than the ones for linux. If anyone wants to give me some hints to improve my java machines performance, go right ahead. On the mac. You have TextMate. Mac’s also have a lot of options, but from what I’ve heard and seen. Very seldom do you develop Rails applications on a mac without using textmate.

Now, for Linux, you have a variety of things to choose from and I’ve dipped my hands in a few of them. First, I tried RadRails. RadRails is what I used in windows and it was familiar to me. Since it runs on all 3 platforms, I figured I’d give it a shot in Linux. The problem was, that it just seemed a lot slower than it ran in Windows. I’m not exactly sure why this is, but speed and reliability were the reasons I went looking for a better alternative. I did some research and found that some people used jEdit. But getting jEdit to work in Edgy was a chore, do I didn’t even try. gEdit was also another option. It highlights syntax. It can take plugins. It’s a pretty light weight editor. I tried this for a couple of days, but it just didn’t feel right.Over in the #rubyonrails IRC channel on irc.freenode.net, I heard about vim and a plugin called rails.vim. I’d given vi a try a long time ago. But never a substantial try. It was always really confusing to get into right away. It’s just not like most other editors. But I figured I’d give it a shot anyways. After a week or so of working with Vim and rails.vim, I’m pretty sold. I’m not 100% comfortable with it just yet, but I can definitely see the potential. I find myself hitting ESC and starting to type :wq when quickly editing something in gEdit or something. Rails.vim takes vim a step further and adds a ton of nice Rails features. Here’s what I did to get into and start enjoying using vim in a couple of days.

First and foremost. Make sure you have Vim installed. Pretty simple. The vimtutor command is optional but VERY VERY recommended if you’ve never used vim. Take the half hour to complete the tutor and you will understand vim a lot better.

sudo apt-get install vim-common vim-runtime vim-gnome vimtutor

Now that you have vim installed, let’s install the vim ruby gem that gives you all the nice syntax highlighting and other cool ruby features. When you run vim-ruby-install.rb, it gives you the option to install to your home folder. I picked this option, so make sure you don’t run this with sudo.

sudo gem install vim-ruby --remote vim-ruby-install.rb (select option 1 when it asks where you want to install. /home/username/.vim)

Now you should have Vim installed with some nice ruby stuff. Let’s go ahead and make a startup file to get rid of a few vim annoyances. Create a new file called .vimrc in your home directory (~/.vimrc) and add the following.

set nocompatible syntax on filetype plugin indent on set mouse=a runtime! macros/matchit.vim augroup myfiletypes autocmd! autocmd FileType ruby,eruby,yaml set ai sw=2 sts=2 et augroup END

Also, if you want to use Tab support, you can add the following to your .vimrc file. It will always show you the tab bar and give you a couple of shortcuts. Press CTRL+T to open a new tab, CTRL+N to move to the next tab and CTRL+P to move to the previous tab. With mouse=a, you can also click on the tabs to select them.

set showtabline=2 set tabpagemax=15 nnoremap <silent> <C-n> :tabnext<CR> nnoremap <silent> <C-p> :tabprevious<CR> nnoremap <silent> <C-t> :tabnew<CR>

Now, all we have to do is download rails.vim. Head over to rails.vim and download the latest version. There should be a plugin directory and a doc directory in this archive. Extract it to your .vim folder and your all set. The last thing you have to do is enable the rails documentation.

vim :helptags ~/.vim/doc

With rails.vim installed, you can launch vim from your project directory and have a lot of new functions. If you try :Rmodel user (which tab completes very nicely), it opens up app/models/user.rb. :Rcontroller blog will open up app/controllers/blog_controller.rb. Everything works just like you would expect it to. You can tab complete the commands and the filenames. If you don’t know what file your looking for, leave the filename off and start hitting tab. You’ll just cycle through all the models or controllers or views. :Rextract will take a currently highlighted section of your code, and automatically create a new partial file while replacing the current selection with the render :partial call. If your using tabs, you can replace the :R commands with :RT commands.. :RTmodel user will open up a new tab with the user model. Also, if you move the cursor over another controller name or model name or anything similar and press gf, you will open up that file. It takes a little getting used to but it really works. For a completely list of everything that rails.vim can do, type :help rails. There’s a lot you can do.

I’ve only been a member of SliceHost (the server that is currently serving this article to you) for a week now but I have to say that I’m very impressed and very pleased with the service thus far. They have a real-ness about them. They have an IRC channel where you can actually find members of the staff. They don’t limit what you can do on your VPS. They’re inexpensive. I could go on about why I think they’re service is great, but I’ll stop myself there. I want to string together some articles that will basically go over how I set up certain parts of my server for those of you who are either new to SliceHost or new to setting up a server.

