21 croissants' Blog

3G Huawei E220 & simyo.de on mac

2009-08-17T15:28:00.003+02:00

Plug the modem and launch the MobileConnect application which is installed inside the E220.

Create a new profile for simyo.de:

telephone number of *99#
Access Point Name: internet.eplus.de
IP-Adresse: dynamic
Primary DNS: 212.23.97.2
Secondary DNS: 212.23.97.3
Account name: simyo
password: simyo

Click "Connect" and you should be online. After I found these configuration data with google, it works the first time. If you have a problem or a suggestion, leave a comment. Remember this config will only work in Germany with simyo.de

I am now ready to work with Rails on rails ;-) I will be indeed traveling a lot with the ICE, the German high speed train, which might not be as fast as the French TGV but it is very comfortable and has electric plugs in all the seats.

In this carbon junky world, I really hope that Copenhagen 2009 will enforce some regulations on plane transports. Instead of stupid competition between EU states railways, EU should also learn from the UK Rails privatization disaster. It would be so nice if the next generation of Europeans could travel on high speed rails transports with a public owned, interconnected, affordable and fast European rails network...

Upgrade subclipse in Aptana Studio

2009-08-11T12:20:00.003+02:00

At work, we just upgraded to subversion 1.6.3 from 1.4.x and it took us a 1-2 days to solve configuration issues. In order to make our life easier during merges, we decided to go for Aptana Studio. Unfortunately, at the time of this writing, this IDE is bundled with Subclipse 1.4.

Follow these manual steps to upgrade to http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.6.x

1. Remove Aptana Subversion Support

Go to About Apanta Studio
- In your Aptana Studio
  - On Windows, go to Help and select About Aptana Studio
  - On Mac, go to Aptana Studio and select About Aptana Studio
- In you Eclipse
  - On Windows, go to Help and select About Eclipse SDK
  - On Mac, go to Eclipse and select About Eclipse SDK
Select "Installation Details"
Select the" Installed Software" Tab
Select the plugins you would like to install and click "Uninstall".

2. Install subclipse 1.6.x

From the Help menu, select Install new Software ...
Select Available Software.
Click the Add Site... button.
In the Location text box, type http://subclipse.tigris.org/update_1.6.x
Also add mylyn: http://download.eclipse.org/tools/mylyn/update/e3.4

3. Install Aptana RadRails

to_yaml from mysql SELECT tip

2009-07-29T09:04:00.001+02:00

Append \G at the end of a SELECT query .

select * from countries limit 5\G;

*************************** 1. row ***************************
id: 4
continent_id: 2
region_id: 14
permalink: afghanistan
name_en: Afghanistan
name_de: Afghanistan
lat: 33.9391
lng: 67.71
eu_member: 0
alpha2: NULL
alpha3: NULL
*************************** 2. row ***************************
id: 8
continent_id: 3
region_id: 19
permalink: albania
name_en: Albania
name_de: Albanien
lat: 41.1533
lng: 20.1683
eu_member: 0
alpha2: NULL
alpha3: NULL

Fixing Bus Error BUG in ruby entreprise edition

2009-07-13T09:18:00.004+02:00

If you want to use ruby enterprise edition (ree) for your project, it's very important to install all the dependencies with the ree gem command, especially if the gems rely on native code such as imagemagick, or ... bluecloth.

I bumped into the following bug when I tried to run my specs with ree:

$ /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20090610/bin/ruby spec/models/advocacy_spec.rb
/.gem/ruby/1.8/gems/bluecloth-2.0.0/lib/bluecloth_ext.bundle: [BUG] Bus Error
ruby 1.8.6 (2008-08-11) [i686-darwin9.7.0]

Abort trap

The solution was to install the bluecloth gem again, with reee gem:

:trunk$ /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20090610/bin/gem install bluecloth
WARNING: Installing to ~/.gem since /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20090610/lib/ruby/gems/1.8 and
/opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20090610/bin aren't both writable.
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
Successfully installed bluecloth-2.0.4
1 gem installed
Installing ri documentation for bluecloth-2.0.4...
Installing RDoc documentation for bluecloth-2.0.4...
jm-macbook:trunk jeanmichel$ /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20090610/bin/ruby spec/models/advocacy_spec.rb
...

Finished in 0.349809 seconds

The recent versions of rubygems use the ~/.gem/ruby/1.8/ folder so it make sense to install gems in your home folder so standard ruby and ree can share them.

On a sidenote, running the specs with ree worked without any problem. memory consumption was lower but it did not improve the speed.

Before | After

2009-06-04T16:56:00.002+02:00

Before:


def self.find_expiring_soon(date_time = Time.now)
@@expiring_soon ||= find(:all, :conditions => ["type_id = 1 AND completed = 0 AND created_at < :date", { :date => (4.months + 14.days).ago(date_time) }])
end

def self.find_expiring_soon_with_donations(date_time = Time.now)
@@expiring_soon_with_donations ||= find(:all, :conditions => ["type_id = 1 AND completed = 0 AND donated_amount > 0 AND created_at < :date", { :date => (4.months + 14.days).ago(date_time) }])
end

def self.find_expiring_soon_without_donations(date_time = Time.now)
@@expiring_soon_with_donations ||= find(:all, :conditions => ["type_id = 1 AND completed = 0 AND donated_amount = 0 AND created_at < :date", { :date => (4.months + 14.days).ago(date_time) }])
end

def self.find_expiring_very_soon(date_time = Time.now)
@@expiring_very_soon ||= find(:all, :conditions => ["type_id = 1 AND completed = 0 AND created_at < :date", { :date => (6.months - 3.days).ago(date_time) }])
end

After:


def self.find_expiring_soon_with_donations
  find(:all,
       :include => :donations,
       :conditions => [
         "expires_soon = 0
         #{with_expiring_criterias}
         AND donated_amount > 0", { :date => four_months_and_a_half_ago }])
end

def self.find_expiring_soon_without_donations
  find(:all,
       :conditions => [
         "expires_soon = 0
          #{with_expiring_criterias}
          AND donated_amount = 0", { :date => four_months_and_a_half_ago }])
end

def self.find_expiring_very_soon
  find(:all,
       :conditions => [
         "expires_very_soon = 0
          #{with_expiring_criterias}
          ", { :date => (6.months - 3.days).ago(date_time) }])
end

def self.find_expiring_now
  find(:all,
       :conditions => [
         "expired = 0
          #{with_expiring_criterias}", { :date => 6.months.ago }])
end

def self.with_expiring_criterias # DRY
  "AND type_id = #{ElementType::MONEY}
   AND completed = 0
   AND activated_at < :date"    end    

private_class_method :with_expiring_criterias   

def self.four_months_and_a_half_ago        
  @@FOUR_MONTHS_AND_A_HALF_AGO ||= (6.months - 6.weeks).ago(Time.now)  
end    

private_class_method :four_months_and_a_half_ago

Much more lines of code (LOC), does it improve readability and understading?
hardcoded values replaced by objects (ElementType::MONEY), does it make easier to understand the meaning of numbers without knowing the DB model
duplicate SQL DRyed in a private method

Which version do you prefer?

Unix recursive Find and Replace

2009-04-30T15:06:00.002+02:00

find spec ! -regex ".*.svn.*" -type f -exec grep -l "it_should_behave_like" {} \; | xargs sed -i "" "s/it_should_behave_like/#it_should_behave_like/"

Explanation:

find spec find in ./spec folfer
! -regex ".*.svn.*" excluding .svn folders
-type f only files
-exec grep -l "it_should_behave_like" {} \; extra line to grep only files which contain "it_should_behave_like"
| xargs sed -i "" pipe to sed editor without creating any backup file (-i)
"s/ENTER OLD STRING OR TEXT TO REPLACE/ENTER REPLACEMENT STRING OR TEXT/"

svn trick: revert a folder when it can not be deleted

2009-04-29T12:13:00.002+02:00

If you ever have this error message when running
svn status
! C stories
> local delete, incoming edit upon update

=> Clean it with reverting the conflicted folder with:

svn revert stories

Setting up logrotate with capitate

2009-04-29T11:37:00.002+02:00

How many Rails projects "forget" to set up a log rotation of their production logs and end up filling the hard disk with gigabytes of log ...

Lots ;-) And mine before I found out about logrotate.

Fortunately, there is one tool which help you to no to reinvent the wheel and set up a log rotation within minutes: capitate ;-)

Install it:

sudo gem install capitate

Add the following snippet to your conf/deploy.rb:

# See http://capitate.rubyforge.org
require 'capitate'
require 'capitate/recipes'

# Add this line but remove it afterinstalling 'cap rails:logrotate:install'
set :use_sudo, true

Run cap -T to see how many recipes you have now!

Run

cap logrotated:install_conf

It should install a new /etc/logrotate.d/rails_yourwebsite.com

/home/youruser/public_html/yourwebsite.com/shared/log/production.log {
size 10M
rotate 7
daily
missingok
notifempty
copytruncate
}

That's it!

Giving and Receiving

2009-03-26T18:33:00.002+01:00

Mxxxxx has left a new comment on your post "xyz":

totally useless. If i wanted to read this i would have read the txt file that came with the download.

This is the nice comment I just received about a post in my blog.

Blogging is giving free content to the world, without expecting anything in return ...
If this person was to meet me in person, would (s)he dare telling me the same thing???

At the end of day, you should never, ever write aggressive text in sms, email, forum, twitter, blog, etc ... Most of the time, if not always, you end up regretting your acts and only create negative energy.

We live in a society which is always connected, maybe it's time to write less emails, send less texts, spend less time on the internet and behave like a nice person in the Real World. Lots of positive energy shalt be the outcome.

Peace & Love :-)

Netbeans usability

2009-03-23T15:32:00.011+01:00

UPDATE:
The netbeans community solved my problem in 24 hours!!! It was a bug due to a problem of deserialization ... Deleting the ~/.netbeans folder solved the problem. Check out http://www.netbeans.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=161070

One of thing I enjoy the most in life is cooking. I distrust most of the products processed by the food industry - gm, transfat, the list is too long... - and try to cook with local, raw and organics ingredient (when available at a fair price). The kitchen utensils I use must be of very good quality: the knifes must cut without effort, the pan must not contain carcinogen material, etc... As the whole cooking experience becomes slightly stressful if I have to cook with other utensils, I tend to bring my best knifes with me on holidays ;-)

To stick with the cooking metaphor, I see the code as the ingredients, the IDE being the kitchen utensils and the working and tested software the resulting meal.
A lot of my productivity and the joy I feel crafting a beautiful software depends on my interaction with an IDE.

