mehesz.net :: n:ews

Nutch und Solr

noreply@blogger.com (imehesz) — Tue, 07 May 2013 08:00:00 +0000

If you are not familiar with these tools, in a nutchshell ... :)

Nutch or Apache Nutch is an open source web-search software project.

Solr or Apache Solr is the popular, blazing fast open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project.

I recently had the privilege to build a smaller search engine (meaning a one server setup, nothing fancy), and to make other people's life easier (an maybe mine in the future if I have to do this again) I decided to write this post.

Since online I found more documentation on Solr 3.6 and Nutch 1.6 back in the day, we decided to go with that setup at first. We got everything working, but later down the road we realized that it would be much better in the long-run, if we try to use the newer versions. The lack of documentation available is definitely a nightmare, but the Nutch community is very helpful (I received an answer on their mailing list in about a day every time when I had a question)

I read through many resources, but I think these were the ones that finally gave me a good start, Building a Search Engine with Nutch and Solr in 10 minutes by Andy Todd and Using Nutch and Solr to Crawl the Web by Hugh Lashbrooke. Although it was written using the older systems, I was able to make some tweaks and changes to the Solr 4.x schema.xml file to make it work with Nutch 1.6.

Originally I tried to handle the crawling and the indexing part directly from JAVA, but I kept running into weird Hadoop errors, so at the end, it was just easier to call these natively. Another funky thing is, make sure you set your environment property NUTCH_CONF_DIR properly, otherwise you'll scratch your head why Nutch is not reading your config files. At best, you'll get the infamous: Job failed! error, or most likely ... nothing.

I hope this will help you at least to start your journey on the right foot, and also, I'll attach the config files we ended up using for Solr 4.2 and Nutch 1.6.

Other resources:
- The Seven Deadly Sins of Solr by Jay Hill.
- schema.xml for Solr 4.2
- nutch1.6_config.zip folder for Nutch (make sure to set your NUTCH_CONF_DIR env variable!)

How to use wget to download a website

noreply@blogger.com (imehesz) — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 08:00:00 +0000

I really needed to download an entire website to my local machine, and I remembered how much pain I went through a couple of years ago with browser extensions, so I figured there must be a better Linux tool that I can use for this purpose. And there is:

And the switches are:

--recursive: download the entire Web site.
--domains allowed-domains.com: don't follow links outside allowed-domains.com.
--no-parent: don't follow links outside the directory tutorials/html/.
--page-requisites: get all the elements that compose the page (images, CSS and so on).
--html-extension: save files with the .html extension.
--convert-links: convert links so that they work locally, off-line.
--restrict-file-names=windows: modify filenames so that they will work in Windows as well.
--no-clobber: don't overwrite any existing files (used in case the download is interrupted and resumed).

(Of course I didn't figure out all this obbamaself, this Linux Journal article helped me.)

Gimp 2.8 on Ubuntu 12.04

noreply@blogger.com (imehesz) — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 08:00:00 +0000

I've been a Gimp user for almost a decade now, I use it to enhance my poor photography skills and to create memes of my family members . I also use it to create web-designs alongside Inkscape (although not as often as I'd like to).

If I remember correctly, the old Gimp used to have its toolbars, layers, palettes etc in one window, until one day, all of a sudden (with an update of course), all these little "things" had their own individual window. It annoyed the hack out of me for years, that's why I got realllly excited when I heard that the new 2.8 version will have the option to switch back and forth between window docking style (just like in PhotoStore or whatever that other photo editing software is called ;) ).

Anyhow, of course Ubuntu is a little behind (at least 12.04) so you have to do some little tweaks to get the latest Gimp release.

I also recently stumbled upon Chris Fiedler, who has some amazing tutorials on Gimp. Enjoy.

Google Web Fonts in Ubuntu

noreply@blogger.com (imehesz) — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 02:40:00 +0000

I started play around with Gimp again, and I was wondering if there is a way to include the available Google fonts. And there is!

