I'm still catching up but now that I've hit the stride for the music portion (see http://h0key.net), I can catch up a bit in the morning. Day 4 for the Interactive portion of the conference saw myself hit up a PHP themed workshop, a couple of mobile web talks, and some interesting thoughts on authentication and privacy on the web. All in all it was fairly fun, even so some the of night time stuff was a little light.

First up I hit up a workshop about BigData and PHP. Some of the luminaries of the talk included the Mozilla lady that wrote the PHP and MySQL Web Development book I own. The focus for the talk regarded strategies to employ when dealing with BigData. BigData are either large chunks of data, large amount of miniscule data, or tons of processing for data in a short amount of time. The CAP theory made its presence known as well.

The next couple of talks I'll group together. In Mobile Opportunites for the Entrepeneurs in 2011 talked about how developers can build more useful tools for mobile technology. The Future of Mobile Gaming/Entertainment had the Angry Birds guy there talking about how awesome the game was and how it was a crap shoot to begin with. He also stated that mobile gaming needed to be taken seriously, with his game getting almost 2% of the total yearly US viewing average compared to television. Lastly, it was Designing for Mobile Web and it had another Sencha Touch representative there. I'm going to use Sencha Touch with PhoneGap real, real soon.

The last talk of the day was fantastic. OAuth, OpenID, Facebook Connect: Authentication Design Best Practices was more than what I expected. The speaker went though the session pointing out some historical and current issues with authentication and privacy surrounding it. The gist of the talk was, you need to be conservative with the data that you collect so you don't make it feel creepy. Also, please make the login process as simple as possible.

The night time was alright. My girlfriend and I hit up the Wired Happy Hour, which I won a lot of schwag at last year. Unfortunately I didn't win anything this time but I did enjoy Texas' own Lone Star beer. After that, it was time to go the GDGT party and I have to say it kind of stunk. The schwag was drool-worthy and I did get a chance to play with the Motorola Zoom, the line was terrible and inside was too packed for music. So after that, we just hot-footed it to Zen Steakhouse for some tasty Japanese fair.

So that's the quick run down for day 4. I purposefully did not go into detail because I will be talking about each topic on its own after I recover. In the meantime, I've got one more Interactive day to gush about. Look for that tomorrow. Now on to some Irish craziness!

So at the day job I grew weary working with Windows Vista and decided to do something about it.  I was sitting on a quad-core Intel machine.  The only issue really was the lack of memory.  Well that and it was a 32-bit version of Vista sitting on a 64-bit capable machine.  Upgrades weren't available at the time.  I opted to bump up the machine to a 64-bit install of Ubuntu Linux.  So far it's been great but there have been some bumps.  The surprising thing to me was how easily my workflow transferred over.

The install was a snap.  I chose to install it on a separate partition than to place it within Windows Vista or wipe the whole thing entirely.  I still needed my docs from the other machine.  After about an hour or two, the machine rebooted and I stepped right into my desktop.  I had to add some sources and download some files separately, but the development environment ended up being pretty much the same for me on Windows Vista.  Here's what I did:

• IDE:  I was using NetBeans with a PHP plugin development setup.  I also had some Subversion modules and a tasty Vim keyboard setup plugin.  Instead of keeping the same way, I decided to jump to Eclipse.  Some of my other projects uses the Eclipse environment so I decided to go all in.  I use the Aptana plugin, which is fantastic, and found that Subclipse and vWrapper were great substitutes for revision control and Vim emulation.  Once I got settled in the only real issue I'm still stuck with is that vWrapper is completely polished and I'm finding that vWrapper and some auto complete features created some errant bugs.
• Browser:  Most of the work outside of the IDE is in the browser.  I use Chrome sparingly because of the lack of extension support, but the Chromium browser is a great replacement for it.  Essentially, it is the open source base Google uses to build Chrome off of.  The rest of the heavy lifting is with Firefox.  I use the Add-On Collection plugin and Firefox Sync to keep me up to date with all of my Add-Ons and Tabs.  I'll talk about that later.  Also, the restricted packages set for media and other non-free type libraries should be installed for optimal Firefox usage.
• Communication:  I used Pidgin on the old setup and the new setup has Pidgin as well.  Ubuntu is pushing Empathy but I am much more comfortable with Pidgin.  Also, I ditched Thunderbird altogether.  Evolution is on the setup but I only use it for sending attachments and some templating.  I moved most of my work over to my integrated GMail.  It's just easier for me collect all the email into one bucket.  I do miss Skype/Google Voice capabilities but I never really use it at work.
• LAMP:  I used an all in one solution for LAMP development by the name of XAMPP.  It's great for a default install and run but some of the intricacies needed for real server management go away.  Since we enjoy Linux thoroughly all around, moving to Ubuntu let's me mirror a closer setup to what we deploy on.  That said, I had to do some extra work getting PEAR and our libraries to work nicely.  Also,  it took me running into some bugs to turn on the error reporting that was on in XAMPP.For the database side of things, XAMPP came with phpMyAdmin but I was using a real great application called Datadmin.  It's a .NET binary that handles just about any database type and it could export to different database types rather effortlessly.  I still miss it.  I tried to get it working with Wine but it was too much of a pain.  In its place, I now use phpMyAdmin and Navicat SQL Lite.  It does the basic of what want, which is a desktop binary that lets manage with multiple windows and/or tabs.
• The Rest:  The only other thing I truly require is background music.  I'm a big podcast listener so I latched onto the horrid ITunes on the Windows side of things.  Yes, it stinks for everything else, but there is no better client for podcast management out there.  Once you get the Smart Playlist setup correctly you can have a real nice queue of podcasts updated in real-time.  I still miss it a big but I have a good enough workaround.  I now use VLC and gPodder.  It's shame they are not integrated.  gPodder manages all of the downloading and play management while VLC is the terminal for audio output.  I had to adjust the settings for VLC to run as one instance and then pass a '--plalist-enqueue' command as part of the VLC choice for gPodder to get it to work more smoothly.The remaining thing that I use heavily is terminal access.  On Windows I use the great PuTTy set of applications to do all my terminal work and key management.  Now since I'm on a machine that has terminals built-in by default, the usage is way better.  I did have to work around the format of keys that PuTTy uses and import them into my OpenSSH setup but after that things are going better than before.  I especially see it when I check out and check in from Subversion.

