I found a few posts about WebView being unable to open local files, and the need to use a ContentProvider to get around the limitation. Tried that, no luck. So, I eventually expanded the .apk and…  No assets?

I found this post to the nbandroid forum from someone seeing the same issue, and tracked down the problem from there. It turned out to be an issue in the build script generated by nbandroid, and the fix is quite simple.

To fix:

1. Create a directory called ‘assets’ at your project root (same dir that AndroidManifest.xml lives)
2. In /nbproject/project.properties, change

   assets.dir=

   to

   assets.dir=assets
   assets.available=true

3. In /nbproject/build-impl.xml, there is line in the “if=assets.available” target that reads

   <arg value="${asset.dir}"/>
   

   that needs to be changed to

   <arg value="${assets.dir}"/>

That’s it – you should be all set and “file:///android_asset/” should be accessible to your application and contain the contents of your project’s assets directory.

Since I’d been meaning to experiment with the Facebook APIs anyway, I built an application that lets me do the basics from my phone. This is something that can be used by anyone with a camera phone, on pretty much any carrier (worldwide!).

Presenting YetiUp! a simple application that lets you easily upload your camera phone pictures to a photo album on Facebook.

It is built using the excellent (though lacking in documentation) Facebooker rails plugin, deployed to Dreamhost.

My wife & I have already uploaded several photos that were previously just confined to our phones.

If you end up using the application, I’d love to hear your feedback!

EDIT : I’ve created a page on the dreamhost wiki that includes this information.

There is a lot of good information on how to run Sinatra on Dreamhost, but after following all the excellent advice, I still ended up with Passenger failing to start with the following error :

can’t activate rack (>= 0.9.1, < 1.0, runtime), already activated rack-0.4.0

Luckily, the solution was pretty easy.

After following the instructions in the Sinatra book, all you need to do is configure where the Rack & Sinatra gems are loaded from. I chose to load them directly from my local gem repository, as this eliminates an additional step of unpacking the gem.

Here is what my config.ru looks like.

require '/home/USERNAME/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/rack-0.9.1/lib/rack.rb'
require '/home/USERNAME/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/sinatra-0.9.1/lib/sinatra.rb'
require 'YOUR-APPLICATION'
log = File.new("log/sinatra.log", "w")
STDOUT.reopen(log)
STDERR.reopen(log)
run Sinatra::Application

A quick touch tmp/restart.txt to restart Passenger, and there you have it! Sinatra and Dreamhost sitting in a tree..

]]> http://blog.yetisoftware.com/2009/03/07/sinatra-on-dreamhost/feed/ 0 http://blog.yetisoftware.com/2009/03/07/sinatra-on-dreamhost/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/YetAnotherProgrammingBlog/~3/y_x01IpOQjI/ http://blog.yetisoftware.com/2009/03/07/running-ie-on-your-mac-in-virtualbox/#comments Sat, 07 Mar 2009 17:32:57 +0000 Deepak http://blog.yetisoftware.com/?p=78 I’ve been developing a few rails applications recently and wanted to test them in IE. A quick google search turned up this excellent article. While that writeup (and its comments) has some excellent content, it is a little dated. Thanks to advances in VirtualBox, I was also able to reduce the number of steps required.

This procedure still isn’t for the tech savvy. You will encounter a Windows blue screen of death for example, and have to use the command prompt, but hopefully it’ll be worth it in the end.

What I wanted to achieve is the ability to test my site using licensed versions of IE6, IE7 & IE8, on my Mac, for free. As it turns out, Microsoft supplies free VirtualPC images “for testing websites with different IE versions on Windows XP SP2, Windows XP SP3 and Windows Vista”. Sweet!.

Downloads

You’ll need to download a few things :

• VirtualBox, an excellent free desktop virtualization solution from Sun. Follow the installation instructions.
• A VPC image. Don’t let the fact that the download is an exe deter you.
• Zipeg to extract the image(s) you download.

Steps

Extract the VHD file

• Rename the .exe image you downloaded to .zip
• Open Zipeg and extract the zip file. Of the contents of the zip, the only file you need is the .VHD file. I’m extracting it to a VirtualBox specific location, but this could be any folder on your system. This takes a few minutes on my MacBook.

