Tag Archives: tech

01 Mar
2010

Simple Database Patching Strategy

One problem that seems to need solving too often is how to keep databases in sync across different platforms, different developers working on a project, and deploying database changes along with code changes. There are lots of ways of approaching this, none of them are really excellent however and personally I tend to err on the side of simple being better. Fewer dependencies means a solution more likely to work on every platform (and no additional complications for the live platform). Usually this means patch files of some kind – here’s an outline of my usual approach. For the impatient:

  • add a table for meta data to the database, set a database version parameter to 0
  • export structure and any essential data (lookup tables, etc) into an sql file
  • for any changes, create a numbered patch file e.g. patch-1.sql, including the change and an update statement to bring the version meta data to match the patch file
  • store all of the above in source control
  • for bonus points, create another sql file with some nice sample data

Give the Database Some Version Awareness

Naming is completely changeable but mine looks something like this:

CREATE TABLE `meta_data` (entry varchar(255) primary key, value varchar(255));

INSERT INTO `meta_data` SET entry="version", value="0";

This new row will hold information about what patch version the database is up to. Every patch that is created will update this number so that it is possible to tell which patches have and have not been applied.

Create an Initial Data Structure

Firstly create a database directory for all these files to live in. This should be outside your web root but inside your source control project.

Take your database and dump just the structure of the tables using the –no-data switch to mysqldump like this:

mysqldump -u  -p  --no-data > create.sql

You will also want to populate tables which hold things like lookup values, country lists, that sort of thing, so that these are set up. People starting to develop with this project, or if the application needs to be deployed to somewhere new, can use this file as a starting point.

Create Patches for Changes

This is where the discipline element comes in – no direct edits on the database are allowed! Instead, write the SQL for your change and place it in the patch file, then run it against the database. If that sounds too much like hard work then copy/paste the SQL you use to make changes, or the SQL generated by whatever SQL tool you use, and place it in the file.

Every file must have its own incrementing version number in its file name, e.g. patch-1.sql, patch-2.sql etc. Within the file the version must also be updated to match, with a statement like:

UPDATE `meta_data` SET value="1" WHERE entry = "version";

Recommended Practice

Here are a few pointers on getting the most out of something like this:

  • Under no circumstances is it acceptable to edit a patch file that has been committed to source control. Someone might have run it already and you’ll confuse everyone completely.
  • Having matching undo scripts alongside the patches can be really useful in case a change gets deployed and needs to be undone.
  • Make a script to look up the database settings in the config file of your application, query the database for what version it is at, and run any outstanding scripts. This makes life much easier especially if you have large numbers of scripts (I’ve seen the patch numbers hit the hundreds)
  • A possible adaptation of this approach is to create patch files for use for updating a database, but to also update the install.sql file to make it correct at any point in time, this means a much shorter and easier setup time for new deployements/developers. The version awareness works in the same way regardless
  • Creating a sample database which creates a few records in each table can really help for development purposes – its quicker for people to get set up and attain a working system that they can make progress with.

I’m sure there are many improvements and variations on this theme of simple database patching, leave a comment and let me know what works for you and why!

23 Feb
2010

Supermondays: Recap

Last night I travelled to the northeast of England to speak to a thriving technical community up there called Supermondays. They contacted me some time ago asking if I could get there to speak one Monday, and last night was the night! It was a very civilised gathering, with sandwiches and cups of tea, and using a lecture theatre at the university for space. As a speaker the best thing about this is that its a space designed for addressing people in, unlike most user groups (and indeed conferences!) where two steps away from the lectern sees you standing in the dark, falling off the stage, or getting projected on to. Last night was a different story with lots of space to wander, slides projected well above me on the wall so everyone could see clearly, and relatively good acoustics despite no amplification.

My talk was entitled “PHP and Web Services: Perfect Partners” – the slides are on slideshare if you want to take a look. There was also a talk about android development by Alex Reid, including a live coding demo which went surprisingly well! Judging by the various events that were plugged and discussed on the night, at the main event and in the pub afterwards, this is a diverse and vibrant technical community – so if you are in the northeast, get along to Supermondays!

19 Feb
2010

Open Office Presenter Console

I’ve been having issues with the presenter console on both my ubuntu machines since upgrading to Karmic (9.10). One is a Thinkpad T400 running kubuntu and the other is an aspireone netbook running ubuntu netbook remix. Neither wanted had a working installation after upgrade and I couldn’t get the plugin installed using the open office plugin manager.

