Like all hosted services, you should never depend on one provider to both manage your data and also back it up. I have 20 years of email in my Gmail account (that I migrated from previous providers) and I’d be pretty sad if I were to lose it.

As some users have discovered the hard way, if your Gmail account gets compromised and your email is deleted, you’ll likely never get it back unless you have an off-site (outside of Google) backup.

One great service that does this for you is Backupify and their free plan will backup mailboxes up to 1GB. I personally love cloud data but prefer local backups so I use Getmail which is a little Python script to download my email. Here’s a more detailed post on how to setup Getmail by Matt Cutts. That said, I have my script backup my entire mailbox (instead of just my inbox) and I use IMAP instead of POP so here’s my getmail.gmail config file:

Don’t spend your time surfing for available domain names, you’ll tear your hair out and pick a worse name as a result. Focus on good names for your business or product. Then when you have the name focus on a domain name for it as a secondary concern. You will build your brand recognition, loyalty, and company name through your actions and products, not through your domain name. That’s just as true for websites as it is for brick and mortar businesses.

Nothing worse than having a friend tell you “you’ll want to check out cordkd, it’s spelled c-o-r-k-d-dot-com, leave the e out”. Corkd (a site I loved while it was in business) may have owned a catchy dot-com name but everyone has to explain how it’s spelled. Even a Google search for corked doesn’t turn up the corkd.com website in the top couple results because the actual word corked is not in their name or on their website. Corkd’s business name was a liability.

Compare that with a great product name but compromised domain like this: “you’ll want to checkout campfirenow-dot-com”. Campfire is a memorable product name and the domain is easy to spell. If I forget the “now” a quick search for campfire on Google returns campfirenow.com as the first result because the word campfire is actually in the product name. When people link to it, they refer to it as “campfire” so the search engine findability is covered. Campfire and campfirenow.com are assets.

Eat My Words has great guidelines for naming your business, disregard them and name your business campr because the domain is free and you’ll have yet another obstacle to overcome. Follow them and you’ll be a happy camper!

Here’s how we went about using a private S3 bucket to store our Git repository of Chef Recipes. Thanks to this post on using JGit to publish to S3 which got us started, the key difference is we wanted to use a private S3 bucket and it took us some experimenting to figure out how to update an existing Git repo (via fetch and merge) from S3.

Download jgit.sh, rename it to jgit and put it in your path (for example $HOME/bin).

Setup the .jgit config file and add the following (substituting your AWS keys):

vim ~/.jgit

Note, by not specifying acl: public in the .jgit file, the git files on S3 will be private (which is what we wanted). Next create an S3 bucket to store your repository in, let’s call it git-repos, and then create a git repository to upload:

In the above I’m using the s3cmd command line tool to create the bucket but you can do it via the Amazon web interface as well. Now let’s push it up to S3 (notice how we use jgit whenever we interact with S3, and standard git otherwise):

Now go somewhere else (e.g. cd /tmp) and try cloning it:

When it comes time to update it (because jgit doesn’t support merge or pull) you do it in 2 steps:

Sometimes you inherit a non Ruby based web app written in PHP, Perl, Java, C#, or Python and you want to create an automated functional/acceptance test suite to minimize the amount of manual QA you need to do. Selenium is a great tool for doing just that and at Common Sense Media I created the Selenium Continuous Integration Runner to make it easy to run Selenese based tests from your Continuous Integration Server such as Hudson, Cruise Control, or Teamcity. That said, Selenese based tests leave something to be desired in terms of readability and maintainability.

The Ruby camp is often at the forefront of great testing frameworks with Aslak Hellesøy often leading the charge with innovations like RSpec and Cucumber. I’d read and played around with Cucumber on Rails based apps and was loving the concept of english language specs that are actually executable as well. But when my friend and former colleague Chris Kimm mentioned that the testing group at his company was using it to test their Java application, I started to get excited as that was the problem I was about to try and tackle at VolunteerMatch.

However, getting the project structure in place required a little help from the Cucumber mailing list and in the hopes of saving others the time, I’ve published the Standalone Cucumber Test Suite to Github. It’s simply a Cucumber project designed to test a non Ruby web application with a sample search.feature that uses Google search as the basis for the test. It uses Capybara with the Selenium Webdriver on the backend but you can also switch it to use Culerity or Webrat if you don’t want it actually firing up a real browser to run the tests. Fork it or download it to start testing your existing website with Cucumber!

One of the jobs of a good programmer is to make their code readable and in this case by naming the variable sum it’s obvious what’s going on to the right so if you can simplify the anonymous function or use syntactic sugar to reduce the amount of code there’s a good chance you can improve the readability as follows:

Then even if the programmer reading the code is coming from another language and doesn’t know :+ or _+_ you’ll still have improved readability because they certainly understand how a sum is computed and can move past the line of code instead of having to read 3-4 lines of a for loop for something as simple as a summing operation. I love the balance of being very concise with the simple stuff so that I can be more verbose with the complex stuff, whereas in Java even the simple stuff is often extremely verbose.