In a nutshell:

For detailed description and on how to install these on Windows, follow this link: http://www.webupd8.org/2011/01/automatically-install-all-google-web.html

(btw, I didn't try this in Inkscape, but I assume it works the same way)

My little pre-commit hook-script for Git

noreply@blogger.com (imehesz) — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 08:00:00 +0000

I use this little pre-commit script to automatically update the version number on the bottom of my main layout page:

To learn more about Git's hooks system, follow this link: http://git-scm.com/book/en/Customizing-Git-Git-Hooks

Auto TDD - how to automate PHPUnit

noreply@blogger.com (imehesz) — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 09:00:00 +0000

You must be familiar with TDD (Test Driven Development) by now, so I'm not going into details on what that is. (I'll give you a link though: wikipedia)

If you are lucky enough you might have the privilege to develop on a Linux based environment, this little tip might boost-up your TDD process (at least the Unit Testing part). With the following shell command you can automatically check your test results in every 15 seconds! (if you have your tests under a folder named unit/)

So my dev screen end up looking like this (of course it's better if you have a big or dual monitor setup!). Tests are running on the top-left fyi.

And now, thanks to Nickerson, we know to use Sveinbjorn Thordarson's watch utility for Mac OS X to use this on an Apple.

(btw, this is an earlier post of mine from the Yii community, but I thought it's worth sharing)

Eufloria ... mania

noreply@blogger.com (imehesz) — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 01:45:00 +0000

I am definitely not a gamer. I like to create them (more or less), but when it comes to actual playing, I usually get bored in a very short period of time and give up. I enjoy shooting games probably the most when I play against other family members or friends, but since my playing brother is an ocean away, we don't play much anymore. Other than that I really don't play video games. I'm also not a spender, so when I first heard about the idea of pay-what-you-want by Humble Bundle, I was like ... Oooh, YEAH!

One of their featured games was Machinarium, and I purchased that separately a couple of months back. I played with it with my 3.5 years old daughter, and she really enjoyed the cute little robot goofing around.

So when HB (Humble Bundle) 6 came around, I knew that whatever I'll spend, it will be good quality - there is usually 4-6 games in the package and hours and hours of music (which I also like). I quickly browsed through the games, and immeditaly thought that this new game called Eufloria sounds very silly ... Why the hack would I care about sowing seeds anywhere anyway, eh?

By the end of the day of course I gave it a try ... and first the music grabbed my attention. Very relaxing, soothing. I put my new Sony headphones up, and my problems immediately melted away ... haha, ok, not that easy, but the music IS pretty cool. As of right now, I spend at least an hour almost EVERY DAY (but 5-6 nights a week for sure!) trying to defeat the grey matter ... sometimes with no luck at all ... they are just everywhere!!! :/ Can you imagine if I'd spend all this time doing something useful???

ps: I play this on my Android tablet, but I think you can play these on a PC as well!

Legit IE9 on Linux with VirtualBox and VPC (FREE)

noreply@blogger.com (imehesz) — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 23:45:00 +0000

If you are working online making websites or design, fortunately/unfortunately you can not avoid crossing the road of the ultimate evil ... Internet Explorer aka IE. (although we must note, it's getting better and better after IE9).

I used to a) not care about IE, b) download an illegal copy of Windows Virtual Box from somewhere and curse Microsoft in the process. I just recently found this link where you can download different versions of Windows and IE completely legal for FREE from the Microsoft site for testing.

Link: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=11575

If you would like to use a more sophisticated and automated solution for Linux, you can use the following link for more details: http://askubuntu.com/a/190603.

Or you can download them from here: http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools

Sound-No-Sound nightmare on Ubuntu 12.04

noreply@blogger.com (imehesz) — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 23:18:00 +0000

At work I have a powerful machine with Ubuntu 12.04 installed, it is very very fast, but every now and then after a reboot the whole machine froze up, the login screen didn't even show up. I switched over to XUbuntu, because it seemed to solve the problem, but unfortunately after a couple of weeks (and updates!), the problem returned.

