Tweetdeck's new logo

Twitter, who bought Tweetdeck in May of 2011 for more then $40 million, is undergoing a lot of changes. Yesterday they launched the new Tweetdeck 1.0. Finally it get’s out of its everlasting beta status. I’ll have to be honest. I really can’t make up my mind about whether or not I like this new direction Twitter is taking. I guess time will tell. (I’ll probably will do another blog post about it in the near future.)

I really use Tweetdeck a lot. It’s easy, fast, feature complete. Since I’m a Linux user, it’s kinda hard to find something for my platform that could replace Tweetdeck. But hey, no problem, Tweetdeck uses Adobe’s AIR platform… right? First of all, in case you’ve missed it, Adobe discontinued the development of Adobe AIR on Linux. While AIR for Linux wasn’t the best piece of software, it surely could run Tweetdeck without problems. But that’s not all, with Tweetdeck 1.0, Twitter also ditched Adobe AIR as it’s runtime platform. Tweetdeck has become a native running application, available for Chrome, Windows and MacOS….. Wait what?! No more Linux?! No more Linux! It’s a goner…

Now what? The solution is actually really simple: The Windows version actually runs fine in Wine I’ve played around with it a bit and really, I didn’t find anything that was broken or not running smooth. So open your Ubuntu/Mint software center, install Wine (if you haven’t done it already), download Tweetdeck for Windows, install it and GO, GO, GO!

Tweetdeck 1.0 running fine under Linux Mint 12 (Lisa) using Wine

If you really hate Wine or, for whatever reason, really are looking for a native Linux solution that is a bit Tweetdeck a like, then I would recommend you to look at the Turpial Twitter client.

Talking about Symfony2

A couple of months ago I started with working with the Symfony2 PHP framework and I must say I really love it I’ve built several applications using it since. But I’ve not been smart at all… I’m still using an alpha version of the SF2 framework, while 2.0.6 is already out in the open. Time to upgrade! Much has changed since one of the first alpha versions release. Mostly for the better I must say and a lot of new addition were made.

One of those additions is the Assetic library, created by Kris Wallsmith (@kriswallsmith on twitter). Assetic is an asset management framework. Assetic enables you to use a variety of third-party tools that will help bring order to your application’s JavaScripts, style sheets and images, at least, that’s what the project description says. To me, it’s currently one major pain in the ass.

Combining and minification of your separate stylesheets and JavaScripts into one file is one of the listed (and documented) examples of Assetic. But is it me or is this broken? Whatever I try I always seem to run into this error:

An exception has been thrown during the rendering of a template (“Route “_assetic_664ddb5_0″ does not exist.”) in /var/www/symfony-standard/src/Acme/DemoBundle/Resources/views/layout.html.twig at line 5.

After working with a lot of documentation and examples, I gave up. Finally it hit me, keep it simple, let’s install the Symfony-standard distribution and try it on the demo it comes with. Guess what?! Same problem!

Let me show you what I did to reproduce the problem. First install the symfony-standard distribution and get it up and running! Easy enough.Then open file ‘/src/Acme/DemoBundle/Resources/views/layout.html.twig’. In this file you will find this follow line of code:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ asset('bundles/acmedemo/css/demo.css') }}" type="text/css" media="all" />

Now read the “How to Use Assetic for Asset Management” from the Symfony2 Cookbook. It tell’s you can let your JavaScripts and style sheets easily combined with Assetic. To do that, you need to change the above line into this:

{% stylesheets
    '@AcmeDemoBundle/Resources/public/css/demo.css'
%}
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ asset_url }}" type="text/css" media="all" />
{% endstylesheets %}

We can’t really call this combining, since there is only one style sheet, but that’s not the point. Now when you try to visit the demo page (in the dev environment), the page is broken with the error I’ve posted above. What is wrong here? I’m on dev right? So the assets should be generated on the fly right? According to the manual it is:

By default, each asset path generated in the dev environment is handled dynamically by Symfony. This has no disadvantage (you can see your changes immediately), except that assets can load noticeably slow.

I’m I really that stupid? Or is it simply broken? I’ve tried it on IRC, no luck. I’ve posted my question on the Symfony2 Google group, no luck either.

The above is the only thing I changed in the Symfony-standard distribution. Nothing else was touched. Assetic is configured in the config_dev.yml to use the dynamic controller:

assetic:
    use_controller: true

And it’s also configured in the routing_dev.yml file:

_assetic:
    resource: .
    type: assetic

To me this all looks fine. I’ve also tried clearing the cache, dumping the assets and installing the assets, no luck either, the error keeps occurring.

php app/console --env=dev cache:clear --no-debug
php app/console --env=dev assetic:dump --no-debug
php app/console --env=dev assets:install web --no-debug

So now what? Who gives me the golden ticket that allows me to fix this problem?

../Frenck

Update: The solution

So @kriswallsmith was kind enough to support me via Twitter. Below the conversation that solved my problem:

kriswallsmith

(Kris Wallsmith)

@Frenck what is your assetic config in config.yml?