Overall, the transition was rather smooth.  It's taken a week for me to get back in the swing of things.  There are no real killer apps I need on the Windows side of things.  Everything I do uses open source so the move to Ubuntu was an obvious one.    It's left me with a good feeling in my stomach.  I now know I can produce professional quality work on an open source stack.  Back in the day I used to use Linux more than have in recent memory.   Making the jump was great and I urge anyone else with the similar environment setup on Windows to make the same move.

Nothing Like A Fresh Subversion Import

Welcome back to part 2 of my Subversion install series.  What we are going to go over is developing the right structure for the repository, importing a website, updating a website, then testing and deploying the website using some of Subversion's command sets.  There were some road blocks along the way and I will talk about that as well as some other thoughts about the process.  After that I'll talk about what's next but first let's setup and deploy some code.

The first step in molding the fresh install of Subversion into something workable, was to decide on what kind of structure I wanted to keep.  Articles online discussed whether or not to keep multiple repositories for projects or maintain a single repository to house multiple projects.  In thinking of how I wanted it implemented, the simplicity of maintaining a single repository won over the cleanliness of revision management in multiple repositories.  Perhaps at a later date I can split it out or even incorporate Git, but for the purpose of getting started I'm going with one repository.

I decided to follow the svnbook's advice of a creating a temporary directory structure to setup the initial framework of the repository.  In my case, there are three major areas I will develop in:  websites, scripts, and home related projects.  I created the structure and imported them in to Subversion using the svn import command.  After which, I deleted the temp directories and verified the structure below.  Here's the output:

hokey@tardis:~/tempdir$ sudo svn import . file:///var/svn/ --message 'Initial Repository Layout'
[sudo] password for hokey:
Adding         scripts
Adding         headquarters
Adding         web
Adding         web/gonzoguys.com
Adding         web/gonzoguys.com/trunk
Adding         web/gonzoguys.com/branches
Adding         web/gonzoguys.com/tags
Adding         web/h0key.net
Adding         web/h0key.net/trunk
Adding         web/h0key.net/branches
Adding         web/h0key.net/tags
Adding         web/hoketronics.net
Adding         web/hoketronics.net/trunk
Adding         web/hoketronics.net/branches
Adding         web/hoketronics.net/tags
Adding         web/kccollegegameday.com
Adding         web/kccollegegameday.com/trunk
Adding         web/kccollegegameday.com/branches
Adding         web/kccollegegameday.com/tags

Committed revision 1.
hokey@tardis:~/tempdir$ svn list --verbose file:///var/svn
1 root                  Nov 18 08:44 headquarters/
1 root                  Nov 18 08:44 scripts/
1 root                  Nov 18 08:44 web/
hokey@tardis:~/tempdir$

It was time to work with local install of my website.  I copied the production code to my home folder on my local webserver.  After setting up the database and changing root path directives, I set about verifying the local page.   It looked good so I then downloaded the latest WordPress package.  Following the directions, I copied the updated code and again verified the website.  The recent point releases didn't affect the database schema, so I was good on that end.

Now that I updated my code to the latest WordPress point release, I imported the website into the Subversion repository.  Using svn add, I recursively added all of the new files from my website.  When it successfully added the file set, I committed the change using svn commit, complete with the initial import message.  Subversion pulls from CVS alot and these two commands reflect that.  It almost felt like I was greasing the code revision bicycle gears and getting back to the smooth ride of code management.