After a while a I realized that the machine is not really "frozen", I can switch to terminal mode by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1 (I know, I should've checked that before), and I can actually execute xfce4start, which will bring up the Xwindow system ... with the sound missing. After many hours of googling and some luck, I found a solution and the whole thing can be solved by "simply" re-installing some alsa modules and restarting the machine.

At this point it worked about 4-5 times, and since I only reboot the computer once in a blue moon, it's not that big of a deal ... for me.

sudo aptitude --purge reinstall linux-sound-base alsa-base alsa-utils linux-image-`uname -r` linux-ubuntu-modules-`uname -r` libasound2

Command Line SVN Goodness

noreply@blogger.com (imehesz) — Tue, 01 Jan 2013 12:27:00 +0000

I know that there are a bunch of GUI tools that make your life easier (?) when it comes to source control. But many times, especially on a Linux environment you either don't have the luxury of sweetly designed windows or you are just simply too good to click with a mouse (I'm the second one). Either way, I found the following SVN tricks very useful:

List changed files (modified/deleted/added) between two revision numbers:

$svn diff -r REVNO:HEAD --summarize

M /project/index.html
AM /project/aboutus.html
D /project/underconstruction.html
M /project/my404.html

(Note: REVNO = revision number ie: 123)

List all commits by user:

$svn log --limit 100 --quiet | grep imehesz

r232 | imehesz | 2012-10-11 16:14:22 -0400 (Thu, 11 Oct 2012)
r192 | imehesz | 2012-09-28 16:44:01 -0400 (Fri, 28 Sep 2012)
r162 | imehesz | 2012-09-21 11:00:43 -0400 (Fri, 21 Sep 2012)
r138 | imehesz | 2012-09-19 09:29:40 -0400 (Wed, 19 Sep 2012)

List commits that contain a specific string:

$svn log --limit 150 | grep "BRGHA-1234" -B 2 -A 1

r232 | imehesz | 2012-10-11 16:14:22 -0400 (Thu, 11 Oct 2012) | 1 line
BRGHA-1234 some changes regarding this ticket
------------------------------------------------------------------------

r192 | imehesz | 2012-09-28 16:44:01 -0400 (Fri, 28 Sep 2012) | 1 line
BRGHA-1234 some changes I made on Friday regarding this ticket
------------------------------------------------------------------------

(Note: the --limit is only needed if you have a lot of commit messages. -B 2 gets two extra lines before the string, -A 1 gets one line after the string - it's just useful to see the user who made the commit)

Web Application Development with Yii and PHP

noreply@blogger.com (imehesz) — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 17:46:00 +0000

I consider myself as an early adopter of the Yii framework (forum members around 800, people on IRC ~5). Coming from other PHP frameworks, this tool simply blew me away, and still does after so many years. If I need to create something small and RESTful, I use Yii, if I have to assemble something bigger for the web, I use Yii.

I was very excited when I heard this summer, that the very first Yii book Agile Web Application Development with Yii1.1 and PHP5 written by Jeffrey Winesett, will get a second edition in a couple of months. Jeff is an excellent writer, and a great teacher, so I was really looking forward to his new additions.

You will build a real live (and actually quite useful) application from the ground-up, and you will be assured that you made the right decision by choosing Yii every step of the way.

I'd definitely recommend this book if you are new to the PHP framework-world in general, and even if you are already familiar with the basic foundations of Yii, you'll find something new and interesting.