I have been using Netbeans since february 2007, following its long path to become a mature IDE for Ruby on Rails. Most of the time, I have used the latest build, reported some issues and it has been a fun and productive experience.

However, I am feeling a bit frustrated now, because of some recent changes in the behavior of the Output Window(CTRL+4) . I rely highly on Autospec to run my unit tests. With Netbeans 6.5, I have the code on one widow and I use an undocked Output window on the right side in order to check out the tests results and open classes in 1 click. This is very handy because Netbeans opens the guilty class in the main window, at the exact location of the guilty line of the backtrace. This makes the whole development cycle "super" productive!

Since Netbeans latest build 23rd of March 2009 (7.0?), this behavior has changed. It seems that the Output window behaves like any other window. By default, it opens in a normal tab, forcing you to constantly CTRL+TAB to switch between classes and output. If you undock it and you click on a backtrace, it will open it in the same undocked window as the Output!!!

So unless you move theses windows to the main IDE, there is no way you can compare the tests output and the class itself. As far as I am concerned, this is a serious usability issue and I'd like to discuss it with other netbeans users and netbeans IDE developers. In the following screenshot, you can see that every time I click on a backtrace, it opens the window in a tab next to the Output window ....

Please, please rollback the Output Window to its previous behavior!

A last tip about running autospec. The netbeans Autospec implementation is flawed: output is polluted by zillions of %RSPEC_SUITE_FINISHED% and the constant scroll bar at the bottom is very distracting. The solution is to run autospec with a simple "Run File" (shit +F6) of the script/autospec. This is much more productive and faster than the RSpec runner built into Netbeans and always works!

In the future, I'd love to see a feature which would allow us to split the IDE in 3 vertical windows.
If you look at Jon and Sandro on Pair Programming hashrocket video, you'll see that they have split their screen in 3: a class, the test class and autotest. Always take inspiration from the best!

The RSpec Book: Never Judge A Book By Its Cover

2009-02-10T13:22:00.009+01:00

The RSpec Book is out in beta version!

It's a long expected book for the BDD Community. The first time I mention this book was at the Paris on Rails 2007 conference. Since then, many changes happened and it seems that API and Practices are mature enough to release a book. As far as I am concerned, the biggest boost was given by Aslak with Cucumber.

Before adding more love, I'll write about 2 small caveats. It's still a bit hard to contribute to the RSpec project as code is a bit complex, I mean compares to bacon or shoulda. The other is the painful upgrading process since version 1.0: no matters what, I always end up spending 2-3 hours to fix my specs or autospec when I update the RSpec gem ...

Apart from that, RSpec and cucumber are one of the things which make me feeling at home working with Ruby (on Rails). Being able to describe the business rules and features is a big step for the software industry. How many hours lost because of misunderstanding between customers and programmers???
This book is aimed at programmers, my hope is that there will be other books following, targeting the customers (business analyst, project manager, end user). So little by little, we learn how to communicate clearly to each other and build better software ...

Never Judge A Book By Its Cover!

The second part of this post has nothing to do with technology or the quality of the book. I want to question the choice of an incandescent bulb to represent a technology as innovative as RSpec.

I have been volunteering for 2 years in an environmentalist NGO and one of the things I keep repeating is how bad for the environment are the old incandescent bulbs. I guess pragmatic programmers editors and RSpec book authors are very busy finishing the book and have other priorities ...

However, in these times of "green revolution", I hope that many RSpec users feel concerned about environmental issues and ask David and other authors to pick another image cover. It's a detail, I know but we have to replace all these electricity greedy bulbs even in the book covers!

RSpec is for alpha geek - the earlier adopters - and I don’t identify myself to a technology born in the XIX century !!!

Why not using a Compact Fluorescent bulb?

Or even more alpha geek, an LED_lamp ?

More information on http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/2007/Update66.htm

UPDATE: International Energy Agency Press release : "Worldwide, grid-based electric lighting consumes 19% of total global electricity production" ..."It shows that were end-users to install only efficient lamps that will save money over the life cycle of the lighting service. Following these measures would save more than 16 000 Mt of CO2 emissions over the same time frame – equivalent to about 6 years of current global car emissions – and would avoid USD 2 600 billion"

http://www.thedailygreen.com/green-homes/eco-friendly/congress-incandescent-light-bulbs-ban-461217

I found the LED bulb image at http://www.flickr.com/photos/partybooper_rob/2324613709/sizes/l/ (Collective Commons)

Install rmagick on ruby entreprise edition

2009-02-04T17:07:00.002+01:00

I was trying to install rmagick on an ubuntu 7.04 and

"ERROR: Error installing rmagick:
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension."

I found the solution in google cache: install the 1.15.12 version !

sudo /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20090113/bin/gem install rmagick -v 1.15.12

RubyCamp Lyon 2009

2009-01-30T13:46:00.003+01:00

J'ai appris l'existence de ce barcamp dans le blog de Ruby onRails - comme quoi, la lecture de RSS n'est pas que de la procrastination ;-)

Dans la série "troublantes coïncidences", j'avais déjà prévu de passer sur Lyon le WE du samedi 21 février et ce pour des raisons personnelles. Ce barcamp tombe donc bien à point! Etant donné que je suis en train de planifier mon retour en France pour le second semestre 2009 - sans doute dans la région lyonnaise - cela sera une parfaite occasion de rencontrer les rubyistes locaux.

Je compte faire un remix de mes présentations de Paris on Rails 2008 et citcon amsterdam 2008:

La vengeance du concombre masqué: Tests d'Acceptance utilisateur avec cucumber
Rouge, Vert, Refactor: Initiation au Test Driven Development avec RSpec

Par rapport à Paris, je compte faire beaucoup plus court, 15 minutes - 10-15 slides - et beaucoup plus simple. Si vous avez des attentes particulières, je vous serai reconnaissant de bien vouloir me contacter ou de laisser un commentaire.

Plus d'info sur http://barcamp.org/RubyCampLyon

n-dash VS m-dash

2009-01-27T13:01:00.003+01:00

The good thing with software engineering is that you learn a new thing every day. Computer programs depend on so many different layers, libraries, hardware that it should be no surprise that things go wrong all the time.

One of the Agile practice to fight this entropy is unit testing and especially Test Driven Development (TDD). Since 2005, I work with TDD, writing the specs (tests) before the code and this is the best design method I have used so far! No more dead code :-) Moreover, the final code looks really clean and the tests are the best up to date documentation with examples I will ever write.

I am implementing a Schedule class which encapsulate event times such as in the flavorpill.com. Following TDD and being lazy(!), I wrote the spec first so I copy pasted directly the "When" text from the event page in flavorpill to my editor:


 it "should output in a pretty format such as Tuesdays–Sundays (10am–5pm)" do
   @schedule.starts_at = 10.am
   @schedule.ends_at = 5.pm
   @schedule.from_tuesday.to_sunday
   @schedule.pretty_format.should equal("Tuesdays–Sundays (10am–5pm)")
 end

=>expected "Tuesdays–Sundays (10am–5pm)", got "Tuesdays-Sundays (10am-5pm)" (using .equal?)

Don't you see the difference? Me neither, and it took me at least 5 minutes to understand what was going wrong.

After increasing the size of the font, it's a bit easier to spot:

expected "Tuesdays–Sundays (10am–5pm)", got "Tuesdays-Sundays (10am-5pm)"

Olala! A colleague of mine who works as an editor introduced me to the wonderful world of n-dash and m-dash.

The hyphen is used to hyphenate compound words and between non-continuing numbers, e.g., phone numbers.

The en dash - is used to "connect continuing, or inclusive, numbers -- dates, time, or reference numbers." [Chicago Manual of Style, sec. 5.115]
The em dash – is used "to denote a sudden break in thought that causes an abrupt change in sentence structure." [Chicago Manual of Style, sec. 5.106]

Morality: copy-paste is evil!

But be honest, who knows about these characters, did you learn it in english classes? As far as I am concerned, there is no key in the keyboard to type the m-dash...

Paris on Rails 2008

2008-12-03T13:35:00.006+01:00

Paris on Rails 2008 was my 3rd conference this year, after XP Days France and citcon europe in Amsterdam . I talked about User Acceptance Testing with cucumber at webrat and selenium. Apologize to my non-french speaking readers, I will write the rest of this post in french.

Je suis de retour de Paris on Rails 2008! Richard et Laurent de nuxos ont vraiment assuré l'organisation de la conf: merci messieurs, ce fut très pro!
Ce que je retiendrais, en vrac:

Russ Olsen, en direct skype des US s'est levé à 5h du mat pour philosopher sur les langages de programmation. Son speech était comme du miel, c'est définitivement un"story teller": impressionant!
Philippe Hanrigou nous a servi sur un plateau une présentation très intéressante sur les Tests d'acceptance web à forte valeur ajoutée. Son utilisation de vidéos et de photos pour illustrer son propos m'a paru une excellente idée. Sur le plan technique, j'ai retenu 2-3 patterns que je vais implémenter ASAP
DHH est cool mais finalement, je ne sais pas si il apporte autre chose qu'un "icing on the cake" à une conférence plutot dense.
Les autres présentations étaient également enrichissantes, sauf peut-être liquid dont je n'ai pas compris la valeur ajoutée
Par rapport aux autres conf, le temps pour "socializer" était encore 1 fois trop limité. Il nous manque un apéro, un petit déjeuner, un goûter d'1 heure pour que l'on puisse échanger des cartes de visites et débattre. C'était un peu la course pour la pause déjeuner ... Quel contraste avec XP Days ou citcon où j'ai eu le temps de tisser de nombreux liens d'amitié lors de soirées d'anthologie et quelque peu éthyliques!
une autre suggestion afin de motiver la communauté: faire un "call for participants" avec un site web 2.0 qui permet de voter pour les propositions. La conférence espagnole est un exemple à suivre.

Quant à ma présentation, ce fut quelque peu épique car je me suis trompé de fichier et j'ai découvert en live une version beta ! J'avoue avoir pas mal bosser pour préparer la conf et voir tous ces slides mal foutues alors que j'avais passé une partie du dimanche à les fignoler m'a filé un coup (aïe!) . L'année prochaine, j'aurais un script pour automatiser le backup sur memory stick et je vais lire les bouquins américains que Phillippe m'a conseillé pour les mettre en pratique.

Pour ceux que ça intéresse, voici la denière version de ma présentation, avec quelque photos censurées ;-)

Tests Interfaces Web avec Rails

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: cucumber acceptancetesting)

Vos questions sont les bienvenues, sachez que je compte démarrer un projet sur github avec des exemples de features pour selenium et de specs pour RSpec.
Malheureusement, je n'ai pas pu me rendre à la Rails Party organisé par Jean-François Trân et rubyfrance.org. Mais le programme avait l'air prometteur et j'avoue que je suis très fan de ces rencontres informelles. Si l'année prochaine, ils la refont et previennent un peu plus en avance, je me ferai tout mon possible pour être présent!

