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Category Archives: Software

Posts and entries related to software, libraries, personal projects, bug fixes, code hacks, and workarounds

Should I go with Ruby/Rails or Groovy/Grails?

I spoke with a recruiter recently, in an attempt to get a feel for the marketability of Ruby skills in my area. He hadn’t heard of any Ruby jobs that were available, but he did have one that called for Groovy on Grails. I have heard of this technology in the past, but didn’t know what it was. After a bit of research it seems to be language and convention-over-configuration framework that runs on the JVM, very similar to Ruby. So this has gotten me wondering if focusing on Ruby would be a mistake. Judging by the number of resources I encountered for each during my brief investigation, I’d say that Groovy doesn’t seem to be anywhere near as popular as Ruby. But if there is a job market for Groovy over Ruby in my area, perhaps I should be looking there instead.

Of course, it would be foolish to change my entire career path on such a minor and anecdotal conversation. If I get out of this missed deadline hole I’ve dug for myself at work, I’ll have to research the topic more seriously. I’m new to both, so I’m thinking that I’ll still lean toward the tech with more free tutorials and resources available. I have such a backlog of codeschool lessons and youtube videos to watch, I don’t think I’ll ever catch up.

In related news, I have decided against developing on Dreamhost’s version of Ruby/Rails. They are extremely old (Rails 3.03, anyone?) and I can’t upgrade them on the shared hosting I have. I’ll look at getting some dedicated Ruby hosting once I have something worth sharing.

Blog migration yet again

Managing my own blog has proved to be a bit too cumbersome for me. I’ve moved both blog.bencarson.net and catsandcode.com to a free wordpress.com blog.

This allows for a free SSL-encrypted connection, plus I figure my site’s backend will be more professionally maintained. I am giving up a lot of freedom in the choice of plugins and themes that I can use, but it is worth it to me. I wasn’t really using anything anyway.

Bonus: they made it super easy to add Google Analytics and Bing Webmaster tracking. Hopefully this will give me a better picture of my visitors than Piwik, because, again, I tend to break shit when I manage my own apps.

Path of the Rubyist

Betwixt chores and binges of Borderlands 2, I have been attempting to learn the Ruby programming language. First inspired by Arlo and Eric over at the dev1.tv podcast, and getting my first lessons on the language from codecademy, I’ve been really excited about this language. Primarily because its available for free on my Dreamhost hosting, but also because, combined with the Rails framework, it is so damn simple to build a web app!

I plan on chronicling my experiences here as both a writing exercise as well as creating a cookbook for how I’ve done things. I know that inevitably my dumb ass will forget so this blog will become a valuable resource for me to fall back upon.

Finally learned how to delete remote branches

I’ve been using command-line git for about a year now. I recently decided to tackle my problem of not knowing how to delete remote branches.

I’ve pushed quite a few branches to some remote repos as a means of transporting projects to/from home/work. As a result there are quite a few useless branches in most of my git projects and it makes working with

git branch -a

more cumbersome than it need be.

In searching for an answer, I actually found out that it is much simpler than I had anticipated. Very similar to what I was already doing to push the branch to the remote repo.

git push origin :<branchname>

That’s it! I just have to add a colon to the remote branch name and git deletes it. Not at all intuitive, but very easy to remember.

File paths in Java

I despise working with file paths in Java. I can never remember where, in the project’s folder structure, the jvm considers root. And it gets even more complicated once you start running your applications in a server container. However, I did find a quick way to determine where a running JVM considers root.

import java.io.File;

...

File f = new File("dummy");
 _log.info("file is at " + f.getAbsolutePath());

This should print out the absolute path to where this File object would be saved. You can use this as a starting point and do any sort of relative filepathing you need to from here.

Added blog security

I don’t have a lot of money, and this blog is more of a hobby than anything, so I haven’t bought any SSL-encryption for this domain.

Thanks to lifehacker though, I have learned that two-factor authentication is catching on with several popular services, not just Gmail. To that end, I just installed the Google Authenticator plugin on this blog for a little bit of added security. It certainly doesn’t bullet-proof my site, but it does make it a little bit more secure than it was previously.