So now that I added the website files to the repository, I did it twice because of another point release in WordPress, it was time to test and deploy the code.  Using the svn export command, I copied the code to the web docs directory on my local webserver.  I decided on doing that instead of checking out the repository on the live site because I'm on a shared hosting platform for production and I didn't want trailing '.svn' folders eating up space.  Plus it adds the benefit of greater security.

hokey@tardis:/var/www/hoketronics.net$ sudo svn export http://localhost/svn/web/hoketronics.net/trunk ./hoketronics.net

The code exported to the local server.  This is where I ran into some issues.  The code portion of the website works well in different directories, but I need to come up with a way to manage dev/test/prod databases for link resolution.  The logon screen for the local test install pointed to the local dev install.  Regardless of that little issue, the code tested out well.  Now it was time to deploy the website to my shared host, minus the config file.

The other issue I ran into was the process of updating my shared host with the new code.  I run Linux on the webserver locally but my workstation runs Windows XP.  The best way, I thought at the time, to copy the update was to compress the test folder, copy it to my workstation, and then use Filezilla to copy it up to my shared host.  This proved laborious and it ended up taking more time than I expected due to two reasons: remembering the correct compression one liner and not taking advantage of a command line ftp client on the local webserver.

That said, the production site on the shared host updated with no breaks.  I logged on, verified the version, and inspected both the UI and and the backend files for any issues.  The Subversion process was almost complete.  After I updated the code, I made note to change the initial work flow for updating my site to handle updates from the local webserver to the shared host.  Also, I'll take some time to flesh out different configs for my environments to avoid any path issues the next time around.  Lastly, I'm going to make sure I centralize my one liners for easier access, maybe even using the repository to keep track of additions.

Subversion seems like a great centralized source code management tool.  With my CVS experience under the belt, much of the commands feel familiar and comforting when I invoke them.  Now that I have the repository live, kccollegegameday.com is getting some work.  I'm looking forward to checking the 'diffs' when modifying pages and themes.  Chances are you'll see me talk about that on top of a couple of article ideas due to the roadblocks experienced with this project.

Before I rolled out the relaunch, I spent a good month trying to figure out the right kind of development environment for tools the I had available.  I have three laptops but all of the batteries are toast and the motherboard on one of them has gone the way of the dodo.  I convinced myself to develop exclusively off of a big ole Western Digital 80 GB Passport USB external drive.  First step done.  After doing some research I decided on XAMMP to drive my environment.  It was nice but there were some issues.

My real focus for this development environment setup was to be able to plug in the hard drive and code directly off of it.  I work off of multiple platforms at home and at the office.  Almost all of the apps do not have a single application to launch.  I already run some portable apps that support clients in Windows, Mac, and Linux flavors, like KeePass.  XAMMP advertised clients for each platform so I decided to give it a try.

XAMMP is a fully integrated web application development server.  The purpose of XAMMP is to roll out a fully workable, out of the box *AMP stack.  The packages include an Apache2 server, PHP version 4 or 5, MySQL 5, and a torrent of management utilities and open soruce libraries/modules.  There are some differences between platforms for the package set, however.  The beauty behind it is that you can pick and choose what you want and start work within minutes.

At first, I wanted to setup all of the platform packages on the flash drive.  Due to the desire for cleanliness on the drive, however, I tried to install the software locally on all of my workstations.  Most of my time is spent on these machines anyway.  Linux was the easiest to turn out, mainly because it just dropped everything into the '/opt' directory.  I could change the doc and database links and move forward from there.  Windows was also a snap as I could modify configuration and turn services on and off with the included XAMMP control panel.  The Mac OS X client was not so easy.

The installer package for the Mac does not allow for choice.  It scans you computer to see if it's okay to run on and then drops it straight to the Applications folder.  The folder it installs to is not entirely encapsulated.  When the configuration points to the database files on the flash drive,  the service will crash upon startup.  I've already been exposed to issues on lock file management on Mac OS X Server, and the workaround didn't work for this issue.  The Apple puts the lock file in a directory other than the MySQL default setup.  When I symbolically linked the lock file, the database would start up.  This was not working with XAMMP.

After spending some small time here and there for about two weeks on it, I ended up just letting it go.  Attempts to find out on their forums page led me nowhere.  Also in my research on this topic, I discovered a Portable Apps version of Xammp but it is Windows only.  Not much help there.  Maybe one day the devs on the project will look for better portable support.  Until then, I'm focusing on version management and working off my lil server in my apartment.

I'm still coming to terms with getting distracted on small setup roadblocks.  I really didn't need to waste the time figuring this out when what I really needed to do was to turn out this blog and other projects.  Struggling with Xammp taught me that sometimes the perfect environment will trickle down from actually working on things first rather than focusing on a perfect setup for work that hasn't started yet.  Plus it's alot more fun when you actually have projects in progress instead of dreaming of working on projects.