Pour conclure ce long post, cette conférence m'a conforté dans ma décision de tenter ma chance de l'autre côté de l'Atlantique afin d'aquérir de nouvelles compétences. Il me reste tellement de choses à apprendre avant de devenir peut-être un jour un "master" en Rails (From Journeyman to Master) !

Donc, si tout va bien, je devrai être à San Francisco à partir de mars 2009. Si vous avez des contacts ou connaissez une start up on Rails, merci de le faire savoir ...

Ubuntu hardy: Fan got crazy because of a bug in NetworkManager

2008-11-19T16:40:00.001+01:00

Found the soluton in the ubuntu forum:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=4559250#post4559250

Copy-paste from the forum:

Last update:
If you update hal to last version (0.5.11~rc2-1ubuntu2) you shouldn't have this issue anymore, and thus you could update network-manager again.

To check your installed version:
Code:

apt-cache madison hal

Quote:
hal (0.5.11~rc2-1ubuntu2) hardy; urgency=low
* debian/rules: build using --with-deprecated-keys, since we don't want to
break packages that were assuming this worked right up through beta.
LP: #204768.

Old thread follows:
'''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''

I've read some posts here regarding wireless issues since last update.

I had issues too, and noticed that NetworkManager was eating 100% CPU and avoiding wireless to work.

So this is what I did:
* Connect to the internet in other machine and download the previous version of network-manager:
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/hardy/i...0.6.6-0ubuntu1
or directly:http://launchpadlibrarian.net/124982...untu1_i386.deb

* Downgrade network-manager with:
Code:

sudo dpkg -i network-manager-gnome_0.6.6-0ubuntu1_i386.deb

It will automaticly stop and restart NetworkAdmin.
After that just configure again your connection.

EDIT:Bug reports follow (as some users reported):
#204931 - NetworkManager 100% cpu usage on WiFi
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/178530
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...er/+bug/204868

EDIT2: If you want to keep aptitude from installing the broken package:
Code:

sudo aptitude hold network-manager

When you want to release it again:
Code:

sudo aptitude unhold network-manager

To check its version after an update:
Code:

apt-cache madison network-manager

Invalid Google Maps API key

2008-11-17T16:32:00.002+01:00

Today, it took me 1 hour to find the reason why my google map was not showing in production env whereas everything was fine in development env. Needless to say I have a "view" spec + a selenium acceptance test which pass.

Google Maps API has only one error message for this kind of problem: "The Google Maps API key used on this web site was registered for a different web site. You can generate a new key for this web site at http://code.google.com/apis/maps/. "

Therefore, I started looking at the wrong place and changed the key set up for the "production" environment in the RAILS_ROOT + '/config/gmaps_api_key.yml many times without any success ...

Finally, I ended up looking at the source of the page and it appeared that the key parameter was empty!

  <script src="http://maps.google.com/maps?file=api&v=2.x&key=&hl=" type="text/javascript">

  









  




 
   
 




  Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050513 Galeon/1.3.21
  Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.2; fr-FR; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050511 Firefox/1.0.4

Run tsung with:

tsung start

Starting the Tsung recorder

Configure your browser
If you use your machine as tsung client and also for the webserver, don't forget to remove "localhost" from the "No proxy For" textfield otherwise all requests to your web application will bypass the proxy server used by the tsung recorder!

Commands:
tsung recorder
tsung stop_recorder

Then you just have to copy the xml file generated the recoreder in ~/.tsung/

Generating the html report

(make sure you have perl installed with the Template Toolkit is used for HTML reports (see http://template-toolkit.org/ . For ubuntu gutsy, there is package available

cd to the log directory of your test (say ~/.tsung/log/20040325-16:33/) and use the script tsung_stats.pl:

/usr/lib/tsung/bin/tsung_stats.pl

(use –help to view all available options)

Update rubygems to the latest version

2008-01-29T10:32:00.000+01:00

sudo gem update --system

With Ubuntu (my version is Gutsy at the time of this writing), you will run with the problem

“uninitialized constant Gem::GemRunner (NameError)”

Take a look at http://www.nickpeters.net/2007/12/31/fix-for-uninitialized-constant-gemgemrunner-nameerror/ for the solution. I did a

sudo cp /usr/bin/gem1.8 /usr/bin/gem

You'll need the latest version of rubygems for Rails 2.0.

Dual screen on Ubuntu Gutsy with Toshiba laptop Intel 945

2008-01-25T17:24:00.000+01:00

I have been learning a lot since I started using linux ubuntu:

to install Dreamweaver with wine
to connect a network preinter with avahi and cups
and now I have finally managed to set up a "Dual screen" so I can be more productive

I found most of the information in the xorg xrandr wiki, it took me 1 hour but the actual set up is very simple:

plug the external monitor before you swich on yout laptop and change the resolution with the GUI
back up yr /etc/X11/xorg.conf and generate a fresh one with
```
sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg     
```
Run xrandr --output LVDS --auto --left-of VGA to see the size of the virtual screen you need, it will return an error message saying your current max size and the one you need
edit the /etc/X11/xorg.conf and add the magic line with virtual (don't use mine!)

Section "Screen"
Identifier "Default Screen"
Device "Intel Corporation Mobile 945GM/GMS, 943/940GML Express Integrated Graphics Controller"
Monitor "Acer AL2251W"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Modes "1680x1680" "1680x1050" "1600x1200" "1440x1440" "1280x1024" "1152x864" "1024x768" "832x624" "800x600" "720x400" "640x480"
Virtual 2880 1200
EndSubSection
EndSection

log out, run xrandr --output LVDS --auto --left-of VGA
and that's it! You can also put the laptop screen on the right with the option --right-of

IMPORTANT, DO NOT USE :

It doesn't work! and will break your xorg.conf :-(

Dealing with files whose status is !

2008-01-25T11:14:00.000+01:00

subversion can be a pain in the a** !!!

If you have some files whose status is :

ghost_file.txt !    Resource is missing or incomplete (removed by another tool than Subversion) You won't be able to commit them.

The easiest hack to deal with it is to create the missing file and add it again to subversion.

pico ghost_file.txt
svn add ghost_file.txt

Time to move to git or mercurial!

21 croissants daily post 01/25/2008

2008-01-25T01:38:00.001+01:00

Trick: Update gmail to the new interface

tags: 21croissantsblog, gmail

It turns out that changing gmail language from English(UK) to English(US) activated the new interface !!! Google is the champion of communication!!! I was waiting like a pinguin ...
- post by jeanmichelg

Connect a network Samsung printer connected to an airport router

2008-01-21T15:07:00.000+01:00

1. Find the printer IP

avahi-browse --all --resolve

The output will be something like:

= eth1 IPv4 Samsung ML-2010 PDL Printer local
hostname = [Linqia.local]
address = [192.168.0.201]
port = [9100]
txt = ["ty=Samsung ML-2010" "usb_STATUS=BUSY" "usb_CLS=PRINTER" "usb_MDL=ML-2010" "usb_CMD=GDI" "usb_MFG=Samsung" "priority=5" "pdl=U" "product=(Samsung ML-2010)" "note=Linqia" "qtotal=1" "txtvers=1"]

2. Add the printer using the "Administration Printing" GUI.
Select a APPSocket / HP Jet Direct and enter the ip address in the hostname field.
Example: 192.168.0.201:9100

3. Footomatik should already have the driver for your printer, you just have to select the model
In my case: Samsung ML-2010

Learning PL/pgSQL - SQL Procedural Language

2008-01-09T17:42:00.000+01:00

I am working on my first project with Postgres and there are a couple of stuff I wanted to document:

To install PL/pgSQL which is not installed by default (!), execute the SQL command on your db:

CREATE LANGUAGE plpgsql;

Otherwise you will get the error message: "ERROR: language "plpgsql" does not exist" ...

Another surprising missing feature is the inability to connect to other databases. It's not included by default in Postgres but seats in the postgres/contrib project within the funcion dblink.

To install it on ubuntu:

sudo apt-get -y install postgresql-8.2 postgresql-contrib

That's not finished! You have to run the script manually to install it.

psql -U postgres your_database_name < /usr/share/postgresql/8.2/contrib/dblink.sql

Import / Export a postgres db

2008-01-02T17:50:00.000+01:00

postgres is the database user. On ubuntu, you should run this command as the user "postgres": su postgres (password by default is 'password' !)

Dump a database into a sql script:

pg_dump database_name -Upostgres -W > ~/dump_script.sql

Restore the database from sql script:

psql -U postgres database_name -f - < dump_script.sql

21 croissants daily post 01/01/2008

2008-01-01T01:38:00.001+01:00

Ruby on Rails: Testing without the database

Unit Test = to test our code, not the class under test dependencies. Testing without the DB is also a good way of accelerating tests

Petite enquête sur vos attentes de Paris on Rails

2007-11-22T11:15:00.000+01:00

J'imagine que le site de Paris on Rails va rediriger pas mal de people sur mon blog alors j'en profite pour faire un petit sondage sur vos attentes:

Cela me permettra d'ajuster le contenu de ma présentation, qui n'est d'ailleurs que dans le stade d'une mindmap à l'heure oú j'ecris ce mot ...

Si vous avez des suggestions, merci de poster un commentaire, je ne manquerai pas de publier ceux qui me paraissent constructifs. C'est pas beau l'internet participatif? D'autre part, je publierai toutes mes sources (présentations sur RSpec en anglais et liens) dans ce blog.

RSpec Resources

2007-11-19T19:15:00.002+01:00

Subscribe to the RSS of my RSpec presentations:

(click on the RSS logo)

My bookmarks with the 'rspec' tag:

21 croissants daily post 11/15/2007

2007-11-15T01:38:00.001+01:00

nbarthelemy.com New Rails Plugin: local_auto_completer

Plugin of the day!
How many billons the plugins are there around??? I am making a few changes to it because I also want the id so I can use it with belongs_to associations attributes.

21 croissants daily post 11/09/2007

2007-11-09T01:38:00.001+01:00

the { buckblogs :here }: Brevity vs. Clarity

Ruby on Rails code should be like a poem ;- )
Code shoule be readable by humans, when I read code containing 2 ternary operators, it takes me 5 min to understand it ... What's the point? Apart from not wanting other to change it??? Fortunately, I have some tests and I am not scared to refactor ...

