The icon of Death

Two weeks ago the inevitable happened.  My drive crashed.  On a mac, when it can’t find the filesystem, you don’t get a geeky message like you do on windows explaining what is wrong.  What do you get? This precious icon to the right.  Apparently that is the universal icon for ‘you’re screwed’ with an Apple-esk design to it.  After much googling about this – it seemed that icon meant one of two things.

1. The problem could be simply the mac couldn’t find the startup disk, and you just reconfigure it using the iOS boot disk. Or – more likely
2. You’re screwed, and your filesystem is so messed up – you might want to go back to paper and pencil and use a real folder like the one in the icon for storage.

To make a long, depressing story short, my drive was toast, and I replaced it.  Out with the bad drive, in with the good drive.  We have an amazing disk image install process here – so all I had to do was plug in a network connection and power, hold down N and power it up.  The MacBook Pro then went out and found the image on our network and through a wizard – installed Lion (an upgrade even).

Data recovery efforts were grim.  I created a Knoppix CD and hooked the dead drive to an external SATA rig and attempted to get some specific code and MySQL databases off. These particular items were not in production anywhere, and were pretty important to me.  I was able to scavenge some code with no errors, but the databases I needed were all corrupt.  I’m guessing because they were opened when the drive hit the fan.  So I have code, but no database for it.  Yes, I can reconstruct the database from looking through the class files, determine the field names, etc … fun.

Enter Chrome.

Remember Chrome? That’s what this is all about  (we’ll come back to my database reconstruction efforts in a bit)  During the re-setup process of my laptop I had installed Chrome.  I prefer this browser over all others because its fast and doesn’t feel bloated like Firefox does (which used to be my favorite browser).  I now have a new appreciation for Chrome – because I learned something I had no idea about.  With a fresh iOS installation obviously I didn’t have a backup of anything, much less my bookmarks.  I open Chrome, sign into Gmail – and a little while later, I notice all of my bookmarks are there.  All organized like they were before the crash.  Not only that, but any site I had told to “Remember Me” for logging in – it did.  Very cool.  I even texted a friend and asked  - ‘How does chrome have all of my bookmarks!?’

I’ve since learned that Chrome is linked to your google account (or can be).  You can configure whatever you want stored by accessing Chrome Preferences .. or by entering chrome://settings/browser.  From here select Personal Stuff from the left, and you can connect / disconnect your google account

You can also choose to manage your synced data on Google Dashboard – this webpage (once you log in) allows you to stop the sync and delete the data that has been synced, along with a host of other google settings not related to Chrome.

Clicking advances settings gives you options to choose what you want synced.  From here you can also choose to encrypt all data that is sent – default is ‘encrypt passwords’ and change the passphrase – might be a good idea – depending how paranoid you are.

Database reconstruction

We’re back to my database woes.  Because I had the ever so controversial autofill checked to sync my forms, and since I originally hand built the MySQL database using PhpMyAdmin – when I got MAMP all set back up – I went in to build my database and tables.  Imagine my surprise when it did a drop down suggestion when I typed in the database name.    I created a new table and when I started entering field names again, it listed suggestions from when I had done it before.  Very cool.  So I was able to fudge my way through creating my tables again because I had some paper notes about the origianal names for things.

But what about the seed data I hand inserted using PhpMyAdmin?  Yep – that auto filled for me as well, the same data I had to think hard about when I put it in, just auto-suggested for me as I typed away names, and values.  So in a little less than an hour, I had my database and seed data setup and my salvaged code working.

Thank you Chrome and Google!

Code it right
theCodeDog

When you set up Quickbooks, you choose a similar industry – and it goes off and sets up accounts and some of the ledgers, etc (stuff I don’t care about). Anyway I got to thinking how the functions of what I do are similar to a lawyer.  THEN I had an amazing idea that I think I’ll implement for 2012 – and we’ll see how it goes (I’ll get into that after these lists) -

Here’s how I’m similar -

• I AM AN EXPERT AT WHAT I DO
• I charge hourly for my expertise and work (unless its a bug fix)
• I take on projects, small and large
• I meet with potential clients to determine if I can help
• I advise people with my expertise (whether they follow it or not isn’t my issue)
• I manage multiple projects at once
• I research and learn all the time
• I create structured documents
• Occasionally I build and implement templates
• I reuse items from other projects
• I rarely produce a physical product
• success is determined by the client, peers and typically the public
• everything I do is to help the client
• I have a pretty damn good success rate