To buy a printed or electronic copy and for the Table of Contents please visit: http://www.packtpub.com/agile-web-application-development-with-yii-second-edition/book

Apps and settings I install on a new machine

noreply@blogger.com (imehesz) — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 09:00:00 +0000

This is more for me, but could be useful for anybody else

sudo apt-get install terminator vim vim-common vim-scripts git-core w3m vim-gnome gimp g++ make

mkdir ~/.vim

cd ~/.vim

# getting NERDTree for vim

w3m http://www.vim.org/scripts/download_script.php?src_id=17123

unzip nerdtree.zip

# and some nice colors

w3m http://www.vim.org/scripts/download_script.php?src_id=18594

w3m http://www.vim.org/scripts/download_script.php?src_id=18915

w3m http://www.vim.org/scripts/download_script.php?src_id=10162

unzip CSApprox.zip

unzip ColorSamplerPack.zip

mv guicolorscheme.vim plugins/.

w3m http://www.vim.org/scripts/download_script.php?src_id=12566

unzip surround.zip

# surround needs: :helptags ~/.vim/doc

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

# my .vimrc

set t_Co=256

map <> :NERDTreeToggle< CR >

" IMPORTANT: Uncomment one of the following lines to force

" using 256 colors (or 88 colors) if your terminal supports it,

" but does not automatically use 256 colors by default.

"set t_Co=256

"set t_Co=88

if (&t_Co == 256 || &t_Co == 88) && !has('gui_running') &&

\ filereadable(expand("$HOME/.vim/plugin/guicolorscheme.vim"))

" Use the guicolorscheme plugin to makes 256-color or 88-color

" terminal use GUI colors rather than cterm colors.

runtime! plugin/guicolorscheme.vim

GuiColorScheme vc

else

" For 8-color 16-color terminals or for gvim, just use the

" regular :colorscheme command.

colorscheme vc

endif

set smartindent

set tabstop=2

set shiftwidth=2

set expandtab

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

# my .bashrc
alias httpserver='xdg-open localhost:8000 && python -m SimpleHTTPServer'
# run vim as gvim
alias vim='gvim'
# set Capslock as ESC
`setxkbmap -option caps:super`

Download Your Fiddle

noreply@blogger.com (imehesz) — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 09:00:00 +0000

Wouldn't it be awesome if you could just simply download your own code (or anybody else's for that matter) from the famous jsfiddle.net site?

Wait no more, just go to the mehesz.net/dlfiddle site, enter the URL you wish to download and get your code in tar.gz or zip format. Yippeee!!! Christmas came early this year ;)

Minty SSD

noreply@blogger.com (imehesz) — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 01:34:00 +0000

I never personally had an SSD, so I was very excited when I finally got the opportunity to get my hands on one (thanks David). At work we exclusively use SSD drives in our machines, and I am more than impressed with their performance. (stability is a different question)

"A solid-state drive (SSD) is a data storage device that uses integrated circuit assemblies as memory to store data persistently." - from Wikipedia

In other words it means that there are no moving parts, it's noiseless and pretty small compared to other (classic) hard drives. The only drawback at this point is the size, and the price. You can get a 128GB drive for about $100+. I purposely didn't mention the speed, because this is when the fun began (in my case)

So I got this drive, a brand I never heard of Corsair (I'm definitely no hardware guy, but it is the best quality you can get in RAM and SSD apparently!), and these drives supposedly speed up your computer to be 5-10 times faster, and since I'm trying to do some Android development, I NEED SPEED!

I followed the usual steps, erase original Windows, install some sort of Linux (right now it's Mint) by using the default settings for the partitions, which is EXT4. Reboot. .. ... ..... the reboot took about 5 mins, which was usually about a minute, then to login, it was about another 2-3 minutes. .. I was like, what the hack (or WTF)?

Of course I started google-ing for some answers and I ran into videos like on youtube like "Booting Mint linux in 13 seconds with SSD" - after down-voting some of these vids (just kidding) I actually ended up finding a possible answer. Someone mentioned that EXT4 has a different journaling system that will make the hard drive work/write more often, and it's a good practice to choose EXT2 in this case, when you have an SSD.

I re-installed the exact same system, chose EXT2 for the partition, and it worked like a charm. Oh, and yes, it IS fast!

NOTE: Mint was constatnly dying on me with SSD, so I ended up installing Lubuntu.

Also, you can read more about the battle on this Ubuntu forumUbuntu forum threadUbuntu forum thread thread.

