I did the usual stuff:

• Run fsck checks and it said that everything is fine
• Used Ubuntu’s live CD to boot, which got me read-write access to root partition. I changed some things in fstab, tried to get it to be rw permanently. No matter what I did as soon as I rebooted the root partition was once again read-only.
• I tried booting from some repair disks I have, but all checks passed and no problem was detected.

Finally, I read somewhere that a similar problem was caused by faulty superblock on hard drive. Fortunately Ubuntu stores superblock backups in different places around disk, so I decided to try to restore it from one of those backups.

It turned out that all I needed was a single command (this Ubuntu forum post helped) to restore superblock:

e2fsck -b 32768 /dev/hdc1

After that my root partition was back to read-write mode.

Before you do stuff like that to your computer I suggest that you read man pages for mke2fs and e2fsck. It will prevent you from doing something foolish like deleting your whole hard drive.

The goal is to get 2 separate RESTful controllers, admin & front-end controller, one model and for admin pages to have scaffolding.

Here is the easiest way I found so far to accomplish this. This example generates categories model and controllers for it.

./script/generate controller admin/categories
./script/generate scaffold category name:string

This will generate an empty controller in admin namespace and a scaffolded resource for front-end controller.

Now we have everything generated we just need to make it work with admin controller and not with front-end.

• move all templates from app/views/categories to app/views/admin/categories
• copy all functions from categories_controller.rb to admin/categories_controller.rb
• add namespace for admin controller in routes.rb:map.namespace :admin do |admin|
admin.resources :categories
end
• in admin/categories_controller.rb replace in 3 places redirect_to calls to work with admin namespace. It will have something like redirect_to(@category), but to work with namespace it needs to have redirect_to([:admin, @category])
• make similar changes in all templates, i.e. make it work within an admin namespace. You need to make following changes:
  • form_for(@category) => form_for([:admin, @category])
  • <%= link_to ‘Show’, @category %> => <%= link_to ‘Show’, [:admin, @category] %>
  • categories_path => admin_categories_path
  • edit_category_path(@category) => edit_admin_category_path(@category)
  • new_category_path => new_admin_category_path

That’s it. Now you’ll have /admin/categories for all administrative tasks and you have a free controller for front-end actions.

You might wonder why not just generate scaffold for admin/categories… The reason is that you’ll also get a model that is namespaced in admin (i.e. model would be Admin::Category). Scaffolded views also wouldn’t work as it seems that generator doesn’t take into account the fact that you are using a namespace.

First one: they offer FTP only access. Meaning you cannot deploy sites directly from code repositories (i.e. git or svn). That sucks.

Second thing that bugs me: for $100 you get quite a lot of computing power which can be used to run multiple sites - but you are only allowed to have one Rails app running. Only one. If you want additional Rails apps (for example to have a test server) you need to pay an extra fee.

I know it’s cloud computing and that you have to be able to run it with any additional configuration (that’s why I think it’s ok that you have to freeze your gems in Rails apps, because you cannot install any gems yourself)… but not being able to checkout my code from repository and having to upload the whole app each time you make changes is really annoying.

In their defense, the support guy said that they are working on it, but he could give me an ETA when they’ll allow something like that.

By default when MySQL uses InnoDB engine it stores most of the information in single file called ibdata1. One downside is that once ibdata1 file grows it cannot shrink - even if you delete all InnoDB tables. For some reason MySQL is set to use single file instead of per-table tablespaces similar to MyISAM.

Enabling per-table tablespaces is easy just add innodb_file_per_table to my.cnf file. Problem is that all newly created tables, only new tables, will be in separate files. It seems that there’s no easy way to convert old tables and reclaim the space taken by ibdata1.

There are 3 ways and two are basically export-drop-delete-import type of solutions:

1. Convert all InnoDB tables to MyISAM
2. Export only InnoDB tables, drop them, delete ibdata1 and import InnoDB tables.
3. Export all databases, delete ibdata1 and import everything back.

I choose option 2 because I luckily had only 40 InnoDB tables and much more using MyISAM. For details on how to apply each solution and down/up sides of each read MySQL: Reducing ibdata1.

[condensed from 'this should be interesting' tumblelog]

No longer… As the Ryan says from now on in the Edge Rails you can specify the name of the local variable in which each collection element will be exposed within a partial. You will can do this:

render :partial => 'employees', :collection => @workers, :as => :person

It’s a simple thing, but it’s just one of the things that bugged me. I am glad it’s gone now.

• Free Book: “Ruby on Rails 2.1 - What’s new”
• Better Blockquotes - blockquotes CSS styling examples
• Slife - free automatic time tracking for Mac
• unfocus-history-keeper - back button enabling, deep linking, event driven Javascrpt/DHTML/Ajax Library (works for Flash too)

After some research and few unsuccessful retries I have finally managed to solve the upgrade problem by downloading standalone 10.5.4 update from Apple download section; booting in safe mode (hold shift key when booting) and then installing the update.

It steps away from a classic web app model by moving a lot of app into the browser itself, which then interacts with server via AJAX. As it says on the SproutCore site:

After lots of testing, we have found that the most efficient way to server a SproutCore application is as a …. static web page!

This means that a “simple” static HTML page (which is easily served by Apache) makes browser do most of the work (i.e. server doesn’t have to generate the pages) which frees up server to respond only to AJAX initiated requests.

SproutCore is written in Ruby, but once you build the app it will generate a set of HTML, JS and CSS files, so you don’t need to know Ruby in order to use it. As the site says:

The code you write with SproutCore will resemble a desktop app written in Cocoa more than it will a web application written in Rails.

Another great thing about SproutCore is that it can be hooked up with any backend as long as it can communicate with it using HTTP. It can be anything: Rails, PHP, Perl, Java, ASP…

Actions speak louder than words, so take a look at the SproutCore demos which shows you exactly what it’s all about.

• SproutCore based photo gallery - iPhoto anyone?
• SproutCore sample controls - demonstrates what kind of controls are already available in SproutCore.

In next few days I will try to build a sample application powered by SproutCore and Rails to see how it goes. I will post my impressions here. After all if it’s something Apple used for Mobile.me - well, it can’t be that bad.

As you can see I just setup the Icebergist blog, so at the moment it’s content-free. While I write some posts you can checkout my posts from my previous blog AS Workshop.

Also I maintain a tumble log called “this should be interesting” where I post small bits of information which I find useful or interesting.

If that’s not enough for you then check out my Twitter feed where I ramble daily (unless I am to lazy or too busy to do so).