Now, I’m still a newbie in using Git, but I did use CVS and SVN over the years. I won’t bore you with the technical details which I may not know exactly.

I used Git recently at GeekMeet24 (and pushed Calin towards it too ) and looking back I see the main advantages as those towards increasing productivity:

1. Get up and running fast.

You NEED some kind of revision control. If you’re not using one for even a small project you’re not really a good developer.

Sadly, there still are developers not always using revision control, but my view is that they find their current solution too cumbersome/hard to set up for any small project and that’s why they don’t use it.

In Git this means going to a folder and executing “git init”, I dare you to configure a svn repository faster.

2. Work disconnected

While it’s hard to find a place without an internet connection these days, and some of us carry our 3G modems everywhere with us, it’s still good to know you don’t need “the server” for every little thing you do. It also makes Git faster but really the biggest advantage of being able to work offline is the next one:

3. Be more confident/agile

In SVN for example, all your commits/branches go to “the central server”. This automatically makes you commit and branch less because you either are not confident to show your half-finished work to your colleagues who have access to the repository; or because you don’t want to clutter the central branch list with many experimental branches. The result is less information about the progress of the project, about what changed in what order and maybe even losing some work or source code.

With Git you can continue to commit early and often, locally. All the change/progress information is preserved but you don’t need to push to a central repository. This makes you more confident in yourself (since you’re only committing) locally but also in the end you have much better information about the code. You’re also using branches more effectively because you aren’t afraid to do anything locally and can organize yourself better. And if just one of the other developers wants to look at your unfinished work, he can just pull the changes from your repository, no need to bother everyone.

I think this is one of the best “features” of Git but also the one which really requires a change in mindset and not only technology. Sadly, technology is the easiest thing to change.

To continue our training in Git and to start to teach others I have already proposed to Valentin Bora, Horia Dragomir, Calin Don and Mihai Oaida that we should hold some presentation/workshop on Git at the next GeekMeet in Timisoara. Feel free to add any suggestions

Now for the longer version..

So this past weekend ( 26-27th of February ) I participated at GeekMeet24. Everyone gathered, teamed-up, and did their best to end up with a good web application at the end of the weekend.

I was involved in the Freeconomy project, meant as an easy way to share or give away unused items. Social-sharing you may call it, so of course we built a social app on the Facebook platform

The Freeconomy team was: Teo (original idea) Calin (programming), Alina (copywriting), Cristi (design) and Me (programming).

It was a very full two days (12 hours in each day actually), with lots of discussions, lots of coding. Sure, it was somewhat tiring but in the end we all learned a lot and felt better for the experience.

What I did:

Programming in PHP, using the CakePHP framework and working with the Facebook API. So mainly things which I don’t do usually, but I think that’s the best part. I learned a lot of new things during the development of the project.

The more special roles I consider I took are:

- hosting provider: I set up a subdomain, vhost, and anything else needed so we could have the application online as fast as possible. This is a must to fully test how the application will behave in a real environment.

- git advocate: not that I know git very well or that Calin took a lot of convincing, but I feel it helped us a lot.

What went well:

We communicated without problems and everyone shared their opinions. That’s always good in any process, not only software development.

From the programming side, we weren’t afraid to refactor/rewrite anything.

Maria Diaconu kept “bugging” us to FOCUS! Although my reaction at the moment didn’t show it, I know it helped all of the teams.

What difficulties we encountered:

Most difficulties were encountered with the Facebook platform. Not that the API isn’t good, but it’s just a lot to take in at once.

Also, I usually prefer to test everything locally but with a Facebook app there’s some things which really must go through Facebook for you to see how they will behave. This also somewhat hindered a fully-parallel development process.

We didn’t finish everything we set up to do but that was to be expected. We’re still working on the application and will have more updates soon.

I’ll probably add more information as I remember it…

On the organizational/logistical side the whole team of GeekMeet24 were great.  The space was big enough for all the teams, we had all the necessary conditions and were very well-fed ( Thanks KFC ). KFC, Pizza, Cola, Power sockets, nice company, we had all of them.