NOTE2: so all and all I think I installed different flavors of Linux on this SSD about 8 times, with no success (it was working for a while, but it was unable to boot after a while!) Then I installed WinXP, it was blazing fast and was working properly but unfortunately XP was unable to recognize some of the devices I had in the PC, so I gave Windows 8 a try ... so far it's working as it should.

Super Simple HTTP servers

noreply@blogger.com (imehesz) — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 01:13:00 +0000

Lately most of my work "only" uses front-end technologies, so setting up a "heavy" LAMP stack or even just an Apache server is unnecessary.

Although PHP 5.4 comes with a built in server (you can start it in a terminal with: php -S localhost:8000 ) if for some reason you don't even want to install PHP, you can use Python (it is included in most, if not all, Linux distros, so it should be installed for you by default). Just execute the following command and you should be good to go:

python -m SimpleHTTPServer

Using PWD in command line as a variable

noreply@blogger.com (imehesz) — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 01:14:00 +0000

I ran into an interesting challenge the other day. My project consists of multiple source control repositories (subversion, but it's irrelevant) and I wanted to create some sort of a procedure that I can execute from the command line which would update all these repositories (btw, there must be a better way than this)

I simply created an alias in the .bashrc file:

alias svn.upall='cd /home/imehesz/repo1; svn up; cd ../repo2; svn up; cd ../repo3; svn up'

While this definitely does the job, the problem was, I end up at repo3/ in the terminal every time (of course). It would be nice to stay in the same place I executed the command from ... and this is when the built in PWD variable comes into the picture:

alias svn.upall='start_update_path="$PWD";cd /home/imehesz/repo1; svn up; cd ../repo2; svn up; cd ../repo3; svn up;cd "$start_update_path"'

... and that's it.

How to use PHP 5.4 on Ubuntu (12.04)

noreply@blogger.com (imehesz) — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 15:00:00 +0000

If you are using Ubuntu (most likely 12.04) and PHP, you probably noticed that your version is 5.3.x, even though PHP has published the 5.4 version a long time ago.

It used to be painful to upgrade (I manually built it from source) but I just found this cool repository that makes the whole process trivial. All you have to do is follow these steps:

$sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php5
$sudo apt-get update
$sudo apt-get install php5

That's also important to note, that this repository is not official! So use it with caution.

How to make your SVN command line colorful

noreply@blogger.com (imehesz) — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 15:00:00 +0000

A couple of months ago I published a post on How To Make Your Git Command Line Colorful. Git is (of course) not the only source control system that has this amazing feature.
I still use SVN (Subversion) on a daily basis, and add the colorsvn as soon as possible on a new system.

Download ColorSVN

Preview:

Daily code snippet: Firebug Log Limit

noreply@blogger.com (imehesz) — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 11:03:00 +0000

It's not a real code snippet, but rather an interesting setting I ran into the other day. Firebug is originally limited to show "only" 500 log messages in the console - and while it sounds like a lot, if you are going down the rabbit-whole/tracktrace, sometimes you need a little bit more.

So:

1) open up Firefox and type: about:config
2) search for console.logLimit
3) double click to edit (increase the number to your needs)
4) done.

Now you can send as many log messages as you need.

You can also find other goodness there, such as:
network.http.use-cache - set it false for development.

Google Drive in Ubuntu

noreply@blogger.com (imehesz) — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 14:24:00 +0000

I'm currently using Ubuntu 10.10, but this solutions should work for newer Ubuntu releases as well.

Step 1: Download all the packages that you can find here by Luca Invernizzi and proceed to second step.

Step 2: Add the following package

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:invernizzi/google-docs-fssudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install google-docs-fs

Step 3: Once the installation completed, logout and login again to your Ubuntu Desktop.

Step 4: Now open “Nautilus” and Create a New Folder in your “Home” folder as “Drive”.

