Interestingly, Javascript seems to have more functional than object orientated characteristics; so it seems reasonable to learn it wearing my functional hat.

I’ve been enjoying learning Ruby syntax via RubyKoans – little tests that teach you syntax and convention as you make them pass

I though I’d create a similar set of Functional Javascript Koans to help refresh my Javascript skills.

Its a bit rough; so please fork and contibute back improvements.
http://github.com/mrdavidlaing/functional-koans

Getting FlexMojos 3.6.1 working with Flex 4, running Flash Builder 4’s version of unit tests and FlexMonkey4’s version of acceptance/UI tests is pretty tricky.

Hopefully this sample project – http://github.com/mrdavidlaing/flexmojos-sample along with this screencast will save someone else the pain I went through to get all these playing together.

Howto add new component to FlexITP from David Laing on Vimeo.

Patches welcome – just clone the git repo make your change, and request a pull.


dpkg-reconfigure mysql-server-5.0


Hopefully that will save someone some hair pulling

If you’re about to name a class **Util; think harder – there is a better name that discribes what that class is for:
Chriss Missal has some advice for you

Faced with the prospect of heaps of left hand side => right hand side code in your DTO of anti-corruption layer? Consider Jimmy Bogard’s Automapper

Very useful when you need to write data manipulation scripts for production databases.

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17

BEGIN TRY
 
    BEGIN TRAN
 
        --Some SQL
 
 
    COMMIT TRAN
 
END TRY
-- Catch the errors on the inserts
BEGIN CATCH
 
    ROLLBACK TRAN
    SELECT ERROR_MESSAGE()
 
END CATCH

For example, consider the following function:

1

      string StringReplace(string haystack, string needle)

If this function is side-effect free, we can use it without fear like this:

1
2
3
4
5
6

        string menagerie = "cat,dog,bee,llama";
        string catFreeMenagerie = StringReplace(menagerie, "cat");
        string beeFreeMengerie = StringReplace(menagerie, "eric");
 
        Assert.AreEqual(",dog,fish,llama", catFreeMenagerie);
        Assert.AreEqual("cat,dog,,llama", beeFreeMengerie);

However, if StringReplace() had the side effect of also changing the passed in haystack, then the second Assert would fail, because the first StringReplace has the unexpected side effect of changing one of its arguments.

Evans in the DDD book has quite a bit to say about this; arguing that having side effect free functions goes a long way towards making a supple design

Side effect free functions also make testing & refactoring easier (less state to worry about etc)

Remember, a function that changes its parameters is rude, and should not be trusted!

PS: Eric the half a bee lyrics

The test was to check whether some tracking tag javascript was being inserted into the page correctly or not.

I assumed that I could get the page source as it was being delivered to the browser by calling selenium.GetHtmlSource(); and then check that for the javascript string I was expected.

Unfortunately, GetHtmlSource is just a proxy for the browsers DOM.InnerHTML method; and that returns the Html after it has been preprocessed by the browser.

Turns out that preprocessing does a couple of funky things, including

• Changing line-endings (Firefox)
• Changing capitalization (IE6)
• Seemingly random removal / insertion of ” & ‘  (IE6)

So, when I was expecting a string like this:

1
2
3
4
5
6

<script language="javascript" type="text/javascript">
<!--
   var amPid = '206'';
   var amPPid = '4803';
   if (document.location.protocol=='https:')
...[snip]...

IE6 was presenting me with:

1
2
3
4
5
6

<SCRIPT language=javascript type=text/javascript>
<!--
   var amPid = '206'';
   var amPPid = '4803';
   if (document.location.protocol=='https:')
...[snip]...

A possible solution is to ignore case, whitespace and quotes when doing the comparison, with a helper method like this:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13

/// <summary>
        /// Use this to compare strings to those returned from selenium.GetHtmlSource for an Internet Explore instance
        /// (IE6 seems to change case and inclusion of quotes, especially for Javascript.?)
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="expected"></param>
        /// <param name="actual"></param>
        private static void AssertStringContainsIgnoreCaseWhiteSpaceAndQuotes(string expected, string actual)
        {
            string expectedClean = Regex.Replace(expected, @"\s", "").ToLower().Replace("\"","").Replace("'","");
            string actualClean = Regex.Replace(actual, @"\s", "").ToLower().Replace("\"", "").Replace("'", "");
            StringAssert.Contains(expectedClean,actualClean,
                                  string.Format("Expected string \n\n{0} \n\nis not contained within \n\n{1}", expected, actual));
        }

It was the line endings that really floored me; because they were automatically normalized/corrected by my test runner when displaying the error. Aaargh!

I don’t want to manage another set of usernames & passwds, so I’d like apache2 to authenticate off the standard users on my system, via PAM.

To get this to work, you need to install and configure mod_auth_pam and mod_auth_shadow

aptitude install libapache2-mod-auth-pam libapache2-mod-auth-shadow

Ensure the www-data user is part of the shadow group, so apache2 can read the passwords

usermod -G shadow www-data

And set up the relevent virtual host:

                AuthPAM_Enabled On
                AuthShadow on
                AuthPAM_FallThrough Off
                AuthBasicAuthoritative Off
                AuthType Basic
                AuthName "Restricted to group: sysadmins"
                AuthUserFile /dev/null
                Require group sysadmins

Restart apache, and you’re done!

https://help.ubuntu.com/8.04/serverguide/C/certificates-and-security.html

Create a new virtual host (you can only have one SSL virtual host / IP)

sudo cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/default /etc/apache2/sites-available/ssl

Edit ssl sothat it looks like this:
NameVirtualHost *:443

ServerName webangle-www1.everyangle.co.uk
ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost

SSLCertificateFile /etc/ssl/certs/server.crt
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/ssl/private/server.key


Finally, if you want to force redirect of all traffic to a certain folder via SSL (e.g, /phpmyadmin), add the following to /etc/apache2/sites-available/default

#Redirect traffic to /phpmyadmin through https
        RewriteEngine   on
        RewriteCond     %{SERVER_PORT} ^80$
        RewriteRule     ^/phpmyadmin(.*)$ https://%{SERVER_NAME}/phpmyadmin$1 [L,R]

Enable it:

sudo a2ensite ssl
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

A convienient way to access that remote storage is to configure rsync over sshfs:

sudo aptitude install sshfs
mkdir /mnt/sshfs
mkdir /mnt/sshfs/rsync.net
sshfs **username**@ch-s011.rsync.net: /mnt/rsync.net

First, unmount

fusermount -u /mnt/rsync.net

Then, install autofs, and edit the config file

sudo aptitude install autofs
sudo vi /etc/auto.master

Add the following line 

/mnt/sshfs /etc/auto.sshfs --timeout=30,--ghost

Then,  

sudo vi /etc/auto.sshfs

Add

rsync.net -fstype=fuse,rw,nodev,nonempty,noatime,allow_other,max_read=65536 :sshfs\#**username**@ch-s011.rsync.net\:

And finally restart autofs 

sudo /etc/init.d/autofs restart

Now, when you cd /mnt/sshfs/rsync.net, after a short delay you will automatically be connected to the remote filesystem over SSH.  After 30 seconds of inactivity, the connection will be closed.