Wandering Coder

Bundler invalid byte sequence

2012-01-25T11:34:00.000+08:00

Running "bundle install" today gave me...

ArgumentError: invalid byte sequence in US-ASCII

Normally I use Terminal.app but I recently switched to iTerm as I'm finding it is quite a bit faster, so this little issue caught me out. iTerm doesn't enable UTF-8 by default.

Adding this to ~/.bash_profile will set it no matter what terminal app you're using.

export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

Angry Birds Not Working On OSX

2011-08-08T19:43:00.001+08:00

I noticed a month or so ago that the online version of Angry Birds has stopped working. That is a bit of a shame, I really enjoyed it.

So out of curiosity I took a peek at the Javascript console for some clues as to why it doesn't work. Ah, ok. 31 errors. The first one is.

XMLHttpRequest cannot load http://r2303.latest.project-slingshot-hr.appspot.com/cors/fowl/sprite_sheets/INGAME_BIRDS.json. Origin http://chrome.angrybirds.com is not allowed by Access-Control-Allow-Origin.

Ah, that old chestnut. Origin is not allowed by Access-Control-Allow-Origin. Basically the game resources aren't being loaded. Simple.

So it looks like I'll have to continue being productive rather than feeding my time to the birds until someone updates the crossdomain.xml file which is currently a 404.

Rolling Back iPhone iOS4 to iPhone iOS3

2010-07-08T12:24:00.002+08:00

Installing iPhone iOS4 on my iPhone 3G and it was a big mistake for me. My iPhone instantly changed from a lovely, responsive device, to one that was taking 15-20 seconds to start up the SMS or Mail applications.

The list of issues I had with iOS4 was long and uncomfortable enough to force me into deciding to rollback to iOS3.

Slow to start applications
Applications are generally slow and unresponsive
Camera app was slow to start, and slow to take a picture
3G network access became unreliable
Lockups and freezing requiring restarts

It was slow and buggy enough that I hated using my phone at all. I didn't get this phone to become the owner of a useless brick.

Waiting for the first update to iOS4 seemed like a lame idea. Who knows how many of the issues would be addressed anyway?

iTunes won't directly allow you to rollback to a previous OS just by choosing a backup that was on that OS version. It doesn't downgrade the operating system, it only restores the data.

Trying to restore an earlier firmware explicitly in iTunes got close, but also failed.

It turns out there is one more step needed to make the rollback work... RecBoot. @pjammer sent me a link to a YouTube video showing how to rollback to iOS3, which worked a treat.

After restoring the earlier firmware you will receive an error message telling you the OS could not be restored and you should choose one of your backups to restore from. Running RecBoot at this point in time allows you to take you phone out of recovery mode.... to find the firmware of your choice running.

You can then restore your data or setup for a new phone.

Victory!

Guess what? My iPhone 3G is fast again. I'll be researching very cautiously before attempting another upgrade to iOS4.

Installing Postgres gem on Snow Leopard

2010-06-30T10:29:00.004+08:00

I had to jump through a small hoop to install the postgres gem on Snow Leopard so I'm putting it here to help others out. Hopefully it saves you some time.

Basic System

Ruby 1.8.7
Macports
OSX 10.6 (Snow Leopard)

Install Postgresql

# sudo port install postgresql84-server

Install the Postgres Gem

# sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64" gem install postgres -- --with-pgsql-lib=/opt/local/lib/postgresql84 --with-pgsql-include=/opt/local/include/postgresql84

Basic Gym Etiquette Is Cool

2010-05-08T17:12:00.000+08:00

There is some basic gym etiquette that most people understand and follow without ever being told, or even without thinking about it. These people probably fit very easily into life and society in general without much effort. They're easy to get along with, considerate, clean and polite. Everybody loves them.

Then there are those other gym users. You might know the ones I mean. The inconsiderate, dirty, and loud gym users.

This stuff is common sense but apparently not everyone has enough to spare, so here it goes...

