The lead developer at Mosaic, Brighton with a passion for web application development and motorcycles.
Nodester environment variables for sensitive data and passwords
When I began using Cloudno.de recently to have a go at Node.js and CouchDB I stored my username and password in plain text in a configuration file. If you are also looking to get CouchDB going with CloudNo.de then my earlier Getting started with Node.js and CouchDB post may be of interest.
The configuration file was fine for testing as nobody who came across the database login details could do any real damage, but as the project got more interesting I wanted to send it live and these details would need to be kept private.
Thankfully the Nodester platform, which CloudNo.de is using, has environment variables built in and you can use them to store sensitive data such as passwords. It is also good to know that the variables will persist even after the host machine is cycled.
27th October 2011
PHP extension writing: PHP Extensions Made Eldrich
External Link: PHP extension writing: PHP Extensions Made Eldrich
Since writing my 15 Excellent Resources for PHP Extension Development post in September last year Kristina Chodorow of 10gen (MongoDB) has written an excellent four part article on writing PHP Extensions on her blog Snail in a Turtleneck.
The world has lost an excellent and exciting rider in Marco Simoncelli. He was a true character. RIP #58.
You can leave a tribute on the MotoGP website.
Getting started with Node.js and CouchDB
Node.js and CouchDB feel like they were made for each other right from the very first time I used them. With the cradle node package the integration becomes even easier.
Whilst both Node.js and CouchDB are open source with packages for most operating systems it maybe easier for you to start out using a hosted solution such as CloudNo.de (has CouchDB now) or Nodester for example. As far as the CouchDB portion goes there is only one place to go and that is IrisCouch.
With the exception of IrisCouch they are all in private beta so there might be a small wait before you get access.
I wrote the following example code before CloudNo.de supported CouchDB so it references IrisCouch, but the setup is similar.
PHP elephants
How the ssdeep PHP extension came into being
Recently (well in a loose sense anyway) I had the need to build a document bank in PHP for a client at Mosaic. It was a fairly involved application with various public and private APIs for integration into the clients network of websites.
The core PHP code was written on top of the Agavi framework and various PHP libraries for extracting text and meta data from documents. One of the major features the client required was for the system to detect similar files to prevent unintentional duplicates making it into the document bank.
The idea was that this document bank would be the one central resource for all of the documents written and managed by the organisation. Duplicates or near duplicates would of course make this a pointless exercise. So I turned to StackOverflow for some pointers, but came up empty.
After some research and much searching of the web I came across an open source package called ssdeep written by Jesse Kornblum. I found it through reading his research papers; Identifying almost identical files using context triggered piecewise hashing.
Running a sane version of Linux on a Dell Inspiron 2500
I have ended up with a very old piece of hardware and of course the first thing I did was wipe the Windows 2000 installation and stick a few versions of Linux on it. Unfortunately it only came with 128MB of memory from factory so nothing would run very well. The PCMIA wireless card that came with it wouldn’t work with WPA2 under Windows 2000 so an upgrade was required.
£5 later I got a matched pair of Crucial 256MB sticks on ebay so I could try out Linux Mint 6 Fluxbox edition and Linux Mint 10 LXDE. Whilst both worked right out of the box I did have to configure the X11 monitor settings so that it would support the full 1024x768 splendour that the Inspiron 2500 affords you. See the gist I have setup on github for my configuration file and some short instructions on getting it setup.
In the end I decided to go with Mint 10 LXDE as it used a similar level of system resources, but ran more smoothly and of course benefited from being the latest version with full package update support.
I expected to have a load of issues getting the Belkin wireless adapter working, but in the end this distro had all the drivers so need for all those ndiswrapper recipes that are out there. It is running much better than the Windows 2000 OS was as well and benefits from having and running newer versions of all the applications I need.
Of course web streaming of Flash video is somewhat staccato with such a small CPU but it is a perfectly usable web browser and word processor.
I remember watching trains from this bridge when I first arrived in Edinburgh from Australia. It was cold then too!
Children Watching Train, Edninburgh
Photograph by Vishal Soniji
This photo was taken during my visit to Edinburgh as I was on my way to Edinburgh Castle.
Reblogged From nationalgeographicdaily
New version of the Agavi framework support for NetBeans 7.0
Released a new version of the Agavi framework support plugin for the shiny new NetBeans 7.0. Still depends on implementation versions of the PHP-plugin, so if something doesn’t work, please let me know.
Prebuilt NBM available here, source code here.
UPDATE: Even newer version available here. Should fix a null pointer exception.
