n-evill

Shortee v1 Launches

2011-12-03T11:16:00.001-08:00

If you have ever needed to quickly record having done something (paid an invoice, drove 100 business miles?) then I'm happy to say I might have a solution...

Shortee is a logging syntax for humans that is also parseable by computers.

A quick example might be:

@JeremyNevill drove 100miles 01/dec/2011

This indicates I drove 100 miles on the 1st Dec 2011, and would be an easy way to store business mileage that I later need to claim back from the company.

I send myself Shortee messages and simply store them in my gmail account, ready for querying when I need to answer a question on what I have done... e.g. what mileage did I drive in December?

I'm currently working on a Shortee parser to enable Shortee specific applications, in the mean time however feel free to check out the Shortee specification over at GitHub. I have open sourced the license so I'm hoping others will use the syntax and help out refining it as we go.

How to setup a Heroku app with a Xeround Cloud Mysql Instance

2011-09-04T14:55:00.000-07:00

JV was interested in how I got Heroku to talk to Xeround... here's how I did it:

Note: This is how I did it with a separate Xeround account, rather than using the Heroku add-on method. I did this because my db is currently fairly small so the 500mb option from Heroku was a bit bigger/more expensive than I needed.

On the Xeround side:

1) Signup and setup your new db instance at http://www.xeround.com

2) Add a user to the xeround db with the right permissions and note down the username/password

3) Import your db into your xeround db - I used a phpmyadmin backup from my existing mysql server, then a rake db:migrate to bring it up to the latest version on my local dev laptop, followed by an import via navicat using the credentials from step 2) above

4) Note down one of the urls for your db, e.g. ec2-999-202-xxxxx

So you should end up with:
a) A db instance on the Xeround cloud (your_instance_name)

b) A user with access to the instance (your_db_username/your_db_user_password)

c) A DNS Name and port for the instance (your_xeround_instance_DNSName:portnum)

And on the Heroku side:

1) Hook up your Heroku app as their docs detail - http://devcenter.heroku.com/ I got my app running using Postgresql with the rake create, migrate, seed commands just to test out a blank db install.

2) Now you need to repoint your std Heroku app using Postgresql to the external production Xeround db instance using mysql...

3) View your current app config using:
heroku config --app your-herokuapp-123
... where your-herokuapp-123 is the name of your Heroku app. This shows you the app config values that Heroku is using, and the key one we are looking to overload is the DATABASE_URL

4) Set your DATABASE_URL config value as follows:
heroku config:add DATABASE_URL="mysql://your_db_username:your_db_user_password@your_xeround_instance_DNSName:portnum/your_instance_name" --app your-herokuapp-123

5) Check the config values again:
heroku config --app your-herokuapp-123
... and you should see your new DATABASE_URL

6) Restart your Heroku app:
heroku restart --app your-herokuapp-123
... and hopefully you're in business.

Once I'd worked out the key was to override the default DATABASE_URL it was plain sailing, all I had to do was shift the db instance from Ireland to the ec2 data centre in the US to improve performance ;-)

WDC Relaunched using Latest Tech

2011-08-24T10:50:00.001-07:00

I have recently relaunched http://www.wakeboard.com as 'WDC - the wake as it happens'... showing 24/7 tweets, results, riders.

This is a tweet/fb/news aggregation engine that also hooks into my wakeboard competition database of results, rider performance etc. The plan is to merge the metadata we have on competitions and riders into the publicly available tweet/fb content that is steadily being posted during the day. I've been using the site myself to keep up with what the top riders are up to and it's great to see a rider post about a comp, then see whether they won the comp the previous year. There's more to come as usual, just need to find an awesome data entry helper ;-)

The latest dev and hosting tech underpinning the site includes:

Hosting: Heroku (cloud based rails platform), Xeround (cloud based mysql database), NewRelic (monitoring), StillAlive.com (testing and monitoring)

Dev Tools: Macbook Pro laptop on OS X Lion, Rubymine Rails IDE, Git, Unfuddle

To keep me going: Jura Impressa C5 coffee machine, Sonos music system

Developing with the above setup is truly fun and it's impressive what you can achieve on the train nowadays with the right kit.

Heroku and Xeround for Wakeboard.com

2011-08-14T13:06:00.001-07:00

Some very early morning tinkering sessions have yielded my 2nd production app move onto some very interesting cloud hosting platforms ... e.g. Heroku and Xeround.

Wakeboard.com now runs on Heroku using Xeround as the scalable cloud based backend db.

I'm trialling Xeround for a month to see how it performs and so far it's been reasonable, now that I've shifted the db instance to the US as having it in Ireland (Amazon's Euro server location) proved sluggish.

Setup was easy on the Xeround site, and a little tricky on Heroku to get the two to talk together... guess they really want you to use their Postgresql offerings.

So I now have my Ruby on Rails website platform running on dev, staging, and two live instances... managing all this via Git and Heroku is proving to be pretty good and I can code on the train then deploy back in the home office, geek heaven.

Philippines Added to Wakeboard.com

2011-01-06T14:30:00.001-08:00

It's the new year and the first competition of 2011 is in Philippines. To host this I have added a new country to Wakeboard.com to hold all comps held in the Philippines.