I discovered that this plugin is now available through apitude – simply install the package openoffice.org-presenter-console and it should all work splendidly! I use the presenter console when I am speaking (which is quite often) to show the time and the upcoming slide, its a great tool.

08 Feb
2010

Word Count

There’s a little command line utility on *nix which I use a lot – it’s wc or “word count”. This is especially useful to because I live in a world where everything is plain text right up until I have to send it to someone else (and sometimes not even then). Despite its name, word count can count more than just words – it can do characters, words, lines and can tell you the length of the longest line while its at it.

Counting Lines

The biggest problem with counting lines is remembering the name of the utility, since its called “word count” and not “line count”. I tend to use this for doing things like piping grep to wc and counting the lines to give me an idea of how many occurrences of something there are. I also use it to count errors in weblogs or really anything else that I could do with summarising. The syntax is something like:

grep -R TODO * | wc -l

Using a count like this is especially good for things like auditing code, where I need to know how prevalent something is – or refactoring, where I’m looking for how many of a particular pattern are outstanding. Counting lines is also very compatible with my habit of making lists in text files.

Counting Words

This is the feature that the utility was originally designed for, and as you can imagine, its pretty good at that. As with most things, this blog post started life as a text file and when I got to this point I saved it and ran:

wc -w wc_article.txt

It outputs the number of words (272) and the name of the file, which is useful if you’re giving it a pattern to match.

Word Count

Its a really convenient and versatile little program; I use it often and I hope others will find it useful too.

26 Jan
2010

Contributing to Projects on GitHub

Recently I’ve been contributing to the code project behind joind.in, the event information and feedback site. I rely on joind.in a lot and after putting up with a frankly astonishing volume of feature requests from me, its owner Chris Cornutt very politely suggested that I might like to fix some of them myself. The project is hosted on github and I haven’t traditionally been much of a git fan, but I wanted to contribute so I set off to work out how to begin.

Register on Github

To do anything useful I first needed to sign up for an account. Github has a range of accounts but I found that with one of their free accounts I would be able to get started and contribute to the project. This gives me a project space of my own and a user to tie all my activities to.

Set up SSH Key

In order to authenticate against the github servers, you need to set up an ssh key and give them your public key so they know you are you. You’ll then need to tell git to use this key whenever it makes contact with the github servers. I do quite a bit with ssh and ssh keys myself so I was comfortable with this step. Even if you are totally new, its still pretty straightforward and they have a great howto on github itself which will help.

I had issues with git not picking up that it needed to use a non-standard ssh key, but I found the answers in this entry on the git website. In a nutshell, set up an ssh alias, set the key in there and then use the alias instead of the actual URL when giving the repo location to git. This now works like a charm for me.

Fork the Project

Now, github uses “fork” where I might choose to say “checkout” – fork in my world means something else completely. But in this case you’re just making your own copy of the project repository. This is where you will commit your changes to and it retains its link with the original repository making it easy for anyone with commit access to that to pull in your changes. Patch files are nowhere to be seen, and although I was wary at first, this is project collaboration at its most painless, I’m impressed! Forking was relatively simple and again there was great documentation on the github site. In particular I recommend that you take the time to follow the bit about adding an alias for the “upstream” repository – this made committing my changes to the main joind.in repo really easy.

The forking instructions linked above also gave a description of how to actually use git, how to get my changes applied to my local repo, and how to push them to my remote repo on github itself.

Make a Pull Request

Once I’d fixed a few things, I was ready to push the code back to the main project so that Chris could consider it for inclusion. This is done by making a pull request from the main project page – you can add a comment about the changes you are supplying to help the maintainers to manage all the incoming patches.

Go Forth and Contribute

It was easier than I expected to get set up to contribute to a project using github, so find something you want to improve and/or be involved with, and do it. I began by fixing the docs for joind.in, which was a great place to start since it allowed me to make a useful contribution without touching the code in the first instance :)

15 Jan
2010

Screen in Ubuntu Karmic

I have written about screen quite often, mostly including my .screenrc file and showing how to have named tabs for the various screen tabs you have open. When Ubuntu Jaunty came out, I found it had some quite cool enhancements that made the customisations for screen really easy by default – and I wrote about these.

