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When GitHub goes down…

So I started to try out github to work with some AS3 related code which I’ll talk about in an upcoming post. I just forked a bit of code I wanted to make changes to and then not long after that Github went down. But…

Don’t Panic! Because of the distributed nature of git, everyone always has a local full copy of the repository, complete with history. Any of your repositories, assuming they have been kept up to date, can be uploaded to the GitHub repository with no loss of data.

via When GitHub goes down….

Pretty cool! I really like the embedded server bit. Very neat indeed.

Tracking Flash usage

stats – mrdoob – FPS, MS and MEM. All in one. – Project Hosting on Google Code

This class provides a simple info box that will help you monitor your code performance.

* FPS Frames per second, how many frames were rendered in 1 second, the bigger the better.
* MS Milliseconds needed to render a frame, the lower the better.
* MEM Memory your code is using, if it increases per frame is VERY wrong.
* MAX Maximum memory the application reached.

MYSQL database modeling and change management

I currently use Navicat for MySQL to manage databases (especially nice for managing multiple sites via ssh). Change management is always an issue with snapshots being manually handled with data dumps. There are very helpful sync tools within Navicat but I’d like to try this to see if it helps the way I think it will. The partos of particular interest are the change management and, something I need to learn more of, forward engineering of a database.

MySQL :: MySQL Workbench 5.1

MySQL Workbench enables a DBA, developer, or data architect to visually design, generate, and manage all types of databases including Web, OLTP, and data warehouse databases. It includes everything a data modeler needs for creating complex ER models, and also delivers key features for performing difficult change management and documentation tasks that normally require much time and effort. MySQL Workbench is available on Windows, Linux and Mac OS.

git on the command line

When I get more into git this could be nice.

shaun smith » OS X Git Prompt

I’m currently using a modified version of git-prompt that looks something like…

Free (to a point) screen-sharin and web presentation… with an open source community version

This looks quite interesting. And the open source version is available to boot.

DimDim Works Well

Over the years I’ve tried numerous different screen-sharing and web-presentation solutions, and most of them have required some kind of adjustment in order for them to work decently. Usually you need to reduce your screen resolution in order to get decent performance, but DimDim didn’t seem to need this. The responsiveness seemed quite tolerable.

Reading chm on OS X

Nice. Will be trying this out shortly. This was mentioned in comments here.

iChm – Cocoa CHM Reader for Mac OS X and iPhone/iPod Touch – 石锅拌饭

iChm for Mac
Features

* Fully built with Cocoa. No ugly window and slow rendering.
* Tab browsing
* Search. Result sorted by relevance.
* Text encoding detecting/switching
* Find in the page
* Tag powered bookmark
* Index
* Back/Forward
* Text zoom
* Export to PDF
* Continuous reading with Page down/Page up

Plotting libraries

I wanted to look up some plotting libraries just to get an idea what’s out there. Plus I like Python for throwing numbers around although R has just become a new favorite for quickly working through some numbers… just need to learn statistics now.

But I turned to stack overflow for an answer.

matplotlib is powerful.

CairoPlot is pretty.

Speeding up workflow with FDT

Some of the following work with FlexBuilder (soon to be FlashBuilder) as well since they are both based on Eclipse.

FDT – Customize Your Workflow- Touch My Blog

We all come across things that end up saving us lots of time when used over and over again. If you use FDT, there are countless options available to enhance a development work-flow. Here are some of mine:

R and statistics

If I have a database and I need to do some random queries where I need to do experimental queries interactively, I turn to python’s SqlSoup. But if it’s CSV, I used to just do some file handling in Python, load it up, and use lists (which are very cool) or some other straightforward data processing on it. Python’s good at that. Then I heard about R. I don’t have a lot of time to dig into the details at the moment but the link below really opened my eyes to what it can do. And how easily at that.

Basic statistics using R

The following page is a quick guide for using R to do most statistics necessary in an introductory statistics class.

Like loading in a table as a dataset:

my.table=read.csv(file.choose())

I mean seriously! While it didn’t pop up a dialog on iTerm (using latest R for OSX) I just pasted in the path to the file and my data was there as

my.table

ready for manipulation. Some searches on filtering led to this post showing:

>tt <- matrix(1:20, ncol = 4)
tt
     [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4]
[1,]    1    6   11   16
[2,]    2    7   12   17
[3,]    3    8   13   18
[4,]    4    9   14   19
[5,]    5   10   15   20
tt[tt[,1] < 3, ]
     [,1] [,2] [,3] [,4]
[1,]    1    6   11   16
[2,]    2    7   12   17

and I tried

 tt[tt[,1]>3 & tt[,3]<15]

based on a conditional seen here just to see if I understood it and got

[1]  4  9 14 19

which is what I expected but didn’t realize how easy that would be. Nice! The subset command is more explicit though with its named columns. Either way, wow that’s really nice to work with. Of course, there is also RPy:

RPy is a very simple, yet robust, Python interface to the R Programming Language. It can manage all kinds of R objects and can execute arbitrary R functions (including the graphic functions). All errors from the R language are converted to Python exceptions. Any module installed for the R system can be used from within Python.

