iamnearlythere @iamnearlythere - Tumblr Blog

Moving blog to Posterous

Gave Tumblr a go since it's super duper easy but I guess it's just a little bit too easy.

Some things that made me leave tumblr:

Bogus search results. Searching for "css" on tumblr: 0 results. Searching through the same, imported, posts on posterous: 4 results. It's really broken.

Very limited browsability. On tumblr, you can not browse posts through tags, in fact, you can't see a list of all tags used.

Some things I will miss:

The admin GUI, clean and optimized for quick publishing. This actually concerns all of the tumblr UI, great work

The bookmarklet, it's great

Getting an email response for each support question after a couple of hours tops (still waiting for a couple of responses @ posterous)

The themes

... hopefully I'll be staying at posterous for a while, otherwise I guess it's wordpress' turn.

Cheers and welcome in to

iamnearlythere.posterous.com

Wirify is a bookmarklet for generating a wireframe for the current page. Read more about Wirify in its announcement.

A creative solution that works amazingly well, plus it fits perfectly in a bookmarklet.

#usability #javascript #bookmarklet

tail -n 0 -f /var/log/...

Wow, just discovered the -n 0 argument of tail, making it

tail -n 0 -f /var/log/lighttpd/php_error.log

Now I finally get an empty/clean start of tail.

#bash #unix #dev

Problem:

VLC cannot open files in the "AVI container" format

Solution:

Uninstall VLC

Find and delete every file containing VLC in the name ("find ~ -iname *vlc*" in Terminal)

Reinstall VLC

#mac #vlc

Leaving out (pdf)

... or rather - welcome in, pdf!

I just posted a link to a pdf and named it Title of important document here (pdf).

Is that really necessary anymore? As a Google Chrome user, I don't really have to bother checking the target of a link anymore because of the built in PDF-reader. It deserves so much cred, it's unbelievable.

PDF used to be unbearable in web context, now it's like any other page. Huge thumbs up for making us leave out the "WATCH OUT, PDF INCOMING" warning at each link (ok, starting now..)

#usability #chrome

#phpdoc #dev #cheatsheet

Redmine and lighttpd got into a brawl, came out as friends

So much for the easy setup of Redmine, our server gazed at me with a 500 Internal Server error the following monday morning.

To track down the error, I started out by tailing Redmine's error log that I previously defined in /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf, showing:

$ tail -f /var/log/lighttpd/redmine_error.log 2010-12-20 12:09:04: (mod_fastcgi.c.2582) unexpected end-of-file (perhaps the fastcgi process died): pid: 6425 socket: unix:/tmp/redmine.socket-0 2010-12-20 12:09:04: (mod_fastcgi.c.3367) response not received, request sent: 909 on socket: unix:/tmp/redmine.socket-0 for /dispatch.fcgi?, closing connection 2010-12-20 12:09:04: (mod_fastcgi.c.1734) connect failed: Connection refused on unix:/tmp/redmine.socket-3 2010-12-20 12:09:04: (mod_fastcgi.c.3037) backend died; we'll disable it for 1 seconds and send the request to another backend instead: reconnects: 0 load: 1

What I did to solve it was (after some googling) to change the lighttpd conf setting for Redmine's socket from /tmp/redmine.socket to /tmp/lighttpd/redmine.socket. Before I could do that, I had to

$ sudo mkdir /tmp/lighttpd $ sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /tmp/lighttpd

to make sure it was going to be writable. Restarting lighttpd after that seems to have solved the issue, permanently I hope.

#redmine #dev #unix #lighttpd

Installing Redmine on Ubuntu and lighttpd

I just finished the installation of the project tool Redmine and will be enjoying using it soon.

However, the official installation hints were far from good, in fact, they previously led me to an aborted installation session. Really annoying.

Instead, I used the perfectly concise and error free guide called:

Redmine 0.9.3, Ubuntu 9.10, Lighttpd 1.4.x, MySQL 5.1.x - jonathanrobson.me

The only diversion was that I installed the 1.0.4 version of Redmine, which seems to be the latest one.

