If you have a max-width set and need to disable it in a cascaded style, you need to set it to none rather than auto i.e.:

img {
    max-width:100%;
}

#some-other-selector img {
    max-width:none;
}

This sounds obvious (and it is really), but because you usually use width:auto to override a previously specified width, I found myself inadvertantly doing the same with max-width and it took a while to realise what I’d done.

Googling didn’t turn up much, but after digging around I discovered that the “TeamCity Web Server” service was in a “Disabled” state. Attempts to do anything with it gave me the message “This service is marked for deletion.”

With the help of this StackOverflow answer, I quickly figured out that I’d started the upgrade process with Windows’ Services viewer open. For whatever reason, this kept a hook into the outgoing TeamCity service which couldn’t be fully uninstalled as a result.

The solution was simple – close the Services window and retry. The installation completed without any further issue.

Whilst this is a bit of an edge case, the fact that the TeamCity error message didn’t directly reference the “TeamCity Web Server” service didn’t help. A clearer message would have sped up the diagnosis.

I promised those I spoke to this year that I would post a list of links on my blog as a follow-up to find out more about web development. I should stress that this list is by no means exhaustive; I put it together quite quickly and there’s plenty more I could have included. For example, whilst I’ve tried to include links relating to a range of technologies, inevitably there’s more about the areas I have more experience with. Hopefully though it can still provide plenty of reading material and food for thought to help in evaluating whether web development is a subject worth investigating further as a potential career or perhaps just as a hobby.

I’ll try to update the list from time to time when I think of more (suggestions also welcome via the comments). I’m also hoping to follow this blog post up with some further thoughts on choosing web development as a career.

Without further ado, here are the links:

Programming Languages / Frameworks

• HTML5/CSS/JavaScript – Open technologies at the heart of the web – learn these first!
• Node.js – Increasingly popular serverside JavaScript platform
• Ruby – Widely used
• Ruby on Rails – One of the most popular web frameworks, built on Ruby
• Python – A good starter language, often taught on uni courses etc.
• PHP – Been around a long time and still widely used, though not considered too cutting edge these days
• ASP.NET – Microsoft’s web platform, used a lot in the enterprise (see also http://asp.net/ and http://msdn.com/)
• Java – Mostly found in the enterprise, not a good choice if you want to keep ahead of the curve!

Online video/interactive training

• Treehouse – Web design & development
• Codecademy – JavaScript courses (other subjects on the way)
• CodeYear – Learn to program in a year (part of Codecademy)
• TekPub – Screencasts on a range of topics, some of which are free
• PluralSight – Large library of videos for a range of technologies (though with a bit of a Microsoft focus), not free but reasonably priced
• appendTo – jQuery/JavaScript training
• NodeTuts – Node.js screencasts
• RailsCasts – Ruby on Rails screencasts

(e)Books

Look out for deals of the day from most of these – they tend to have an ebook or two available each day for around £7-£10 (see my Twitter list covering many of the ebook publishers).

• O’Reilly – My favourite, some great JavaScript books such as Douglas Crockford’s “Javascript: The Good Parts“
• Manning Publications
• The Pragmatic Bookshelf
• Apress
• InformIT

Resources

• Move the Web Forward – One stop shop for keeping abreast of web standards and getting involved in the community
• jQuery – Most popular JavaScript framework for rapid web development
• Twitter Bootstrap – UI framework that makes it really easy to get a good UI up and running very quickly
• Google Reader – RSS aggregator – subscribe to blogs and news sites and have all articles brought together in one place to save having to check each site manually
• TweetDeck – Useful Twitter client for monitoring topics and lists of accounts to help breakdown the wealth of information that flows through Twitter

Databases

• MySQL – Most popular open source relational database server (free)
• PostgreSQL – Another popular open source relational database
• SQL Server – Microsoft’s SQL database, common in the enterprise (free cutdown editions available – Express and Compact Edition)
• MongoDB – Popular open source “NoSQL” database (free) – an alternative approach to “traditional” databases (has pros and cons)
• CouchDB – Another popular NoSQL database

News

• Hacker News – Anything and everything of interest to a techie
• Reddit Programming – As above – see http://reddit.com/r/LearnProgramming/ and other related sections also
• DailyJS – JavaScript/Node.js news
• Ruby Inside – Ruby news and tutorials
• Techmeme – General tech news, usually one of the first places you’ll find the big stories
• Twitter – One of the best ways of keeping on top of everything – many blogs tend to post on their Twitter feeds when new articles are posted, plus there’s an endless stream of useful links being shared

Help

• StackOverflow – Q&A site for developers with specific problems, usually related to specific source code
• Programmers – Q&A site for programmers with higher-level conceptual problems