On 7-12-2011 19:58:55 from Twitter for Mac in reply to Franck Nijhof

Frenck

(Franck Nijhof)

@kriswallsmith It's an untouched symfony-standard (with the exception of the template). This is (my) config.yml: http://t.co/Dc51IO5v

On 7-12-2011 20:26:27 from TweetDeck in reply to Kris Wallsmith

kriswallsmith

(Kris Wallsmith)

@Frenck you need to add your bundle to assetic.bundles to it knows to scan there

On 7-12-2011 20:26:54 from Twitter for Mac in reply to Franck Nijhof

Frenck

(Franck Nijhof)

@kriswallsmith added bundles: [ AcmeDemoBundle ], problem persists. Also http://t.co/L7Gt2cMD states that all registered by default

On 7-12-2011 20:41:44 from TweetDeck in reply to Kris Wallsmith

kriswallsmith

(Kris Wallsmith)

@Frenck You need to clear the cache to rebuild the router. If you had "bundles: []" that means none were being scanned.

On 7-12-2011 20:55:14 from Twitter for Mac in reply to Franck Nijhof

Frenck

(Franck Nijhof)

@kriswallsmith Wow! Indeed, well thank you! This should be noted somewhere (http://t.co/6hQiPvip). Gonna update my blog :)

On 7-12-2011 20:57:44 from TweetDeck in reply to Kris Wallsmith

kriswallsmith

(Kris Wallsmith)

@Frenck glad i could help :)

On 7-12-2011 20:58:04 from Twitter for Mac in reply to Franck Nijhof

So now you know! If you are having this problem, check your configuration, add the needed bundles to Assetic, clear your cache and voila

Thanks for your quick help Kris!

../Frenck

A couple of days ago, I wrote a blog about my Amazon AWS login issue’s. Apparently, Amazon has some kick ass customer support. Just hours after publishing my blog, I’ve received an email from an Amazon employee explaining how to solve my issue:

Hello from Amazon Web Services,

Firstly, I want to thank you for your participation in Amazon Web Services and also apologize for any trouble you may be having with your account.  We noticed your blog post today where you wrote of having difficulty accessing your data, and we definitely want to get this resolved for you as soon as possible.

We have looked into the issue for you, and see that you may have created more than one account using the e-mail address associated with your account.   We allow users to create multiple accounts using the same e-mail address, but each account will have a different password.  It is possible you may be trying to access an account that does not contain your AWS data.

I can suggest trying to log in using a different password than you have been using most recently and see if this gives you the access you need.

If you still require assistance, please reach out to us via our Contact Us form:

https://aws-portal.amazon.com/gp/aws/html-forms-controller/contactus/aws-account-and-billing

I hope this helps!  Thank you for your time and patience.

Best regards,

Lisa A.
aws.amazon.com

Great isn’t it? Apparently I’ve created two accounts. I still could not log in, nor did I succeed in restoring, my first account. So after a quick email back, that issue is resolved as well!

Amazon, thank you. Really, you guys did a good job on this one.

../Frenck

TURN OFF YOUR WiFi!

This is a message for all you gentlemen out there. If you are a bit like me, then you probably are fucked. Why? Well, according to some scientists, WiFi kill’s your sperm! So, if you are a bit like me, or at least, you have a laptop on your lap quite a lot, then it’s possible you killed a couple of million potential children So maybe it’s time to lay off the laptops.

msnbc.com writes: “In a report in the venerable medical journal Fertility and Sterility, Argentinian scientists describe how they got semen samples from 29 healthy men, placed a few drops under a laptop connected to the Internet via Wi-Fi and then hit download. Four hours later, the semen was, eh, well-done.”

I guess if four hours of using WiFi on your laptop makes your semen well-done, then my balls are incinerated by now

Amazon Web Service

I’ve been using Amazon Web Services (AWS) for almost 2 years now. I use it mainly for hosting static files, on their S3 service, for some off my small websites. I use it in combination with CouldFront to distribute my files around the world. Amazon is doing a pretty damn good job at this. If you are using WordPress I can really recommend using it! Sign up for AWS, create an S3 storage bucket, install the W3 Total Cache plugin in WordPress, configure it and voilà!

I’m not really using AWS massively, my monthly billing statement from Amazon never gets higher than a buck Although something has changed in the last couple of months or so. While my files are still being served, bill’s are send and my credit card is still being charged by AWS, I can’t seem to change or modify anything?!

I can still log in to the AWS console, but can’t do anything. S3 & CouldFront tabs are telling me to sign up first? And if I do anything else, I need to provide my billing information again? What the fuck is going on here? Did they kick me out or what?

Time to check out how good (or bad) the support is @awscloud

Update: Just a couple of hours after blogging this, Amazon contacted me! Read more about it here.

Welome to my (yet) empty blog

Maybe you want to check back later?