#redmine #unix #dev

New dev area with gitweb

I'm currently setting up a new dev server at work. This includes hands-on work such as writing PHP organized in namespaces, but at a more technical level, modifying lighttpd and installing lots of packages on a Ubuntu server. The dev server which is being deprecated is equipped with svn & trac, which has been really nice, especially for browsing the source code, code reviews and managing tickets, so the goals are set for this new server. Gitweb will correspond to the demands for viewing source code, diffs and branches. Installing it and getting it up on lighttpd was a breeze, thanks to the guide How to setup gitweb with lighttpd on Ubuntu - jonathanrobson.me. I used his config with some tweaks. The `$projectroot` variable in **/etc/gitweb.conf** now points at a directory which has a clone of each of our reposes. I.e. $ cd /home/git/projects if **/home/git/projects/** is where you store all of your repositories, in a common place as a base for your dev or stage area. Read my entry [Using git init —bare for a slim repository look](http://iamnearlythere.tumblr.com/post/2063552190/using-git-init-bare-for-a-slim-repository-look) for a directory layout that works. If you followed my approach, $ ls /home/git/projects should only consist of directories called `project-1.git`, `project-2.git` and so forth. This is *ideal for gitweb*, which prefers to have a single directory to check for git repositories. (Check jonathanrobson's link above for the whole shebang.) ##Bonus feature: styling There's a github repository on https://github.com/kogakure/gitweb-theme which has an easily installed theme that looks much better than the original bundled with gitweb.

#dev #git #gitweb

Trying out closure

Very easy way of minimizing a few bytes of every request using Google's Closure Compiler which is a java program for compressing javascript.

$ curl -0 http://closure-compiler.googlecode.com/files/compiler-latest.zip $ unzip compiler-latest.zip -d ~/Applications/closure-compiler ; cd ~/Applications/closure-compiler $ echo "// A simple function. function hello(longName) { alert('Hello, ' + longName); } hello('New User');" > hello.js $ java -jar compiler.jar --js hello.js --js_output_file hello-compiled.js $ cat hello-compiled.js function hello(a){alert("Hello, "+a)}hello("New User"); $ wc -c hello.js 101 hello.js $ wc -c hello-compiled.js 56 hello-compiled.js

Rinse and repeat

$ curl -0 http://closure-compiler.googlecode.com/files/compiler-latest.zip

Download the good stuff

$ unzip compiler-latest.zip -d ~/Applications/closure-compiler ; cd ~/Applications/closure-compiler

Locate the executable in a standard location and go there

$ echo "// A simple function. function hello(longName) { alert('Hello, ' + longName); } hello('New User');" > hello.js

Create a file with valid javascript in it

$ java -jar compiler.jar --js hello.js --js_output_file hello-compiled.js

Use the recently unzipped compiler.jar to take input from hello.js and generate its optimized version at hello-compiled.js. Note that there's only one file to use, compiler.jar. Usable.

$ cat hello-compiled.js function hello(a){alert("Hello, "+a)}hello("New User");

Dump the contents of the newly created file, just to verify what a minified javascript file could look like

$ wc -c hello.js 101 hello.js $ wc -c hello-compiled.js 56 hello-compiled.js

Comparing bytes in each file shows almost 50% winnings, both in terms of lowering the storage needed but also for each request of that file.

#closure #dev #javascript

Roadmap of PHP development - follow it

I just discovered an interesting wiki part of php.net, http://wiki.php.net/rfc.

It contains drafts, proposals in an easy-on-the-eyes format. Some of the more interesting topics are

Function Array Dereferencing

Example:

function a() { return array(1, 2, 3);} echo a()[0];

Status is listed as "accepted" - finally! This syntax is so handy, the only real alternative seems to be list() which is a bit clunky. Besides, everybody knows this syntax from javascript.