Wipe Down Equipment

Nothing... I repeat, "Nothing"... is more revolting than going to use a bench that is covered with someones sweat. So the next user of the equipment is expected to use their towel to wipe off that 10 litres of sweat? What the hell is wrong with you!? Wipe it down when you're done.

There are signs everywhere about this at any gym, but I don't think the offenders in question care.

Wipe down equipment after you use it. It takes about 2 seconds. If you don't you're a pig.

Put Equipment Back

You got the weights of the rack. You used them. Then you just walked away. You're not a very nice member of the Gym world are you?

I'm not your Mama! Put your own damn weights back where they belong. I know you just lifted a personal best. Awesome. I'm sore and tired too. Why should I put them back for you?

A lovely side effect of everyone putting equipment back after use is that everyone can find it easily. Bonus!

Share Equipment

Nothing is more annoying than someone commandeering a piece of equipment for a long period of time. If you're going to be using something for quite a while the least you can do is get on, do your thing, then stand aside a moment. This makes it easy for others to approach you and ask if you mind if they "cut in" for a set.

Phone Calls

This point deserves a post all for itself!

Do you really think everyone in the gym wants to listen to your marathon phone call? Walk away from the equipement, go and find somewhere away from everyone. Talk your ass off as loud as you want there.

Don't Throw Your Weights

We all know how awesome and powerful you are. Your strength makes me quiver. But do you need to drop your weights from as high as possible?

We all know you rock even if you just put the weights down.

Clean Gym Attire

Don't turn up to the gym in the same gear that is still soaking wet from your last workout.

My favourite gym member is the one that sits on a bench, sweating like a pig with no towel in sight, totally surrounded by the 5 different sets of dumbells they've been using while talking on the phone the one of their mates about the awesome babe they almost picked up Friday night. You're a filthy pig. I doubt you were going to pickup either.

Is any of this that hard?

I would love to see the trainers that walk around the gym pull people up for breaking etiquette but they won't for fear of upsetting a paying member. What about the majority of gym users that have to train in the same gym as the above mentioned gym users? That's the majority of your paying customers. Look after them.

Mishca's Mothers En Vogue Photoshoot

2010-04-26T12:11:00.001+08:00

Mishca had a photoshoot for Mothers En Vogue on Nov 25th 2009.

She went really well considering she was such a shy little girl just a few months ago :)

Well done Mishca!

Facebook Makes More Of Your Data Available Again

2010-04-25T13:52:00.013+08:00

Facebook is once again making more of your data available without your permission.

I was very disappointed to see that I was suddenly opt-ed in to basically sharing everything about me, and allowing my friends to also share this information about me. I never gave my explicit permission to do this. I'm sure it is entirely covered by their Terms and Conditions.

At a minimum, Facebook should have asked users what their preference was, but chose not to do so. This is an extremely deceptive practice, somewhat similar to lying by omission.

Yes, I am aware I can change the settings. I also know most people won't because they don't care, are too lazy, or just do not understand how much they are "sharing".

I also love how giving away your personal information is called "sharing" now. How very, "double-speak" of Facebook. To be fair Facebook aren't the only social networks that shares you information to their partners.

As an individual that still has dreams of privacy I simply do not like where this is going. I was hesitant about joining Facebook to begin with because I could see the depth the data that would allow information seekers to build very detailed profiles on each of us. I even deactivated my Facebook account once before giving in and re-activating it.

So, I'll announce it to the world...

I will be deleting my account on or before 25 May 2010, using Facebook's Delete my Account page.

Deep down I am not at all surprised by the direction Facebook is going with this. My lack of surprise also reminds me that although I was quite sure it would get to this point it was a stupid decision ever choosing to believe it could would have been any different.

Bye bye Facebook. It has been... educational.

Links

Howto Install Ruby 1.8 and RubyGems from source on Debian

2010-01-18T10:40:00.014+08:00

In the latest addition to the, "Howto Install stuff from Source on Debian", series, this post shows how to install Ruby 1.8 and RubyGems from source on Debian.

This installation has been tested out successfully on Debian Lenny, and Debian Etch. It should also work on Ubuntu.