Two flavours are available: rpy and rpy2.

Best of both worlds?

BDD and Flex

I’ll post them as I find them. I know there is a commercial system similar to this called RIATest. But this should suffice for a lot of basic cases.

Gorilla Logic | Our Stuff | FlexMonkey

FlexMonkey is an Adobe AIR application used for testing Flex- and AIR-based applications. Providing the functionality to record, playback and verify Flex UI interactions, FlexMonkey also generates ActionScript-based testing scripts that you can easily include within a continuous integration environment.

Links on app testing and functional testing

I just want these in one place for future reference, in no particular order except the order they are open in tabs in Firefox at the moment…

Software Testing Geek -Software Testing – Selenium IDE, RC Tutorial & Workshop

Examples « Watir

Home – mozrepl – GitHub

Software Testing Geek -Twill – Simple Web Automation Tool in Python

3hv » Blog Archive » Cucumber and WATIR: kick-starting your testing

Home – cucumber – GitHub

Watir

brynary-webrat :: gitrdoc

PHP – cucumber – GitHub

Eclipse PathTools and a 503 error for the DTD

The problem I was having with PathTools (which was only alluded to here) is that Eclipse simply failed to install it… after I installed it once already. Either way the error got me digging into my Eclipse config.

The error message was a seemingly unrelated “Server returned HTTP response code: 503 for URL: http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd”. For whatever reason, Eclipse is actively trying to request and parse the DTD. According to the post below, the W3C gets hammered by these requests and have been actively blocking them with 503′s which is what I got when trying to install PathTools.

W3C Systeam’s blog – W3C’s Excessive DTD Traffic

A while ago we put a system in place to monitor our servers for abusive request patterns and send 503 Service Unavailable responses with custom text depending on the nature of the abuse. Our hope was that the authors of misbehaving software and the administrators of sites who deployed it would notice these errors and make the necessary fixes to the software responsible.

• Pay attention to HTTP response codes

  This is basic good programming practice: check your return codes, otherwise you have no idea when something goes wrong.

This happens when trying to install PathTools from the update site given on the Google project page:

http://pathtools.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/PathToolsUpdateSite/site.xml

However searching Eclipse Plugin Central site for the plugin shows a different update site:

http://pathtools.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/PathToolsUpdateSite/

And it also shows that it needs Eclipse 3.4+. My install of FlexBuilder 3.2 is running Eclipse 3.3. And THAT turns out to be the crux of my problem. I installed it once (during some late night coding session no doubt) but it never showed up. It did show up in the “Manage Configuration” dialog though. So I disabled it, then deleted the related plugin and feature files, and to make sure it can actually install without the DTD error I tried again. It installed correctly except for the fact that it still doesn’t show up since this Eclipse is too old. So I’ll try a previous version to see if that’ll get it running here. Either that or see if I can get FlexBuilder running with 3.5.

[update]
I got Flex running on Eclipse 3.5 as per the directions noted in the line above. I’ll have to put it through it’s paces to see if it’s behaving correctly, but PathTools is oh very nice.

[update2]
Unfortunately the issues noted at the link for installing FB3.2 and Eclipse 3.5 happened for me as well so it’s back to my current working install for now.

EploreFS for Eclipse

In this post I mentioned trying to get PathTools to work and that I’d look into it later. That’s for another post upcoming in just a moment. But for now, there is ExploreFS mentioned below. It gets you to the folder where the asset is stored so you do still have to navigate to it but that’s still easier pretty good. Once it’s highighted (and you’re on a Mac) you can of course use Quicksilver to copy the highlighted file’s path to the clipboard.

Eclipse Plugins – RSS View, ExploreFS, and FreeMem

Eclipse Plugin: ExploreFS
ExploreFSExploreFS is a tiny plugin (~6KB) that opens a selected file in the folder of the native file manager. It adds “Explore in File System” to the context menu of Eclipse’s package explorer, resource navigator, and other views. Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux are supported.

Copy path of asset in Eclipse

I often find myself alt-clicking an item to pull up the properties to get the path to that file/folder/etc. Just found this. Nice! Copies paths, folder paths, other commands, terminal open to the path of the file, find the item in the file explorer of the OS, and other goodies.

pathtools – Project Hosting on Google Code

and was this is how it was originally made?!

update: not able to get it to work in FlexBuilder 3.2 at the moment. I’ll have to look into it later.

Quicksilver + pbpaste + pbcopy

After seeing the following post, many possibilities came to mind.

Notes: Pretty print XML

But working with XMPP and SAPO Broker, I’m always copy&pasting XML from one place to the other and it would be nice to format the XML snippet sitting in the clipboard.

This pipe does the trick quite nicely:

pbpaste | xmllint –format – | pbcopy

I wrapped this into a script, called x-xml-format-clipboard and now its just one command away from gratification.

