MyWeeklyLinks – Week 5

Starting this week, week 5 of 2010, I’ll be gathering some links I discovered through twitter, facebook, forums and in-your-face talks like a few people still does. The goal is to keep it below 10 links each time. Most of all, I do this for myself, to remember to read a lot of stuff and to remember what I read. Hope it is useful for you too.

For next week, I’ll remember to note who tipped me off! Like a @birdtalk and such.

So, the first of my weekly link summaries

Week 5

• This is cool, link two is using link one. http://nodejs.org/ ,  http://amix.dk/blog/post/19490#Plurk-Instant-conversations-using-comet
• I’ve followed raphaeljs for while, pure javascript and svg, doing stuff you normally would have done in flash. Truly awesome. doom-ish look, implemented in pure javascript and svg: http://raphaeljs.com/scape/
• Is this the future of technology? Really interesting watch! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrtANPtnhyg
• Implementing Done, In Process, and Ready Queues in LeanKit Kanban http://indomitablehef.com/?p=239
• Field Annotations Unexpectedly Rock, jUnit. http://www.threeriversinstitute.org/blog/?p=456
• Scrum / Agile’s inherit shortcomings? Uncle Bob Martin’s 7 theses n. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/scrumdevelopment/message/44851

Last, but definitely not least. The ideal norwegian foundation Cantara is in the process of ‘building’ the Utviklerhuset=Developers’ House. They’re looking for a big place to rent. And ObjectWare gave its wiki (lots of agile related stuff) to Cantara.
http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article157728.ece

Amazon EC2 instance comparison small vs medium

I’ve been working on a blog post on more EC2 stuff for a while now, but it grew too big, too much text. So I’ll break it up in small pieces and post what I feel for. The first thing out is a highly unscientific, but illustrative comparison of the difference between a the cheapest (small) and the second cheapest (medium) EC2 instance available at AWS. It should be obvious out of the technical specification of the instances, but many people are slow, like me.

What’s installed on the instances being tested?

• nginx w/passenger installed
• ruby 1.8.6 and rails 2.3.4
• sqlite3
• my rails app
• ubuntu

Psychology plays a bigger part in systems development than you like to believe

How come the very same programmer may feel physically exhausted at 11 am, working at one project, then in the weekend may work from 8 am to 2 pm, completely pumped with energy the whole time?

Think about it. Is it because of money? Is it because his boss says he’s fired unless he doesn’t deliver? Is it about technology? Is it as simple as he got exhausted from the 8am to 2pm effort?Do you honestly believe those reasons??

How valuable is the answer to this?

Imagine having a team of the energetic thriving people in your teams, developing your precious business product idea! Wow. Even standard working hours from 8am to 4 pm with high energy level would drastically improve your degree of success/failure! I would say the answer is extremely valuable, don’t you agree?

So, about time we focus more on the psychology in systems development?

What do you think might cause these two extremes mentioned above? I would really like to know!

My go at deploying to the cloud, EC2. It’s not *that* easy

I don’t have much server background, and probably its a lot easier to set up your servers with amazon EC2 than setting them up yourself or at other hosting solutions. I don’t care, it really annoys me that everybody claims how easy it is, showing you how to launch an instance in a minute. Yes, thats really easy, but you quit too abruptly. Nobody wants to set up an instance, then terminate it and lose everything you did on that instance. I say, never press terminate, you will lose every change from the last ami save. You are warned, be prepared or waste a lot of time.

Read on for links an tips for the whole cycle of launching, changing, saving and registering AMI. Everybody deploying to EC2 really have to do all this as a part of setting everything up, being prepared to launch more instances of the same kind.

Part 2: local clients pushing data to local server with RESTful web services

It’s really easy! But only when you know how! Like most stuff is. I was completely confused at the beginning. What does RESTful web services mean? It’s just a convention. You access the web services almost as you would access using a browser.

• /products gives index.html with products
• /products.xml renders the xml with products
• /products/1 renders the show.html of product with id 1
• /products/1.xml returns product with id 1 as xml
• and so on. That’s RESTful

If you are using rails, you follow its convention of a controller with the methods index, show, new, create, edit, update, destroy.

To post data to a RESTful controller, you perform a POST to mydomain.com/myobjects.xml with a xml file. Using httparty, it’s like this

post('/diagonses.xml', :query => {:diagnose => { :time => time,
                                    :diagnosis => 'RESTfully in love'}}})

Creating a RESTful Web Service Client

Part 1. Deploying to experimental, :at => local

I’d like to share my workflow, as it has proven efficient for me. I’m running two ’servers’ locally (!). Hang on, I said it was efficient, even though it surely doesn’t sound like it. The workflow should gain teams of any sizes, in my opinion.

