This is a receipe how I save stuff to S3 from my Mac:

1.) Signup with S3: http://aws.amazon.com/s3/ (check pricing!). This will give you access to the AWS Management Console.

2.) Create a Bucket: This can be done via the AWS Management console. If you are not familiar with the concept of ‘buckets’ check-out the S3 documentation. Simply put, it is a virtual storage device that has a fixed geographical location.

3.) Go to ‘Security Credentials’ in your account settings in the AWS Management console and create an accesskey.

4.) Download JetS3t. You then have the following directory on your Mac:
/Applications/jets3t-0.7.3

Open the Terminal and change into the bin directory:
$ cd bin;

Create a file named synchronize.properties there:
$ nano synchronize.properties;
and save the following content using your keys from step 3:

accesskey=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
secretkey=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

5.) To sync the contents in the path /Users/marco/MySyncStuff with the bucket myBucketName use this command:
$ ./synchronize.sh UP myBucketName /Users/marco/MySyncStuff/ –properties synchronize.properties;

Of course you can create as many buckets as you like and script and schedule your data syncs now from here as you wish. Use the command
$ ./synchronize.sh –help
to see what the synchronize.sh else has on offer.

6.) Browsing buckets: JetS3t has its own S3 browser. To start and use it do the following:

$ cp cockpitlite.sh cockpitlite.command;
$ ./cockpitlite.command &;

You should see the Java coffee cup on your task bar. Use your keys to log in and browse your buckets.

You can also use the free S3 Browser for Mac.

This is just a link to a very good tutorial on how to make your own SVN post-commit hook using a PHP script. It sends the following information via email:

• Committer name
• Commit message
• List of files edited
• Diff of changes made

http://techchorus.net/writing-php-script-send-svn-commit-changeset-email-notification

As a development team we always run into situations where we have trouble setting up a proper development environment for each of the team members to get going or add new staff on the go. It annoyed me every time since it causes a lot of unnecessary communication and friction.

I often heard of virtualization but never actually played seriously with it. The idea is:

If we could have a virtual machine for every project that contains an equivalent environment like the production system, everybody working on it…

• … could just rely on his development environment by just starting the VM without having to set up anything half-baked themselves.
• … could use his favourite working environment OS, IDE and tools on which they are most comfortable and thus happy and productive.
• … could work on their own checked out working copy using version control.
• … could immedately see what they built refreshing the local browser or starting Unittests on the VM via ssh to check their dev increments.

We used http://www.virtualbox.org. A good starting point to get to know VirtualBox better and learn how to start your first virtual machine: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/VirtualBox

Our target was to be able to startup the development VM as guest system on any developers development machine being the host system, open a browser on the host (!) and call for example http://develop/ to see the webroot of the VM. Additionally we set up samba and ssh on the VM in order to have the webserver’s webroot on the VM available via the filesystem. In order to do that you need to…

• …start your VM with networking set to ‘Host interface’ instead of the default NAT. This is explained in detail on this page (sorry German) http://www.nwlab.net/tutorials/virtualbox/virtual-networking.html - for me it was tricky to get the guest machine available on the host and have internet access at the same time.
• …edit the hosts file (on OSX ’sudo nano /private/etc/hosts’ and reboot) on the development machines and add something like the following line: ‘192.168.56.101 develop’. To find out the IP enter ’sudo ifconfig’ (OSX/Linux) on your host system after you have started the VM. You will see aditional adapters set by virtualbox and the IP address.
• …configure /etc/samba/smb.conf on the VM, restart samba and connect (e.g. smb://develop/webroot). We check out a working copy of the applicaton under development directly onto the webroot and create a new PHP-Project there in our IDE. Update and commit directly from there.

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If you search the web for ready-made VMs you find mostly VMware images. You can not run them directly in VirtualBox and need to convert them.

Under Linux you can convert the VMware image (.vmdk) into a VirtualBox image (.vdi) like this:

sudo apt-get install virtualbox-ose virtualbox-ose-guest-utils;
sudo apt-get install qemu;

qemu-img convert xxx.vmdk xxx.bin;
VBoxManage convertdd xxx.bin xxx.vdi

Install the required packages with apt-get install once. VBoxManage is part of VirtualBox. The last two lines do the conversion.

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We ended up creating a fresh install from a Debian 5 netinstall iso. The iso-file can be mounted as CDROM on the creation of the new VM with VirtualBox. Receipes for setting up the appropriate LAMP environment with apt-get install can be found on the web. You only have to do it once. Save the state of your VM afterwards.

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There are ways to generate a virtual machine from a physical server. Use Google to find receipes. I used http://www.partimage.org on a Debian Etch system with the live CDROM from http://www.sysresccd.org. This requires that you are able to umount your filesystem or rather boot into the live cd on the production/staging machine in order to generate the partimage.

You mount an external drive over the network or a usb harddrive. The partition (e.g. /dev/sda1) you would like to backup must be umounted. From the live cd you can see your partitions, including attached usb drives, with the ‘fdisk -l‘ command. Just mount the target (e.g. /mnt/usbdrive) and start partimage from the commandline. Dialogues guide you through the image creation.

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In case you wonder what is meant by the ‘Host key’ to enter or leave a running VM with your mouse… it is the right (!) Strg-Button on your Keyboard.

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I just installed Ubuntu Server on a VM from my MacBook. To have a usable keyboard once you logged on to the new VM, you must do the following in order to have a keymap including the pipe symbol, braces etc.:

• sudo apt-get install console-data; #to install the keymaps
• sudo loadkeys mac-macbook-de; #to set the keymap for German MacBook

Once you have done that, you can use your right Command-Key as ‘Alt-Gr-Key’ like on a PC keyboard. The pipe symbol is then typable with ‘Alt-Gr + >’, Braces and Brackets are typable via ‘Alt-Gr + 6,7,8,9′.