Also, great thanks to Radu Ticiu from the Timisoara Software Business Incubator for giving us the space and the right conditions to work in. I don’t know if we could have found a better place anywhere else and hope to enjoy more events there in the future

Some personal conclusions which I’ll take to the next similar project:

- Always use revision control and set it up as fast as possible. Git of course is the fastest and easiest to set up so it’s a clear winner for small of time-constrained projects where you don’t want to waste even an hour configuring SVN or something else.

- You can’t build a web application locally, always have some remote server configured. You especially want to avoid the problems that it works on your machine but not after deploying to your hosting environment.

- I’m gonna be more organized.

These groups are usually tied to a geographical location or at least a specific network, so a useful feature of the applications they use is IP authentication.

Why would a company want to use IP authentication? The good points are:

• They have their own network (VPN included) and they want easier authentication. You usually need only a username and to have the right IP address for this to work.
• They want increased security: Restricting use of their account to specific IP addresses.
• The service they provide is based on geographical/network location: This is true for libraries mostly but also for companies. Everyone who is at a computer in the university’s library has access to the online services the library has subscribed to.
  • Also, increased security: The users don’t need to be given any passwords or other kind of access. They just need to be physically present in the library and they have access. They also cannot steal or pass any passwords to someone else.
  • Less management overhead for the institution: They don’t need a username/password for every person, they don’t need to check every person. If someone is in the library/company they are presumed to be trusted already, checked by some physical security checks.
• Transparent for the user.
• Similarly to security tokens, it’s authentication by something you have (the IP in this case), usually more secure then authentication by something you know or who you are. An IP also can’t be stolen as easily as a security token.

So of course there are a lot of advantages but also some bad disadvantages:

• Not everybody has a static IP address/range.
• Management overhead: Someone still needs to add/check the IP ranges for specific users. IPs (version 4) are not that user-friendly for non-technical people. Let’s not even think of IPv6 which just looks wrong (complicated) for a lot of people
• IPv4 versus IPv6: At some point you will have to support both which means some development/testing effort. I know for example that I will have to change the code in my applications to correctly handle IPv6… but have others even tested with IPv6?
• Good for large institutions: They usually have a large reserved IP block or a gateway with a static IP.
  • Bad for large institutions: They usually have a large reserved IP block or a gateway with a static IP => It’s a lot harder to filter users. If the whole university has the same IP block and you only want to allow access from the library it might not be as straightforward as you think. Same with a single gateway: you give access to some part of the company, you give access to all of it.
• IP portability: If you have people working on the road they either have to connect to the company VPN (which might not always be possible) or do their work without access to the applications authenticated by IP. Bad luck for people using mobile internet devices and always connecting from different IPs.

The future will bring some changes in this area. The future will bring IPv6 as a requirement for all applications so people will re-evaluate IP authentication.

With IPv6 you will not need as much NAT and gateways isolating everything. Even internal computers will have their own IP addresses so limiting the access to certain users will be much easier.

Maybe some will even give up on IP authentication when they look at an IPv6 address and ask “what the f*ck is that?” and move to something more user-centric (well..user’s machine/browser centric) like SSL Client Certificate authentication.

I for one still like IP authentication because of the transparency for the user. But I would not force anybody to remember/manage lists of IP addresses.

My current idea: Make authentication by hostname. You don’t type an IP address in your browser so why should you when giving some user access to your application? Dynamic DNS services have been along for quite a while and with CNAME records you could have hostnames like “johndoe.salesteam.companyname.com” always pointing to the laptop of John from the sales department. And you don’t even need to know if he’s in the company, he’s at home or if he’s on the road using a mobile internet connection. And this still offers the ’something you have’ guarantee, since the domain (and thus any subdomains) will be owned and administered by the company.