How I’m NOT like a lawyer

• I’m honest and not seedy (I know not all lawyers are bad)
• I’m 100% up front with pricing and charges and my clients ALWAYS know what to expect when an invoice comes
• I don’t charge for phone calls
• I don’t charge for quick tasks that take more effort to create the invoice than the actual work performed
• I probably do not charge enough (thus don’t overcharge) for the work I do
• I don’t have an assistant to do my dirty work (book keeping / phone calls, research, etc)

There is one thing that a lawyer does that is good that I don’t currently do, and it hit me and I’m curious if it will fly.  Keep me on retainer.  I looked it up and here’s a quick definition for a retainer -

A retainer is a fee paid to an attorney or other professional in advance, for services. Often, retainers are paid monthly, based on an estimate of the amount of work to be done for the client each month.

A retainer might work like this: You would pay your attorney $500 a month for legal services during that month. If you have a question or need a matter handled, it comes off the retainer amount. If you don’t use the full amount of the retainer, in most cases you would not get a refund or a credit toward the next month. If you use more time than the retainer amount will cover, you will need to pay the additional fees.

With that in mind, I’m wondering if any other programmer does this, and if clients would go for it.  In the past I’ve offered support contracts for an app I’ve built for a client.  If they wanted small changes, tweaks (all defined beforehand) they didn’t have to worry about it.  If a user had questions, needed training (again outlined specific hours) that was included.

The upside to a retainer agreement this is that you have reliable/consistent income each month, the client has the assurance you’re not going to walk away from the job.  They have the security in knowing that you’re there to call if anything comes up. They have a reliable budgeted amount to allocate for the project. And most importantly – if you have a retainer agreement with them, they would get preferential treatment and pop to the top of the workload (or as near as possible depending on what you have going on)

The downsides (two that I can think of) is that if you do this with too many clients, you might be overwhelmed with ‘high priority’ work (which would probably happen regardless of a retainer agreement and the same number of clients).  The other (seems petty) is that you probably have to invoice them every month instead of hoping they remember to pay you (which you may not have to do if you didn’t do any work for them that month).

Deciding I’m going to offer this…what’s a fair rate then?

Figuring here in Pennsylvania the typical rate for what I do is $70-$100/hr – are clients seriously going to pay me 4-5 hours ($280 – $500) a month so I’m at their beck and call?  I personally don’t have any clients that large – I think they’d say – no, that’s ok, you can just invoice us for work performed. Maybe if they do put me on retainer – I lower my rates? Even 50% seems a bit steep for some of them and then you’re just screwing yourself because now you’re performing 5 hours of work for half the price you would be if you weren’t on retainer for them.

Its an interesting issue I’ve been pondering.  I like the idea of offing this to clients, I guess if they take it, its a win either way.  Especially if I get a month in there where they don’t use the 5 hours.

If you do this or have done this – feel free to comment below or shoot a tweet to @thecodedog

and if you want me on retainer for you definitely contact me and we’ll talk – jonathan.wheat @ codedog.net

Code it right
theCodeDog

Add this php code to the top of your php page to have it verify and flip to secure mode if needed -

<?php
if ($_SERVER['SERVER_PORT']!=443)
{
$url = "https://". $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] . ":443".$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
header("Location: $url");
}
?>

Conversely if yiou have to pop back to http, you can alter the code to this -

<?php
if ($_SERVER['SERVER_PORT']!=80)
{
$url = "http://". $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] . ":80".$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
header("Location: $url");
}
?>

That’s all, just wanted to share something I found when I need this behavior on an application form.

BTW if you want to do this via .htaccess – you can use something like this -

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://domain.com/$1 [R,L]

Code it right
theCodeDog

after copiuos amounts of logging to the screen, I’m greeted with -

THIS TOOL IS DEPRECATED. See –help for more information.

Debug Certificate expired on 27.10.11 08:10
Error building APK file

Seriously?  Wonderful.

If or should I say WHEN you get this because apparently the debug certificates are valid for 365 days – here’s the solution -

Find and delete the file “debug.keystore”.  This is stored in your home directory under “~/.android” (OSX, Linux).  Similarly on Windows file resides in the “C:\Users\[user]\.android folder.