In the end I came up with a couple that I use a lot after searching the web. The possibilities are endless but these are neat for me. In Eclipse I can’t easily transform text unless I install AnyEdit which I have on other systems. But I haven’t yet on this one. So the transforms are simple:

upper to lower:

#!/bin/bash

pbpaste | tr '[:lower:]' '[:upper:]' | pbcopy

lower to upper:

#!/bin/bash<br /><br />pbpaste | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' | pbcopy<br />

remove blank lines:

#!/bin/bash<br /><br />pbpaste | grep -v '^

These are made into executable scripts on my path which I can then pull up with Quicksilver. So now to remove blank lines, I select the text in any editor, trigger Quicksilver, highlight the command, press enter, and paste it back. Nice. Of course this means that you can do just about anything with this kind of thing as discussed here. | pbcopy
These are made into executable scripts on my path which I can then pull up with Quicksilver. So now to remove blank lines, I select the text in any editor, trigger Quicksilver, highlight the command, press enter, and paste it back. Nice. Of course this means that you can do just about anything with this kind of thing as discussed here.

Nice set of Photoshop actions to add a little spice to images

Note to self: check this list again later.

20 Photoshop Actions to Add Flair to Your Photos

The non-professional photographers among us are often left with boring and flat shots from our cameras, the photos lack the flair and energy that is achieved with expert techniques and equipment. Photoshop Actions on the other hand, can help recreate some amazing photo effects, just by pressing a button! This post rounds up 20 of the best Photoshop Actions that allow you to easily spice up your photos with popular effects, including HDR, Soft Focus, Lomo, Velvia and more!

Commandline calculator for OSX

Every now and then I like to do a bunch of quick calcs with references back to previous calcs. I can use iPython which is really powerful tool since it’s an advanced interactive frontend to python. But this is just a neat little tip.

[awk] Command line calculator using awk « *NIX tricks

This is an update on our bash command line calculator posted a few days ago — except for the fact that this time we’ll use awk to do the calculation instead of bc. As I mentioned in that post, you may use python or ruby (irb) to do the same thing, but these tricks may be useful if you don’t ruby or python installed (bc and awk, in general, come by default in any Unix or GNU/Linux distro).

First, create (or rewrite if you used our last trick) function “?” as follows and put it in your ~/.bashrc file:
? () { awk “BEGIN{ print $* }” ;}

and make sure to reload your ~/.bashrc file (do the similar thing if you’re using any other shell). [NOTE: ZSH does not like ``?'' as a function, so you might consider replacing it with something reasonable, e.g., ``compute'']

Now, if you want to calculate an expression, do it, for example, as
$ ? “2*3+4.0*(9.9+8.1)”

and don’t forget the quotes.

Automating Firefox… from within…

This is just crazy cool. Just noting for future use.

MozLab | hyperstruct

MozRepl

Connect to Firefox and other Mozilla apps, explore and modify them from the inside, while they’re running.

Execute Javascript, play with browser GUI, sneak into HTML pages, examine functions and variables, redefine them on the fly, hot-fix bugs, …

FunFX Tutorial

Just for future reference… this is some nice stuff indeed!

Testing your Flex app with new FunFX | Ladislav Martincik – Personal website

Flex Functional Testing

See the syntax example on the page for a quick reference. Wow…  that’s pretty cool.

.::FunFX – Functional Testing of Flex applications

FunFX is created as a framework that will enable you to drive a Flex application through a web browser. FunFX together with for instance Test::Unit or rSpec creates a great to for testing and asserting the functionality of a Flex application.

Flash Functional Testing

Looking into functional testing, i.e. testing a user interface to make sure it does what it’s supposed to. There are a lot of web tools which I’ll try to log here for future reference but I also wanted to note Flash resources as well.

flash-selenium – Project Hosting on Google Code

The FlashSelenium is the component adding Flash communication capabilities to the Selenium framework.

Basically, the FlashSelenium is a Selenium RC Client driver extension for helping exercise the tests against the Flash component.

BASH command line history

Sweet. The page has more tips as well like getting partial stuff from your history. I don’t know how much of this will work on OSX but it’s still neat to see.

Access to command line history in BASH

To activate those two commands, add this to your .bashrc file:

bind ‘”\e[A”‘:history-search-backward
bind ‘”\e[B”‘:history-search-forward

Now you can easily summon any command from the history by typing the command and pressing Up arrow. You might continue pressing Up arrow until you find the command instance you wish to execute again.

Finding domain name info on the command line

Nice. Even for funny domains like .name, etc. Quicker than pulling up an app or going to a site that doesn’t handle the edge cases.

How do I find the authoritative name-server for a domain name? – Stack Overflow

% dig +short NS stackoverflow.com
ns52.domaincontrol.com.
ns51.domaincontrol.com.

Mac OS X XML editor

I think I may have stumbled on a neat XML editor that runs as an Eclipse plugin. I like it already! Simple things like formatting XML, autocomplete of tags and attributes already present, and……generating a schema from xml… interesting. Works well for my VERY minor usage so far…

Rinzo Xml Editor – Eclipse xml editor

Rinzo is an Eclipse xml editor with the goal of make life simpler when dealing with xml files.
It has several features regarding plain xml edition such as:

* Autocompletion of tags and attributes, proposing the ones defined in the file’s DTD or Schema.
* xml validation using DTD or Schema, DTD and Schema generation from a xml
* Namespace support.
* And more