Simple minute addition in Google spreadsheet

I am working on building an after-work schedule, but didn’t want to do everything manually on paper. A quick Google spreadsheet would be perfect for this. It will keep all my data organized and automatically compute time changes so I can experiment to find the most efficient and practical schedule for myself.
However, after creating my outline, I found out that there isn’t a simple technique or formula available in Google Docs for adding time (or even dates for that matter). But I did manage to find a partial answer on StackOverflow. Google stores it’s dates as floating point values that appear to represent hours. This means that multiplying the number of hours in a day (24) by the number of minutes in an hour (60) will give me the floating point  value that represents the number of minutes I need to add.

So here’s what I did:

how to add minutes to a Google Doc spreadsheet

Adding minutes to a Google spreadsheet

The formula looks like this:

=<original time>+(<# of minutes to add>/(<number of minutes in an hour> * <number of hours in a day>))

In more simple terms:

<time next task begins> = <time previous task begins> + (<number of minutes task takes to complete>/<total minutes in a day>)

Lost Java

Somehow, I broke my Fedora installation this weekend.

After having a great time getting started on my Gravatar project this past Saturday, I settled in for some Labor Day programming yesterday. However, as soon as I tried to open Eclipse, I was given an error message telling me that the command ‘java’ was not in the PATH variable (or something like that)

I have no idea what the hell happened between Saturday and Monday, my laptop was shutdown between those times.

At first, I thought it might be some leftover quirks from the time that Fedora shut itself down when my battery died (the fact that it didn’t warn me is pretty crappy). I ran some fsck’ing on a few mounts. But I don’t know what I’m doing there, so I wasn’t surprised when that didn’t work.

I decided to go for the obvious and just fix the PATH variable. This required me to figure out where this damn variable is in Linux. I also wanted to uninstall Oracle’s JDK 7 as I thought that might have been a part of the problem. First, linuxquestions.org helped me uninstall all java packages with the ‘yum upgrade -y’. I don’t know what it does, but it set me back to using openjdk7. Then a stackoverflow post helped immensely by showing me where my PATH variable was and how to alter it.

After I added the openJDK filepath to my PATH variable, I logged out and logged back in. ‘java’ at the command line works again and Eclipse opens without a problem.

Issue resolved.

Restrict all Liferay traffic to be encrypted

Our CTO came to me recently with the results of a PCI audit. One area of non-compliance that the audit discovered was the need to have users log in only through a SSL encrypted gateway. I set about finding a way to accomplish this with Liferay. Thankfully, it was a pretty easy change and didn’t require any custom log in code (as I initially feared.)

At first, I just happened to come across a relevant property in my portal-ext.properties file.

servlet.always.encrypt=false

On my local machine, I changed this value to true, restarted the server, and all traffic on my local server redirects to the ssl encrypted version on port 8181!

“Hooray”, I thought. “I’m done!” I talked to our Ops team to get the changes made in our other environments and he promptly burst my this-is-too-easy bubble. “Why is it encrypting our marketing site? We shouldn’t be encrypting everything, just the stuff we need protected.” Damnit! Now I have to find an alternative. Fortunately for me, the same Ops guy found the relevant properties to include in our portal-ext.properties file:

#require https for login
web.server.http.port=8080
web.server.https.port=8181
company.security.auth.requires.https=true

This is exactly the technique we needed. Our site doesn’t encrypt any public-facing page (unless you are already logged in) and all logged-in traffic is SSL-encrypted. Liferay team really did me a solid by making this so easy to configure. Thanks girls & guys of Liferay!

Distro hop

I recently decided to try another Linux distribution.

This time I went with the Fedora Xfce spin in 64-bit flavor.

My favorite distribution yet! Miles ahead of the KDE environment and better looking and more intuitive than Mint LXDE. Plus its available in 64-bit. Which does absolutely nothing for me, but still.

Too bad I wasn’t able to use this version of Linux for more than a week and a half. I started hearing crackling whenever I would plug-in my piece of shit Dell laptop. I finally noticed that the crackling was being caused by little blue arcs of electricity coming out of a crack in the wiring of my AC adapter. Definitely will not be operating this laptop until I am able to get a replacement AC adapter.

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