RSpec at Paris on Rails 2007

2007-11-07T10:00:00.000+01:00

Last year, I gave a talk about testing Rails at the first Spanish RailsConf in Madrid. It was quite a challenge because I am not fluent in Spanish and it was the first time since university I was talking in front of such a large public.
This year, I will have the honour to talk after DHH at Paris on Rails 2007 on the 10th of december 2007. I will attempt to evangelize the crowd about the beauty of BDD and show some demos with RSpec, Autotest, RCov, ....

You'll find all details at the conference page.

Here is the full details in French:

Les Tests avec Ruby on Rails

La nécessité d'écrire des tests automatisés fait l'unanimité auprès de la communauté Rails. Mais, par où commencer? On les écrit après avoir implémenté une nouvelle fonctionnalité ou encore avant, afin de spécifier le comportement de nos objets dans un langage naturel proche du jargon métier parlé par les utilisateurs.

Et quand on a terminé d'écrire ces fameux tests, comment en tirer le meilleur parti? Comment être certain que ce "commit" de 2 lignes de code ne va pas casser une fonctionnalité majeure d'un module développé par un autre collègue?
Quand peut-on considérer que l'on a écrit suffisamment de tests?
Faut-il aller jusqu'à automatiser les tests de l'IHM afin de garantir que les interfaces AJAX fonctionnent avec tous les navigateurs et OS du marché?

Pendant cette présentation, nous évoquerons le

et quelques autres outils tout en apportant les réponses à ces questions.

21 croissants daily post 11/05/2007

2007-11-05T01:39:00.001+01:00

device-mapper: table: 245:1: linear: dm-linear: device lookup failed - Ubuntu Forums

This "sudo aptitude remove evms" saved my life, after the upgrade to Ubuntu gutsy from Fesity, my computer went crazy and was displaying billons of lines "device-mapper: table: 245:1: linear: dm-linear: device lookup failed". I had to try to type this command line while the screen was continuously displaying these lines !!! Not sure I will keep with linux (I want a MAC)!

device-mapper: table: 245:1: linear: dm-linear: device lookup failed

Output the rspec report to an html file

2007-10-24T15:43:00.000+02:00

rake spec

Create a spec.opts with:

--format
html:doc/rspec_report.html
--loadby
mtime

=> It will generate a rspec_report.html file in your doc folder!!!

The rspec documentation actually explains it but I missed an example to start using it ...

Do not use an IDE to commit with svn your rails frozen gems!

2007-10-04T17:10:00.000+02:00

After having lost a couple of hours trying to commit my rails/vendor both with netbeans and subeclipse, I think it's time to come back to old school command line: it's 10 times faster and do no take 100% CPU!!!

Go to the vendor folder
svn add rails
svn commit -m "Added vendor/rails version 1.2.3"

Done!

Playing with float arithmetics with Ruby: how to truncate decimals

2007-09-28T19:56:00.000+02:00

I needed to truncate a float to 4 decimals because I am using geocoding in my app and Google map returns coordinates with a lot of decimals ...

After reading this post in the ruby-talk mailing list, I decided to take a break in my development and write the following code :


require 'benchmark'

class Float
  def truncate_decimals_with_printf(number_of_decimals_after_dot)
    ("%.#{number_of_decimals_after_dot}f" % self).to_f
  end
  
  def truncate_decimals_with_regexp(number_of_decimals_after_dot)
    match = Regexp.compile("\\d*." + "\\d" * number_of_decimals_after_dot).match(self.to_s)
    match[0].to_f
  end
  
  def truncate_decimals_with_arithmetic(number_of_decimals_after_dot)
    x = 10 ** number_of_decimals_after_dot
    (self * x).round.to_f / x
  end
end

describe "Float.truncate_decimals" do
  
  it "could truncate decimals using printf" do
    1.12349.truncate_decimals_with_printf(4).should == 1.1234
  end
  
  it "could truncate decimals using a regexp" do
    1.12349.truncate_decimals_with_regexp(4).should == 1.1234
  end
  
  it "could truncate decimals using arithmetic" do
    1.12349.truncate_decimals_with_arithmetic(4).should == 1.1234
  end
  
  it "Benchmark:" do    
    Benchmark.bm(10) do |timer|
      timer.report('arithmetic') { 1.12349.truncate_decimals_with_arithmetic(4) }
      timer.report('printf') { 1.12349.truncate_decimals_with_printf(4) }
      timer.report('regexp') { 1.12349.truncate_decimals_with_regexp(4) }      
    end    
  end
  
end

The result:

Float.truncate_decimals
- could truncate decimals using printf (FAILED - 1)
- could truncate decimals using a regexp
- could truncate decimalsusing arithmetic (FAILED - 2)
user system total real
arithmetic 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 ( 0.000015)
printf 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 ( 0.000017)
regexp 0.000000 0.000000 0.000000 ( 0.000028)
- Benchmark:

1)
'Float.truncate_decimals could truncate decimals using printf' FAILED
expected: 1.1234,
got: 1.1235 (using ==)
/home/jeanmichel/ruby/projects/iss2.0/spec/models/float_spec.rb:22:

2)
'Float.truncate_decimals could truncate using arithmetic' FAILED
expected: 1.1234,
got: 1.1235 (using ==)
/home/jeanmichel/ruby/projects/iss2.0/spec/models/float_spec.rb:30:

Finished in 0.008598 seconds

4 examples, 2 failures

The arithmetric solution is the fastest! Faster than printf ! Computers are good at division and multiplication ;-) The regexp is damned slow, however it's the only one which actually fullfill the specs ;-)

Any idea how to change other implementations ?

Today, I have lost a few hours because the arithmetic implementation was working on my dev box, a Linux 2.6.20-16-386 i686 GNU with a ruby 1.8.5 (2006-08-25) [i486-linux] and NOT at all on my production server, a
Linux i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux with a ruby 1.8.4 (2005-12-24) [i386-linux] ...

At the end, I used the printf version, which is OK because I don't care about the rounding...

Most important rule: you should always get a stage server IDENTICAL to your production server and run the tests / specs on it before deploying!

Hola RailsConf Europa

2007-09-17T17:03:00.000+02:00

Escribo este mensaje para los que hayan visto mi mensaje en el message board, y que quieran saber un poco más sobre 21 croissants.

Soy un programador Rails desde el 2006 y me encantan el "testing", BDD, RSpec, selenium, etc ... Echa un ojo a mi ponencia a Rails Hispana en el 2006

Para resumir, después de 5 años de Java, en Paris, Londres y Barcelona, empiezo mi actividad de autónomo con eco-union, una asociación ecologista y estoy buscando clientes (ONGs / Asociaciones / Servicios públicos o PYMES.

Me gustaría escribir tutoriales sobre RSpec y introducir este framework. Me gustaría saber que te parece el Rspec y el testing.

Mándame un mensaje si quieres quedar en la RailsConf.

Hasta pronto!

Jean-Michel

Bonjour RailsConf Europe

2007-09-17T16:40:00.000+02:00

J'écris ce post au cas oú tu sois tombé sur ma carte de visite dans le message board de la RailsConf et tu voudrais en savoir un peu plus sur 21croissants.

En 1 ligne, je développe avec Rails depuis 1 an et des brouettes et je suis passionné par le "testing", BDD, RSpec, selenium, etc ...

Pour résumer en quelque lignes, après 5 ans de java successivement à Paris, Londres puis Barcelone, je commence mon activité de freelancer dans le cadre de eco-union, association écologiste à Barcelone et je recherche des clients potentiels (ONGs/ associations / services publiques ou PMEs). Je n'ai pas encore décidé si j'allais rester en Espagne, et je suis donc intéressé par toutes les entreprises francophones (petite structures!) qui utilisent Rails et une méthode Agile.

Je recherche également des partenaires freelancers intéressés par offrir des prestations de formation sur Ruby on Rails en français ou en anglais pour 2008.

J'ai l'intention d'écrire des mini-tutoriels (screencasts) sur RSpec et présenter ce framework lors de la prochaine Paris On Rails. N'hésite pas à me donner ton point de vue sur ce framework et le testing en général.

Envoie moi un email si tu as envie de me rencontrer en personne pendant la RailsConf.

A bientôt j'espère!

Jean-Michel

Cheap Rails hosting

2007-09-03T11:12:00.000+02:00

I pay about 10$ / month for the hosting of my apps at site5
So far, I haven't had any major problem but I wonder if it's not time to move to a more powerful configuration with a more qualified support.

I am not saying site5 support is not competent but they are a bit slow. Most of the time, there are different people who reply to my questions. I suspect they only have a few rails experts and a lot of people in their support with no specific specialization...

Moreover, they are still using ruby 1.8.4, rubygems 0.9.2 and rails 1.1.6, more than 6 months after the release of Rails 1.2.3!!!

When asking about moving to mongrel instead of the quite unstable fcgi, they reply they have not planned it ...

Any host to recommand apart from Railsmachine?

I am going to try the startup at primetime, a norwegian company whose engineers are top-notch gurus in linux and Rails.

It happens they are also friends of mine from Oslo ;-)

Configuring Rails To Use Gmail’s SMTP Server

2007-08-31T16:02:00.001+02:00

Nothing original here I am afraid.
I copied Google's cache from http://blog.pomozov.info/posts/how-to-send-actionmailer-mails-to-gmailcom.html

Save the following code within your rails app in lib/smtp_tls.rb



require "openssl"
require "net/smtp"

Net::SMTP.class_eval do
private
def do_start(helodomain, user, secret, authtype)
raise IOError, 'SMTP session already started' if @started
check_auth_args user, secret, authtype if user or secret

sock = timeout(@open_timeout) { TCPSocket.open(@address, @port) }
@socket = Net::InternetMessageIO.new(sock)
@socket.read_timeout = 60 #@read_timeout
#@socket.debug_output = STDERR #@debug_output

check_response(critical { recv_response() })
do_helo(helodomain)

if starttls
  raise 'openssl library not installed' unless defined?(OpenSSL)
  ssl = OpenSSL::SSL::SSLSocket.new(sock)
  ssl.sync_close = true
  ssl.connect
  @socket = Net::InternetMessageIO.new(ssl)
  @socket.read_timeout = 60 #@read_timeout
  #@socket.debug_output = STDERR #@debug_output
  do_helo(helodomain)
end

authenticate user, secret, authtype if user
@started = true
ensure
unless @started
  # authentication failed, cancel connection.
  @socket.close if not @started and @socket and not @socket.closed?
  @socket = nil
end
end

def do_helo(helodomain)
 begin
  if @esmtp
    ehlo helodomain
  else
    helo helodomain
  end
rescue Net::ProtocolError
  if @esmtp
    @esmtp = false
    @error_occured = false
    retry
  end
  raise
end
end

def starttls
getok('STARTTLS') rescue return false
return true
end

def quit
begin
  getok('QUIT')
rescue EOFError, OpenSSL::SSL::SSLError
end
end
end

Add this code to config/environment.rb

require “smtp_tls”
ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = {
:address => “smtp.gmail.com”,
:port => 587,
:authentication => :plain,
:user_name => “someone@openrain.com”,
:password => ’someonesPassword’
}
Use ActionMailer as normal.

