Myles Carrick

Tracking WordPress with Git

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 16:35:00 +1100

I use Git and want to track upstream WordPress.

[UPDATE] I was using a utility here called svn2git. That was crazy. Now I’m just using git-svn and it rocks.

Here’s what I do to track Wordpress SVN. It couldn’t be easier.

git svn clone -s http://core.svn.wordpress.org wordpress_svn

The -s flag tells it you’ve got a normal-looking SVN repo. I clone it into a git repo (folder) called wordpress_svn

It takes FOREVER… replaying svn history one commit at a time.

When you’re done… have a look at the branches

cd wordpress_svn
git branch -r

To refresh it (or if it dies halfway through) just

git svn rebase

Couldn’t be easier. I have mine at https://github.com/newington/wordpress - master branch and usually at least one recent topic branch should be current.

Using Chef to build cloud servers for WordPress and Drupal Commons

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 21:48:00 +1100

So I decided this afternoon that with a wife 39.5 weeks’ pregnant I’d get into devops fun experimenting with Chef.

My goals are simple:

give me a clear, unambiguous, repeatable way of deploying servers of various types
help me deploy a bunch of PHP stuff I need right now:
- WordPress with Network stuff
- Drupal Commons

I toyed with the idea of getting someone to do it, but sometimes it’s just easier to do it yourself (read: faster and far less complicated).

Why Chef?

The reasons are fairly simple, and all about me:

Chef’s all Ruby. I know and love Ruby.
I can use Opscode’s hosted platform for the servers. The last thing I want to do is run another server or bunch of servers to control my servers - I’m trying to be quick and lightweight here.

Where am I going to deploy?

I’m not entirely sure where this is going to end up. I have some unused Linodes that have to either start getting used or die. Other possibilities are Ninefold and of course AWS/EC2.

Next post: the details…

"Talk is cheap. Show me the code."

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 14:17:57 +1100

“Talk is cheap. Show me the code.”

- Linus Torvalds on the Linux Kernel Mailing List https://lkml.org/lkml/2000/8/25/132

Genuine insight from Pixar on managing effective teams

Sun, 15 May 2011 09:42:00 +1000

Ryan Singer from 37signals mentioned this vid from Stanford GSB

Pixar founder Ed Catmull addresses the question: “Why do ‘successful’ companies fail?”

What’s more important? Great people or great ideas?

Ed goes through some important things that have made Pixar awesome, like:

Undergo constant review - review it all every day - push through the embarrassment; make it so that ‘when you’re done, you’re done’
Keep it safe to tell the truth
Communication and org structures shouldn’t necessarily match - everyone should be able to talk to anyone about anything; managers shouldn’t be precious about always being kept in the loop.
Don’t let success mask problems
Restructure the postmortem / retrospective - keep it fresh; allow it to be sufficiently in depth.

He also addresses the strange feature re company themes / mottos - they tend to be truisms - everyone knows they’re true; all competitors have pretty much the same one.

Sometimes having the pithy statement means we can say it and not change behaviour

There are, Ed surmises, two types of ‘crisis’:

you don’t like what you see & have to make changes. People will have to change. It’s hard.
you finish and it’s rubbish (game over)

The first sort is a LOT better - it’s self-imposed. It’s harder. But it might actually work.

Bucketloads of ideas here for how I manage teams, methinks.

Yes, lecture capture sucks... now what?

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 21:17:07 +1100

Fellow contrarian Mark Smithers writes on the phenomenon of widespread, automated lecture capture in education›:

the large scale implementation of lecture capture is probably one of the costliest and strategically misguided educational technologies that an institution can adopt

At UNE we’re currently in the throes of deciding our plan of attack for all things rich media. Naturally this includes lecture capture, but the peculiarities of our environment have thankfully provided the context for a re-think. In particular:

80% of our students study all or mostly online
An ever-increasing number of our teaching units have no face-to-face cohort - i.e. no actual lectures to record
The tools for academics to record great, focused learning interactions are inexpensive, powerful, and much easier to use
We don’t have the legacy of an existing lecture capture practice
As Mark has highlighted, a gazillion studies have shown (and our own experience often attests) that an hour-long, lecture-style video is rarely the best way to engage, stretch, develop and enhance learning.

So what are we going to do?