Permissions

As noted in my last post, my user has write permissions to /usr/local/src so I don'thave to run everything under sudo. This was accomplished by allowing the staff group to write to /usr/local/src , giving write access to the staff group, and adding my user to the "staff" group.

If you would like to set this up...

# sudo chown root:staff /usr/local/src
# sudo chmod 775 /usr/local/src
# sudo usermod -a -G staff your_username

If you were not previously a member of the staff group you will need to logout and login again, or just open a new shell, for the changes to take effect.

Install

A browser friendly version of the script can be seen at http://gist.github.com/271029.

Once again, I've leveraged gist as a tool to store my installation scripts.

The script is just a wrapper to install the necessary Debian packages. This script then downloads a second script which actually downloads, configures, and install Ruby 1.8 and RubGems.

Not only is gist a very useful tool, but I've also found GitHub to be an excellent online git repository.

The scripts use the "Raw" versions of the gists.

To install, run these commands...

# wget http://gist.github.com/raw/271029/d16c8acf620047b88e509ccab205959681fd443d/install_ruby18_on_debian.sh
# chmod a+x ./install_ruby18_on_debian.sh
# ./install_ruby18_on_debian.sh

If all goes well, Ruby and RubyGems will have been installed.

# which ruby
/usr/local/bin/ruby

# ruby -v
ruby 1.8.7 (2010-01-10 patchlevel 249) [i686-linux]

# which gem
/usr/local/bin/gem

# gem -v
1.3.5

Enjoy Ruby!

Install Nginx from source on Debian

2010-01-15T21:40:00.013+08:00

I thought it was time to write a followup post to, Install Memcached from source on Debian Lenny.

At this moment, Debian provides Nginx 0.6.39 and I was wanting to run Nginx 0.7. The latest stable version is 0.7.64, so I thought I would put together a script to automate the download and installation for me.

Some devoted Debian users will want to string me up for installing a source package, and some others will no doubt say that I'm hating Debian for not using aptitude. These people are entitled to their opinion of course, but I don't feel that there is anything wrong with installing a source package on Debian.

If you feel like installing a package from source makes Debian cry, leave now :)

Permissions

On my system, my user has write permissions to /usr/local/src so I don't have to run everything under sudo.

You may need to set permissions for your system.

Install

A browser friendly version of the script can be seen at http://gist.github.com/274883.

This script should work on Debian Lenny, and Debian Etch. I think it would also work on Ubuntu.

By the way, I've found gists to be an excellent tool when automating source installs. Using gists makes it wasy to put any kind of script up on the net, as well as supporting config files as so on.

There is a link on that page to the "Raw" version of the script, which the script below will download and execute.

To install, run this command...

# bash -c "`curl http://gist.github.com/raw/274883/e93ec7c38b303b759699e1023c8f6d2e60c93351/install_nginx_on_debian.sh`"

If all goes well, Nginx has been installed, started up, and set to start automatically at boot.

You can verify Nginx is running...

# ps -p `cat /var/run/nginx.pid`
  PID TTY          TIME CMD
15004 ?        00:00:00 nginx

Check that Nginx has been set to start at system boot.

# sudo sysv-rc-conf --list nginx
nginx        0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off

I'd love to hear if this was useful to you.

Install Memcached from source on Debian Lenny

2009-12-14T16:22:00.014+08:00

Debian is quite simply excellent, and I wouldn't even consider running any other distro in production anymore.

Occasionally though, there are packages that become a bit outdated, and a source install is needed.

For me, Memcached is one of those packages. The latest in the Debian Lenny Apt repositories is 1.2.2, but the latest stable build is actually 1.4.4. Good luck seeing that in the stable apt repositories anytime soon :)

So, to make life easy, I've put together a fairly simple bash script that downloads and installs Memcached, and libevent, for you.

The script is a blunt instrument, and assumes...

You haven't installed memcached from apt repositories on this machine
You won't be sad when it puts config and startup files at
- /etc/memcached.conf
- /etc/init.d/memcached
- /usr/share/memcached/scripts/start-memcached

If you have installed memcached using apt, I suggest uninstalling it first, and backup the 3 config files.

