I’ve spent the last few hours trying to update the firmware on my iPhone to version 2.1 as most of the applications in the Apps Store are starting to require it.

First a bit of background info: I’ve been a passionate Linux user for the last 4 years and I don’t see why I should switch to Windows just to sync my iPhone (which btw. isn’t working as my Thinkpad T400 has successfully blocked as the Windows installation crashes with a BSOD) and I don’t see why Apple can’t support Linux too.

So I was thrilled when I heard that I could use VMWare Workstation v6.5.0 to sync my iPhone and all worked well for a while. But then I thought “why not try a firmware update?”, and all hell broke loose. After waiting for iTunes for more than an hour to give me back an absolutely generic failure message I gave up on my first attempt. Today on my second attempt I got a little bit farther. I now realize that it has something to do with the updater disconnecting the device and then waiting for it to reappear (why that is, I have no idea) but instead of the iTunes updater to respond to the device in recovery mode, it is Linux jumping in as it should and thus invalidating the update.

It’s getting really annoying by now, and resetting (15 seconds holding both home and power and then holding 2 seconds the power button, for those like me who can’t remember how) isn’t too nice…

When will Apple finally learn that there is a huge market for their devices if they’d only open up a little bit or provide us with the tools to use them under Linux?

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I recently lost all of my music collection due to a harddisk crash on my fileserver, which means that I have to start collecting all over again, and believe me, some rare songs are pretty hard to find.

On the other hand I often find a nice song on Youtube and decide that I have to keep it. And after a bit of looking around I found the handy youtube-dl script which automatically parses the pages content and downloads the video file, much like keepvid.com does, but all from the shell.

After we have the video file all we have to do is dump the audio and convert it to a format we like (most likely MP3 or OGG). Until today I used mplayer and mencoder to dump and encode the audio, but I stumbled across this article on howtoforge.org that uses ffmpeg, and is more flexible and avoids me one intermediate step

#!/bin/bash
# Just additional setting to use high quality video
YOUTUBE_OPTS="-b"

# Please make sure youtube-dl is in your path
youtube-dl $YOUTUBE_OPTS -o temp.flv "$1"

ffmpeg -i temp.flv -ab 128000 -ar 44100 "$2"

Please make sure, as stated above that youtube-dl is in your path. Usage is pretty darn simple:

ripyoutube <youtube-url> <mp3-name>

I have been trying for quite some time to get a project started and I always stumbled over some small things. Sometimes it’s a dbUnit test not running through, sometimes it’s the maven jetty plugin which does not want to start at all. All of these problems are related not with the development activity, instead they are due to some problems setting up the environment. So wouldn’t it be nice if there was a tool that preconfigured all of these small things just to work fine?

Well there is: enter the magic world of AppFuse.

AppFuse comes with some skeletons configure for you to simply use and then extend however you want to. In this little tutorial I’m going to show how to setup a Spring-MVC application with Hibernate as a backend.

From the list of available archetypes we select the Spring MVC Basic archetype since this is a small project and I really like Spring:

mvn archetype:create -DarchetypeGroupId=org.appfuse.archetypes -DarchetypeArtifactId=appfuse-basic-spring -DremoteRepositories=http://static.appfuse.org/releases -DarchetypeVersion=2.0.2 -DgroupId=net.snyke -DartifactId=HelloWorld

This will create the basic folder structure for our project.