Since most of my work and most of this blog will be about Ruby on Rails, I thought it only fit that the first article be about getting a Ruby on Rails system up and running. My slice has Gentoo installed on it, so the instructions will be using commands specific to Gentoo, but if your using a different system, you should be able to follow along and replace ‘emerge’ with your package manager. Let’s get started, shall we?Getting Started

The first thing we should really decide is how we want to serve up our Rails application. You lucked out because I’ve decided that for you! I’ll be setting up a mongrel cluster with Apache 2.2 used as the proxy. If you would like to use Lighttpd and FastCGI or some other setup, you may want to just skim this guide and find another that is more specific to your needs, but mongrel clusters and Apache 2.2 are all the rage these days, so you should really give it a shot. Let’s start with the basics. Let’s get Ruby on Rails up and running. First, how about we make sure everything is going to stay pretty uniform. We need some USE flags so that ruby and apache and everything else get installed with the correct things compiled in. Edit /etc/make.conf.

USE="apache2 ruby ssl mysql postgres sqlite3 imagemagick gif jpeg jpeg2k png tiff svg wmf xpm pdf truetype unicode python"

Obviously, not all of these flags are necessary, and you may even want to add some extras. When using emerge, I strongly recommend adding the -va option. This will print out everything that’s going to be installed and ask if you want to continue. It will also print each USE flag the packages will be compiled with and without, so it’s a good way to see what flags you really need. Next we need to emerge some things. Since we already know what we NEED to have installed, I’m going to go ahead and do this in one step. Let’s add some keywords and unmask some things.

# vim /etc/portage/package.unmask net-www/apache dev-libs/apr dev-libs/apr-util # vim /etc/portage/package.keywords ~net-www/apache-2.2.4 ~dev-libs/apr-1.2.8 ~dev-libs/apr-util-1.2.8 dev-ruby/rubygems

These are essential unmasks and are used for installing Apache 2.2 on Gentoo (which is currently masked for testing). I’ve yet to find any bugs or any critical problems with it so if your afraid of installing testing software on your new server, relax a little. x=) If you can’t relax, you may want to seek out a tutorial that doesn’t use mongrel clusters with apache, since 2.2 is the version you require to use the mod_proxy_balancer module. Again, your free to add whatever else you might want to have a more bleeding edge version of.

Emerge!

Let’s start the emerge, I’m getting hungry.

# emerge ruby rubygems openssl apache \ graphicsmagick subversion mysql postgresql \ sqlite3 -va

You’ll see a list of everything that’s going to be installed. It’s good practice to get into the habit of looking at this and seeing what use flags are and are not being used. If you see something you don’t like, just say no and add the use flag to /etc/portage/package.use and try again until it looks right. When your satisfied, say yes to the prompt and your packages will start to build. This will probably take a while so, like I said, I’m hungry. You should grab something to eat as well…

Lunch ….

Install Gems

Okie doke. How was lunch? Ready for the fun stuff? Of course you are. We need some gems! There are people who say it’s better to use portage for some gems that are available, but I would rather just have 1 place where I install all my gems so we’re going to use Ruby Gems for all of this. We’ll start by updating Ruby Gems, since the latest version in Gentoo is a little old and then we’ll install Rails and a few other things we might need.

# gem update --system # gem install rails -y # gem install mongrel -y # gem install mongrel_cluster -y # gem install rmagick -y # gem install mysql -y # gem install postgres -y # gem install sqlite3-ruby -y # gem install tzinfo -y # gem install ruby-yadis -y # gem install ruby-openid -y

Obviously, the last 2 gems aren’t REQUIRED, but why the hell aren’t you using OpenID in your rails application!? You should now have a fully functional Ruby on Rails system. What’s next? Well, I’m sure you have your application that your DIEING to get running, so let’s pretend your application is called chunky_bacon for the rest of this tutorial and we’ll get started setting up Apache. I won’t be going over deployment with Capistrano or anything because I’ve never used it (yet). I’ll definitely update with a new article when I finally learn the ropes.

Uploading Your Application

Setting up Apache as a proxy for Rails is actually pretty simple. Let’s upload chunky_bacon somewhere. Most Gentoo systems have their apache documents in /var/www/yourdomain.com/. Let’s go ahead and pretend like our domain is chunkybacon.com for the time being and let’s create an environment for our chunky_bacon application.