One of the simplest and nicest authentication mechanisms based on hostname/dns I’ve seen is the XMPP(Jabber) Server Dialback protocol, check it out for a good read.

Some questions sounded like: “I’ve got this xml processing thing I need to do, what would be faster?” and then enumerating SAX,DOM,etc…but mostly SAX versus DOM.

Of course they are VERY vague about the processing they must do, so it’s similar to a XY Problem and I just want to hit them with something hard.

Disclaimer: I don’t want to say anything bad about my coworkers, they are great usually, but it’s the small things that I get annoyed about.

So how do we treat such a problem?

First: Stop talking and start communicating, explain what you are trying to do avoiding any hows for now. You might be on the wrong path from the beginning.

Second: Do you really have a speed problem? I once had a data processing step which took around 14 hours to complete. Since it worked just fine, always gave good results and I had to run it every 6 months I really consider it was fast enough. Sure, when I knew I was going to have to run it a couple of times in the same month I took a couple of hours to make it run two times faster. But otherwise I wouldn’t even have thought about making it faster.

I usually try to automate/optimize something when I had to do it manually/slowly at least two times and I know a third time is coming. Or when actually writing an automated tool and running it is quicker than doing something manually.

Third (but likely first when thinking how to do something): There is no silver bullet when parsing XML.

Be a programmer and realize that everything is a compromise. It all depends on what you’re trying to achieve. XML is one of those cases where you really need to define how you want to look at an XML file based on what you want. So just a few examples:

• you want to count characters in an xml file: you would be rather stupid not to just open the file as text and start reading it character by character (assuming you have no entities and know the encoding, as I said..compromise).
• you want to count elements/attributes in an xml file: all the information you need is provided by a SAX parser, so why use anything else? It’s also the fastest and safest method (now considering you do have entities and weird encoding )
  • You want more control over the flow/speed of parsing, use StAX (Streaming API for XML). SAX is a push-parser, StAX is a pull-parser.
• you want to get information from some elements selected by weird conditions: assuming the weird conditions depend on ancestors/descendants/attributes and something else. You will have to create a DOM, no other way. How you create the DOM and which kind of DOM is debatable. If you say SAX is faster go on, try keeping track of all the context by yourself, reinventing the wheel and missing your deadline. If you’re really good with SAX you’ll end up with your own DOM implementation in the end and kick yourself. Of course, not all DOM implementations are created equal, I kind of like Saxon’s TinyTree for speed and low memory consumption.
  • Side note: The DOM API sucks, has always sucked and everybody knows it. If you want to easily understand/modify your code later on do yourself some good and use XPath
• you want freaky conversions from one dtd to another, weird processing, special output: Go the XSLT/XSLT2/XPATH/XQUERY way and laugh at stupid Java programmers struggling with their DOMs.
• and no, I will not discuss JAXB because I hate being considered a java-specific person, but if you are you should look at it.

And just to be very impartial, if you’re getting your XML from something built also by you, then really really think if XML is the good choice. Although I specialize in XML, I feel so good when I can convert somebody who was thinking of using XML to JSON

</rant>

“}

Money, fame, fortune(not the same as money), the opposite sex, tough challenges, even good Karma.

But one that really stands out for me as a software(web) developer is this: The Users. I really care about the users.

I often found myself doing these kinds of things in the last few months:

• application goes down – immediately drop ANYTHING (even if it’s a 3:00 AM on a Saturday night) and try to get things fixed.
• updating a production application – if I know there’s going to be even 2 minutes downtime I’d destroy my sleep cycle and wake up before the crack of dawn to make the deployment rather than causing any inconvenience for the user.
• Monitoring user visit/pageview trends and number of users. In my spare and unbilled time just because I want to know users are happy and returning.

Odd enough, I’m usually working on applications for other customers so the end users don’t even know I exist.

I even disagreed on some occasions with the customer because they wanted to do something which I though was bad for the users.

Sadly, I guess in the end it might be some ego-trip, me wanting to have contributed to an application used and appreciated by many people. I even react differently to requests from different clients, favoring the one with the largest user-base.