Linux 101

2007-08-30T13:07:00.029+02:00

The (sad but real) truth is I am new to Linux, even if I have been using Unix systems (solaris based), back in 1995 at the university. My teachers were quite uncompetent and as my home pc was windows based, I did not learn as much as I could have done and forget little by little the few things I knew ...
As I have decided to use this blog as a personal public knowledge database, I have decided to post about all the simple commands I learn.

firefox, how to synchronise bookmarks

I am using both Linux Ubuntu and Windows XP on my laptop (with dual boot), I am using the foxmarks extenstion to keep my "Bookmarks Tool folder" synchronised. I kepp all my personal bookmarks on my del.icio.us

man

To quit, type "q"

vi

to edit a file: vi file_name.rb, then type "i" to edit
More commands on http://www.comptechdoc.org/os/linux/usersguide/linux_ugvi.html

To quit:
If you were editing the file, escape the edition mode with the escape key.

:q

To save:
:wq

sudo

To do things that required "root" privileges.

configuration : /etc directory

To add a folder to the PATH variable, the "best" seems to edit the file ~/.bashrc
gedit ~/.bashrc

and append at the end of the file:
PATH=$PATH:~/programs/scripts export PATH

Taken from http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=269793&highlight=PATH

bash

When I start my machine for work, I end up launching more or less the same application. I wanted to write a quick script which allows to launch all these applications in one-click!: Reading http://www.mkssoftware.com/docs/man1/sh.1.asp, I found about the &
&: asynchronously executes the command that precedes it. This means that the shell just starts the command running and then immediately goes on to take new input, before the command finishes execution.

creating alias

gedit ~/.bashrc
Append alias at the end of the file:
alias ll='ls -l'

Locking the screen with the "key menu" is not cool!

I was looking for a software which would allow me to customize keyboard shortcuts and I came accross keytouch , which seems great but you have to configure your keyboard in order to use it.
I thought I could do that later and then share my work to the community ...
Oooops! There was a side effect, every time I hitted the "menu" key, it was locking my screen! After 1 day of clumsy locking and having lost 30 minutes searching into ubuntu forums what was happening, I decided to uninstall keytouch. Bingo!
It was such an improductive hour! Next time, I won't spend more than 15 minutes on that kind of shits ...

I didn't know the name of this *&$·%· key, this is how does it look like:

The "menu key" or "application key" is on the right side

Killing process which belong to a certain user

ps -ef | grep process_name
skill -9 -u 'username' -c process_name

Deleting a directory (reccursively)

rm -Rf directory_path

Copying an entire directory

The following command will copy "src" inside "dest"

cp -R src/ dest/

uses the backslash ( ) for directories whose name contain spaces o

Example:

cp -R /windows/Program Files/Macromedia/ ~/.wine/Program Files/

Display hidden files (files starting with dot)

ls -a

Display the list of process running and ... KILL!

ps -ef
kill -9 id_process

Display the list of process running and their memory footprint

ps -eo pid,pmem,size,args --sort=-size

It shows every process ID with the percentage of memory used, the actual KB of memory used and the full command w/ command line options. And sorts everything by used memory.

Environements variables

Display all env variables:

env

Display one env variable

echo $LOGON

Assign a value to an env variable
export PATH=${PATH}:${ANT_HOME}/bin

Chmod reccursively

chmod -R ...
Check out the informations in http://www.ss64.com/bash/chmod.html

Copy files through ssh using scp

scp username@server.com:/path_to/files path_to_local_destination_file

Examples:-

scp myfile you@remote.machine.org:/userdisk/yourdir

Copy the file called ``myfile'' from the current directory to the directory called ``userdisk/yourdir'' belonging to the user ``you'' on the computer ``remote.machine.org''.

scp "you@remote.machine.org:/userdisk/yourdir/*" ./

Copy all files from the directory called ``userdisk/yourdir'' belonging to the user ``you'' on the computer ``remote.machine.org'' to the current directory. For further information see section 8.7.

Console commands

CTRL + R : will search in all the commands typed not only in the current session
cd - : to come back to previous folder

Process commands

before the comand:

nice

A nice value of −20 is the highest priority and 19 is the lowest priority. The default nice value for processes is inherited by its parent process, usually 0

nohup

enabling the command to keep running after the user who issues the command has logged out

'a command '&& notify-send 'Done'

will pop up when the command has finnished

Call another shell script:

source ~/another_bash.sh

Swap

My system uses a lot of swap and I have no idea of how to tell it to use the RAM when it's available ...
I've found this:

cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
60
The value of 60 is often the default on SuSE Linux systems. This value ranges from 0 (less likely to swap) to 100 (very likely to swap). I notice that by setting it to 10, the system uses much less swap memory than before.
/proc/sys/vm/swappiness
The above code will set the value temporarily. To set it permanently so that it takes effect on each boot, edit the /etc/sysctl.conf file and add the line:

vm.swappiness=10
Changing the value contained into swappiness should help you tuning how your system swap.

Setting up public key authentication over SSH

Every time I want to setup public key authentication over SSH, I have to look it up, and I've never found a simple guide, so here's mine.

Generate key on local machine

ssh-keygen -t rsa

It will ask you for a password but you can leave it blank.

Note you could also pick -t dsa if you prefer.

Ensure that the remote server has a .ssh directory

Make sure the server your connecting to has a .ssh directory in your home directory. If it doesn't exist you can run the ssh-keygen command above, and it will create one with the correct permissions.

Copy your local public key to the remote server

If your remote server doesn't have a file called ~/.ssh/authorized_keys2 then we can create it. If that file already exists, you need to append to it instead of overwriting it, which the command below would do:

scp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub remote.server.com:.ssh/authorized_keys2

To copy to an existing  .ssh/authorized_keys (99% of time):

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh user_name@remote.machine.com 'cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys'

You may also be able to remove the exact known host with the following command via ssh on your local machine. Remember to replace mt-example.com with your own domain.

ssh-keygen -R mt-example.com

Finding a file

Here's an example find command using a search criteria and the default action:

find / -name foo

will search the whole system for any files named foo and display them. More examples here.

Finding a file containing a string

For example search for a string called redeem reward in all text files located in /home/tom/*.txt directory, use
$ grep "redeem reward" /home/tom/*.txt

Task: Search all subdirectories recursively

You can search for a text string all files under each directory, recursively with -roption:
$ grep -r "redeem reward" /home/tom

Recursively remove .svn directories

find . -type d -name .svn | xargs rm -rf

How to exit a process

[18:29:18] … What about Ctrl + Z
[18:29:26] … ?
[18:29:39] Marco i: now write 'jobs
[18:29:40] … '
[18:29:41] … jobs
[18:29:52] : Stopped telnet localhost 11211
[18:30:01] : do: kill %1
[18:30:11] … It kills the first stopped job.
[18:30:18]: [1]+ Terminated telnet localhost 11211
[18:30:23] Marco Lazzeri: ok
[18:30:27] … now you're out
[18:30:33] Jean-Michel Garnier: OK, I will add this trick to my linux trick. Thanks again
[18:30:39] Marco i: but having ctrl + ] as font increaser is NOT good ; )
[18:31:00] … You know that with CTRL + Z you can stop jobs.
[18:31:21] … Then if you issue 'bg' you send it to background
[18:31:36] … While if you issue 'fg' you take it back to your screen: foreground.
[18:31:44] Jean-Michel Garnier: I have learned it today
[18:31:57] Marco i: It can be uself.
[18:31:59] … useful
[18:32:05] … especially when working on remote systems.
[18:32:16] … when you don't have graphical shell
[18:32:29] … or when opening more terminals is a waste of time

Remote control with vnc

vncviewer -fullscreen 192.168.2.23:0

If you want to quit vncviewer: Press 'F8' and select Quit viewer

RFormat an external USB hard drive to ext2

sudo umount /dev/sdb1
[sudo] password for jeanmichel:
jeanmichel@21x100:~$ mkfs.ext2 /dev/sdb1
mke2fs 1.40.2 (12-Jul-2007)
warning: 424 blocks unused.

Filesystem label=
OS type: Linux
Block size=4096 (log=2)
Fragment size=4096 (log=2)
61166016 inodes, 122093568 blocks
6104699 blocks (5.00%) reserved for the super user
First data block=0
Maximum filesystem blocks=0
3726 block groups
32768 blocks per group, 32768 fragments per group
16416 inodes per group
Superblock backups stored on blocks:

Tar / Untar a file

Tar:

tar czf /path/to/output/folder/filename.tar.gz /path/to/folder

Untar:
tar xvf tsung-1.2.1.tar.gz && rm tsung-1.2.1.tar.gz

CPU Usage

top

type "1" to see mutliple cups

Hard drive Usage

du -s * | sort -nr | head

How to check if an IP is denied from ssh acces

grep 88.6.173.50 /etc/hosts.deny

How to make multiple folders

You can make multiple folders in bash and other shells with {folder1,folder2} :

mkdir /usr/local/src/bash/{old,new,dist,bugs}

Which version of packages I have installed?

dpkg -l | grep openssl

Configure /etc/init.d

sudo sysv-rc-conf

provides a terminal GUI for managing "/etc/rc{runlevel}.d/"

Free space on hard drive

DF command reports how much free disk space is available for each mount you have. When executing DF, I like to use the -h option, which returns the output in a more readable format:

wtn@wtn2:~$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 7.5G 2.1G 5.1G 30% /

What time is it?