There is of course the extreme of making your code too concise. Look no further than write-only languages like Perl to see where too much conciseness and obfuscation can lead to unmaintainable code.

This example is only trivial and somewhat contrived but I find that newer languages like Ruby and Scala give you significantly better tools to elegantly dial up or down the conciseness than Java or C# resulting in less code + more readable code = easily maintainable code.

As an example, I used just about every conciseness trick in the book I knew of when composing my submission for the 3rd Ruby Challenge’s Shortest Path Algorithm and I only discarded the ones that I thought obfuscated the intent. I like to think the reason my submission won was precisely because it was concise while still being readable. Writing that same algorithm with the same level of readability in Scala would be easy but in Java it would have tripled the lines of code hurting readability somewhat.

Following the instructions I then ran gem list -d rails noting the install path for newer gems was now /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8 whereas the older gems that cleanup was failing on were in /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8. So the solution was to run cleanup once while overriding GEM_HOME as follows:

sudo sh -c 'GEM_HOME=/System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8 gem cleanup'

That allowed cleanup to remove the older gems in the old path and now sudo gem cleanup is once again working.

I’ve been doing some iPhone and iPod Touch development and if like me you’re used to web development in languages like Ruby, Java, and Python, the learning curve to build a native iPhone app in Objective C is quite steep. Since my applications are online (in that you need to be connected for them to be useful) I was pysched to find a much easier way using two great open-source tools:

iUI consists of Javascript/CSS/images that allow you to build a mobile version of your app that looks and feels just like a native iPhone app

PhoneGap lets you create an iPhone application (that can be submitted to the app store) that displays a framed mobile version of your site

To build your iPhone app:

1. Make an iPhone/iPod Touch friendly version of your site with iUI (which your users can access in mobile safari)

2. Bundle it as an iPhone application (so the user has an app store version they can install) using PhoneGap and submit it to the app store. What’s even better is that with PhoneGap you can also target Blackberry and Android devices.

As a web developer I’m not sure how they could make it any easier for me, sweet! Plus you get the double exposure of the app store or when users visit your site with their iPhones they get the mobile version of your site.

To that end one of the tools I want to give a shout out to is the MySQL Performance Tuning Primer Script. You download and run it against a production system (that has preferably been running under normal load for a day or two so that it’s gathered stats). It’s a read-only script so you don’t need to worry about it changing anything but it makes some great recommendations about which tuning parameters may need adjustment. Here’s a snippet from from a production server:

KEY BUFFER
Current MyISAM index space = 173 M
Current key_buffer_size = 1 G
Key cache miss rate is 1 : 1003
Key buffer fill ratio = 7.00 %
Your key_buffer_size seems to be too high.
Perhaps you can use these resources elsewhere
…
…
…

It’s no replacement for a DBA but if you want to get a somewhat sane my.cnf going for your particular application it’s a great place to start!

Selenium Selenese Continuous Integration Runner

on GitHub in the hopes that it will save other people time when trying to get their Selenese tests running from a continuous integration server. It’s very simple but one thing I battled with was that I had to patch the selenium JAR to get it to work with Firefox 3.0. It should work fine in any continuous integration server regardless if it’s Hudson, Cruise, Cruise Control, Bamboo, etc.

The functional testing products I’ve used that drive a real browser include Test Complete (commercial), Selenium, and Watir. I think all 3 do a good job but one thing I like about Selenium is that it’s dirt simple to get a user productive with the Selenium IDE Firefox plugin. However, that benefit is also the most limiting factor of the Selenium IDE which is that to be able to re-open tests in Selenium IDE you have to save them as Selenese (which is the most limited of the testing languages that Selenium supports). Still, I think Selenese is a reasonable choice for a lot of organizations that need a moderately sophisticated functional test suite.

Update 7/8/2009: With the latest batch of contributed patches standalone migrations now works just like Rails migrations
Update 12/26/2008: I switched standalone migrations to use a Rakefile instead of a Ruby script.

In my work managing websites I end up working in Ruby, Java, and PHP. In everything but Rails managing the schema requires rolling your own solution. As a result I’ve started using Rails migrations in non-Rails projects to manage the schema. It’s not much code but I figured others might benefit from it so I created a little Github project called standalone migrations.

It’s based on Lincoln Stoll’s blog post titled Stand-alone ActiveRecord migrations and David Welton’s blog post titled Using Migrations Outside of Rails.

Assuming you have Ruby and Gem installed on your machine, here’s how to use it:

gem install -y activerecord rake mysql
wget http://github.com/thuss/standalone-migrations/zipball/master (or fetch it using git)
unzip it, and mv to something like my_non_rails_project/db
cd my_non_rails_project/db/ (or wherever you put it)
cp config/database_sample.yml config/database.yml
vi config/database.yml
./new_migration some_user_story
vi migrations/*_some_user_story.rb
rake db:migrate (this applies your newly created migration)