I am developing an app it in rails and it also exposes some RESTful web services,  with_feed :through => :third_party. The third parties aren’t necessarily third parties, as we develop these too, but they are external apps collecting and sending data to my app. Part 2 will cover the creation of dummy clients that send randomish data to the core app.

OK, I will share the script and procedure I did to have a running server locally alongside developing my app. I wanted to have the server running locally, being able to receive request to the web server, testing the app manually, fast. To distinguish this local server (say localhost:3001) from your development server (sat localhost:3000), I decided to name it experimental, for simplicity. This is my workflow cycle

1. developing, creating migrations and so on, running mongrel at localhost:3000
2. git commit -am “I commit small changes, often!”
3. back_to step 2 if more_should_be_done
4. relaunch experimental server at localhost:3001, continuously receiving WS requests.

git pull and git push is performed frequently as well, but not as frequent as the above.

Rails 2.3+ template for creating new projects

I’ve been working with ruby on rails for the last few months and it’s been lots of ups and downs to me. It’s a learning curve and you just have to stand tall through the first frustrating weeks cursing the magic behind that you don’t understand. At least for a hard core java, spring, hibernate developer like myself, spoiled with great IDE support, which ruby lacks (It’s improving, with RubyMine, which I’m using,  a “clone” of IntelliJ IDEA). But then it becomes better, a lot better!

Templates

Kind of what AppFuse was supposed to provide the java maven community (what’s happening with this? I like the initiative!), the template runner of rails (version 2.3+) is supposed to help you set up your project with useful libraries, as authentication, test frameworks etc. No need to talk to much about it, I’ve created one that you can see for yourself, http://github.com/oma/rails-templates !

Sharing files and folders in windows should be easy

And, yes, it is (sometimes). In XP, right click a folder, select “Sharing and security” (no: Deling og sikkerhet), then check the box “Share this folder on the network” (no: Del denne mappen på nettverket”, select a sharename. Everything seems fine. But when other try to connect, typing \\mycomputername\ in the file explorer, it times out. wtf?

It should have been obvious to me, but I don’t consider myself a windows user. I run Win XP on my Mac OS X through VMware, which works fantastically. Solution; you probably have a firewall blocking port 445. Probably not the windows firewall as I guess it opens this port automatically. Check your anti-virus software firewall!

A basic GIT guide for the SVN user

I know there’s been written a lot about this, but either way I’ve found it so hard to switch from subversion and keep mixing stuff! I still consider myself a git newbie, not even liking git too much yet. I guess it’ll grow on me, though. Having spent too much time struggling, I’ve finally learned to master some simple techniques, as undoing changes, undeleting and removing new files not yet under source control. I’ll show these after the following desparate attempt to explain how the repository concepts differ fundamentally. This you must understand:

Jeg leier bolig, men ønsker IKKE kollaps i boligmarkedet!

Et innlegg utenom det vanlige fra denne ellers så tekniske bloggen min. Dette er et unntakstilfelle, jeg føler altså så mye for temaet at jeg ikke klarer å la være. Jeg leier bolig og ønsker ikke kollaps i boligmarkedet! Jeg skal forklare hvorfor, samt trekke frem noen interessant tall og begrunne min frykt for at vi er på vei ut stupet.

Bilde, advarsel rasfare

Bildet: Rasfare! Boligpriser med stor fallhøyde.

En kollaps i boligmarkedet får ringvirkninger langt utover at det blir billigere for meg å kjøpe bolig. Kjøpekraften vil også kollapse, deretter sliter bedriftene med inntjeningen og jeg, og mange andre, risikerer å miste jobben.

En vis mann sa en gang “det er ikke farten som dreper, det er bråstoppen”.

Jeg har alltid følt prisene var høye i Oslo, men gud jeg skulle kjøpt da jeg kom hit i 2001! Jeg hadde selvsagt ikke råd som fattig student uten mulighet for økonmisk hjelp hjemmefra, men det er lov å være etterpåklok og tenke “om at og hvis at” så jeg hadde tjent masse. Siden 2006/2007, når jeg endelig hadde råd til å kjøpe selv, har jeg spådd snarlig boligprisnedtur. Historien viser at jeg har tatt grundig feil til nå og prisene er idag tidenes høyeste! http://www.dn.no/eiendom/article1733294.ece