$ date

Thu Jul 17 08:30:46 GMT 2008

See What Version of a Package Is Installed on Ubuntu

dpkg -s

Is drive mounted?

if [ ! -d /backup/mydir ]; then
echo "drive not mounted"
fi

List processes with ports they use

netstat -nlp

Propuesta Rails Hispana 2007

2007-07-29T22:35:00.000+02:00

Para la conferencia Rails Hispana en noviembre 2007, me gustaria presentar una ponencia sobre rspec.

rspec on Rails
El "Behaviour Driven Development" (BDD) fue inspirado por las teorías de Sapir Worhf. Según estas, las palabras que usamos cambian nuestra manera de pensar.

rspec es un framework de BDD que permite usar el lenguaje natural para especificar el comportamiento del código Ruby con ejemplos ejecutables que ayudan en el proceso de diseño y se pueden usar como documentación y tests.

describe "Charla sobre rspec" do

it "debería explicar" do

Conceptos clave de rspec a través de un ejemplo práctico y analogías con Test::Unit
Ejemplos de especificaciones de Modelos, Controladores y Vistas (con Selenium)
rspec como especificaciones funcionales

end

it "debería presentar" do

GUIs
rcov y Heckle para mejorar la cobertura y la calidad de los specs
rspec + Autotest para automatizar la ejecución de los specs
rspec + jruby para especificar programas java

end

end

My Rails bookmarks

2007-07-07T20:31:00.004+02:00

Struggling with blogger

2007-07-06T17:42:00.001+02:00

I have been struggling for so many hours with the google blogger template system!!! So far, this has been quite a frustrative experience. So I thought I shared the source code of my template so people can benefit the hacks I have found:

Hide the blogger header
Use Shaded border with javascript
Use the javascript syntax hightlighter, this one took me 3 hours!

On the whole, the xml based template language used by google is a good anti-pattern of a very complex and unreadable view language. The only way to work with this "cr*p" is Trial and errors ... Very frustrating!

Fortunately, there are still independant individuals who innovate in the open source world, check out the genius idead of Yuri Rashkovskii , a 25 years old nice ukranian geek (I have met him in Oslo). I will blog about lilu as soon as I have the chance to play with it.

I wanted to include the code of my template so you could copy-paste it but once again Blogger f*cked up everything (sic) and did not display it properly ...So please download it here !!!

Getting the latest netbeans ruby-ide automatically

2007-06-28T23:33:00.003+02:00

Update 12/11/2007: Blogger had completly destroyed the formatting of the code, I had a received a few emails telling me the script did not work. I have once again copy pasted it and it should work, I apologize if I have wasted your time, I should really move to a serious blogging system !!!

Update 10/04/2008: THE SCRIPT DOES NOT WORK ANYMORE. The Netbeans changed their nightly build system, you can download the latest version and install netbeans manually from http://bits.netbeans.org/download/trunk/nightly/latest/

I am using netbeans since april 2007 as my primary Rails editor on Linux ubuntu. I used to work with Radrails (now Aptana) because I used to be a java developper and work with Eclipse.

When RadRails "dissapeared", I started looking for alternative IDEs and so far I am very happy with netbeans.

Tor Norbye and his team are very active (and responsive!) and keep delivering new features all every week! The only way to use these features - as far as I am concerned - is to download the latest build from the Continuous Integration server at http://deadlock.netbeans.org/hudson/job/ruby/

To save a bit of time, I have written a script to install the latest netbeans ruby-ide automatically. You need to install the mechanize gem first.

This script will:

connect to the Continuous Integration server of sun (http://deadlock.netbeans.org/hudson/job/ruby/)
Guess what's the latest stable build file name and download it to a temp location (depending on your OS)
rename the old install
unzip the build to the netbeans installation folder
delete the downloaded zip from the tmp location

Usage:

You need to install mechanize:

gem install mechanize

Hten, copy the following code to a ruby file and adapt the last two lines to your configuration. The 1st paramater is the "netbeans installation folder" and the
second one your tmp folder.

Example:

script = NetbeansUpdaterScript.new("/home/jeanmichel/ruby/programs", "/tmp")

script.run


require 'rubygems'
require 'hpricot'
require 'open-uri'
require 'mechanize'
require 'fileutils'

class GenericScript
def download_from(url, save_as)
  mechanize = WWW::Mechanize.new  
  mechanize.get(url).save_as(save_as)
  puts "downloaded " + url + " and saved to " + save_as
end

def remove(file_or_directory)  
  FileUtils.remove_dir(file_or_directory, true) if File.directory?(file_or_directory)
  FileUtils.rm file_or_directory if File.file?(file_or_directory)
  puts "remove " + file_or_directory
end

def unzip_file(file, target_dir) 
  system(
  "unzip", "-q", file, "-d", target_dir
  ) or raise "Error extracting (#{$?}): unzip #{file.inspect} -d #{target_dir.inspect}"
  puts "unzip " + file + " to " + target_dir
end

def is_using_mac?
  RUBY_PLATFORM == /darwin/
end

end

class NetbeansUpdaterScript < tmp_folder = "/tmp" netbeans_installation_folder =" netbeans_installation_folder" netbeans_folder_path =" @netbeans_installation_folder" tmp_folder =" tmp_folder" netbeans_installer_file =" @tmp_folder" doc =" Hpricot(open(" last_stable_build_number =" doc.inner_html" last_stable_build_number=" + @last_stable_build_number.to_s     @last_stable_build_number   end       def url_latest_build                     get_last_stable_build_number          if is_using_mac?       " script =" NetbeansUpdaterScript.new(">

I have used this script for a week and it seems to work alright but I'd be happy to hear some feedback about the code or any problem you might have.

Upgrading to Ubuntu Feisty

2007-06-28T19:53:00.001+02:00

At last, I upgraded to the latest stable version of Ubuntu last week. So far, I am very pleased: my firefox, amarok, openoffice and netbeans were very unstable and now everything seems to worl like a charm! The network manager is also very cool: 30s to connecto to a WPA2 network!

However, the 3D and funky effects (Berryl window manager) don't work perfectly so I had to uninstall them (I can live without!).

Apart from the fact I could not find a good software for screencasting, I am very happy with Ubuntu even if I'll probably buy a mac in 2008 anyway

Well done Ubuntu!

L_Appel du 8 juin

2007-06-08T13:47:00.000+02:00

“Ici Paris, la Blogosphère parle aux francophones: Les pingouins qui, depuis de nombreuses années, sont à la tête des geeks francophones ont formé un projet de livrer des applications en retard avec du code non testé. Ces applications, alléguant la défaite de nos comités QA, se sont mis en rapport avec le GrandBugQuiNiqueTout pour cesser le combat. Certes, nous avons été, nous sommes, submergés par la tradition du cycle en cascade, la tradition du “Ca marche a 83%” et la loi de Murphy, de l'ennemi. Infiniment plus que leur nombre, ce sont l'absence de tests unitaires, une mauvaise communication et l'incompétence des personnes chargées du planning qui nous font reculer. Ce sont l'absence de reconnaissance de l'excellence technique des geeks qui aiment le travail bien fait, la horde de fichiers de configuration XML qui dupliquent sans fin les même informations et le manque d'”Agilité” des projets (Planning en continue, Itérations courtes, Tests Unitaires, Intégration Continue, Rétrospective) en générale qui ont surpris nos chefs au point de les amener là où ils en sont aujourd'hui. ....".

Le Texte complet de la pétition de l'Appel du 8 juin 7, Signe-la (pour rire)

J'ai un rêve: publier un e-book en français pour début 2008 d'une centaine de pages de recettes sur le BDD on Rails avec rspec. Le titre provisoire est T.G.V.: "Testing à Grande Vitesse", en honneur à l'excellent système de transport publique de la SNCF.
Etant donné que je n'ai eu aucun contact avec la communauté Rails de France et de Navarre depuis 5 ans, je vais avoir besoin de sérieux coups de main pour me mettre à la page;-) Ecris-moi a jean tiret michel suivi d'un arobababase 21 croissant au PLURIEL petit point COM (j'ai tres peur des spammeurs) ou laisse un commentaire à ce post. Pour commencer, voici une petite idée de ce que j'ai derrrière la tête avec l'application web2.0 de mind mapping collaboratif mind42.com:

Selenium reports with screenshots using RSpec and imagemagick on ubuntu

2007-06-07T17:19:00.001+02:00

After having read Aslak Hellesoy's post Watir reports with screenshots using RSpec and Win32::Screenshot, I got very excited because this was exactly the kind of thing I had been daydreaming while taking my morning shower (don't you?).
Aslak's article explains how to use Watir and Internet Explorer on Windows to generate rspec reports with screenshots. Garps! I am working on linux (ubuntu Feisty) as I can't afford a mac (yet) and can't stand Windows. I got a bit frustrated because I wanted to do the same thing on my ubuntu.

So, I decided to do a bit of researches and x*y*z hours later (sic), I got my selenium+rspec taking screenshots! My intention is to contribute to the RSpec sub-project spec_ui.

How does it work?

To get a 30s answer, please watch the flah screencast I have made of netbeans executing rake spec:selenium, running the selenium server, Webrick, lanching firefox and taking a screenshot after having maximized the screen.

Here is the code in spec_helper.rb :


 config.before(:all, :behaviour_type => :view) do       
    selenium_remote_control_manager = SeleniumRemoteControlManager.new
    selenium_remote_control_manager.start_webrick
    selenium_remote_control_manager.start_selenium_server
    @browser = selenium_remote_control_manager.get_firefox
    @browser.start
 end

 config.after(:each, :behaviour_type => :view) do
   Spec::Ui::ScreenshotFormatter.take_screenshot_of(@browser)
 end

 config.after(:all, :behaviour_type => :view) do
   @browser.kill! rescue nil
 end

And the code of contact_list_spec.rb:


describe "/contact/list", :behaviour_type => :view  do 
 include SeleniumSpecHelper

 it "should provide a description automatically (TODO extract)" do       
   open "/contact/list"
   @browser.is_text_present("Frequently Texted").should be_true
   # This line will fail :-)
   @browser.is_text_present("All Contact Tak tak").should be_true       
 end
  
end

I have used imagemagick to capture the screenshot.

What's next?

I have had the chance to meet Aslak at an irb meeting in the beautiful Oslo and we talked about rspec and selenium. He told me about the idea of generating screencast from the execution of a selenium rspec and I have started to implement it. I am really close to get a solution but I will publish it by the end of july.

Here are a few features I'd like to have / implement for testing Rails Views:

a nice BNL compatible with watir and selenium
take a screenshot from the specs in order to generate nice documentation, not only when a spec fails
generate a good looking html doc with a sidebar - a la javadoc. And an AJAX search a la gotapi.com ;-) In a funky world, this would be connected to subversion and allow specs to be updated
to be completed ...

To conclude, I hope that tools such as greenpepper and RSpec are announcing the beginning of the end of "Microsoft Word" and "PrintScreen" as tools for writing specifications. Obviously, there will be some serious Manager / Customer / Developper resistance before accepting that tests are part of the delivery and THE only accurate specifications but let's wait for 5-10 years and see in 2012 how people work ;-)

RSpec Changes log RSS

2007-06-05T20:43:00.000+02:00

The excellent BDD framework RSpec has been very active these days, and the 1.0 version was immediatly followed by minor uptates. As their web site seems to not contain a blog or RSS feed, I have used the excellent idea and tool page2rss.com to generate a RSS feed on changes from the

http://rspec.rubyforge.org/changes.html page.