This script has worked for me with Debian Lenny, and Debian Etch.

Download the installation script

I would love to hear if this works for you :)

Fix POST for Ruby 1.9.1 and Passenger

2009-12-10T11:35:00.001+08:00

How exciting! A new Ruby release to play with.

I figured it was time to migrate this particular app to 1.9.1 on the integration server. We've been developing this app with 1.9 and all looks good.

So I...

Upgraded Nginx to version 0.7.64
Installed Ruby 1.9.1-p376
Installed Passenger 2.2.7
Configured Nginx to use the new versions of Ruby and Passenger
... and restarted Nginx

I hit the home page of the app.... Sweet, it works! Yay!

At this point I did a minor happy dance. Nothing over the top, you know... just a little wiggle :)

Then I tried to login to the app... "500 Internal Server Error"

Oh. :(

I stopped dancing right there.

It turns out that POST requests fail for Ruby 1.9.1 and Passenger.

Fortunately, there is a patch.

Patching tempfile.rb did the trick. On that particular machine, tempfile.rb was located at /usr/local/lib/ruby19/1.9.1/tempfile.rb

Thanks to Ryan Bigg for confirming the fix is good.

Remember Which Goals are Important

2009-11-24T10:34:00.005+08:00

John Nunemaker made an excellent comment which reminds us of the value of setting goals.

In the "crazy" world of software development, we are often pushed to make software the best, the biggest, or the option with the most features.

But...

When Boeing prepared to launch the design of the 727 passenger plain in the 1960s, its managers set a goal that was deliberately concrete: The 727 must seat 181 passengers, fly nonstop from Miami to New York City, and land on Runway 4-22 at La Guardia. (The 4-22 runway was chosen for its length--less than a mile, which was much to short for any of the existing passenger jets.) With a goal this concrete, Boeing effectively coordinated the actions of thousands of experts in various aspects of engineering or manufacturing. Imagine how much harder it would have been to build a 727 whose goal was to be "the best passenger plane in the world."

Setting those few important goals helped make the 727 a successful and versatile aircraft. This same concept can be applied to anything we do, even on a much less grand scale.

This is a great reminder to not lose focus on what is important to your project.

Now, back to creating the best software I can :)

Factory.create(:factory_girl, :fixtures => false)

2009-11-10T14:48:00.004+08:00

Rails fixtures are a great starting point, but you can't live with them on a large project.

While working on a feature recently I kept breaking other unit tests while working with working in the associated fixtures. The relationship graph between all these objects is quite large, and I quickly decided this wasn't a game I wanted to play anymore.

Enter FactoryGirl.

FactoryGirl isn't new, and I've actually played around with FactoryGirl in the past. It didn't take much effort to add a test/factories.rb, specify a few Factory objects and then bask in the win.

Tests written. New feature added. Existing tests continue to work. Everybody is happy.

Over the last few weeks we have almost entirely replaced fixtures as we've encountered them. At this point in time it is quicker to replace the fixtures than it is to continue repairing fixtures.

Yay, our tests aren't as brittle anymore :)

For everything but the most trivial project, I'll be dropping fixtures at the start of the project.

Twitter really satisfies?

2009-05-26T14:37:00.005+08:00

I haven't felt the need to blog lately at all. Maybe expressing myself on Twitter has been enough to satisfy my urge to vent from time to time?

Flinging 140 characters around with Twitter is cheap with regards to my time, which is an extremely precious commodity to me. More people probably read my tweets than read my blog anyway. Most of what I blog about is of interest to such a small group of people it probably just doesn't matter here. I can communicate effectively with those people on Twitter.

Life and work has been so busy lately the only way to express anything meaningful at all is via those gorgeous 140 characters that Twitter limits me to. The limit means no prattling on.

I'll make a deal with myself (and you too, if anyone is reading this)... If I can't fit it into 140 characters and it is still worth saying, I'll blog about it.

If you're interested in seeing what I'm up to on regular basis, follow me on Twitter .