E_USER_DEPRECATED

Finally a way to properly mark parts of your API as old:

trigger_error("Use BlaBla::Bla() instead of ".__METHOD__, E_USER_DEPRECATED);

docBlock Parser

A native parser for docblocks which will probably be a lot faster and also increase awareness and interest of actually documenting code. PHPUnit testcases and frameworks such as Doctrine 2 might gain some speed increase.

Strict type

There are some proposials (about time) for making a method signature like the following valid:

function(int $apples, string $collection_name) {}

C# style getters/setters

A really usable syntax, instead of __get(), __set() or __call():

class TimePeriod { private double seconds; public double Hours { get { return seconds / 3600; } set { seconds = value * 3600; }// The variable "value" holds the incoming value to be "set" } }

The proposal then tries to include every possible aspect of this, from the beginning, good idea. Just by reading the discussion on the wiki (never read any mailing lists) I'm already getting tired of it. Too bad.

Conclusion

There exists some really nice discussions in an easy-to-read format. Since there are quite a few proposals already implemented, I probably got hoping for too many new features... In one way, it's great to see the language improving, in another way: why is it taking so long?

Also, it feels nice to see inspiration coming from other languages (surprisingly javascript stands for quite a few). I wonder if it will become more and more like java, with all the oop/namespacing in the latest patches. (I hope so.) The more global functions we get rid off, the better.

#php

Using git init --bare for a slim repository look

Until now, I've mainly worked alone with my git repositories. Sometime pushing to my github-account, but always using the service as a kind of backup solution. Until now. At work, we're setting up our new environment with git and I'm lucky enough to learn it while doing it.

This setting will differ quite a lot from what I'm used to:

for private projects, the git repository is my project folder;

for work, the repository has to be synced across multiple users, a base for deployment and act as a more important repository than our local ones, kind of what SVN was doing and what, I'm told, git isn't really made for.

Also, exercising a plain git init routine creates a complete repository with all source files, branches & stuff; which really are ment to keep track off and develop in. Let's not, let's just keep the repository there and only git push there so all development will be done in each user's local repository.

Let's get to the good stuff:

# create a user named 'git' and make that user the owner of your repositories, and nothing else $ mkdir -p /home/git/repositories $ cd /home/git/repositories $ mkdir your-project.git && cd your-project.git $ git init --bare $ git config receive.denyCurrentBranch "ignore" $ mkdir -p ~/www/your-project && cd ~/www/your-project $ echo "lalala, random file" > random.txt && git add . && git commit -m "First commit" $ git remote add origin /home/git/repositories/your-project.git $ git push origin master

There you go, a fully capable external repository, local on your dev machine, ready to export to a staging/testing/Q&A-setting. For an easy setup of this, go read Using Git to manage a web site which worked out of the box for us.

If you get any errors whilst doing this, google it or just try to parse it (for us, it mostly came down to chown- and chmod-ing the -R /home/git/repositories/ folders, so using sudo helps a lot).

#git #dev

talesofinterest-blog-blog

iamnearlythere

Wow, love this bookmarklet..

#javascript

which - saves the day

which tell you where a program is located.

$ which php /usr/bin/php

Very helpful if you install a lot of stuff which is put in "random" locations as /usr/bin, /bin, /usr/local/bin, /opt ... the list goes on.

#bash

These guys knows how to design a UI. Trying out the beta now.

#git #tools #mac

Nice ORDER BY-syntax: FIELD()

SELECT turtle, pizza, rating FROM heroes ORDER BY FIELD(turtle, 'Donatello', 'Michelangelo', 'Raphael', 'Leonardo') This let's you get the ratings of Donatello's first, etc. Really practical.

#mysql #dev

Just finished **fineprint** which is a **jquery plugin** that let's the developer **direct the user's attention** towards small fragments of your very large document. It's easily customizable and let's you drop it on an already functional page, being truly unobtrusive. The project is up and running on github: https://github.com/chelmertz/fineprint which includes full source, documentation and a couple of demos.

#dev #fineprint #jquery #projects #github

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