To receive updates for this page in RSS format copy-paste this link (http://page2rss.com/page/rss?url=rspec.rubyforge.org/changes.html) into your feed reader.

If you use one of the following reader, just click to the link to subscribe to Feed:

I have also shared my netvibes rspec tab which includes RSS on the mailing list archives (user & developper).
If you are using netvibes, you can add it by cliking on

Otherwise, here are 2 screenshots to give you a ruff idea:

The different modules (RSS and links):

If you want to suggest more, please contact me ;-)

Netvibes has a new feature which allow to preview web sites without leaving the netvibes window. Just clik on the right hand corner button: "Show website". Doing this, I can skim first through the titles and then preview the web sites to read the details of each post: so cool!

Don't wait, install netvibes now!

The RSS for the user & developpers' list comes from nabble.com

Before finding out about nabble, I have been trying for the first time Yahoo!pipes and I have to say I love it!!! I have a feeling it's going to be one of my favourite gadget. It is a very user friendly tool with a fantastic user interface, it took me 45 minutes to write the pipe which generates the url http://page2rss.com/page/atom?url=rubyforge.org/pipermail/rspec-devel/2007-June/thread.html
from today's date. The only issue was that Yahoo!pipes truncated the post content because the RSS generated by the page2rss.com did not give a title to the posts ...

Technorati Tags bdd,rubyonrails

Set up rspec on Rails

2007-06-05T20:41:00.001+02:00

I have described the steps to install and configure rspec, the Autotest module from ZenTest and a notifier for Ubuntu.

Make sure you have the latest rubygems (0.9.4)

sudo gem update --system

Installing rspec

At the time of this writing - 5th of June 2007 - latest version of rspec is 1.0.4, and we'll install it in the vendor/plugins:

cd <your project home>
ruby script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/rspec/tags/CURRENT/rspec
ruby script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/rspec/tags/CURRENT/rspec_on_rail

Check out http://rspec.rubyforge.org/ for updates (I could not find a RSS) but I guess Aslak will be updates on his blog.

Warning: if you had installed rspec before, run a "gem list" to check if you have a web_spec rogue gem, you must delete it before carrying on, more details in Zenspider's blog.

Installing and configuring Zentest

Latest version of ZenTest is 3.6.0, run

sudo gem install ZenTest

Thankfully due to the extensible nature of autotest, we'll be able to set up a notifier for ubuntu by adding the following to your <Rails project root>/.autotest file:


#!/usr/bin/env ruby

module Autotest::GnomeNotify

  # Time notification will be displayed before disappearing automatically
  EXPIRATION_IN_SECONDS = 4
  ERROR_STOCK_ICON = "gtk-dialog-error"
  SUCCESS_STOCK_ICON = "gtk-dialog-info"

  # Convenience method to send an error notification message
  #
  # [stock_icon]   Stock icon name of icon to display
  # [title]        Notification message title
  # [message]      Core message for the notification
  def self.notify stock_icon, title, message
    options = "-t #{EXPIRATION_IN_SECONDS * 1000} -i #{stock_icon}"
    system "notify-send #{options} '#{title}' '#{message}'"
  end

  Autotest.add_hook :red do |at|
    notify ERROR_STOCK_ICON, "Tests failed", "#{at.files_to_test.size} tests failed"
  end

  Autotest.add_hook :green do |at|
    notify SUCCESS_STOCK_ICON, "All tests passed, good job!", ""
  end

end

# a pop up window will appear to display the tests results
# More examples in /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/zentest-3.5.0/example_dot_autotest.rb

# see http://ph7spot.com/articles/getting_started_with_autotest

The GnomeNotify was written by Philippe Hanrigou, a French Thoughtworker living in California, he has written the best "getting started" guide to Autotest. To install libnotify on ubuntu, run:

sudo apt-get install libnotify-bin

Finally, from the Rails project’s root, type:

autotest

Pressing Control-C twice in quick succession will exit Autotest back to the shell prompt.

Integration with netbeans

As far as I am concerned, netbeans ruby-ide is the first IDE to integrate autotest. Select your project root in the Projects windows, right click and then "Auto Test". This will open an output window and run Autotest. This is very cool, check out the screenshot:

Checking out a svn project with netbeans

2007-05-28T18:03:00.001+02:00

I am using site5 for my rails hosting (for how long? The fcgi is just not stable ...) and I host the source code of my projects with subversion.

The svn integration in Netbeans can be slightly improved, as I could not check out my project using the GUI, I ended up using the command line and then imported the rails project into Netbeans ...
svn co svn+ssh://YOUR_USER_NAME_HERE@21croissants.com/home/YOUR_USER_NAME_HERE/rails/svn_repository/YOUR_PROJECT_HERE/trunk YOUR_PROJECT_NAME_IN_YR_LOCAL_MACHINE_HERE

Do not forget to set up the routes when using the REST Controller generator

2007-05-11T18:00:00.001+02:00

NameError in Contact#index

Showing app/views/contact/index.rhtml where line #18 raised:

undefined local variable or method `new_contact_path' for #<#<Class:0xb768e1bc>:0xb768e194>

Extracted source (around line #18):

15: 
16: <br />
17: 
18: <%= link_to 'New contact', new_contact_path %>

RAILS_ROOT: script/../config/..

Application Trace | Framework Trace | Full Trace

#{RAILS_ROOT}/app/views/contact/index.rhtml:18:in `_run_rhtml_47app47views47contact47index46rhtml'
app/controllers/contact_controller.rb:6:in `index'
app/controllers/contact_controller.rb:6:in `index'

Don't forget to set up the routes.rb when using the REST Controller generator !

Edit the routes.rb and:

ActionController::Routing::Routes.draw do |map|
  # The priority is based upon order of creation: first created -> highest priority.
 
  # Sample of regular route:
  # map.connect 'products/:id', :controller => 'catalog', :action => 'view'
  # Keep in mind you can assign values other than :controller and :action

  # Sample of named route:
  # map.purchase 'products/:id/purchase', :controller => 'catalog', :action => 'purchase'
  # This route can be invoked with purchase_url(:id => product.id)

  # You can have the root of your site routed by hooking up '' 
  # -- just remember to delete public/index.html.
  map.connect '', :controller => "sms", :action => 'new'

  # Allow downloading Web Service WSDL as a file with an extension
  # instead of a file named 'wsdl'
  map.connect ':controller/service.wsdl', :action => 'wsdl'

  # Install the default route as the lowest priority.
  map.connect ':controller/:action/:id'
 
  map.resources :contact
end

(I can't stand Zoho writer horrible interface: it's the most UNuser 
friendly interface I have ever seen: you can't set the style of
the text to "normal")

Bitter Browser manual configuration sample script

2007-05-11T12:53:00.001+02:00

<script type="text/javascript">

</script><script src="http://b1.bitty.com/b2script/" type="text/javascript"></script>

XP Day France 2007

2007-05-10T17:29:00.001+02:00

Last week I went to Paris in order to assist to the second XP Day France conference which was held in Paris. This was an excellent opportunity to catch up with the french speaking Agile & Rails communities. After all, I left Paris almost 5 years ago - in july 2002 ! Nethertheless, I am feeling deeply connected to my home country and I really can't stand bad croissants full of vegetable hydrogenated fat ;-) I have met and talked with passionate people, among others:

Laurent Bossavit, Paris, The organizer who did a very good job, the conference place rooms food & drinks were quite good. Laurent is an independant Agile consultant and offer training services about Agile practices
Richard Piacentini, Paris, who created RailsFrance, organized Paris on Rails and is a founder of nuxos.fr, a consulting company on open source and Rails projects.
Ludovic Blaas, Besançon (my home town!!!), Agile coach at Parkeon ex Schlumberger where people work with Pair Programming, unit testing, Continuous Integration and so on. Allez Besac!
Olivier Lafontan, UK, Agile consultant at exoftware. I attended 2 excellent session given by Olivier: "XP Game" perfect training session to re-learn how to do the planning and "Numbers which sell Agile methods" which focussed on ROI of Agile projects and how to give a business value to customer stories
Pascal Van Cauwenberghe, Brussels, nayima, gave a very good presentation on identifying bottlenecks on projects. Pascal is one of the inventor of the famous XP Game, he has also a looooot of experience in programming
Jacques Couvreur, Geneva, hortis.ch, gave a return on experience about Pair Programming
Jérôme Laurens, Paris, founder of ss2j, part of the "sustainable" and ethical consulting network ss2j
François Beauregard, Montreal gave a talk about GreenPepper, a product which is a mix of BDD / wiki and FIT

If you read in French and want to join the hip crowd of happy Rails developers, BUY THIS BOOK! This is the second edition, updated for Rails 1.2.3, translated by Laurent Julliard and Richard Piacentini and published at "Editions Eyrolles". A Must Have !

Procrastinating on Ubuntu

2007-04-13T17:38:00.001+02:00

Music plays an important role in my life: it makes me very happy ;-) Yesterday, I went out until 4am to listen to Dj set de Will Holland a.k.a Quantic. Good music is like sport or finding a tricky bug after a good night of sleep: a natural flash of pure serotonine. In a world where most people need to get drunk or take drugs (cigaret, skunk, cocaine, ...) to feel good, I am happy to have a clean brain still depending on natural stimulations ....

I have been using ubuntu Edgy on my Toshiba SATELLITE M100-184 since September 2006 - 6 months at the time of this post - and I have to say I am not convinced yet it the best choice I have ver made. Yesterday, I spent 2 hours (including a 20 minutes for updating this blog) to have subversion worked with Netbeans. Today, I have spent 1 hour to have sound on my computer !!! It was working perfectly fine until I ran an automatic update and .... Pchhhhh!

After some intensive googling, I came across a troubleshooting post about my sound card - the HDA Intell & Realtek ALC861 -
The sound came back but it was very low volume!!! Arghh :-((((

Fortunately, someone has had the same problem on Feisty and posted a solution ... Very lucky! I have no clue how these people find these solutions but I am very grateful to them!
sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

and append at the end of the file:
options snd-hda-intel model=auto

I am thinking to wait for another 6 months and then make the move to Apple if I am still spending my time procrastinating on configuration issued instead of doing real work!

Set up subversion for Netbeans on Ubuntu Edgy

2007-04-11T14:17:00.001+02:00

The subversion support on Radrails was flawned and I have been loosing a few days before finding out that the subclipse needed to be updated. Now, history is repeating and I am fighting some configuration monsters to get the good looking netbeans subversion support to work!