Just delete it, rm it, shred it, drag it to the trash, whatever.  Get it out of there.  A new one will regen much like I do in Black Ops when I get nailed by a zombie.  Its probably a good idea to do a rake clean:android as well, just to clean up from the failed compile, although this probably isn’t 100% necessary.

Now you’re good to go.

-Jon

Code it right
theCodeDog

So I’m plugging along building and testing 2 apps in the simulator, they’re working great.  I decided I’m to the point where I’d like to test them on my phone, so I fire up XCode (4.1 to something) and got a nice little message that said something like the Operating system on your device does not match the SDK version on this machine.  Click here to revert the device … WHAT?  Heck no.  So that mean I now have to go through the pain of updaing XCode.

This has happened multiple times to me as I’ve progressed up through OS versions on my phone, so this time I figured I’d document it – so next time its not so much guess work, and it might help someone else too.

• Download XCode : Log into your developer account at http://developer.apple.com click downloads, and download the latest SDK version (4.2 includes iOS5 SDK)
• Install XCode.  This can take a while, so grab a book or make a sandwich.  DON’T listen to music on iTunes, because that’ll have to be closed during this upgrade.

If you’re developing with Rhodes (http://rhomobile.com) you might possibly have to upgrade this as well.  Since you have your sandwich and a drink, you might as well.

Rhodes Upgrade (optional)

From a terminal prompt

• sudo gem update rhodes
• rhodes-setup
• set-rhodes-sdk (from your application’s root folder)
• rake clean:iphone

If you get an error like this -

=== CLEAN NATIVE TARGET rhorubylib OF PROJECT rhorubylib WITH CONFIGURATION Distribution ===
Check dependencies
Unsupported compiler 'GCC 4.2' selected for architecture 'i386'

Welcome to the club.

It seems that XCode 4.2 removes the older 4.x simulators.  I found this out when I opened XCode trying to debug the message above, and there was only iPhone Simulator 5.0 listed.  So to fix the error above, you much edit your build.yml file and set these lines -

Code it right
theCodeDog

Today I’ll post this code to remind myself how to do that from within a redirect.

Sometimes in your view or controller, you might call a method to do something – say store something in the database and pop up a message, and you might need to redirect to a new view/method after that.  Well sometimes you need to get some parameter(s) to that new page as well.  If you search the system-api-samples project Rhomobile has – you won’t find this in there. Ok, you might, I didn’t.

I had a ‘duh’ moment when I got this to work, because its pretty dang near identical to passing parameters in a link.

Here it is in all its glory :

Where list_details is the destination method and we’re passing session_id with the variable @session_id

redirect :action => :list_details, :query => {:session_id => @session_id}

If you had more parameters, you’d separate them with a comma like this -

:query => {:session_id => @session_id, :session_title => @my_title, :message => 'it worked'}

Easy, right?

Code it right
theCodeDog

Still have some formatting / tweaks to do, but the bulk of this is now working.

Enjoy.

Main Floorplan

Exhibitor Info

Home Screen

Twitta Feed

Session Breakout

Session Details

Code it right
theCodeDog

So in an effort to try to limit the suck you have to go through if/when you have to deal with dates, I hope this helps.

My app, when first loaded, pulls a feed from our oracle database.  The date is listed in the ‘typical’ format – 22-NOV-11, stores this in the device’s database (FixedSchema) (  property :session_date, :date ) – so you would think that would be the type date.  In my controller I do this little query -

@days = Session.find_by_sql("SELECT distinct(session_date) _
   FROM Session ORDER BY session_date")

In my view I loop through with something like this -

<% @days.each do |session| %>

typical, nothing special

so we essentially have session.session_date inside this loop – and I don’t want to display it in the default format (22-NOV-11).  So I endevored on a painful journy – pulling in 3 other developers on the rhomobile list. 10 emails later, I got it working.  I used this code -

@display_date = Date.strptime(session_date,"%d-%b-%y").strftime("%A, %B %d")

But I wanted what I’ve found is called the ordinal suffix on the end ( the ‘rd’,'st’,'nd’,'th’).  In rails there is an .ordinalize method – but that’s not available in ruby (maybe you could include a library or gem or something, but by this point, I’ve suffered 3 days to deal with this), so I created my own.

session_date = session.session_date
@display_date = format_date(session_date)

in my session_controller.erb:
def format_date (date_in)
prefix = Date.strptime(date_in,”%d-%b-%y”).strftime(“%A, %B %d”)
day = Date.strptime(date_in,”%d-%b-%y”).strftime(“%d”).to_i
if day == 11 or day == 12
return prefix + “th”
else
case day % 10
when 1 then return prefix + “st”
when 2 then return prefix + “nd”
when 3 then return prefix  +”rd”
else return prefix + “th”
end
end
end
might be a little klunky coding, I’m sure I could just set the suffix and append / return them at the end, but this works, and I need to move on to another part of my app.

