Mirmo Dynamics - Geekeries

The 2.0 resume

Geoffrey — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 14:42:00 +0100

With the emergence of new web-based developper tools like Github and Stack Overflow. Building a concrete resume has never been so easy.

If you're French (or maybe there have been attempts as well in other countries but I've not heard of them), and working in IT, you must have already seen those crappy video-resume attempts, so-called 2.0 resumes meant to show off one's mastering of bleeding edge technologies. Why were those attempts miserable failures ? Apart from being ridiculous, they did not demonstrate anything. Anyone can fire up any newbie-friendly video editing software and come up with a video or flash based resume, or even build a dynamic one using PHP, python, javascript or something.

With Github for example, not only can they see the result of your work, but they can see your real work, the actual code you wrote, the project you participed in, the actual code you contributed. In a nutshell, they can truly see what you're worth (that is, technically speaking). Stack Overflow, and LinkedIn Q&A before it, etc, has the same quality. They make you go public.

In an industry where profiles and adaptability matter at least as much as pure skill, having a way to see how people work, what project they get involved in and how they behave with fellow developers is an invaluable resource for recruiters. So here's one piece of advice I'd give to any developer looking forward to being hired: work your numeric identity:

Answer questions on Stack Overflow and/or LinkedIn Q&A
Host your projects on public websites like GitHub or CIA.vc
Contribute to opensource projects (not only it permits you to show off your skill, but you are going to learn stuff as well)

And Don't forget to include them in your online resume through RSS/Atom feeds or direct link to your profiles!

Introducing IPS, a PHP interactive shell

Geoffrey — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 00:03:00 +0100

It's been a while now since I first looked up for an interactive PHP shell. There quite a lot of projects in the wild, such as PHP_Shell, PHPInteractiveTerminal, iphp, phpsh, etc, but none that would actually satisfy me (either they didn't fulfill my requirements or they were only toy projects or...). Until today ! I am very pleased to announce PHPInteractiveShell, a (nearly) full-featured interactive shell for PHP.

Key features include:

Fault tolerant: will not die on fatal errors
Readline support (only history for now)
Multiline support: start your if on a line and finish it on another
Plugins support: easily extend the shell capabilities
Bootstrap support: easily setup an environment inside your shell
Config file support: easily configure your shell behavior

The whole thing is still in beta stage, so feel free to fork it, play with it and report any issue!

Help Symfony: fix one bug per day and win some gifts !

Geoffrey — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 19:31:00 +0200

Today is the first day of the "1 day / 1 ticket" Symfony event.

Starting from today, each ticket you close (or help closing) from this list by either submitting a patch, submitting unit tests, etc will earn you points. At the end of the month, gifts are attributed to people with the most points.

This is a fun and exciting way to help your (hopefuly) favorite opensource project ;)

For more details on rules, please see the official page.

subversion, tags and externals

Geoffrey — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 16:14:00 +0200

It's been brought to my attention today (by my fellow developper hartym) that there is a HUGE problem with tags in subversion.

The problem is very simple, when you create a tag for your project, and that your project uses svn:externals (quite a common situation), externals in the tags ARE NOT FROZEN. Which means that, if you checkout your tag at a T time, and an external gets modified at T+x, a checkout at T+x will not be the same than the one at T.

Wow.

I'm going to seriously consider switching to git.

SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 1005 Can't create table '*' (errno: 150)

Geoffrey — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 15:18:00 +0200

You may or may have not already stumbled upon this rather obscure error message (no, I'm not starting a serie on obscures error messages). Well the first thing to think when you encounter this is your foreign keys. This message generally denotes a failure in foreign keys creation, for example when the two columns you are trying to link are not of the exact same type (that is, you can't link an integer(4) to an integer(11)).

Now what if you are absolutely certain that your two columns are of the same type ? I just had the problem with this piece of doctrine schema (simplified for example purpose):

Media:
  columns:
    image:           { type: string(255), notnull: true, unique: true }

ExplorationMission:
  columns:
    probe_image:         { type: integer, notnull: true }
  relations:
    ProbeImage:          { class: Media, local: probe_image, foreign: id, onDelete: 'SET NULL' }

Can you spot the problem ?