# mkdir /var/www/chunkybacon.com # cd /var/www/chunkybacon.com

Now copy your application here. However you feel comfortable. FTP, SSH, SFTP, WebDAV… Whatever works for you. So long as in the end, you have something like /var/www/chunkybacon.com/chunky_bacon/ as the root of your rails application. Since the database is pretty much up to you to pick. I’ll assume you know at least the basics of setting up your database of choice and creating the production database. Remember, we’re in production mode now, so make sure you give root a password and it’s a pretty good idea to use a different user to access your database.

# rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=production

Apache Setup

This step is up to you. edit /etc/apache2/httpd.conf to suit your needs and your server. The entire configuration file is very well documented so take the time to read through it and set everything up for your server.

All done? Ok. Let’s move on. Let’s edit the default virtual host that’s going to proxy our traffic to our mongrel cluster. Again, you have some choice here. I’m editing the default virtual host, but if you’d like to create a new one for a different subdomain or whatever, feel free. If you don’t know much about virtual hosts, you should read up on the apache documentation for them.

# vim /etc/apache2/vhosts.d/00_default_vhost.conf <IfDefine DEFAULT_VHOST> NameVirtualHost *:80 <VirtualHost *:80> ServerName chunkybacon.com ServerAdmin [email protected] DocumentRoot /var/www/chunkybacon.com/chunky_bacon/public <Directory /var/www/chunkybacon.com/chunky_bacon/public> Options FollowSymLinks AllowOverride None Order allow,deny Allow from all </Directory> RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/%{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ balancer://chunky_bacon%{REQUEST_URI} [P,QSA,L] ProxyPassReverse / balancer://chunky_bacon ProxyPreserveHost on <Proxy balancer://chunky_bacon> BalancerMember http://localhost:8000 BalancerMember http://localhost:8001 BalancerMember http://localhost:8002 </Proxy> <Proxy *> Order deny,allow Allow from all </Proxy> # Makes sure any .svn folders won't be accessible. <DirectoryMatch "^/.*/\.svn/"> ErrorDocument 403 /404.html Order allow,deny Deny from all Satisfy All </DirectoryMatch> </VirtualHost> </IfDefine>

This in itself isn’t going to help us. We need the mongrel cluster!

Setup a Mongrel Cluster

Good thing for us, setting up the mongrel cluster is the easiest part!

# cd /var/www/chunkybacon.com/chunky_bacon # mongrel_rails cluster::configure \ -e production -p 8000 -a 127.0.0.1 -N 3 \ -c /var/www/chunkybacon.com/chunky_bacon

This will create a file in your config directory called mongrel_cluster.yml. You don’t need to worry about manually editing it at all. What we are saying here is we want to configure a cluster for production. We want to start at port 8000 on 127.0.0.1 (localhost) and set up 3 mongrels (8000-8002, as seen in the virtual host configuration). Now, we have a few loose ends to clean up and we’ll be all ready to go.

Clean Up!

First, it’s a good idea to run services as something other than root. Apache is nice enough to give us the apache user and group to use for running apache, but lets make a new user for running our application.

# adduser -m chunkybacon # passwd chunkybacon # chown chunkybacon:chunkybacon /var/www/chunkybacon.com -R

Now let’s start up Apache and add it to a default runlevel. If you stopped your database, you’ll want to start that up again too.

# /etc/init.d/apache2 start # rc-update add apache2 default

The first time I tried this, I included 2 extra options in the mongrel_rails command for creating the cluster configuration. --user and --group for changing the user and group. I figured this would be useful for the day I decided to write an init script to start mongrel automatically. The problem was, even though the mongrels were run by the new user, the home directory was never reset so any configuration files needed were being looked for in /root. You may not run into this, but mephisto definitely had a problem with it so I recommend just using a regular user for your applications. Let’s fire up our new application and see her in action!

# su chunkybacon # cd /var/www/chunkybacon.com/chunky_bacon # mongrel_rails cluster::start Starting 3 Mongrel servers...

Cross Fingers

Now point your browser to http://chunkybacon.com and you should see your application! That’s all there is to it! Note. This is pretty basic for setting up your application. You should definitely do some research about virtual hosts and other things to make sure everything is working just the way you need it to. That’s the great thing about SliceHost, your not limited to just what your host wants you to have control of, you have complete control! Now that I got you started, venture off into the real world and show it what you can do! Leave some comments if I made any mistakes here (a lot of this was from memory) or if something doesn’t work for you.

DONE!