Setting Debug level in CouchDB

I have experimented with CouchDB in the last days and wanted to switch on the debug level. I thought this could be done when starting the couchdb server, but this wouldn’t work.

The solution was simply to set the level in the ini file (e.g. /usr/local/etc/couchdb/local.ini):

[log]
level = debug

This may be useful from time to time.

November 2nd, 2009 • Posted in Programming | No Comments »

Haynes Catalog live

I’m glad to announce that the Haynes Catalog went live yesterday. The Haynes Catalog is an online project which “presents an interactive and continuously updated database containing music for and with oboe up to 1800“. A friend of mine, Peter Wuttke, continually collects information and uses the online catalog to make this available to the public.

The application is using Ruby on Rails with a Mysql database in the background. Apart of the public part of the application, there is an admin interface which allows Peter to update the data. Since I worked on this project only sporadically in my spare time, two challenges proved to be more complicated than expected:

  1. Versioning of changes:
    We tried to make changes of the data transparent to the user. It should be visible to the user, when information has been changed, for example when a composition has been published, or other data is corrected. Hence there is some change history.
    However, not all changes should be mentioned – simple corrections of typos etc. should be ignored.
    Finally, the versions must span several tables as there are a lot one-to-many or many-to-many relations.
  2. Synchronisation:
    Most of the research is done offline, for example in libraries or when travelling. Therefore there exist two installations, both being “productive”: the official homepage plus an offline installation which is used during the research.

Both problems can be solved, but there is no “out-of-the box” solution. There will be some detail about how to solve these two issues in a Rails application in following posts.

July 3rd, 2009 • Tags: ,
Posted in Programming | No Comments »

Redesign of Beauty of Code

In the last weeks I completely changed the design of this site. It became much lighter and I removed some plugins which I didn’t want to use anymore. In particular, I removed the simile timeline on the left.

In the previous design, I used the WP Simile Timeline plugin to show the timeline of the blog entries. This was a vertical timeline located in the left sidebar. The problem was that vertical timelines are pretty complicated to design and the simile timeline doesn’t really support a vertical layout. Therefore I chose to change to a horizontal blog timeline as part of the redesign. At the same time I realized that the timeline doesn’t fit to the overall design.

Hence I wrote my own timeline implementation using jQuery and embedded it in the new layout. Each small vertical tick in the header corresponds to a blog entry. If you hover over it, the link to the blog entry is shown.

Currently there are only few features:

  1. RSS feed: the timeline implementation reads the RSS feed of the site an creates the div elements for the timeline.
  2. Custom creation of events:  create a div and call a simple javascript method to add an event.
  3. Design completely using CSS: it is very difficult to change the theme of the simile timeline. The timeline above can be adjusted using very simple CSS.

But of course, it still can (and needs) to be enhanced.

June 24th, 2009 • Tags: , , ,
Posted in Web | No Comments »

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