Code it right
theCodeDog

Since I respect the guys from TechZing and with the on going praise, I figured I’d try it again.  I googled how to remove it completely from my mac, just to make sure the old broken / mis-configured stuff was gone, downloaded and installed it.

To my amazement, it installed easily, and I was able to quickly open Titanium Studio (essentially eclipse customized for Titanium) and run a new empty app.  Granted it wasn’t an exciting app, but it did open in the simulator.  After about 40 minutes of dinking around, I was able to get everything in order (thanks Apple) and deployed it to my iPhone.  Again, no awesomeness in that app, but still – a huge leap.  Titanium has an app called Kitchen Sink – where they add all of their features, and show off the framework.  I downloaded that, imported it, and was able to deploy that on my phone as well.  This rocked.  10 minutes later, I had it running in the Android simulator. It only took 10 minutes because I had to get the Android SDK stuff in order.

Within an hour of downloading, I had both created and imported apps, built them, tested them on the simulator and deployed them to my iPhone.  Amazing.

Appcelerator uses Javascript as a programming language, yea, not just a scripty thing you use on a webpage, as the language. Pretty cool.  The code gets compiled using the device SDKs so so the deployed app runs natively on the phone.  This gives you access to the device’s features like calendar, GPS, accelerometer, camera, video, photo libraries, file system etc.

I have yet to really start playing around with it, but I’m planning on building an app for a friend, so keep watching this blog for that.

All in all – when I can go from download to deployment on my device in about an hour, that rocks. Titanium Appcelerator gets an A+ from me. Thanks Justin and Jason for influencing me to try it again.

Code it right
theCodeDog

ezSQL was created by Justin Vincent – and its nothing short of amazing. ezSQL can sit on a multitude of databases including – mySQL / Oracle8/9 / InterBase/FireBird / PostgreSQL / MS-SQL / SQLite / SQLite c++ … I mean WOW.  One thought I had was to possibly have a development version of the database as MySQL – and the production version as Oracle.  The data structure won’t change, I’m pretty much building screens off of that, so table changes would be minimal. But seriously, in practice who does that ?  Hmmm, maybe me.  We’ll see after I get out from under the mound of work I have.  My problem is – while I have VPN access to the Oracle database, if I don’t have a net connection – I can’t work on the app – since I have no database, not good.  So this may help me be more productive, if I’m sitting at the pool waiting for my kids to finish swim practice, I can code, or if I’m out in the park or at my mother-in-law’s place (yea – she’s got no wireless).  Anyway, the more I think about this – I could easily create a config option as to which database to use.

Back to ezSQL…

Once configured (which took a whole 2 minutes, and that was because I moved the files from the demo into my app) you can make calls like this -

$users = $db->get_results("SELECT name, email FROM users");

Typically, results are stored in an object, but you can alter the call to return associative arrays, or numerical arrays.

So using the example above, you’d pull out the name and email like this -

foreach ( $users as $user )
  {
      // Access data using object syntax
      echo $user->name;
      echo $user->email;
  }

If you have just one row you use get_row, if you’re simply getting 1 item like a count, you use get_var.  A simple to read instruction page explains it all.  There are many examples on that page to help get you started.

Probably the best feature is $db->debug();  this little gem (can’t thank Justin enough for this one) spits out a pile of information about the query, as well as the data that’s coming back.  So if you’re having a problem with the database call – toss in this command and it’ll help you out.

Another gem is the $db->vardump($users); which displays the contents and structure of the variable / object.  Again great for determining what is happening with a query.

I know I sound like a paid advertisement for this, but the support was amazing too.  I had a problem with the version I had downloaded, and emailed Justin.  The next day – he fixed it right away and posted a new version, which is currently posted on his site (2.10)

Overall, this is a big win for me.

Code it right
theCodeDog