Facebook Facebook Facebook

2011-01-04T12:32:00.000-08:00

I've finally relented and wired up Wakeboard UK to Facebook. It's obvious the way things have gone now that nearly all mobiles are able to grab Facebook streams on the move. Stage one is the hook up the news articles on Wakeboard UK over to a Fanpage on Facebook. Ping.fm provided the bridge and I wrote the feed for the articles homepage, nice and simple.

Another bit of Facebooking(?) I did recently was to investigate one of my younger rellies' hacked facebook account. Interestingly the mechanism involved a worm like messaging system that directed the unsuspecting victim to a fake login page... thus allowing harvesting of the Facebook credentials.

Once nabbed the worm iterated the user's contact list sending the same phishing message on... simple but effective. Cleanup involved resetting my rellie's password and double checking they hadn't 'Liked' something they didn't like. We also turned off mobile posting as the worm messages had come via the mobile api. Finally we gave my unsuspecting relatives a short course on checking https certificates and making sure the url matched the website.

Tagging Photos with Competitors

2010-12-02T15:30:00.000-08:00

Just added the ability to tag photos in Wakeboard UK with the competitors who are in them. Check out Nancy's profile page for an example.

Pounds and Hash on the Mac Keyboard

2010-10-14T03:28:00.001-07:00

So this winds me up.. why do I forget where the UK Pound symbol and the hash symbol are on a mac keyboard. For future reference they are Shift-3 and Alt-3, now I can look this up next time I forget.

Wakeboard UK Relaunched

2010-06-09T09:17:00.000-07:00

We've hit another big milestone for the Wakeboard UK website today with the relaunch of the website!

Over the last few months we have worked hard to merge Wakescore into our rails cms to enable live wakeboard competition management online.... however, the user interface wasn't the most pretty we'd set eyes on.

To that end I've spent the last week implementing a new theme for the website which I have been grafting into the Ruby on Rails code, sprinkling a bit of Jquery here and there.

The new theme includes large images, which are uploaded and hosted on Amazon S3, and served up on the cloud using Amazon's Cloudfront. This ensures super fast delivery of big images and even video. I've used the same technique for WukMag and we easily get 4x the download speed over hosting it on our vps.

Hope the new design goes down well with our users... next up Wakeboard.com

Versions and Deltawalker

2010-06-09T06:55:00.000-07:00

Subversion is a great base code repo system but I've been needing a decent client and diffing combo on OS X (Snow Leopard) for a while now. Finally I have a good setup using Versions for the client and Deltawalker for the diffing tool.

Versions allows you to have multi repo connections and displays your source status via it's timeline, browse, and transcript views. Browse-Changed is what I look at mostly and use this to visually check my changes prior to checking in.

If a diff is required to refresh me on what has changed I simple use Compare Differences on the right click (if you have this enabled on your mac mouse) and view the comparison with Deltawalker. I'm hoping Deltawalker is a good Mac alternative to Beyond Compare which is my all time favourite dev tool... I let you know how well Delta compares as I use it.

Wakescore Goes Online

2010-01-29T15:03:00.000-08:00

I've been a volunteer with Wakeboard UK for the last decade and have provided them with Wakescore, a wakeboard competition management application for the entire period.

I've had it in my mind to bring Wakescore online to enable quicker publishing of results and give many more competition organisers the opportunity to simplify the hectic process of running a competition.

In addition to quick results publishing other features include rider profiles, multi user access, easy software updates, iphone compatibility.

Janurary 2010 sees many months of evening and weekend tinkering come to fruition with the relaunch of Wakeboard.com and Wakeboard UK using Wakescore Pro as the backend competition server. Have a look at the new results pages on Wakeboard.com to see the first public views that have been launched.

This small cluster of page hides the complexity of competitions, heats, divisions etc and partners with the competitors page to show a more attractive way to display comp results.

Over the years Wakescore has been used from local club level right through National comps up to regional and world competitions... here's hoping Wakescore Pro will continue the hard work!

Dev Bargain of the Year

2009-12-02T01:40:00.001-08:00

If you're like me you appreciate great development tools. Recently two of my favourite tools have become a lot more affordable.
The two tools are Confluence and Jira, both produced by Oz based Atlassian.

Confluence is an enterprise wiki application and I use this for all my note taking and documentation tasks.
This includes documents I need to send to people as Confluence will output to both pdf and word rather well.
Some of the great features of Confluence include: Spaces, xml backup and restore, funky macros.
My favourite feature is really that it is fast to create documents, you spend more time on the content and less on the formatting (e.g. the opposite of word).

Jira is another enterprise tool for bugtracking and can be used also to manage your work tasks and the tasks of others.
I use this to manage my development projects and delegate work out to the developers.
My favourite parts of Jira are the combination of speed and flexibility which leads to being able to manage project iterations with relative ease. It's fairly simple to manage 1000 tasks and bugs at a time by grouping them into projects, components and versions.

I spend nearly all day in one or other of these tools so can heartily recommend them as brilliant products, I just wish I could earn commission on recommending them '-)

Both products have new starter licenses enabling small teams to use these awesome products without having to find hundreds of dollars from their dev budgets, check them out!

Wakeboard UK is Rebranded

2009-12-01T05:29:00.000-08:00

Ready for the 2010 Northern Hemisphere wakeboarding season I have rebranded the Wakeboard UK website for a more stylish look. Tools used during the rebrand included Stylizer on the Pc, Cssedit and Rubymine on the mac.

I like the new design (thanks to Peter Gill for the logo and colour scheme) and I hope it goes down well with the WUK crew.