Tweet you later :)

Australian Website Blacklist. Would you like lies with that?

2009-03-20T13:48:00.008+08:00

So it seems the Australian government lied about how many URL's are on their blacklist.

Fair enough I suppose, we weren't meant to ever know what was on the list anyway.

Of course they lied. Whenever power is wielded in the absence of transparency do we ever hear about how it was secretly used for out benefit? No, we don't.

Senator Conroy says that this isn't the list. Now, because the list is supposed to be a secret there is nothing to weigh this statement against, so it must be taken on faith alone.

Ah, faith...

This is where we get to the other part of the problem. Senator Conroy represents a group of Australians that think it is OK to push their religious views onto others. We all know how great religious zealots are at being open and honest. They've scored a 0 out of 10 for that. These guys are as "open and honest" as they need to be to push their agenda, or to escape prosecution. Don't tell me you need examples.

What about my agenda? I don't have one. I'm also a nobody with no power. I just want information to be out on the open where it wants to be. If you or I want information, we should be able to find it. I do not want my Government telling me what information I should or should not see, as it has proven so often in the past to be way too tempting to Governments to use censorship to help keep themselves in power. Again, you don't need examples, I'm sure you can think of many instances of this being reported... eventually.

"But won't someone think of the children?!", some of you cry. Will someone think of the children years from now when they are denied access to information about about other political parties in Australia, or news about the latest bad things the Government has been doing to Australians.? OK, that may not happen, but once a blacklist exists it can happen. You don't need examples provided for this either.

I'm quite sure if the Labour Party had made it known they were planning on introducing web censorship the balance would not have tipped in their favor at the last election. I suppose thats why they want to get the blacklist implemented in the early part of their term. Voters have short memories generally.

Once we've all been conditioned to accept with censorship of the information we can see, your opinion as an individual is worthless. You lost the power to make your vote mean what you intended it to mean, because without all the information available to you, how can you make an informed decision?

As an Australian I'm incredibly disappointed about this whole mess, although the cynic inside me is not at all surprised.

scottbarr-number_to_text RubyGem

2009-03-08T21:34:00.005+08:00

I was playing around with a bit of Ruby to convert numbers to text a few weeks ago but never finished it and forgot all about it. Today Guest11057 (thats an extremely boring nick!) on the #rubyonrails IRC channel asked if something like this existed, and apparently it doesn't. That reminded me about the mothballed code, and motivated me to finish it off and package it up as a RubyGem. To convert a number to text:

n = Number.new(119)
puts n.to_text # => "one-hundred-and-nineteen"

I'm not happy with how the implementation came, but it does the job. I'll clean it up to work a bit nicer sometime :) If you need to convert numbers to text in Ruby, take a look at http://github.com/scottbarr/number_to_text/tree/master

Shiny new Apple Airport Extreme

2009-02-15T13:38:00.002+08:00

Last week my Linksys WRT300N died after only 8 months use. It didn't die as much as it became so unreliable that it was useless. Every now and then it would drop the wireless connection, and then refuse to allow reconnection no matter how many times I power cycled it. This became so frequent and wasted so much of my time that I decided the unit had to go. I could probably send it back Linksys under warranty but I would need another wireless unit in the meantime anyway. As I've had an excellent run with Apple products I decided to give the Airport Extreme a shot. It was a breeze to setup, and my wife and I can both notice the speed difference when accessing the net. So far, so good! Quality costs more but it seems you get what you pay for. We'll see if I'm singing the same tune about the Airport Extreme in 12months time.

YahooCurrency Gem

2009-02-15T09:33:00.014+08:00

I recently created the YahooCurrency Ruby gem that gets currency exchange rates from Yahoo! Finance. Originally the code was part of a working Ruby on Rails demo I created about 12 months ago. A project we are currently working on needed exchange rates, so i created a Gem from the original code so we could easily reuse it across any of our future Ruby projects. We discussed making the project open source, and agreed that it would probably be useful for others, and also great for Global IT Creations to contribute something back to the open source. It is only a small contribution, but you have to start somewhere. Here is some example code...

exchange_rate = YahooCurrency.get_rate!("JPY", "USD")
exchange_rate.from #=> "JPY"
exchange_rate.to #=> "USD"
exchange_rate.rate #=> 0.0111
exchange_rate.timestamp #=> Wed Feb 11 22:20:00 +0800 2009

Get the source or the gem from http://github.com/scottbarr/yahoo_currency/tree/master Hopefully this will be the first of many projects that GITC releases as Open Source.

