i.justrealized

Well here it is, my typical .gitignore file for every project. This doesn’t change much. Specially it is written for Yii Framework and CakePHP:

Continue reading “My gitignore file for Yii Framework” »

Does your /etc/hosts file look like this?

Every request I made to gladlyCode.local takes 5 seconds to resolve to my local Apache server. Something was wrong!

If it does and you’re on Mac OS X Lion, you should change your VirtualHost names to something else. It turns out that Mac OS X Lion no longer looks up /etc/hosts first when you try to lookup a .local domain since are technically reserved for Multicast DNS (MDNS), or Bonjour. Starting Lion, it will lookup through MDNS first, and after the 5 second timeout, it checks with /etc/hosts.

This is at a cost of developer productivity and I have to change all my .local domains to .internal.kw.sg which is a domain name I own. I figured that if it is a domain name I own, it will never clash unknowingly. I changed ‘gladlycode.local’ into ‘gladlycode.internal.kw.sg’ and point it to 127.0.0.1 now. Now testing gladlyCode no longer takes 5 seconds per request (ridiculous!).

Alternatively you can use another top level domain (TLD) instead of .local and the common ones such as .com.

The reality with most projects is I typically work with origin master only. Only 10% of my projects is doing actual branching. (Yea, there probably should be an improvement on that figure.)

Here’s how to merge origin master by default.

You never have to see the following message again:

Every web developer uses his/her set of preferred tools. Here’s mine:

• Text editor: SublimeText 2, because it loads fast and I swear by its open by file name feature
• Computer: MacBook Air 13″, a decent screen size with good portability. I like working at cafés and this gadget fits my lifestyle.
• Browser: Chrome 18 or 19. I lost track of Chrome’s version, comes with Chrome is the excellent debugger I cannot live without.
• CSS generator: Less, because Less can be compiled by JavaScript on the client side. It’s easy to get started developing.
• Database engine: MySQL InnoDB.
• Database browser: Sequel Pro, never found a replacement for this. I’ve been using this for 3 years, by far the best.
• Revision control: Git or SVN. My vote is to Git but my company is still on SVN.
• Image editor: Photoshop. Embarrassingly I am one of those that will just launch Photoshop to make PNGs with alpha-transparency. There are probably better tools out there but I can’t get used to them.
• Programming languages: PHP for web development. JavaScript or Ruby on scripting automation. I still use Expect for a bunch of server-side tasks, I cannot move away from that still.
• Web server: Apache for development. It’s all because of PHP’s xdebug. My colleagues use .htaccess often too. I use nginx for production usually.
• Load profiling: Seige, it’s simple and reliable.

Other tools include:

• LiveReload 2 has been extremely convenient and it has been part of my workflow for months. I never looked back.
• Bash alias lets me quickly navigate through the trenches of my messy directories. I also use it to pull for Git quickly.

Oh you murderer, but let me assist:

This kills all ssh processes. I use this often to kill all my ssh tunnels. It works in Mac OS X Lion as well as Ubuntu/Debian Linux.

As we put more and more into programs, debugging becomes time consuming. This quote is particularly true:

As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn’t as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs.

– Sir Maurice Wilkes

This is more for my own reference. This is my development computer’s httpd-vhosts.conf. I don’t suppose anyone would find this useful: Continue reading “My Apache Virtual Host file” »