First issue: The SVN executables are not set by default!

Open the options / Miscellaneous / Subversion and set the /usr/local/bin/ folder as in the following screenshot.

Important, you have to input the svn executable folder, not the executable file. Unfortunately, there is no validation run by netbeans to check if your entry is valid!

A sidenote to Netbeans developpers, this is typically the kind of things which should be automatic, like in RadRails and Eclipse ;-)

Second issue: The subversion version installed on Ubuntu Edgy won't work with netbeans!

Ubuntu Edgy comes with version subversion 1.3, we'll need to upgrade to 1.4.2 manually because the synaptic repository does not contain anything ...
Here is a script inspired by Higepon which should make the whole thing easier, go to a tmp folder, copy & paste into a sh file and don't forget to make it executable with chmod +x install_svn_1.4.2.sh

sudo apt-get -y remove libsvn0
sudo apt-get -y remove subversion
sudo apt-get -y install libneon25 libneon25-dev
sudo apt-get -y install libapr1.0-dev
sudo apt-get -y install libaprutil1.0-dev
sudo apt-get -y install libdb4.2-dev
sudo apt-get -y install libdb4.2
sudo apt-get -y install libsqlite3-0
sudo apt-get -y install libsqlite3-dev
sudo apt-get -y install libldap-dev
sudo apt-get -y install libpq-dev
sudo apt-get -y install libexpat1-dev
wget http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.4.2.tar.bz2
tar vxf subversion-1.4.2.tar.bz2
cd subversion-1.4.2
./configure --with-ssl
make
sudo make install

The official NetBeans Subversion Support F.A.Q. is also a good source of informations.

TGV

2007-04-05T11:16:00.001+02:00

Premier post en français!

Il y a quelque jours, j'ai décidé de commencer la rédaction d'un mini e-book en français qui devrait s'intituler TGV - Testing à Grande Vitesse - en honneur au nouveau record de vitesse battu par la SNCF le 3 avril 2007.

Etant donné que je n'ai eu aucun contact avec la communauté Rails de France et de Navarre, j'ai pensé faire une petite enquête d'opinion sur ses attentes.

Bon, la tout de suite, c'est un ptit post mais j'ajouterai des zoho surveys!

Record TGV High Speed SNCF Euronews
Uploaded by supersaiyan

Quick tip: change the short link to java executable in Unbuntu

2007-04-03T13:34:00.001+02:00

sudo update-alternatives --config java

A quick_dirty trick to set ENV[RAILS_ENV]

2007-03-30T17:00:00.001+02:00

I am using webbrick or Mongrel in development mode and Apache + fcgi in production mode on my site5 server (I'd recommand them, they are very reactive).

I have read that you're supposed to set ENV['RAILS_ENV'] to 'production' in environment.rb
As I am using capistrano de deploy my webapplication, I have tried to move that setting to dispatch.fcgi and it works! No need to get 2 versions of environment.rb (1 for developement & test and 1 for production)

Maybe there is a more elegant solution, I'd love to hear about it!

Firefox 2.0.3 keeps crashing on my Ubuntu Edgy Eft

2007-03-29T17:32:00.001+02:00

Since the lasted automatic update on the 25/03/2007, firefox has been very unstable. Every 20 minutes or so, it crashes with the following message:

"The application 'Gecko' lost its connection to the display :0.0;
most likely the X server was shut down or you killed/destroyed the application."

I am investigating the problem following

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MozillaTeam/Bugs?action=show&redirect=DebuggingFirefox advices

The same version of firefox running on Windows XP runs absolutely fine, I am looking forward to reporting to the ubuntu community!!! So far, I have no clue, could it be my installation of ubuntu???

The sad truth was that before this update, firefox was more stable in Windows too ...

Clearing Out Rails file-bases Sessions with cron

2007-02-27T17:06:00.001+01:00

Adapted from Agile Web Development on Rails:
The session handler in Rails doesn’t do automated housekeeping. This means that once the data for a session is created, it isn’t automatically cleared out after the session expires. This can quickly spell trouble. The default ﬁle-based session handler will run into trouble long before the database-based session handler will, but both handlers will create an endless amount of data. Since Rails doesn’t clean up after itself, you’ll need to do it yourself. The easiest way is to run a script periodically, you could put the following command into a script
that will delete ﬁles that haven’t been touched in the last 1 hour every morning at 4am.

In the bash, run the command:
crontab -e

You'll enter a command line editor vi like, type "I" and copy-paste the following command:
0 4 * * * cd ~/YOUR_RAILS_APPS_HOME_FOLDER_HERE/; find tmp/sessions -name 'ruby_sess.*' -amin +60 -exec rm -rf {} \;

To save, type ESC, then wq in order to save the file and quit.

As far as I am concerned, I can't stand these command line software which don't give a clue about how to use them. I am sooooo looking forward a rebirth of some Pao Alto 70 spirit in the domain of User Interface: I want to see 3D, vocal commands, predictive User Interfaces !!! Damn the Monopoles!!!!

MySQL Database access problem in Ruby on Rails

2007-02-21T22:12:00.001+01:00

I was having the following problem repetitively when using rake to run the tests on my ubuntu Edgy Eft machine:
rake aborted!
Lost connection to MySQL server during query
/config/../vendor/rails/activerecord/lib/active_record/vendor/mysql.rb:1127:in `write'

As I am using Radrails since the beginning of my ruby career , I have never found out before!!! Indeed, Radrails must use another driver than my plain ruby to access the mysql database.

It turned out that installing the libmysql-ruby solved the problem:
sudo apt-get install libmysql-ruby

Deploying a rails application on site5

2007-02-14T20:05:00.001+01:00

It took me a while - 2 days and a half ! - but I finnaly managed to deploy my application on site5 using capistrano!

The toughest part was understanding this error message:

error: directory is writable by others: (/home/xxxxxx/rails/webapps/xxxx/releases/20070213163348/public)
[warn] FastCGI: (dynamic) server "/home/xxxxx/public_html/xxxxx/dispatch.fcgi"
has failed to remain running for 30 seconds given 3 attempts, its restart interval has been backed off
to 600 seconds

It turned out - as I found in the site5 forum - that site5 has CGI/FCGI configured to shut down scripts that are group- or world-writable. As of 1.3, Capistrano issues a "chmod g+w" command over the entire check-out branch.

The solution was to change the permissions in a :after_update_code task.

The thing is, site5 is cheap but it so sloooooooooow! not sure how long I am going to pay for such a service.

# Capistrano deployment script on site 5
# Jean-Michel Garnier
# Tested with capistrano 1.40 14/02/2007
#
# Inspired by http://fluctisonous.com/2006/11/19/moving-home-with-capistrano-on-site5
# And Kyle Daigle http://forums.asmallorange.com/index.php?showtopic=8892

# Usage:
# the first time: cap setup
# 
# Then to initialize the db the first time- if you have a bootstrap task like in mephisto -
# env BOOTSTRAP=true cap  deploy
# 
# otherwise: cap deploy


# =============================================================================
# Customize these variables
# =============================================================================

set :application, "bicinostrum"

set :user, "your userlogin at site5"            # defaults to the currently logged in user
set :password, "your site5 password"       
set :domain, "21croissants.com"      # your applications domain name
#set :deploy_server, "you.server.name" # the url of your server 


set :public_html, "/home/#{user}/public_html/#{application}"
set :svn_repositoty_home, "rails/svn_repository"
set :rails_apps_home, "rails/webapps"

# =============================================================================
# Do not change these variables
# =============================================================================
set :use_sudo, false
set :rails_env, "production"
set :deploy_to, "/home/#{user}/#{rails_apps_home}/#{application}"
set :repository, "svn+ssh://#{user}@#{domain}/home/#{user}/#{svn_repositoty_home}/#{application}/trunk"

# =============================================================================
# ROLES
# =============================================================================
# You can define any number of roles, each of which contains any number of
# machines. Roles might include such things as :web, or :app, or :db, defining
# what the purpose of each machine is. You can also specify options that can
# be used to single out a specific subset of boxes in a particular role, like
# :primary => true.

role :web, domain
role :app, domain
role :db,  domain

# =============================================================================
# SSH OPTIONS ?
# =============================================================================

set :svn_passphrase, ""
# ssh_options[:port] = 25

# =============================================================================
# TASKS
# =============================================================================
# Define tasks that run on all (or only some) of the machines. You can specify
# a role (or set of roles) that each task should be executed on. You can also
# narrow the set of servers to a subset of a role by specifying options, which
# must match the options given for the servers to select (like :primary => true)

desc "Restart the web server. Overrides the default task for Site5 use"
task :restart, :roles => :app do
run "skill -9 -u#{user} -cdispatch.fcgi"
end

task :after_setup, :roles => :app do
run <<-CMD  
  ln -s /home/#{user}/#{rails_apps_home}/#{application}/current/public/ #{public_html}
CMD
end

task :after_update_code, :roles => :app do
run "find #{release_path}/public -type d -exec chmod 0755 {} \\;"
run "find #{release_path}/public -type f -exec chmod 0644 {} \\;"
run "chmod 0755 #{release_path}/public/dispatch.*"

if ENV['BOOTSTRAP']
  run <<-EOF
    cd #{release_path} && rake db:bootstrap RAILS_ENV=production
    EOF
else
  run <<-EOF
    cd #{release_path} && rake db:migrate RAILS_ENV=production
    EOF
end
end

Unlocking an HTC S620 WIFI phone in 5 minutes / Resisting to telco thanks to voip

2007-02-13T16:48:00.000+01:00

In most of european countries, there are 3-5 operators who have agreed to maintain very expensive prices for mobile phone communications and text messaging. This is obviously an unofficially agreement and there will be some kind of justice one day, probably from the European Commission...

But today is a great day, I have unlocked in 5 minutes the HTC S620 I bought on eBay in the US for 220€ using IMEI-Check services (20 pounds). This is still cheaper than the 489€ retail price in Europe! I did not want to buy any Microsoft based device but I was not convinced by what I read about symbian os smart-phones (correct me if I am wrong).

Hopefully, there are a lot of open Wifi networks (still) + the fact the FON network is growing rapidly, I am confident I will be able to use Skype and call for free my relatives abroad, make voip phone calls at the rate of 12 centimes instead of 18 centimes (I am not sure about that, the price system of mobile phone communication was not not made to be readable) (plus the fact they always fucking charge the first minute even if the conversation lasted 1 second), and especially send text messages for 7 centimes instead of 20 centimes with my current pay-as-go contract!!!