Extract the image

Setup VirtualBox

• Start VirtualBox and create a new virtual machine

Getting started

Give the VM a name

Give the VM some RAM

Configure the hard disk, choose "Existing" here

Select "Add" and then choose the VHD you extracted in the first step

You are done! Click Finish, and then Start the newly created VM

Get past the Windows Blue Screen of Death (BSOD)

• At first boot, you’ll likely encounter the infamous BSOD. Here is how you get around it. As soon as you start the VM, press fn + F8. That’ll bring up this options menu
  

Select Safe mode with Command Prompt

• You get around the BSOD by renaming the file that is causing the error, in this case processor.sys. (You’ll likely encounter a number of “Files needed” and “Found new hardware wizard” dialog boxes, I just kept pressing cancel until I go to the command prompt)

Rename processor.sys and then restart the machine.

• After a restart, you’ll finally be rewarded with a Windows desktop, and presented with the EULA. You’ll also still run into a number of “Files needed” and “Found new hardware wizard” dialog boxes. Keep canceling them.

Install VirtualBox Guest Additions

• With your VM running, select Devices > Install Guest Additions, and follow the wizard. Select Continue Anyway when prompted. Finish the install, and select the option to reboot later.

Configure Networking

• Finally, we need to get networking working. While VirtualBox used to ship with Windows XP drivers for their network interface, they don’t seem to be included in the guest additions any more (As of 2.1.4?)
• On your Mac, type the following commands into the terminal to download the drivers from AMD

      $ mkdir VirtualBoxShares
      $ cd VirtualBoxShares
      $ wget http://www.amd.com/us-en/assets/content_type/utilities/V4.51.zip
      $ unzip V4.51.zip -d driver

• Configure sharing so that you can access the afore extracted drivers from the windows VM.

With the VM running, select "Devices > Shared Folders" to bring up this dialog

Point this at the VirtualBoxShares directory you made earlier

Press OK to complete the sharing

• In the Windows VM, Click Start, click Control Panel, click Performance and Maintenance, and then click System.
• On the Hardware tab, click Device Manager.

Device Manager.

Right-click on the Ethernet Controller and select Update Driver...

Don't connect to windows update (since we don't have a network yet!)

We'll tell it where to find the AMD drivers

Select "Include this location in the search" and then "Browse"

Browse to the location of the shared folder.

Getting closer!

Networking is configured!

• Finally, launch IE, and ensure you’ve got connectivity.

Sweet Success!

Summary

An hour or two of tedium is rewarded with a functional Windows VM, one on which you can browser test to your hearts content. Hopefully  my outlining of the steps will allow you to get through it quickly and with minimum frustration!

I should note I haven’t tried this process with the Vista VPC images yet, so would love to hear your feedback if you have.

1. Shouldn’t require root access: I’m deploying this app to a shared hosting service on which I don’t have root.
2. Shouldn’t require firing up the Rails stack for every incoming email: A number of the solutions I came across use this method. Seems awfully inefficient, especially if you expect to receive lots of messages. Since I’ve already got a running rails application, why not just create a new service/controller in it?
3. Can be scheduled to run automatically: Pretty obvious. I want to be able to retrieve messages periodically.

There is already a lot of information out there on how to achieve parts of these requirements, including the Rails wiki, Rails Tips and Craig’s writeup. My solution is really just piecing together bits of each. Here’s a high level overview of the components in my solution :

High level overview of components and desired interaction

Mail Poller:

This is the component responsible for :

• Connecting to the email provider (Gmail)
• Downloading new emails
• Posting contents of new emails to the Rails app.