Is this bad, is it good? I pretty much don’t care, as long as I make a lot of people happy by giving them a good application.

La Multi Ani!

PS: Pe cand la un vin/bere?

Mi-am amintit că aveam și un domeniu .ro, deathy.ro și am zis să văd dacă pot să-l recuperez și folosesc la ceva.

Nu mai știam nici de unde exact l-am cumparat dar m-am dus direct pe site la rotld. Văd acolo administrare online a domeniului ceea ce nu exista când mi-am cumparat domeniul.

Îmi incerc și eu norocul cu recover password, bag domeniul. Primesc pe adresa de mail parola.

Pană acum placut surprins.

Urmează login și văd că pot schimba nameserverele, nimic prea surprinzător. Dar pot și adauga host-uri directe pe domeniu ( aka ns.deathy.ro când deathy.ro nu avea nameservere puse ).

Update-urile de nameservere și host-uri au fost la fel, surprinzător de rapide.

Dacă mai bagă și înregistrare cu taxă pe an și scapa de domeniile vechi blocate deoarece sunt “pe viață” chiar nu voi mai avea motive să-i înjur.

PS: Mi-am dat seama că urăsc să scriu cu diacritice, dar mai încerc…

In the spirit of sharing all my recently read/bought books you can find on My Shelfari Page. And I also added a shiny widget to the sidebar

Just this evening I started by change to read a story from Clive Barker’s Books of Blood (Son of celluloid) and even thought I didn’t want to, I couldn’t take my eyes off the page for at least half an hour.

I love reading and I love good books. Currently, except for technical things, my favorite authors seem to be Clive Barker and Seth Godin. Odd combination of course, but I like diversity

Got any good book recommendations?

What do most of us do with those kind of ideas?

• You either completely forget about them or ignore them for their insanity
• You write them down in a little black book of things you might do if/when you have the time. And of course you don’t ever do them.

I say: post them out there for everyone to see!

I was in the second group for quite a while during high-school. I thought ideas had a big value and wouldn’t tell them to anyone. I even thought my source code was a state secret and wouldn’t show it to anyone.

I’m over that. Ideas don’t have any value, the implementation is where the real fun/work/value is. And even in implementation I’m sad to say the technical part is not the most important.

So share your ideas on twitter, on your blog, anywhere you can. Maybe you’ll find people interested in collaborating with you on it. Maybe someone will have the time to implement it and if they’re successful they’ll buy you a beer later on.

To eat my own dog food I’ll post any random ideas I have on my blog/twitter, starting with the rest of this post.

Random idea: “pidgin plugin to automatically expand any short urls you receive. ( makes me wish I knew c+gtk+pidgin now ).”

Details: I hate the opacity of short URLs. At least for security purposes I’d like to see the real link of something someone sends to me on messenger. There’s already Long URL Please for the browser but usually you get a lot of links on any instant messenger things you use. I didn’t yet find a plugin for pidgin,yahoo messenger or others that does this. (They could even use the Long URL Please API for what I care ).

Random idea: “job posting site that automatically crawls/lists your open-source project contributions ”

Details: I probably saw something similar online but the idea popped into my head while reading about the Hacker Fair. So going on the same idea that developers should show/present their skills a good way would be to show for a person all open-source software contributions they made. This shows their interest, they coding style, what kind of software/issues/bugs they like and so much more. You could get all their commits from GitHub or other repositories of oss software projects, get their mailing list posts from mail-archive.com or something similar. You could even make it as an API for other job posting sites to use. It’s good because it shows actual contributions by the people you’re thinking of hiring, not what they wrote on their CV.

Will be posting other random ideas in the new “random_ideas” tag, but can’t say when because they’re random

Even added as mailto for your parsing convenience.

Yes, it’s an experiment and the only failure would be to not get any spam. Like that could happen for any publicly displayed email address

The interesting bit is how fast and much it will come