We’re currently working at ensuring that our focus is on (a) the tools our students tell us they want to use… and (b) those our great teaching staff are keen to get their hands on.

Thankfully, those two are one and the same:

We’re rolling out great synchronous meeting / classroom platform. Based on Adobe Connect and tightly integrated with our Moodle site. It’ll give us a great building block for fantastic online discussions - for tutorial-style discussions, supervision, collaboration, and more.
We’ve put in place the absolute best media storage and management platform. Kaltura forms the foundation for this - we’ve started with terabytes of storage and are sponsoring the open source development of the Moodle 2.0 plugin. It’ll be possible to record or upload video straight into the browser… and Kaltura will automatically take care of the formats, resizing and distribution.
We’re investigating the best way to give all staff (and potentially students) the easiest way to capture audio and video from the desktop and in lecture-style situations.

Excited? I am!

"Most of the things you read on the internet are just plain wrong. Always remember that."

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 00:00:07 +1100

“Most of the things you read on the internet are just plain wrong. Always remember that.”

- Thomas Fuchs (@thomasfuchs)

"Forgive me my nonsense, as I also forgive the nonsense of those that think they talk sense."

Tue, 15 Feb 2011 10:00:07 +1100

“Forgive me my nonsense, as I also forgive the nonsense of those that think they talk sense.”

- Robert Frost (I’ve been thinking about putting this on the presentations I seem to give each day)

Yesterday I posted about how LinkedIn is using JRuby with Java -...

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 09:00:06 +1100

Yesterday I posted about how LinkedIn is using JRuby with Java - YouTube then suggested this next vid in a similar vein - hugely valuable understanding how we might shoehorn JRuby (and other cool stuff like haml, scss, etc) into our environment

"If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking."

Sun, 13 Feb 2011 13:55:00 +1100

“If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.”

- George S Patton

At UNE we have the legacy of a massive number of Java apps and...

Sun, 13 Feb 2011 12:41:00 +1100

At UNE we have the legacy of a massive number of Java apps and Java infrastructure. It seems like that’s one small thing we have in common with the dev team at LinkedIn. Yesterday I stumbled across this great, short presentation by Baq Haidri on how LinkedIn is sliding jruby into their existing infrastructure - will be flicking it around our teams for sure!

Unzipping massive files on OSX

Wed, 09 Feb 2011 17:40:30 +1100

OSX Snow Leopard has a command line zip/unzip utility…

Today I needed to unzip a MASSIVE (10GB) zip file (for Adobe LiveCycle - but that’s another story)… and got this response:

unzip LiveCycleES2.5-0.0.5.zip 
Archive:  LiveCycleES2.5-0.0.5.zip
skipping: LiveCycleES2.5-0.0.5/LiveCycleES2.5.x86_64-0.0.5.vmdk  need PK compat. v4.5 (can do v2.1)
creating: LiveCycleES2.5-0.0.5/
inflating: LiveCycleES2.5-0.0.5/LiveCycleES2.5.x86_64-0.0.5.vmx

So what’s PK compat. v4.5 ? The standard zip libraries don’t let you unzip really big files. The PKZip libraries have evolved with myriad different versions and capabilities - including (in 4.5) the addition of Zip64 - with support for huge (>4.5 GB) files.

To get it to work, we need p7zip the Linux/Unix port of the 7-zip libraries.

I use homebrew - and you should too.

brew install p7zip

then use the 7z utility (with a magic ‘x’ for extract like so:

7z x LiveCycleES2.5-0.0.5.zip

…and we’re cookin with gas.

"Enterprise? A colossal spaceship from the 80’s flown by people with bad taste: Highly advanced, but..."

Sun, 30 Jan 2011 11:49:52 +1100

“Enterprise? A colossal spaceship from the 80’s flown by people with bad taste: Highly advanced, but purely fictional.”

- Mads Buus Westmark (Capgemini Ruby on Rails pioneer)

Lessons from Facebook on Engineering Management

Sat, 22 Jan 2011 15:41:08 +1100

Lessons from Facebook on Engineering Management:

Yishan Wong spent several years as a technical manager at Facebook. These posts from him are a real revelation, particularly the need to focus on tools for efficiency and for all members of the team to be technically proficient. Great stuff.