I started by creating a new ruby script in RAILS_ROOT/script/ called mail_poller. This is based heavily on the script by John at RailsTips

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'net/imap'
require 'net/http'
require 'rubygems'
require 'logger'

config = YAML.load(File.read(File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), '..', 'config', 'mail.yml')))
log = Logger.new(STDOUT)

begin
  imap = Net::IMAP.new(config['host'], config['port'], true)
  imap.login(config['username'], config['password'])

  # select inbox as our mailbox to process
  imap.select('Inbox')
  # get all emails that are in inbox that have not been deleted
  imap.uid_search(["NOT", "DELETED"]).each do |uid|
    # fetches the straight up source of the email
    source   = imap.uid_fetch(uid, 'RFC822').first.attr['RFC822']
    # Post the email to the Rails app's restful service
    res = Net::HTTP.post_form(URI.parse(config['service_url']), {'email'=> source})
    case res
      when Net::HTTPSuccess, Net::HTTPRedirection
        # OK
      else
        res.error!
    end
    # Delete the email
    imap.uid_store(uid, "+FLAGS", [:Deleted])
  end

  # expunge removes the deleted emails
  imap.expunge
  imap.logout

  # NoResponseError and ByResponseError happen often when imap'ing
  rescue Net::IMAP::NoResponseError => e
    # Log if you'd like
  rescue Net::IMAP::ByeResponseError => e
    # Log if you'd like
  rescue => e
    log.warn e
end

This script relies on a RAILS_ROOT/config/mail.yml script for configuration of mail server, username, password etc. Here’s a sample of that config file. It is pretty ugly, and needs to be refactored to be environment aware. Perhaps I’ll update this post once I’ve refactored it. The username & password in the service_url are explained in the “Mail Controller” section below.

host: 'imap.gmail.com'
port: '993'
username: 'your.address@gmail.com'
password: 'your password'
service_url: 'http://admin:pass@localhost/admin/incoming'

I like this solution over a postfix/sendmail/qmail/et all solution because it keeps the logic of fetching mail ‘close’ to my application. What does that mean? If I needed to deploy my application to a new host, I wouldn’t have to reconfigure an MTA on that host. It also has the added benefit of not requiring sudo/root privs.

Mail Poller Scheduler:

Since this is running on *nix systems, cron is a well vetted, ubiquitous solution. Creating a cron job to run our mail poller every minute is easy. Add the following to your crontab entry (crontab -e). Replace the full path to ruby with what is correct for your system (a ‘which ruby’ command should give you the  path you need). Replace RAILS_ROOT with the full path to your rails application.

* * * * * /opt/local/bin/ruby RAILS_ROOT/script/mail_poller >> RAILS_ROOT/log/mail_poller.log

This will ask cron to invoke the mail_poller script every minute, and redirect STDOUT to the ‘mail_poller.log’ log file.

Mail Controller:

This is the last piece in the puzzle. It is invoked via a POST when the poller retrieves a new email. In my case, the controller is namespaced to an /admin/ area which is password protected, thus the need for the username & password in the service_url above.

Lets start of with my routes.rb

  ...
  map.namespace :admin do |admin|
    admin.resource :incoming,   nly => [:create]
  end
  ...

This creates the folowing route :

admin_incoming POST   /admin/incoming                  {:controller=>"admin/incomings", :action=>"create"}

My controller looks like this :

class Admin::IncomingsController < ApplicationController
  before_filter :admin_required
  skip_before_filter :verify_authenticity_token  

  # Being invoked as a POST from the mail_poller
  def create
    mail = TMail::Mail.parse(params[:email])
    # Do stuff with the mail object
    ...
  end
end

I’m using TMail to parse the email (which is also used by ActionMailer’s receive method). Once you’ve got the mail object parsed, you can process away at will. There are plenty of examples out there on how to walk through the email looking for what you want.

Acknowledgments:

As mentioned above, this solution is heavily based on the following resources. Many thanks to the folks behind that information

• Rails wiki
• Rails Tips
• Craig’s writeup

Summary:

I really like the simplicity & separation of concerns this solution provides. The poller is pretty ‘dumb’, i.e. it doesn’t have any application logic (does nothing with the contents of the email), and it doesn’t have any timer/sleep logic. The application logic is relegated to the already running rails application. The timer logic is relegated to the old stalwart, cron.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this approach. Post a comment below and let me know what you think.

Did you know the iPhone doesn’t support MMS? I didn’t until this incident. It doesn’t support copy & paste either! I love me some apple action (all 3 computers in this house are Macs), but come on Apple! Pretty basic features don’t ya think?

Short story long, that is what inspired me to create :

Does the iPhone support MMS? : http://doestheiphonesupportmmsyet.com/

Does the iPhone support copy & paste? : http://doestheiphonesupportcopyandpasteyet.com/

Enjoy!