@leo's

No version controling

leo — 2009-05-05T17:52:49Z

I did hear of this company which is not using version controling, we all did hear of this one company. But did you ever hear the name of the company? I didn't! There must be a company, not using version control to develop their software, but nobody tells you the name of the company. I even heard stories of companies that develop software for libraries for which they did lost the source code.

After quite some time hearing these stories and never hear a name, I thought these are just fairy tales. Fairy tales! Like the ones parents tell their kids to scare them. Well nobody can be that stupid! Nobody is developing software without version controlling (at least not for projects in teams and not for projects that run longer than a week, but even then it would be a good idea). No, that would just be stupid! Software development without version controlling is like bungee jumping without ropes.

But last week, not thinking about these stories anymore - I found it! I found the company not using a version controlling system, this company does really exist. And off course I'm not gone tell you the name of the company. I don't want to blame them (in public). But trust me this company does exist! They save their files on the disk and try to not work on the same files as there coworkers do.

But too scare you not too much: They will switch to a version control system soon. So the company using no version controlling is soon history. If you really should find a other one (or, behave, work for one) tell them to install a revision control software. Install one as soon as possible not matter which one (as long as it is not source shredder, ähmm safe). Git, SVN, CVS - they are all fine! As long as you use one.

You might probably not believe what I say. But please believe Bertrand Delacretaz, he's a director of the Apache Software Foundation (this guys manufacture the internet), and in his talk he does also tell you the next three step after having a version control system. You find the slides and the video recording here.

Twitter

leo — 2009-05-04T20:21:24Z

It looks like I will use the "@" and "#" key more often in the future. After hanging around in facebook, spending a lot of time organizing conveniat, examine some exams and even finding some time for some fancy hacks I finally found some time to open a twitter account(*), like all the cool kids did years ago.

You find my random ramblings and rants in 140 chars @LeoBuettiker

I did not found out what should be that cool about twitter. But I like to see what my geek-friends are thinking about. We will see if there will be more output that we currently have on this blog.

(*) To be honest, there's already a second one @MyTvTipps. But more about this probably later.

Vorname sucht ...

leo — 2009-02-20T16:43:42Z

Gleichzeitig mit dem Bankgeheimnis schafft der Blick am Abend heute auch das Ersetzen von Platzhaltern ab...

2009 Forecast

leo — 2008-12-31T15:01:33Z

Well, I do not tend to write technological forecasts. There are people out there how are much better at this and even they are often wrong. But this year I will give it a try. Some idea about next year's trends in the web:

Crisis

The credit crunch will get worse next year. It will also affect the web world. A lot of startups will close the doors because they will not find any money. For others this will also be a good posibility, in a time where you even can't trust the banks, investors will search for startups with serious business plans.

For the big ones in the web the time will be pretty hard. There shareholder will ask question about how they will get their money back. Facebook has to find a way to make more money. I think it might be likely to see in 2009 more ads on facebook or "pro-accounts" for which users have to pay, possibly also both.

Google has possibly to stop some projects that do not generate enough money. Or create also a way to pay for these services. This might affect Google Chrome, Google Analytics and others. Likely Google Chrome will not reach more then 1-2 Percent Market share, Google will stop this project and support Firefox instead.

As there is still no usable micropayment (well paypal is still not there and will probably never be) out there I expect Google or Facebook (or a new startup) to come up with one. Possibly they buy a bank for this (UBS anyone?! Ok, this is not serious.)

Cloud

Well there was already a lot of buzz around Cloud Computing in 2008. But I think this will take off in 2009. Googles App Engine will support fast development off small apps. I think Facebook will introduce something similar for scripting apps for facebook. Most likely this will be in PHP (or JavaScript). Amazons AWS will be the platform for a lot of startups.

But with the accepance of Cloud Computing a lot of classical providers (the big German ones) will introduce new price models and also some kind of cloud computing. I think it will be very likely that also some cloud computing open source solution on the base of xen and the LAM* stack. Some comercial solutions will probably follow. This might include Sun with glasfish, mysql and solaris, Microsoft with the dotNet platform and probably others.

