Here at Katipo, we’re using New Relic RPM to monitor our deployed Kete applications, to help make things as fast as possible. In order to make New Relic as useful as possible, I’ve been trying out three New Relic RPM features, some available in only the latest versions of RPM, on one of those sites. These recent and little-known features aren’t enabled by default, so I’m going to run you through them and how to set them up in this post.

If you don’t yet use New Relic RPM, you can get a Lite account for free by going to newrelic.com, where you can also test drive New Relic RPM on a real application. (more…)

For those of you who follow this sort of thing, Github shut down their gem building. Thankfully, a newer and easier gem hoster, Gemcutter, appeared on the scene not long before that happened. The idea behind it, for those who haven’t heard of it, is that you manage your own gem building. Gemcutter doesn’t wait for your Gem spec to change before it makes a new gem. You simply build it locally, and push it to Gemcutter, using a handy gem they provide that extends Rubygems ‘gem’ console command.

But Github was building gems for some time, and due to it’s continuing popularity, many well known Ruby on Rails developers and companies switched permanently to Github for their gem building/hosting at the time, so it’s likely that quite a few gems you’ve got installed are from Github.

To help transition over from Github to Gemcutter, Maxim Chernyak wrote a great utility called off_github, which looks at your list of gems, and tells you which ones you’re installed from Github, and whether they can be reinstalled from Gemcutter. It saves a lot of time and effort  than having to do it manually. So here’s how to get started….

(more…)

Stumbled upon this. If you’re going to make a URI (domain or sub domain) with an underscore, think twice. IE7 and IE8 do not support these URI’s when dealing with cookies.

For more details, see this blog post, detailing the symptoms.

http://blog.patrick-morgan.net/2008/09/problems-with-ie7-sessions-not-saved-in.html

When I started on a new Ruby on Rails project at Katipo Communications, I evaluated a range of testing libraries, and decided on Cucumber. It’s simple and has a flexible style of feature testing. For more info about it, see the Cucumber Wiki Documentation. In this post, I’ll detail some of my experiences with it for other developers who are considering using it.

(more…)

In MySQL, there is an easy way to get all index of a particular table.

SHOW INDEX FROM table_name;

But what if you want to list all index’s from all tables in a database so you can find out what you have and where you’re missing some? If you have 20 or more tables it’ll get tiring after a while running the SHOW INDEX command on each.

Thankfully, the information is stored in another table MySQL uses called information_schema. You can get a list of all the index’s, along with the table name and field names, by running the following (change “your_database”).

SELECT table_name, column_name, index_name FROM information_schema.statistics WHERE index_name != ‘primary’ and table_schema = ‘your_database’;

That’s it. A list of what table, what field, and the name that each index applied to. Happy indexing.

When you want to use git on Debian its as easy as “apt-get install git-core”…… or is it? The version on the stable debian repositories (1.4.4) is very old. It lacks many of the features git users use on a regular basis. So how do you upgrade git? Well the simplest approach for getting the most recent version, for those that know how, is to wget the source, unpack, cd, configure, make, and make install. Takes about 5 minutes, and you’re up and running. But what if you don’t know how to compile, or you want to maintain package only install for your system, so upgrading and uninstalling will be easy? Where do you find a newer package?

(more…)

In the previous part of this guide, we created an export script which produced an XML formatted output of the current versions of pages in your phpwiki installation. If you havn’t done that yet, please read the first part of this guide. Now we are going to take that file, and import it into Kete, maintaining as much as the information as possible. We’re going to cover system settings, topic types, extended fields, privacy controls and import synonyms. So lets get started.

(more…)

(the following article and code applies only to phpwiki version 1.1.x and 1.2.x. Previous and future versions of this software use different methods of formatting and so will require changes to the scripts used here)

If you have a set of articles on a phpwiki that you can’t afford to lose, and want to move to Kete then theres a simple two part process you can follow to do just that. Over the next two blogs posts, I’m going to show you just how it’s done.

(more…)

When you upload a file using attachment_fu (http://github.com/technoweenie/attachment_fu), for the most part, the upload will work fine. But there are occasions that the mime type will return something that isn’t useful, such as application/octet-stream, application/x-download or a blank mime type. In these cases, it can refuse to upload a perfectly legit file. Allowing octet-stream and x-download to be uploaded, while possible, does create a certain security (permissions) issue. So how do you get around this without causing any more problems?

(more…)

We at Katipo recently moved our software Kete to Github. But a few existing clients were still tied to the old SVN repository, so we had to find a way to keep the link between them so we could pull changes from git and commit them back to SVN. Using various sources from the web, we were able to do just that. Here’s how… (more…)