Andy's Blog
Code till you … drop
On losing my primary HDD
Jul 27th
On losing my primary HDD
Well, it just happened – i was aware of the ‘clicking’ sounds for the last few days but i didn’t bother to check what it was… it was the hard drive, stupid!
But why? And why now? Well, it turns out the power supply fan was not functioning and I guess the high temperature made matters deteriorate fast! BIOS isn’t recognizing the drive and there’s nothing i can do through software means – the HDD containing my home folder was history…
But anyway, my first thoughts were to quickly send the disk for recovery and here are some service i’ve found out (through web search) that can handle such a task here in Athens / Greece:
I didn’t contact any of them but it looks like the price for the recovery can start from 300€ but will most likely end up to 1000-1500€. So, why didn’t i contact any of those? Well, after the first few hours had passed, i had calmed down and had booted to the second HDD’s – that one’s still alive – Windows Server 2003 for the first time in the last 2 years. Then, and while installing those 2 years’ worth of updates, I tried hard to think what i had lost.
So, i’m happy to say that i haven’t lost much! Passwords are recoverable + in laptop’s browser as well. Bookmarks in delicious and in laptop. Important documents & emails in gmail (and laptop). Pictures & videos in laptop & wife’s laptop & windows HDD (hmmm… perhaps that still says something about linux device support : P). Private keys were once copied to windows for use with putty. In fact, i’m currently aware of only the following loses: some uncommitted changes to a few projects and loss of a git repo for a week old project (chesstu.be) for which i at least got the latest code from the deployment server! And that’s all for now… perhaps i’ve lost more and perhaps i’ll find that out soon but still i think i was just lucky, esp. considering i had no “formal” backups
Update: Forgot to mention I’ve definitely lost thousands of 1 0 bullet chess games played on FICS … but those are either reproducible, or just crappy!
Partial review of last year – php comeback?
Jan 29th
Partial review of last year – php comeback?
In 2009 I did several php projects. The decision to use php was a pragmatic one – very cheap, available everywhere, easy to google for and I had a lot of experience with it in (its and … mine) early years. I even used to teach it at SPHY.
So anyway, up till last year, thinking of php would always bring back memories of spaghetti-code (though I hasten to add, the worst spaghetti-like project i’ve had to work on was in Java/jsp and that was back in 2001/2002 – copy/paste was the emperor and reuse was an unknown word). But all those memories have since changed – php 5 can do OOP and apart from a few gotchas, it’s not that much different to Java… and you do get instant productivity gains (due to save-reload workflow)
After doing a short review of the php web frameworks & libraries, I chose to use Kohana (ver.2) in my projects. Kohana has proven to be a very elegant and clean MVC implementation and its new version (ver.3) now implements HMVC (hierarchical MVC) which is awfully close to what component-based web frameworks are offering but with less magic and thus less complexity
( i’ll need another post -or posts- to explain this further)
( i’ll need another post -or posts- to explain this further)
Of course, when you’re back to the PHP land, it’s worthwhile to take a look at some of the best (and most used) apps that are written with that, namely wordpress, drupal and joomla (FlatPress is also great if you can’t afford a DB). I took a close look at the source code of wordpress and drupal and their architecture and found both straightforward – code is understandable, authoring plugins and extending default functionality is both easy and fun! And this makes you think… perhaps I can use any of those platforms as a base for my projects. Perhaps YOU should!
Anyway, i’ll expand my thoughts in the following days. I’ll close with screenshots of 3 greek blogs i was involved with this winter (onlybeauty.gr, ufoerotiseis.gr, grease.gr):
A new and wonderful Tapestry 5 blog
Jan 4th
A new and wonderful Tapestry 5 blog
Igor Drobiazko (a Tapestry committer) has recently started blogging on Tapestry 5 and his entries are very interesting and informative… Take a look:
Having Fun. PS3′s here
Dec 23rd
Having Fun. PS3′s here
Well, that’s just another kick-ass gift from Emi!
Here’s what i’m currently playing:
- Uncharted – Drake’s Fortune Never heard of that, got it by accident, but GREAT!
- Braid cool platform little indie game – had read the dev’s blog (or was it a Gamasutra srticle) some months ago and wanted to try it ever since
- Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2
- Killzone 2
- GT5 Prologue
Anything else you’d suggest i should try?
Reading Apache Maven 2 Effective Implementation
Nov 21st
Reading Apache Maven 2 Effective Implementation
Thanks to Amit Sharma (of Packt Publishing), I recently got a copy of Apache Maven 2 Effective Implementation authored by Brett Porter and Maria Odea Ching.
The book has proven to be an interesting read so far (even for an advanced maven user), covering a lot of important (and sometimes little known) plugins. Its best practices chapter along with the real-life advices/tips that are found throughout the book are a must read. On the other hand, I would really have liked to see a chapter or appendix covering maven support in IDEs + I must admit don’t have much of respect for Archiva (that’s based on a few weeks interaction i had with it 3 years ago – perhaps things have improved?) which is covered in detail in the book, along with Continuum.
Anyway, expect a complete review soon.
Streaming Schedule of ApacheCon Hadoop, HTTP Server, and Lucene Track
Nov 4th
Streaming Schedule of ApacheCon Hadoop, HTTP Server, and Lucene Track
Starting in less than 24 hours and for the next 4 days there’s ApacheCon. Don’t miss the live streaming from http://streaming.linux-magazin.de/en/program-apachecon-us-2009.htm . Here’s the schedule (times in UTC):
Wednesday, 04 November 2009: Hadoop Track
17:00 Opening Plenary & State of the Feather
William A. Rowe, Jr. & Jim Jagielski
17:30 Apache Pioneer's Panel
Moderated by Brian Behlendorf
19:00 Introduction to Apache Hadoop
Owen O'Malley
19:30 2009 State of the Elephant
Christophe Bisciglia
21:30 Becoming a Pig Developer
Alan Gates
22:30 Apache Hadoop in the Cloud
Tom White
00:00 Practical HBase
Michael Stack
01:00 Apache Hive: SQL and Data warehousing on Apache Hadoop
Ashish Thusoo
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Thursday, 05 November 2009: HTTP Track
17:00 Munging URLs with mod_rewrite
Rich Bowen
18:00 Hardening Enterprise Apache Installations Against Attacks
Sander Temme
19:30 Keynote: Standing Out in the Crowd
Kirrily Robert
22:00 Scalable Internet Architectures
Theo Schlossnagle
00:30 Recent Developments in SSL and Browsers
Rick Andrews
01:30 Lightning Talks!
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Friday, 06 November 2009: Lucene Track
17:00 Implementing an Information Retrieval Framework for an
Organizational Repository, Sithu D Sudarsan
18:00 Apache Mahout - Going from raw data to information
Isabel Drost
19:15 MIME Magic with Apache Tika
Jukka Zitting
20:15 Keynote: How Open Source Developers Can (Still!) Save The World
Brian Behlendorf
22:00 Building Intelligent Search Applications with the Lucene
Ecosystem, Ted Dunning
23:00 Realtime Search
Jason Rutherglen
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So, Apache friends, enjoy!
Maven and slow dependencies report
Oct 5th
Maven and slow dependencies report
If the dependencies report takes too long to finish, it could be due to maven trying to determine (and generate a report of) which repository contains which artifact… and the network and/or repos being slow or unreachable.
In any case, here’s how you can short-circuit that process:
mvn -Ddependency.locations.enabled=false site