Step 5: Access “Terminal” and type the following command

gmount Drive username@gmail.com

(replace the username with your google account detail to access your Google Drive)

Step 6: You must see a prompt for Password, and give your google account password to complete the steps and you must be seeing the Google Drive with your Free Cloud Storage now mounted as a Virtual Drive.

Thanks to Robin C who showed me the way: http://www.dailytut.com/linux/google-drive-ubuntu.html

Daily code snippet: jquery debouncer

noreply@blogger.com (imehesz) — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 14:16:00 +0000

I recently had a lucky day and discovered this jQuery plugin called jquery-throttle-debounce, when I was trying to execute some Javascript code when the user stopped(!) re-sizing their browser window.

Example:

$('input#someid').keyup( $.debounce(250, function{ alert("boo"); } ) );

So this would wait 250 milliseconds before executing the specific function (instead of all the time).

Link:

http://benalman.com/projects/jquery-throttle-debounce-plugin/

#barcampOrlando 2012

noreply@blogger.com (imehesz) — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 02:03:00 +0000

This was the 5th annual BarcCamp Orlando event. As far as I know this was the first time the whole thing was hosted in the "PLAZA". Since I used to live in Orlando I figured I don't need no GPS or Google maps, I can find my way around ... did not happen!!! After the second drive around downtown I somehow ended up at the library and found a parking garage for $6, so it wasn't that bad.

I was running a little late, but since I didn't plan to talk about anything publicly it didn't make much of a difference. I collected the cool looking BarcampOrlando T-Shirt (which I never leave without) and some stickers.

The board quickly filled up with presentations, there were 4 "rooms" (aka separated areas), which turned out to be kinda noisy, but it wasn't unbearable at all.

The good thing about barcamps is that there is no structure, the talks begin at one point (that's a given) and end at another point (that's a given also) ... so there is no opening ceremony to attend to, you can jump right in ... let's do just that:

1)
The first talk really interested me. It said something like: get $25K in a weekend with a Startup. I was like woooo, that sounds cool :) It turned out that these guys actually did WIN funding for their Startup, Not the whole $25K, but some cash with services like 2 month worth of Lawyer hours etc. The whole idea-pitching sounds like a lot a LOT of work. He was talking about a Startup weekend where he had to compete with at least 60 other pitches ... so technically, you have to be really good, or find somebody who is good at it, and go for it. $25K in 3 days!!! They also mentioned SharkTank. (if somebody knows the name of the presenter or their website pls, let me know!)
Also, if you want quick and cheap voice over, check out VoiceBunny.

Steve Litt titled his presentation the Troubleshooter Ninja. He sounded like he really was, and had some key points, but I only wrote down 2 ... sorry :/
It's not how smart you are it's:
- How you operate your brain
- How you organize your knowledge

I've been hearing about 4 days work weeks for many years now, and it sounds like an awesome thing, but unfortunately only maybe a handful of companies are doing it. (I'm talking about 32hrs/4 days NOT 40hr/4 days). The presenter had some interesting ideas, like don't change your deadlines, calculate them as you normally would and surprisingly (he says), the deadlines will be met, even though you "seemingly" work less. He was talking about how on Friday you are already tired (and Monday you are just worming up) etc. How the moral and turnover of your employees will change (for the better).

LUNCH BREAK

Some robots were presented also!

Vahid Rujevic wrote his own (open source) 2D game-designer system called Pavilion. I no nothing about gaming, but it seemed pretty cool. He was dragging and dropping some "boxes of code" and made circles move around, fall down by gravity and jump up. Sorry, this was one of those "you had to be there" moments :)

I've been a podcast-junkie for many years now, listening to shows about comic books, Rails and PHP programming, Standups, Photography etc. Hack, I'm the producer of the Yii Radiio podcast! I never really thought that you can actually make money (real $$$ money!) to do this full time. And here is this guy, Lou Mongello, who is doing a podcast about Disney World(!?) - WDWRadio.com (and he is not on Disney's payroll!) used to be a lawyer somewhere up north, sold his house, brought down his fam to Florida and bammm ... built-up a business starting with a podcasts, now interviews, videos, tours etc.