Horror Movie Code

2009-02-12T14:29:00.010+08:00

For the last few days I've had the displeasure of working through some code that we have inherited from another company, which I will not name. One section of code I'm looking at has a 300+ line if/elseif block, up to 9 levels deep! And if you want to see some real crap, you can look anywhere else in the remaining 700+ lines of code. As for the project in general there are no meaningful unit tests, all the code is crammed into the Controllers, and it is so un-DRY you need a raincoat to get through it. Code like this makes me want to cry. This code is concrete evidence that if your parents are blood relatives you should not write software. (No offence intended to non-code writing inbreeds.)

Rails with NO Fixtures?

2008-09-22T11:30:00.015+08:00

I have a Rails project, and I created a Country model. I added the basic details of Norway to the countries.yml fixture.

norway:
 code: NO
 name: Norway

I added a unit test to make sure I could get Norway by it's country code, which is NO

def test_find_by_code
 assert_equal countries(:norway), Country.find_by_code('NO')
end

Agreed, I probably don't need a unit test for this, but this should have worked, but it was failing with the following message.

Country id: 318845244, code: "1", name: "Norway" expected but was
nil

Apparently NO in the yaml file is interpreted as a 0 (zero). To prove the theory I changed the code of norway to YES. The unit test failed, and indicated that the model it expected should have had code: "1". Changing countries.yml to be...

norway:
 code: "NO"
 name: Norway

I personally really like fixtures and the nice features they bring in, but sometimes they can catch you out. I'm sure it's not a bug, I've just never encountered this before. Ever found anything strange in your fixtures?

Phantom Butterlies OSX Screensaver

2008-09-16T20:18:00.005+08:00

I've had the Phantom Butterflies screensaver installed for a while now. It's a very attractive screen saver, isn't too distracting, and my 14 month old daughter Mishca loves it. She has a good shot at saying, "Butterflies!". I poked around a bit more and found that White Knight Logic has a few other nice screen savers that are also worth downloading. Whats your favorite OSX screen saver?

My Psychic Inner Child

2008-09-04T08:57:00.002+08:00

Damn my Psychic Inner Child, he (or is it a she??!) let me down once again. We had a great meeting with a client a few days ago, and we're busily putting together an estimate to do the project. Yet we are still raising questions!! Why didn't my psychic inner child fast forward a few days and see what we had dug up in the analysis, and then whisper them to me that I needed to ask these questions in the meeting? Big let down this time, psychic inner child.

View source code for iPhone RSS feed

2008-08-31T19:30:00.009+08:00

I tried to view the Slashdot RSS feed on my iPod Touch, but instead of an RSS feed I was redirected to a specially formatted feed for iPhones. Very nice!

The iPhone specific URL is http://reader.mac.com/mobile/v1/http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot .

I was curious to about the source code of the page, really just to see if there was any interesting markup. So I tried to view the URL in Firefox... no dice. I was shown a page saying, "This Application Is Viewable Only On iPhone".

Hmm... it was time to cheat a little then. I googled around for the User Agent that the iPhone sends, opened a terminal and entered...

# curl -A "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3 " "http://reader.mac.com/mobile/v1/http://rss.slashdot.org/Slashdot/slashdot"

I can now take a look at what makes an iPhone/iPod specific feed :)

Ruby on Rails doesn't scale you say?