It's rather obvious when you know it, but I spent rather some time cursing mysql in vain. The point is that there is a major logic error in this schema. it declares the probe_image as NOT NULL while it gently asks the FK to set it null on delete. See ?

Hope it saves some frustration :-)

Ajax query failing unexpectedly ?

Geoffrey — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 18:14:00 +0200

I was gently doing some ajax black voodoo when I came upon this obscure-ish error in my firebug console:

Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x805e000a [nsIXMLHttpRequest.open]"  nsresult: 0x805e000a (<unknown>)"

What the fuck I though. And then after some (useless) firefox rebooting, I decided to ask the all-mighty Google.

No shit, he said, I know what you are talking about, and thou shall find more informations at this place, and to point me to this thread, where you can read the following:

AdBlock Plus was killing it HAH!

And then I disabled AdBlock Plus, and exactly as the writings told, it worked.

Rewrite rule to add missing www

Geoffrey — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 19:30:00 +0100

  RewriteEngine on
  RewriteCond %{SERVER_NAME} !^www\..*$
  RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ http://www.%{SERVER_NAME}/$1 [L,QSA,R=302]

From the manual, using %1 as a back reference from the RewriteCond in the RewriteRule should work, but it didn't on my installation. Weird.

Rebooting the iphone without touching the screen

Geoffrey — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 11:46:00 +0100

Yesterday, I had a bug with my iphone that prevented me to use the touchscreen. Weird. No problem I though, I'll just reboot the damn thing and it'll be fine. Except you need the touch screen to turn the iPhone off. After a few manipulation and frustration, I found out that you can actually reboot the iphone by holding the power button and main button simultaneously for a few seconds. Handy heh.

Charset detection with python

Geoffrey — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 12:30:00 +0100

I was looking for a way to easily determine a file's charset when I stumbled upon the Universal Encoding Detector. Just wanted to share it.

Installation:

$ wget http://chardet.feedparser.org/download/chardet-1.0.1.tgz -O - | tar xz
$ cd chardet-1.0.1
$ python ./setup.py build
$ sudo python ./setup.py install

Usage:

From a python console:

>>> import chardet
>>> chardet.detect(open('/path/to/your/file', 'r').read())
{'confidence': 0.98999999999999999, 'encoding': 'utf-8'}

Nice !

[Pub] Monitoria: track your websites downtime

Geoffrey — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 22:40:00 +0100

Monitoria is a web service developped by some friends of mine and designed to help you track and minimize downtime on your sites. Excerpt from the homepage:

Monitoria is a website uptime monitoring service designed to help you detect website downtime which can mean lost revenue and profits.
The worst thing is customers who may never return to your website again if they experience difficulties opening your website.
Register now and take control over downtime today!
Let Monitoria monitor your website 24/7/365 and alert you immediately upon your website accessibility, availability or performance problems.

And because you're smart enough to read my blog, here is a 20% discount coupon code: phpmafia20-87361.

PHP's april's fool

Geoffrey — Sun, 26 Oct 2008 00:13:00 +0200

http://wiki.php.net/rfc/namespacese...

wait, we're not April 1st ?

Mass vim file opening reloaded

Geoffrey — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 21:20:00 +0200

Thinking about it, the snippet I posted earlier was a bit silly as vim can open by itself multiple files way more efficiently. The only benefit from my script is that I don't have to type the --servername and --remote-silent-tab.

So let's add some usefulness ! First, when I need this script, it's often that I first grepped the files, and then decide that I want to edit them all. From this point of view, having to pass them as arguments is not that handy, so we'll add a way to pass them via STDIN.

Also, what if I want to send them to another vim server ? We'll add this ability too.

Here is the resulting script:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# set a default SERVERNAME
SERVERNAME="ash0"

# look for files on stdin
if ! [ -t 0 ]; then
  FILES=`cat /dev/stdin`
else
  exit;
fi;

# now let's check if we want a specific vim server
if ! [ -z $1 ]; then
  SERVERNAME=$1
fi;

# we can now open the files
/usr/bin/gvim --servername $SERVERNAME --remote-silent-tab $FILES

Tada !