Went to a refresher course of photography 101 (how to place your subject(s)):

Rule of 1/3 s
Leading lines
Simplify
Photoshop the stuff out <--- all comes down to this ;)

2 high-school kids did this site in Rails in a weekend. Sometimes I just wanna go and bake some bread ... http://shareaprayer.org

When people in the past were talking about jQuery mobile, I was always "yeah yeah, I know jQuery it's probably the same". Nop. It's nothing like that at all. The presenter built up a simple little (but functioning) mobile app in a matter of minutes! Seeing this, I don't understand how come there are still sites outhere that do not have mobile versions!? It is actually more like HTML, you just need to know the right tags, you don't even have to know jQuery or Javascript at all ... scary.

Good times, I hopefully will make it next year again ...

Sponsors:

http://envylabs.com, http://avectra.com, http://hostdime.com, http://stackframe.com, http://tawlk.com, http://izea.com, http://looknewmedia.com, http://voxeo.com, http://merchspin.com, http://barcamptour.com, http://floridatechnologyjournal.com, http://orlando.colabusa.com

ps: FOOD WAS AWESOME!

ps2: just because I love these guys :)

Twitter vs/or Facebook

noreply@blogger.com (imehesz) — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 17:30:00 +0000

Drupal Camp Florida 2012 (Day 1)

noreply@blogger.com (imehesz) — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 21:03:00 +0000

Although I haven't used Drupal for quite a while now, I still got up at 6am this Saturday and went down to Orlando (Winter Park to be exact) to attend the 4th annual Florida DrupalCamp (#FLDC). The Drupal community is probably the most vibrant PHP community and I really like to hang out and meet new people even though I'm not an every-day Drupal developer anymore. Anyhow, the weather fooled me a little bit with the temperature but it was a nice sunny day nonetheless.

There was a nice long line to signup in the cold and grab your swag, but it was worth it. I also found Joe Nammour from Nammour Designs, send him some work if you can.

9:15 The opening session was running a little late, probably because this was the largest Drupal gathering I've ever seen (~300 people) Mike Anello introduced the sponsors and told us how the Florida Drupal Camp has grown over the years. We also took a group photo, which was something new.

10:00 The first presentation I saw was about VirtualBox in Drupal and Lamp environment by Dan Eveland. I don't know much about virtual machines, but I dabbled the idea of having a ready-to-use development environment at any time. Dan also showed us how to use phpVirtualBox which you can use to manage all your virtual environment from a browser.

10:45 Mobile Titanium development and Drupal by Stephen Barker. I was really excited about this particular course, because I'm trying to force myself to turn towards the mobile scene a little more. It definitely got better over the years for sure, you don't have to code in C or C++ or whatever else cellphones use these days (Objective C or Java ;) you can simply write your application in Javascript by using Titanium (an IDE/Compiler tool built by AppAccelerator.com) and it will generate the desired source-code for you.

One thing I noted, you really have to type a lot to make things work. (you should also always use JSON to transport data instead of XML) - You can download the code from https://github.com/DigitalFrontiersMedia/DrupalServices...

12:00 launch - I totally forgot what I ordered for lunch, but I had a grilled chicken sandwich. If I ate somebody else's I'm really sorry. One of the great things of these camps that you have the ability to meet new people. This time we sat down and enjoyed the company of Spider Byte Design, a young but passionate Drupal consultancy firm from South Carolina. Best of luck to them.

13:00 The keynote speaker was Michael Haggerty who was talking about Drupal as a Social Platform. He also mentioned the CRM Core module. Oh, and that coding is all about the beer! :D

14:00 If I see David Rogers in the crowd and I know he has something prepared, I always try to make sure I see his talk. He is like a programmer/standup comedian. One day, when I grow up, I wanna be like him. His presentations are full of useful information, I always learn something and I always have a funny story to tell.