Big companies will provide users (open source projects and big customers) some cloud systems to test their software. Microsoft does this already for some open source project. But also commercial Projects (that write clientsoftware) might profit for this. Probably also Red Hat, SuSE/Novell or Sun will follow this example.

Not out (, yet)

I think 2009 will be a year of vaporware. We will not see PHP 6, Perl 6, MySQL 6 or Duke Nukem Forever. The first 3 of this will fight with a bigger community and it will be hard to find desisions. I'm in doubt if MySQL six will ever be here; Forks of it (like perconas version and drizle) are very likely to overtake the lead and will stop sun to work on MySQL longer then Version 5.

Hard Times

2009 will be a hard year for the whole web. But as long as you think you cannot be replaced trough the 3 bellow your job might be still secure. So I wish a very good 2009 to all of you.

Bye, bye 2008

leo — 2008-12-31T13:29:52Z

Schon wieder vorbei?! Das Jahr 2008 ist wie im Flug vergangen.

Die wirklich grossen Ereignisse sind dieses Jahr ausgeblieben. Da ich aber wieder Cevi gemacht habe blieb dieses Jahr fürs Bloggen (und auch das Bloglesen) ziemlich wenig Zeit. Meine zwei neuen Teams im Cevi sind grandios und machen den Aufwand fast vergessen. Zudem habe ich im 2008 das erste Mal Lehrabschlussprüfungen abgenommen, was ebenfalls ziemlich gut gegangen ist.

Das Umbauen und das Einziehen in die eigene Wohnung hat leider viel mehr Zeit gekostet als zuerst angenommen. Inzwischen habe ich mich jedoch gut eingelebt und bin (auch zu meinem eigenen Erstaunen) noch nicht im Chaos versunken ;-)

Viel gearbeitet habe ich natürlich auch sonst. Tilllate macht ganz schön Fortschritte: Anfangs Jahr haben wir Trevi abgeschlossen in dem wir einen grossen Teil der Applikation neugeschrieben haben, danach haben wir nach 8 Jahren tilllate in ein neues Kleid gesteckt und zum Jahresschluss haben wir im Projekt Jonny dann endlich ein skalierbares Filesystem eingeführt. Tilllate hat wohl in den letzten zwei Jahren gewaltige Fortschritte in Sachen Performance, Skalierbarkeit und Qualität gemacht, die wir im 2009 hoffentlich Fortsetzen können.

Ausserdem hat es im 2008 auch noch ein paar schöne Reisen gegeben: Zuerst eine Geschäftsreise nach Belgrad (eine wunderschöne Stadt, auch wenn der Reisezeitpunkt nicht so ideal war), dann Skiferien im Westen von Kanada und zum Abschluss noch eine Woche in Prag.

Im 2009 werde ich nur noch 80% für Tilllate arbeiten. Meine andere 20 Prozent werde ich Pro Bono als Beauftragter Helferkordination für das grosse Cevi Fest Conveniat arbeiten.

Meine Vorsätze für's 2008 habe ich grösstenteils erfühlt. Die Vorsätze für's 2009 sind diesmal ziemlich einfach:

Mindestens einmal Blutspenden, etwas das ich 2008 wieder einmal nicht geschafft habe.
Mein möglichstes dazu beizutragen dass das Conveniat für alle ein unvergessliches Fest wird.

In diesem Sinn euch allen einen guten Rutsch ins 2009.

Jira status

leo — 2008-12-25T16:03:57Z

After my last post I thought it might be also helpful to publish how many open jira tickets I have to my skype status.

You can get each jira search result also as a rss feed. Your browser does indicate the link to the result as rss. This url might look something like:

http://jira.example.com/sr/jira.issueviews:searchrequest-xml/temp/SearchRequest.xml?&&resolution=-1&assigneeSelect=specificuser&assignee=leo.buettiker&sorter/field=priority&sorter/order=DESC&tempMax=100&reset=true&decorator=none

To call this url, even if you have no valid session, you might add your user credentials at the end. This looks like:

&os_username=$username&os_password=$password

You could now use a xml or rss parser to interprete the returned feed. But for my result even that is too much, I only will count how many items in the feed are. The php snippet to do this will look like:

$jiraRss = file_get_contents($url);
$jiraCount = substr_count($jiraRss,'<item>');	
$jiraMessage = $jiraCount?" and $jiraCount open Jira Issues":"";

There might be a lot of other cool usecases you can simply implement (ticket you currently work on, Tickets closed int the last week, etc.). It's just a little bit sad that there is no REST API for Skype which would be make it easier to change the status between platforms.