2008-08-14T10:54:00.007+08:00

You might want to read this how this Bumer Sticker, a Linked-In application, that is serving 1 billion page views per month. From the article... "Ruby on Rails is frequently criticized for lacking the ability to scale. While the road to a billion page views per month has certainly had some potholes, Bumper Sticker has clearly demonstrated that the Rails platform can scale quite well, so as long as the team behind it understands that many of the bottlenecks are exactly those faced by developers on any other database-driven web platform." Joyent also blogged about this. How many Rails application have you developed, then found scaling the app was fast, relatively simple... not to mention cheap? How many Java web applications have you developed, then found scaling the app was difficult, slower, and expensive? You probably aren't even aware of the extra work you're going through here if you've never tried to scale a Rails app. You can take your pick of frameworks, I'm not citing any specific Java web application frameworks here. I'm not directly comparing Rails to Java, but Rails to insert-your-java-framework-here. I've been working with Java for a long time, and it still has it's place. But I think Rails is eating Java's lunch in a lot of areas these days, particularly in the web application and web services area.

Stop and start PostgreSQL on OSX

2008-08-07T15:40:00.007+08:00

To manually stop or start a PostgreSQL 8.2 server that was installed via macports, use the following commands.

Stop

# sudo launchctl stop org.macports.postgresql82-server

Start

# sudo launchctl start org.macports.postgresql82-server

Obviously this will also work for PostgreSQL 8.3 or 8.4 if you change the commands slightly.

I prefer the approach Linux distros have generally taken for service management, where all services are listed under the /etc/init.d diretory. To me /etc/init.d/postgresql-8.2 is easier, and you can use command completion to type it.

sudo bash > /dev/evil

2008-07-18T16:57:00.013+08:00

Today I sat down with one of my team while he logged into a linux server to perform some administration tasks.

After ssh'ing to the machine, the first command entered was:

# sudo bash

Ouch!

Most of the time when we log into a remote server we are intending to perform admin tasks, but not every command needs to be executed as root. Executing "sudo bash" defeats the whole purpose of using sudo to begin with.

Sudo helps provide elevated privileges to multiple users of a machine. I don't want to limit the sudo rights on these machines as they are development and integration machines and many services are experimented with, configured, stopped, started, and generally played around with. I just want the team to treat root with respect.

Am I being picky about this?

What do you think?

Re-Architecting J2EE with REST

2008-06-22T14:56:00.001+08:00

I'm investigating re-architecting parts of an existing client's application. I prefer not to re-architect existing applications of non-trivial size but the current application has outgrown its current lack of architecture. Because of it's size (not to mention the development environment being used!), development work on the application runs at a snails pace, fear of breaking code is high, and deployment is a long, painful process. The state of the project is at least partly my responsibility, as I have worked with this project in the past. My previous attempts to get client buy-in on improving the architecture failed. I am planning to use other methods and tactics to try and illustrate to the client just what they are getting out of this. But I digress... I have become a big a fan of REST over the last few years with success on various projects built using REST. I looked at the Restlet project about a 6-9 months ago, but the documentation was inadequate for me at that stage. This isn't surprising because Restlet was quite early in the development at that time, so I'm not having a go at the Restlet team here in any way, they've been doing some really good work with their REST implementation. But on having the need for REST in Java again, I've taken another look at Restlet. The documentation has improved a lot. The examples, tutorials and explanations of the Restlet implementation are now at a stage where you can quickly evaluate Restlet, and decide if it can work for you. I would of course rather do all of this in Ruby or Python, but with the existing application in Java/J2EE the Restlet implementation of REST will mean the current team can still use Java, and means I have one less hurdle to try and negotiate. As I have experienced on other large applications, when you move components out into discreet services you end up with a nice SOA application that naturally enforces separation of layers. I am expecting to see large improvements in development speed, quality of code, and deployment. I'll blog about how the proof of concept goes in a later post.

MacBook Pro Trackpad Gestures

2008-06-19T22:36:00.000+08:00

Sometimes its like a light bulb just got switched on in your head, and you have a strong suspicion you were the only one still floundering around in the dark :) I was just reading some pages at the memcached site using my MacBook Pro, when I accidentally dragged 2 fingers down the trackpad. And what do you know... the page scrolled! I didn't realise that using two fingers on the trackpad was a gesture for scrolling. After a little investigation theres a whole bunch of gesture options under the Mouse and Keyboard options in System Preferences.