This time he was talking a lot about project management, agile methods (of course), testing, server setups, backups and source control systems aka robots that shoot lazer from their eyes. (sorry, you had to be there for this one :P ) He also told us about the concept of Planning Poker. You can find him @at_the_x.

At this point I had to leave, because I had to drive back to JAX, but I didn't miss my ice-cream treat.

See you all in 2013.

BarCamp Tampa Bay 2011

noreply@blogger.com (imehesz) — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 17:33:00 +0000

We still live in Tampa so I didn't have to drive for 3.5 hours to get here, which was good. The Barcamp was held at KForce's HQ in historic Ybor city, just like last year. Nice facility for an event like this. I met up with Joe Nammour, a very good buddy of mine, who is a first-time camper and running a one-stop Drupal shop in Tampa. I know he had a good time.

Around 9 o'clock we gathered together and the biggest surprised was that Bob Buckhorn (YES, the mayor of Tampa) showed up and gave us a very uplifting message about how the city can grow with us and he will be helping us along the way. Thanks, Bob.

I also ran into Derek Bender who recently launched a new site called Impressto where creative people can buy, sell and share their work. Nice work as always.

so ...

9:00 - I sat in to see GazelleLab's presentation on mentor-ship and how important it is when you start a company. The internet was kinda sucky (wouldn't be a real Barcamp without it ;) so I couldn't show my new game I Know My Quotes. Well, maybe next time.

9:30 - I chose the SASS talk even though I already have a basic understanding of this technology, I wanted a little refresher and Matt Cowley delivered a high quality, entertaining "show" on SASS and Compass.

10:00 - Ryan Dorrel from AgileThought told us how he and he team built-up the company, how they put their employess first (yes, in front of clients most of the time) and how they've been voted to be the "best place to work" many times in various magazines. At this point I was pretty much ready to apply, but unfortunately they don't have a ping-pong table ... so that's a no then :)

10:30 - I was waiting for this presentation the most. A launch of a website is always exciting. We Are Tampa Bay.com will eventually collect local tech enthusiasts and companies into one place in a presentable manner. It runs on Ruby on Rails btw.

11:00 - I've been using git for about a year now, so I figured this presentation won't really have anything new to show, and fortunately I was mistaken. PRESENTER gave us a very nice overview why this source control will slowly but surely take over the world and walked us through how a git flow would work in "real life".

11:30 - I know Nick Petite from ThinkVitamin Membership (soon to be Treehouse) so I was absolutely sure this presentation will be high quality and it was. I know that Nick will show this presentation in the UK next week (month?) at a conf, I'll not go into details :) Let's just say he was talking about Responsive Web Design.

12:00 GOOD FOOD from Jimmy John's :) thanks for sponsoring ...

1:00 Right after lunch we gathered together with Ryan Price from Florida Creatives and ended with a somewhat heated argument over why there are NO talents in the Tampa area (hiding?) and why entrepreneurs have to go out of state or to India to get jobs done. It was interesting nonetheless.

2:00 Just as I mentioned the high quality of Nick Petite's talk, the same can be said about James Hopkins's Node.js and Socket IO presentation and it definitely gave us a little peek into the future. Who would've thought this 10 years ago about JavaScript, eh :)

2:30 So I promised my wife that I'll leave at 3 so at this point I just randomly picked a topic. As an application developer I don't really pay attention to SEO as much as I should (should I?) but this talk completely changed my view. I never really knew that blogging can change lives and make (this much) money unless you are a serious blogger with high profile contacts. And it's totally not true!

The audience was wowed many times(!) by this dude, he didn't even have any slides or cool toys. He is using Wordpress to power all his (hundreds?) blogs where he talks about ... stuff. From Jersey Shore to Shoes, Fashion, Electronics etc. And that's all he does. Anyhow, keep an eye on this guy Ryan Magin.

My achievements that day

pat/touched Kevin Hale on the back (Wufoo)	started following Miss Destructo ... (on Twitter!)