Mailing Lists

• JavaScript Weekly
• HTML5 Weekly
• Ruby Weekly

Podcasts

• Herding Code – Weekly podcast on a range of topics
• Boagworld – Longest running web design podcast
• The Changelog – Weekly podcast on the world of Open Source
• .NET Rocks! – .NET
• Hanselminutes – .NET/Windows focus
• NodeUp – Node.js
• 5by5 – A number of podcasts on a range of topics

Web Hosts

• Heroku – For Ruby, Node.js, Python, Java and more (requires understanding of source control – see below)
• AppHarbor – For .NET (requires understanding of source control – see below)
• WebHostingTalk – Great forums to help find/discuss any type of web host

Jobs

• StackOverflow Careers
• CoderStack
• CW Jobs

Source Code / Version Control

• Git – One of the most popular version control systems out there
• Mercurial – Similar to Git, slightly easier learning curve
• Github – The most popular source code host, based on Git
• BitBucket – Supports Git and Mercurial

There are a number of implementations available for different platforms, and the purpose of this blog post is to highlight a feature in dotless – the .NET implementation – which I’ve had to call on occasionally but often forget about in the interim, so I’m hoping this will stop me from forgetting

From time to time (when needs absolutely must) it’s necessary to use the proprietary filter attribute to accommodate IE (much better if you can use something like CSS3 PIE but like I say, sometimes needs must). For example:

.some-class {
    filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Shadow(Strength=15, Direction=0, Color='#000');
}

However, because of the abnormal syntax this involves, it causes parsing issues with dotless. I’ve read about a number of ways of working around this, but the only one I’ve found to be properly reliable (e.g. including the ability to use variables within the filter) is the use of dotless’ formatString function (which appears to be undocumented).

This has a similar signature to String.Format i.e. it takes as its first argument a string containing placeholders where values need inserting ({0}, {1} etc) followed by an argument for each value to be substituted. So using the above example, your CSS would look something like this:

.some-class {
    filter: formatString("progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Shadow(Strength={0}, Direction={1}, Color={2})", @strength, @direction, @color);
}

Or perhaps more usefully, making use of a mixin:

.some-class(@strength = 15, @direction = 0, @color = '#000') {
    filter: formatString("progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Shadow(Strength={0}, Direction={1}, Color={2})", @strength, @direction, @color);
}

Obviously formatString can be used for much more than this particular scenario, it’s usefulness isn’t restricted to working around annoying proprietary CSS attributes that really are way past their sell by date…

I got the following exception (where <URL_TO_GIT_REPOSITORY> is a placeholder I’ve substituted for the original URL):

jetbrains.buildServer.VCS – Error while loading changes for root <URL_TO_GIT_REPOSITORY> #master {instance id=43, parent id=3}, cause: ‘git fetch’ command failed.
stderr: The repository at directory ‘D:\Development\Infrastructure\.BuildServer\system\caches\git\git-4D05D25B.git’ cannot be opened or created, reason: The specified directory D:\Development\Infrastructure\.BuildServer\system\caches\git\git-4D05D25B.git is already used for another remote <URL_TO_GIT_REPOSITORY> and cannot be used for others (<URL_TO_GIT_REPOSITORY> ). Please specify the other directory explicitly.

What this essentially seems to be saying is that it can’t checkout changes from my remote Git repository because its local repository is currently tracking a different remote repository… which just happens to have the same URL! This didn’t make any sense – why was it thinking there were two different URLs here when they were clearly the same?

Well the eagle-eyed amongst you may spot that there is actually a subtle difference between the two reported URLs – the one in brackets has a trailing space after it. Turns out that I was setting the VCS root URL via a build parameter and had accidentally left the trailing space in there for one of my build configurations, giving me two different values in theory, even though to a human eye they looked the same. Clearly TeamCity doesn’t trim whitespace from VCS root URLs, otherwise it would have normalised them and treated them as one and the same.

Needless to say, removing the trailing space prompted everything to spring back into life.

Silverlight IO.FileNotFound_FileName exception

I couldn’t find any evidence of people getting this problem before, the MS page it pointed me to was typically useless. The only suggestion I came across was that it might relate to diskspace having run out, but neither the Mac nor the external fileserver this file was being loaded from were low on space so that ruled that one out.

From a process of trial and error I managed to track the problem down to the folder these files were stored in which, whilst it appeared perfectly normal when viewed on a Mac, when accessed via Windows showed up as gobbledygook. Creating a new folder and copying all the contents over did the trick – the file could be selected and uploaded as before.