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This is how you copy a virtual machine using VirtualBox tools:

$ VBoxManage clonevdi /Users/marco/MyMachine.vdi /Users/marco/MyMachine_copy.vdi
$ VBoxManage internalcommands setvdiuuid /Users/marco/MyMachine_copy.vdi

Find out interesting thoughts and experiences about the selection and usage of a frameworks for your projects in this set of slides ‘Living with Frameworks‘ by Stuart Herbert, Technical Manager at www.gradwell.com.

You will learn about:

• How frameworks save you time (=money) and ensure quality but can also waste resources if applied in another way the framework was intended to be used.
• The importance of the framework guru role.
• That a chosen framework and architecture should be strategically introduced (top-down).
• Introduction and proper use of a new framework has a steep learning curve.
• Legacy code and the parallel maintenance hassle.
• Refactor early, refactor often, perform regular code reviews with the framework guru.
• Frameworks will not fix bad practice (specification, quality, no training).
• Your framework should fit your overall development plan and practice.
• Training your staff in your framework is a means of building your team.
• Headcount on projects has increased, means more teamwork, organisation around needs to mature too.
• Importance of upgrades and backward compatibility.

I just hacked together a very simple class and CLI script to help me generate Google sitemap XML on a daily basis using PHP. If you have not yet heard of it: Google sitemaps help you promote your content if you have certain deep links that only show up if a visitor for example performs a search and clicks a result.

Check the documentation of the Google Sitemap Format

Here is the code: Google Sitemap Generator

It works like this:

$ php generate_gsitemaps.php; #will generate your standard sitemap
$ php generate_gsitemaps.php -e > my_sitemap.xml; #echo sitemap xml to another file


Example: generated_example_sitemap.xml

Have fun being found!

EtherPad is a free webbsased editor which lets people remotely and simultaneously edit the same text document. Just click ‘Create new Pad‘ and you see the URL which you can send to your remote friend(s).

Use it for group development on code snippets, catch realtime meeting minutes, brainstorming ideas and many things more…

Thanks AppJet for this nice tool!

I was using a factory like this

$factory = new Object_Factory();
$curr_object = $factory->create('brand');

to generate instances of objects I needed and wondered why Eclipse could not auto-complete e.g. getters and setters in my code for me later on for the $curr_object. My productivity and my motivation to type all that stuff were seriously suffering…

So I found a very nice solution: Hippie Completion!

Instead of listing possible completion solutions like with Strg-Space the

key-combo “Alt-/” (/ on the number block!)

just completes what you started typing. You can also press Alt-/ as many times you like to page through all terms you could have meant like with the Strg-r on the console.

In case you try and wonder why it is not working like expected right away: Precondition for the hippie completion in Eclipse is, you typed the term to be completed once before!

Why didn’t anyone tell me this cool one before!

gt5 is a handy shellscript that extends the linux command du (disk usage). It can be run from the console or remotely over ssh. Nothing to be installed. It uses GNU tools like head, sed, awk and lynx. It generates html which is then passed to lynx to be displayed.

You can install it via: sudo apt-get install gt5

You will also find screen shots at: http://gt5.sourceforge.net

Browsershots loads a given URL, using different browsers on different OSses and generates a screenshot for each one. You can also specify window size, JavaScript-ing and Flash version. Simply enter your URL and wait until your ‘job’ has been processed. Finally you will see a screen like the one on the left.

http://browsershots.org

The advanced packaging tool has a built in cow. A nice piece of programmer humor.

I had a bunch of .dbf (source was Lotus Approach) files, at which I wanted to shoot SQL-like queries to generate some meaningful reports. So there were 2 tasks to be accomplished:

1. Read the data into a tool or database and
2. formulate and perform the queries to generate results to base your reports on.

As of opening and saving, I first tried MS Access. But some of the tables could not be imported (reasons unknown). Then I tried to open those files with MS Excel. It worked, but I had more than 65536 records per table, so I could not actually use Excel. After some investigation I came across dbftools which promised to help me converting the data into a text-based format.

I simply unpacked the C source and typed ‘make’ from the console and I had a working dbf2txt binary. I created a directory with all the dbf-files in it and hacked together the following simple shell script: convert.sh

#!/bin/bash
for i in data/*.dbf
do
dbf/src/dbf2txt -v "$i" > "$i.txt";
done


It supplied me with all txt-files each containing a table with fieldnames in line 1 and the data in tab-separated format. Nice!

To get this data into MySql, I hacked this little tab2sql script which converts the txt-files into SQL statements. It is called like this:

$ php tab2sql.php data/my_table.dbf.txt > sql/my_table.dbf.txt.sql;

You can then dump all sql-files in the sql-dir into MySql via:

$ for dir in data/*.sql; do mysql dbf_import -h localhost -u root < “${dir}”; done;

Thanks Frank Koormann for the dbftools!

Sidenote: If you have big tables and you plan to work with joins… Do not forget to set field-types and indices properly after the import! This could otherwise stress your machine.

It’ a nice idea, to have a magnetic character for each developer on your project planning boards.

Design your characters on the Soutpark-Studio-Website: http://www.sp-studio.de

This is me:

[2008-08-07] You can do it with the Simpsons too: http://www.simpsonsmovie.com

Here is a tool which generates loads of random passwords: pwgen.

On Debian you can install it with ‘apt-get install pwgen’.