In Karmic Koala, Ubuntu 9.10, the packages are still there but they’ve changed names! So if you want to use screen with Ubuntu Karmic or later, install packages byobu and byobu-extras, and uninstall screen-profiles and screen-profiles-extras (they were broken on my system after upgrade anyway) and you should find everything works as expected. To run screen with the new features, you should run “byobu” instead – although screen commands seem to work to detach and reattach the screens that result, weirdly.

I’m mostly posting about it because I have been very frustrated and there’s no way I could have guessed, or probably ever will remember, what these packages are called. Apparently a byobu is a japanese room screen … you learn something new every day!

29 Dec
2009

Silencing Curl’s Progress Output

I seem to have been writing a lot of shell scripts to do things with curl lately, and the main difference with piping curl’s output to somewhere rather than just looking at it on the screen is that curl will then start outputting a whole bunch of progress information that you don’t usually see. This can be frustrating if you wanted the same output as it viewed on the command line, or (as in my case) just wanted to grep for something in the header output.

To silence the additional output, use the -s switch – but be aware that this will also silence any error messages as well! Something like this:

curl -s http://lornajane.net | grep PHP

This will enable you pass into grep just the output you would usually see on your terminal. Hope this is useful to someone!

21 Dec
2009

Cookies and Curl

curl is the C URL library – its a command-line tool for making web requests, with libraries available in many languages. Personally I prefer to use it from the command line and recently I have been using it with cookies for a web services which set a cookie at login and then needed this to be supplied on all subsequent requests. This turned out to be really simple so I thought I’d put some notes down on how to do it.

Storing Cookies in a Jar

Quite enchantingly, its traditional to call a cookie storage a “cookie jar” which makes a lot of sense when you think about it! To do this with curl, use the -c switch:

curl -c lj.txt http://www.lornajane.net

If you now examine the resulting file, lj.txt, you’ll see that it contains all the details of the cookie. You can edit this if you want to (health warning: only do this if you know what you are doing! If you need to test something though, its useful), and then submit the next request with that cookie attached – exactly as your browser would.

Making Requests with Cookies

To make the next request with the cookie, simple replace the -c with a -b to dip into the cookie jar and sent all relevant cookies for this domain with your request, like this:

curl -b lj.txt http://www.lornajane.net

As I say, I was using this with a web service, where it made no sense to use a browser as I also needed to pass data with the requests. You might also like to refer to my curl cheat sheet previous post.

17 Dec
2009

New Camera: Fuji Finepix F70

Recently I’ve had a new gadget in my life – a Fuji Finepix F72, which is really an F70 but exclusive to Jessop’s in a different colour (I have no idea why retailers do this but hey, it means mine is shiny black).

The camera is a birthday/christmas gift from my parents, since I’m taking increasing numbers of photos these days and our 3-year-old Fuji Finepix F650 is on its last legs! I have been looking around and although there are a few other things in the same kind of market, I read an astonishingly detailed review of the F70 and, considering how much I had liked the previous fuji, decided that this would be a good bet.

Its smaller than the last one while having a lot more resolution, I’m not really a camera geek but it does some funky things that I quite like. Even left entirely in auto mode, the photos are much better quality – especially in low light which was always an issue for the old camera! The scene presets are there and useful as ever. It has some strange settings where it takes multiple photos of the same thing to provide more detail – for example the mode which is pretending to be shallow depth of field takes a bunch of photos and then sticks them together in software, with interesting results:

Profocus Seagulls

I’m still getting to grips with the different settings, and am attempting to join in with the daily shoot which is an exercise in taking a new photographic assignment every day. I’m running at less than 50% success rate but I am taking more photos than I would have otherwise so its good in any event I think! One thing I really want to crack is taking recognisable photos of people … so far the only person I seem to do well with is my toddler niece (perhaps because she doesn’t fear the camera the way the adults do?)

Natalie in the crate

So, thanks mum and dad – and if you’re interested in following my photographic adventures, my photos are on flickr.

15 Dec
2009

Sound Issues with Kubuntu Karmic Koala

Since upgrading my work machine to karmic koala, I’ve noticed that my sound had stopped working. There were some broken packages in aptitude and Skype knew there was a problem as it notified me when I tried to make a call. I saw some issues reported with karmic, notably this one, so I uninstalled pulseaudio

sudo aptitude remove pulseaudio

When I restarted Skype, everything seemed to work as expected – for reference I have a thinkpad T400, if you’re having the same issues, then hopefully this will help!