Mailstatus in Skype

leo — 2008-12-05T08:59:13Z

You all know the troubles with overflowing inboxes. I'm a bit fan of Inbox Zero and I found a lot of ways to work fast with my mails. I did switch off signaling ingoing mails, I use a lot of filtering and a good folder structure.

But sometimes my own lazyiness get into my way. So I started to put "Inbox Zero" into my skype status if I get my box empty. But after some times I decided to automatised this message.

I do know that Patrice does automated Skype updates with his Mac. After a quick search I found out that on Windows Skype has a COM-Api and they even provide a little PHP Example. With PHP it is also pretty easy so to acess an IMAP inbox (MS Exchange also provide a IMAP access). So I wrote a quick script that updates my Skype-Message:

$mail = imap_open('{mail.example.com}INBOX','leo.buettiker', 'password');

// Create a Skype4COM object:
$skype = new COM("Skype4COM.Skype");

// Create a conversion object:
$convert = $skype->convert;
$convert->language = "en";

// Start the Skype client:
if (!$skype->client()->isRunning()) {
  $skype->client()->start(true, true);
}


while(true) {
	imap_check($mail);
	$number = imap_num_msg($mail);
	$skype->CurrentUserProfile()->MoodText= 
		"Leo has currently $number mails in his inbox";
	sleep(5);
}

This does not only demonstrate how you can overcom your own lazyiness with open comunication and automated tools. It's in my point of view also a nice example what it's possible with PHP outside of the classical website rendering.

PHP Quine

leo — 2008-09-09T10:22:00Z

Ok, Mirko made me again losing a hell lot of time. He wrote a about his implementation of a quine in Ruby. Quines are just programmes that can replicated themselves without opening a file (also not itself, 'cause that would be too easy in PHP). As usual I had to try this in PHP myself. I found the article from Patrick Schneider very helpfully. He explains a quite cool approach with a base64-encoded-dna pretty clear. I just wrote the solution a bit shorter which brought it down to 159 chars (you have to have it all on one line):


<?=($dna='PD89KCRkbmE9JyonKT9zdHJfcmVwbGFjZShjaHIoNDIpLCAkZG5hLCBiYXNlNjRfZGVjb2RlKCRkbmEpKTonJz8+Cg==n')?
str_replace(chr(42), $dna, base64_decode($dna)):''?>

Unfortunately Mirko did not allow my copy-past solution (damn academics!). And for myself the solution with a generator is not too natural, as using another program to generate a quine is probably not like it was supposed to be. So with help of diff I tried to find my own solution:

php quine | diff -u quine -

I still nearly got a knot in the brain (much nicer in swiss german: "chnopf im chopf"). But after some trying I did had a solution which is with 113 characters even shorter:


<?=($a=array (
  0 => '<?=($a=',
  1 => ')?$a[0].var_export($a,1).$a[1]:"";',
))?$a[0].var_export($a,1).$a[1]:"";

By the way, as a nice start for the language of your choice you should look in the messy c2-wiki (although not all solution there might be work).

I'm in ur powerlinez

leo — 2008-08-27T20:20:07Z

The Story

100@facebook

leo — 2008-08-25T20:25:10Z

OK, having a 100 "friends" at facebook is nothing special. Even I have now 100 "friends". Nothing special so far, but I did not add a single one of them, they all added me. After being forced to open a facebookaccount a half a year ago, I decided in a silent protest to use it, but not add anyone unless the send me a request. Unless other networks I add just everybody (as long as he's not a real spamer with hunderts of contacts).

I do not like this crappy, spamy applications which do go in my way and in the one of the usability in general. But it's incredibly how many people do have a facebook account. There are not only the usual suspects (like my internet-save nerd friends) at facebook even my friends from primary school seams to have all an account.

I just want to let you know that facebook is absolutely crazy, no matter if you like it or not. (And for the geek in me, I think I can not help me and will lose a lot of time soon with there puzzles)