ARDAgent Local Explot on OSX

2008-06-19T10:02:00.002+08:00

Ouch... Nice one. # osascript -e 'tell app "ARDAgent" to do shell script "whoami"'; root Hopefully this is patched soon. I'm sure there are some apps out there that could make creative use of this hole. This is discussed at length on Slashdot at, "Mac OS X Root Escalation Through AppleScript".

Firefox 3.0 is Shiny

2008-06-18T21:47:00.000+08:00

Firefox 3.0 final was released today, so I thought I'd better take a look while it's still shiny :) I'm actually writing this post using Firefox 3.0 and all seems sweet. The look fits well with the OSX Leopard. After many years of running Linux desktops I really enjoy a unified GUI. Looks aren't everything of course. I really like the 'Awesome Bar', which is an impressive improvement over the Location Bar in Firefox 2. The drop down of suggested URLs is feature rich and should prove really useful. Think of the Awesome Bar as the Location Bar on steroids. Zooming in is also really nice, more like a true zoom than anything I've used before other than my iPod Touch. I switch between Firefox and Safari depending on my mood and the way the wind is blowing, but I always enjoy something new so I'm sure I'll favour FF 3.0 for at least a little while so I can get a feel for what it really has to offer over Firefox 2. There is a cool download counter at http://downloadcounter.sj.mozilla.com/ . For posterity I've captured a video of the counter in action. Oh yeah, and apparently the IE team sent the Firefox team a cake!

Back in Singapore... Again!

2008-06-17T13:09:00.000+08:00

I'm back in Singapore again! My wife and I returned home to Australia in 2007, but both Australia and Singapore both have their plus sides, and after returning we eventually decided that Singapore is be a better place for us to be in the long run. We're really looking forward to making Singapore home again :) I accepted a position with the company I used to work for here previously, Global IT Creations. I'm quite excited about working with this company again, as we do some really interesting work for our clients. There isn't one other company I've previously worked for that I would return to work with, but I can easily make an exception for GITC. I really want to blog about bits of code I write and play with, and this will be the outlet for those experiments. At the moment I'm mostly using Ruby and Ruby on Rails, but I've had lots of development experience using Java/J2EE, Python and PHP in the past. I've also recently been toying with Flash after avoiding it for so long, and I've really taken a shine to ActionScript 3. Lets see what comes out of it all.

Wandering Coder

Bundler invalid byte sequence

Angry Birds Not Working On OSX

Rolling Back iPhone iOS4 to iPhone iOS3

Installing Postgres gem on Snow Leopard

Basic System

Install Postgresql

Install the Postgres Gem

Basic Gym Etiquette Is Cool

Wipe Down Equipment

Put Equipment Back

Share Equipment

Phone Calls

Don't Throw Your Weights

Clean Gym Attire

Mishca's Mothers En Vogue Photoshoot

Facebook Makes More Of Your Data Available Again

Howto Install Ruby 1.8 and RubyGems from source on Debian

Permissions

Install

Other Posts in this Series

Install Nginx from source on Debian

Permissions

Install

Install Memcached from source on Debian Lenny

Fix POST for Ruby 1.9.1 and Passenger

Remember Which Goals are Important

Factory.create(:factory_girl, :fixtures => false)

Twitter really satisfies?

Australian Website Blacklist. Would you like lies with that?

scottbarr-number_to_text RubyGem

Shiny new Apple Airport Extreme

YahooCurrency Gem

Horror Movie Code

Rails with NO Fixtures?

Phantom Butterlies OSX Screensaver

My Psychic Inner Child

View source code for iPhone RSS feed

Ruby on Rails doesn't scale you say?

Stop and start PostgreSQL on OSX

Stop

Start

sudo bash > /dev/evil

Re-Architecting J2EE with REST

MacBook Pro Trackpad Gestures

ARDAgent Local Explot on OSX

Firefox 3.0 is Shiny

Back in Singapore... Again!