Clearly something went very screwy deep down in the OSX filesystem with that folder, though I have absolutely no idea what it might have been. Maybe I missed something really obvious (I have no experience with Macs to call on), but hopefully by bumping the number of Google results up to 8 I might one day save somebody a bit of time

No command 'rvm' found

I’d installed RVM as a single user using the following command:

bash < <( curl https://rvm.beginrescueend.com/releases/rvm-install-head )

The next step involves adding a line to your .bash_profile file (which in the case of Ubuntu is .profile, although the actual change needs to be made in .bashrc):

[[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && . "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" # Load RVM function

One thing I was warned about during installation was the presence of a return statement in the above file, which I was instructed to refactor into an if statement (I’m assuming this is standard on Ubuntu as my installation is fairly clean):

WARNING: you have a 'return' statement in your .bashrc, likely this will cause untold havoc.
This means that if you see '[ -z "$PS1" ] && return' then you must change this line to:
if [[ -n "$PS1" ]] ; then
... original content that was below the && return line ...
fi # <= be sure to close the if.
#EOF .bashrc
Even if you use zsh you should still adjust the .bashrc as above.

I duly made this additional change but eventually discovered I’d made a key mistake; the closing ‘fi’ statement needs to come before the new RVM line, not after it. Maybe this is a no-brainer to most people, and I know it does refer to the original content in the above instructions, but as somebody without a great deal of Linux experience, it wasn’t particularly clear to me which way round these lines should be, and the matter was further compounded by guidance I found on blog posts and forums that had the RVM line inside the if statement.

So if you’re having issues getting RVM to run, double check .bashrc and see if you’ve made the same mistake I did. Don’t forget to reload your profile after making any changes:

source .profile

When attempting to push to a git repository over HTTP, you may experience a “broken pipe” error along the lines of the following:

Counting objects: 14466, done.
Delta compression using up to 4 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (3746/3746), done.
error: RPC failed; result=22, HTTP code = 400
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly
Writing objects: 100% (14466/14466), 104.13 MiB | 31.34 MiB/s, done.
Total 14466 (delta 10927), reused 13812 (delta 10474)
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly
fatal: expected ok/error, helper said '2004�Ȍ/↓/Ɠyb��Nj}↑z��"#7‼.m���+x9`>��☼�uhh_������м5���§��z���W?�^&��͙mQM��a`Q�C���Z'

fatal: write error: Broken pipe

This error occurs when the amount of data you’re trying to push in one go exceeds git’s http post buffer which is defined in the docs as:

Maximum size in bytes of the buffer used by smart HTTP transports when POSTing data to the remote system. For requests larger than this buffer size, HTTP/1.1 and Transfer-Encoding: chunked is used to avoid creating a massive pack file locally. Default is 1 MiB, which is sufficient for most requests.

Whilst most day to day pushes are likely to be under 1MB, if you’re pushing a large repository over HTTP for the first time, there’s a good chance you’ll exceed this limit, resulting in the above error.

Increasing the buffer is a simple config change to set the new size in bytes (a value which will obviously need to exceed the size of the push that’s erroring):

git config http.postBuffer 209715200

One more thing – even after increasing git’s buffer I was still getting fatal errors. If you also host the destination repository, you need to make sure the server it’s running on doesn’t have a limit to the size of POST requests it will accept – a configuration change may be required to that as well. After I bumped up my max request length, everything worked as expected.

Having set up an initial instance, I switched on the multi-tenancy module so as to install a second instance alongside the first one rather than deploying another copy of Orchard in its entirety. When attempting to install some additional modules within the second instance, I ran into trouble – every time I clicked the “Install” link for a module in the gallery, or the “Install a module from your computer” link within the “Installed” tab of the Modules section, I got an “Access denied” error.

I started checking permissions in various places – my Orchard user account, filesystem ACEs, IIS configuration etc. In the end I had to dive into the code to see what conditions were in use.

Turns out that the problem lay with the fact I was using multi-tenancy – module installation (and possibly themes too though I haven’t checked) is only possible from the default instance, not the other tenants. I’m assuming this is because all tenants share the same modules and themes, and only the default instance is allowed to control them to prevent anarchy breaking out amongst the different tenants. My solution was simple – install the module via the default instance and then go back to the second one where it immediately showed up for me to enable.

Whilst I can see some logic to the business rule here, and maybe it’s spelled out clearly somewhere I missed, I think it could be handled better – there either ought to be a delegation feature within the multi-tenancy module that grants tenants the right to install modules, or a clearer error message when access is denied that makes it immediately obvious what the problem is. At the very least the UI for installing a module ought to be hidden when logged in as a tenant to avoid confusion.

Note the above all applies to Orchard 1.2 – if you’re reading this blog post some time down the line, be aware that it may not apply any more.

However, rather than simply getting you to pre-register and then sit tight and wait with crossed fingers, they’ve taken quite an innovative approach. Having registered the .app.cc domain, any domain that’s pre-registered automatically comes with a YOURNAME.app.cc subdomain redirect to the URL of your choice. This will continue to work even if the ICANN bid fails.

Multiple people can pre-register the same domain name but only the first person will get the redirect for that name.

Head over to the pre-registration page now and stake a claim to your app name!