mvn archetype:create -DarchetypeGroupId=org.appfuse.archetypes -DarchetypeArtifactId=appfuse-basic-spring -DremoteRepositories=http://static.appfuse.org/releases -DarchetypeVersion=2.0.2 -DgroupId=net.snyke -DartifactId=HelloWorld
[INFO] Scanning for projects...
[INFO] Searching repository for plugin with prefix: 'archetype'.
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Building Maven Default Project
[INFO]    task-segment: [archetype:create] (aggregator-style)
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
Downloading: http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/net/snyke/wagon-http-shared/1.0-beta-2/wagon-http-shared-1.0-beta-2.pom
Downloading: http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/net/snyke/wagon-http-shared/1.0-beta-2/wagon-http-shared-1.0-beta-2.pom
[INFO] Setting property: classpath.resource.loader.class => 'org.codehaus.plexus.velocity.ContextClassLoaderResourceLoader'.
[INFO] Setting property: velocimacro.messages.on => 'false'.
[INFO] Setting property: resource.loader => 'classpath'.
[INFO] Setting property: resource.manager.logwhenfound => 'false'.
[INFO] [archetype:create]
[WARNING] This goal is deprecated. Please use mvn archetype:generate instead
[INFO] Defaulting package to group ID: net.snyke
[INFO] We are using command line specified remote repositories: http://static.appfuse.org/releases
[INFO] ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Using following parameters for creating OldArchetype: appfuse-basic-spring:2.0.2
[INFO] ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Parameter: groupId, Value: net.snyke
[INFO] Parameter: packageName, Value: net.snyke
[INFO] Parameter: package, Value: net.snyke
[INFO] Parameter: artifactId, Value: HelloWorld
[INFO] Parameter: basedir, Value: /home/cxd/Desktop
[INFO] Parameter: version, Value: 1.0-SNAPSHOT
[INFO] ********************* End of debug info from resources from generated POM ***********************
[INFO] OldArchetype created in dir: /home/cxd/Desktop/HelloWorld
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESSFUL
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 17 seconds
[INFO] Finished at: Tue Sep 16 02:16:51 CEST 2008
[INFO] Final Memory: 8M/14M
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

If we now enter the folder we wont see much in there, but we will be able to already run the basic AppFuse application:

mvn jetty:run-war

will start the application, and after a while we get a message that says that the Jetty Server has been started. After this open a browser and point it to http://localhost:8080 and you’ll see the running application:

Right now the jetty server is running the application from the war-file. While this is pretty nice, we want the application to reload changed resources on the fly, so we don’t have to rebuild all the time. This can be achieved by using war:inplace, like this:

$ mvn war:inplace
[INFO] Scanning for projects...
[INFO] Searching repository for plugin with prefix: 'war'.
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Building AppFuse Spring MVC Application
[INFO]    task-segment: [war:inplace]
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] [war:inplace]
[INFO] Generating webapp in source directory... /home/cxd/Desktop/HelloWorld/src/main/webapp
[INFO] Exploding webapp...
[INFO] Assembling webapp HelloWorld in /home/cxd/Desktop/HelloWorld/src/main/webapp
[INFO] Overlaying 2 war(s).
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESSFUL
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 14 seconds
[INFO] Finished at: Tue Sep 16 02:24:00 CEST 2008
[INFO] Final Memory: 8M/15M
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

So by now we can add new screens and work with the existing DAOs, but we still haven’t full access to the source. To get the full sources we have to execute one more command:

$ mvn appfuse:full-source
[INFO] Scanning for projects...
[INFO] Searching repository for plugin with prefix: 'appfuse'.
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Building AppFuse Spring MVC Application
[INFO]    task-segment: [appfuse:full-source]
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] [appfuse:full-source]
[INFO] [AppFuse] Installing source from data-common module...
[INFO] [AppFuse] Installing source from hibernate module...
[INFO] [AppFuse] Installing source from service module...
[INFO] [AppFuse] Installing source from web-common module...
[INFO] [AppFuse] Installing source from spring module...
[INFO] [AppFuse] Source successfully exported, modifying pom.xml...
[INFO] [AppFuse] Removing maven-warpath-plugin...
[INFO] [AppFuse] Adding dependencies from root module...
[INFO] [AppFuse] Adding dependencies from data module...
[INFO] [AppFuse] Adding dependencies from data-common module...
[INFO] [AppFuse] Adding dependencies from hibernate module...
[INFO] [AppFuse] Adding dependencies from service module...
[INFO] [AppFuse] Adding dependencies from web module...
[INFO] [AppFuse] Adding dependencies from web-common module...
[INFO] [AppFuse] Adding dependencies from spring module...
[INFO] [AppFuse] Removing maven-warpath-plugin...
[INFO] [AppFuse] Updated dependencies in pom.xml...
[INFO] [AppFuse] Renaming packages to 'net.snyke'...
[info] [AppFuse] Refactored all 'org.appfuse' packages and paths to 'net.snyke'.
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] BUILD SUCCESSFUL
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------
[INFO] Total time: 1 minute 17 seconds
[INFO] Finished at: Tue Sep 16 02:36:40 CEST 2008
[INFO] Final Memory: 6M/23M
[INFO] ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Having access to the full sources you now can edit everything, just follow the lead of the AppFuse examples. AppFuse tries to be as generic as possible and implements some great patterns, don’t be afraid to copy some of them.

A last tip before I let you go: using the offline switch (-o) will speed up maven by a factor 2-3 depending on how fast the repositories are