You can now do the followings:

grep foo | sendtovim
grep foo | sendtovim grep0

Mass vim file opening

Geoffrey — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 19:40:00 +0200

Remember my old post about vim and rox-filer ? Well I've got one tiny and silly addition to it now, I can mass open files from any shell command line, with this little script placed in my ~/bin/ (don't forget to chmod +x):

for i in $*; do
  /usr/bin/gvim --servername ash0 --remote-silent-tab $i
  sleep 1
done;

The sleep 1 is necessary as vim does not seem to like being flooded with files.

Example usage:

sendtovim `grep foo *`

Opens in vim all files containing "foo" in the current directory. Who said handy ?

Note: I know have an updated and useful version of this script

The Eight Irrestitible Principles of Fun

Geoffrey — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 23:57:00 +0200

http://www.eightprinciples.com/

(via pmog)

La Défense / Puteaux a pied

Geoffrey — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 11:51:00 +0200

J'aime beaucoup google maps, et pour fêter ça, et à cause des travaux sur le tram qui coupent la circulation entre la défense et puteaux, j'ai fait une map avec le trajet optimal (je pense) entre le parvis de la défense et la station de tram de puteaux.

Voilà c'était la minute je kiff gmaps.

Rename directories to lowercase

Geoffrey — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 15:35:00 +0200

Using a single (and somewhat simple) shell line, you can rename any directory to its lowercase version.

for i in *; do lcase=`echo $i | tr A-Z a-z`; if [ ! -d $lcase ]; then mv $i $lcase; fi; done;

Viva el chell !

Apache and mod_rewrite to subdirectories

Geoffrey — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 18:17:00 +0200

Naneau just poke me with a little problem he had with mod_rewrite when trying to rewrite to a subdirectory. Imagine you've got the following setup:

Apache's document root is /document_root/
You application's bootstrap is /document_root/public/index.php

You could come to the following rewrite rules quite easily:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ public/index.php/$1 [L]

And you'd be horribly wrong.

The problem here is that when you hit / on your server, mod_rewrite will populate %{REQUEST_FILENAME} it to /document_root/, which obviously fails the !-d rewrite condition. By the magic of DirectoryIndex, you'll eventually hit /index.html (or whatever your directory index is set to), and there we go for another rewrite magic. At this point, things get a little messy, and if you're like naneau, you'll end up crying while rolling on the floor and calling for help on irc (that's quite a set of hard things to achieve at the same time).

The solution is not that simple, and actually, I've not found a fully satisfying solution yet (although naneau is satisfied with the partial solution). The quick hack is to simpy remove the !-d condition. The obvious drawback is that any existing directory will get rewritten, but you'll be able to access the files inside it. I'm still working on a more complete solution, but as it's not my main concerne for the moment, it'll wait a bit (unless someone posts a solution in the comments).

Symfonians, un site pour les maestros en herbe

Geoffrey — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 11:06:00 +0100

Les utilisateurs du framework symfony ont désormais leur cafet' dédiée pour aller prendre un ptit café ! Pour résumer, symfonians se propose de réunir la petite communauté symfony autour de fonctionnalités aussi conviviales qu'utiles, telles que la création d'un profile développeur symfony, des offres d'emploi, ce genre de choses quoi. Le projet est chapoté par NiKo, ce qui au moins est un gage de bonne qualité.

Zend Framework 1.0.3 PEAR package

Geoffrey — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 23:50:00 +0100

Just to say I packaged the 1.0.3 version of the zend framework on the phpmafia pear channel. It's a bit late I know, but at least it's here. Please note that I already have been notified of a problem regarding the Zend Locale's xml datafiles and that I hope to have worked out a solution for the next release (1.5 if all goes well).

Ubuntu est chez Dell

Geoffrey — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 12:21:00 +0200

Je ne sais pas si c'est récent ou non, mais toujours est-il qu'hier j'ai remarqué sur le site de dell france la posibilité d'acheter un ordinateur dell équipé d'Ubuntu Linux. L'initiative est vraiment sympa, d'autant plus que le matériel proposé me semble tout à fait abordable: on arrive à une configuration desktop équipée d'un core duo et d'1 Go de ram plus un écran 19 pouces pour moins de 600 euros (livraison comprise). J'achète.