Rails3, Compass and the Heroku read-only filesystem

Wed, 05 Jan 2011 08:57:00 +1100

I use Compass with Blueprint for all projects these days.

When deploying on Heroku, the read-only filesystem has trouble with the conditional around the IE stylesheet - leading to something like this;

Errno::EROFS (Read-only file system - /disk1/home/slugs/.../mnt/public/stylesheets/compiled/ie.css - Heroku has a read-only filesystem.  See http://docs.heroku.com/constraints#read-only-filesystem)

I get around it by asking Compass / SASS to not bother trying to regenerate my sass/scss files in production:

in config/environments/production.rb:

Sass::Plugin.options[:never_update] = true

Turning off "Upload a single file" Assignment type in Moodle

Fri, 10 Dec 2010 18:42:00 +1100

Among the various things we’re doing for UNE’s move to Moodle, one thing we thought would be cool would be to remove the ancient option Assignment type that allows only one student file per submission (and no teacher “response” files).

This gives us a stack of simple benefits:

we only have to hook up online marking to one type
we can hook our funky new print and scanning system up to one type
teachers never get stuck having allowed one file and then wanting to allow more
teachers don’t have to remember that the more limited type doesn’t allow them to provide responses

Making the changes is really simple:

First, add a config setting (in config.php):

$CFG->assignment_hide_uploadsingle = true;

Then tweak mod/assignment/lib.php as per the commit at https://github.com/une/moodle/commit/cf89f14ffc36cae22175874f6f737f4e773cfd74

The change is basically:

-    $standardassignments = array('upload','online','uploadsingle','offline');
+    $standardassignments = array('upload','online','offline');

It doesn’t break any existing assignments of that type - just means your teachers won’t go creating new ones.

Getting serious about managing assessment in Moodle

Tue, 07 Dec 2010 17:21:20 +1100

Getting serious about managing assessment in Moodle:

Moving to Moodle in 2011 brings with it a number of challenges for how we manage assessment. It also introduces a stack of exciting opportunities.

Today marks the start of a focused attempt to draw…

PHP5 with Freetype support on Snow Leopard

Wed, 24 Nov 2010 09:17:55 +1100

PHP5 with Freetype support on Snow Leopard:

Rolling your own PHP (or any othr *nix tool) is not insanely hard… but when someone puts together a nice set of binaries, it certainly makes life easier.

Wanting to do some quick development in Mahara, I found that Snow Leopard’s own PHP had no Freetype support baked into its GD libraries :( I turned up Taracque’s great set of binaries built with the Entropy toolkit…

I’d have loved to have been able to use homebrew to do it, but this is also fairly easy - and the installer plays nice by installing to /usr/local/php5

No warranty attached, but it’s certainly working nicely for me in development.

Macquarie Uni joins the stampede to Moodle

Fri, 01 Oct 2010 02:04:34 +1000

Macquarie Uni joins the stampede to Moodle:

Macquarie Uni announced last week that they’ll be joining UNE and others in shifting from Blackboard CE (formerly WebCT) to head to Moodle 2. It’s great to see other unversities “seeing the light”…

Getting back into Drupal at UNE Flexible and Online

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 21:46:00 +1000

Getting back into Drupal at UNE Flexible and Online:

Last month we set up a quick Drupal 6/Acquia site. It’s my first foray back into Drupal since some projects two years ago with Fairfax and Austereo. The strategy to go online with communications for our program of twenty-something projects at UNE Flexible and Online was to fourfold:

to visually convey our four key messages: choice and flexibility, a seamless student experience, driving innovation, and regionally based; globally oriented.
to aggregate posts from our various blogs (including mine for the Revitalising Learning Program)
to provide a “who’s who” of Program team members ad
to give us a platform for distributing information about the various individual projects.

Getting it online was a cinch - we used Chef Solo to build the server (on Sydney-based VPSes at Mammoth - currently on just the $20/mth plan). I’m not a massive fan of PHP, but it sure was easy!

Only one more Moodle “Blocker”

Wed, 22 Sep 2010 20:45:07 +1000

Only one more Moodle “Blocker”:

Moodle’s bug, issue and feature “tracker” (http://tracker.moodle.org) helps the project track new feature requests, issues and bugs. All bugs are rated on a scale: blocker, critical, major and…