X Forwarding with Fedora image

At first I couldn't figure out how to see X programs from the Fedora image on my local box. I installed the packages needed for xclock and ran ssh with the -X flag (and the -i flag for my identity file), but no luck. I found forum post suggesting using the -v flag. When I did that I saw debug output about xauth not being installed. I searched on that and found a useful post on an IBM forum. It turns out all I have to do is install xauth, and X seems to be forwarded properly.

I am considering using ruby-gtk2 for the next project. It's not installed on the CS lab computers I've tried so I thought I could use an image on EC2. Maybe that's a waste of resources, but it's nice to have that option. Haven't tried out the ruby-gtk2 yet, but I'll post on how it works.

RMagick and ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick

I decided to use ImageMagick, rather than GraphicsMagick. It seems the newest version of RMagick has a helpful convenience method that seems to make the thumbnails trivial. When using RMagick 1, that method didn't seem to exist. To use RMagick 2, however, I need to be using a recent version of ImageMagick, rather than GraphicsMagick. Good thing Ubuntu is so good at handling all the dependencies. I reckon Fedora will be as well.

It's pretty sweet that these tools can actually change these photos. Hopefully the watermark won't be too bad.

Installing RMagick with gems

Getting the RMagick ruby gem to install wasn't too bad. Ubuntu has an RMagick package in the apt repository, but I installed a newer version of gems a while ago, and have kind of gone down the road of installing most ruby libraries as gems rather than with the Ubuntu package manager (although that probably would have worked as well).

To get it set up, I just had to install the libgraphicsmanager1-dev package and let apt install it's dependencies. Then I used gem to install rmagick. The default "gem install rmagick" seems to look for ImageMagick, rather than GraphicsMagick, but a little searching led me to this page on the RMagick website, which says how to install the correct gem for GraphicsMagick. You just have to tell gem to install version 1.15.nn, where nn is part of some sort of version number, which, as of this writing, seems to be 1.15.17 (See this RubyForge page and follow the download link to see the newest version).

I haven't actually tried RMagick yet, but at least the gem installs without failing, so hopefully it shouldn't be too hard to reproduce on the Fedora Amazon image. Good luck, everyone!

Cleared the Pictures and Comments Domains

I cleared the pictures and comments domain earlier today, so that the db would be consistent with s3. I did so by deleting and creating them. Things seem to be working now. Thanks for your patience.

I'm still not sure what the cs462-data bucket was used for. Does anyone remember? Sorry if your stuff was in it.

cs462-data and theimageproject Buckets Deleted

Whoops. I accidentally deleted the cs462-data and theimageproject buckets. They are back now, but the data is gone.

I think the best step is to clear the comments and pictures domains in the simpledb so that the data there matches what's in the theimageproject bucket. Please let me know if you disagree or have any other suggestions.

So, if you're seeing some strange behavior this is probably why. Sorry about that.

Queues Visible

Thanks Brad, Bracken, and Devlin,

There is a right_aws sqs implementation for the newer queues and I can see our queues when I use it. Just had to look farther into the documentation.

Possible Cause of Queue Trouble

The error I am getting involves parts of this message:

...QueueAlreadyExists...This queue already exists for another wsdl version. Queue names must be unique across wsdl versions....

I did a search and found a helpful page at the Amazon Web Services site. It seems that if we're using different versions of the API we may not be able to see the queues. I am using right_aws for ruby, which the documentation says uses the 2007-05-01 API. The newest version appears to be 2008-01-01. What are others using? I asked Devlin about it and I'll post if there's something we can think of.

Having Trouble with Queues

For the 2nd half of the App Server I am having troubles using the necessary queues. I can only see 2 queues, named "processing" and "storage". As far as I know I need to be able to access all the queues named on the wiki. I'll look into it and ask Devlin and post what I find out. If anyone has any suggestions, I'd appreciate a comment. Thanks.