a view from afar

I now have an account on the github beta - and it's pretty cool. Since I've only done one thing with it I can only comment on one feature: forking. It's pretty effortless, and only took me a few minutes to get my Mailtrap LogParser extension up there. Best thing - assuming they are telling the truth :) - it's easy for the maintainer of the parent repo to merge the changes back in.

I suspect github will eventually change the nature of open source collaboration. But where is darcshub?

I just came across a need to test emails sent in a Rails project. It's a RSpec story integration test I'm working on (using Selenium, not a RailsStory), and using ActionMailer in test mode is not good enough. Instead I'm using Matt Mower's handy tool Mailtrap

I created a listener class to start and stop mailtrap as the story runs - which is easy enough - but I needed something to parse the log file from Mailtrap. So I created Mailtrap::LogParser - code available here for anyone that's interested.

As soon as github gives me a beta login, I will fork the Mailtrap repo and add this in. For the mean time, you can use the tarball above.

This is just a stopgap solution really, until Mailtrap has a way of outputting a more structured (and therefore easily-parseable) output.

Thanks to the incredible incompetence of our soon-to-be new broadband provider DST, my blog may be out of action for a while (10 days is apparently the worst case). DST let the MAC code we provided lapse, and Pipex are refusing to issue a new one. (Pipex actually claim that issuing a MAC code is considered a form of cancellation, so I'm not even sure why we still have a net connection at all.)

Unfortunately, due to the time I'm spending at work lately, I don't have time to move the blog to shared hosting. I intend to do that as soon as I can though... I'm getting ever so slightly sick of the universal contempt that consumer ISPs show for their customers.

Since Google bought FeedBurner, their MyBrand feature has been free. This means you can access FeedBurner feeds via "feeds.yourdomain.com". All it takes is a CNAME record in DNS to point feeds.yourdomain.com to feeds.feedburner.com, then you can access FeedBurned feeds via a URL you own. It's pretty generous of Google seeing as it means you can switch feed tracker with a simple DNS change...

Here is my Apache config (with added line breaks) to send the Mephisto-generated URLs to the FeedBurner ones:

    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner
    RewriteRule ^/feed/atom.xml \
                http://feeds.aviewfromafar.net/aviewfromafar-home \
                [R=301]

Actually the feeds.feedburner.com addresses haven't moved, so if you are subscribed to this blog via the Atom feed you will still get updates. But the correct address is here:

http://feeds.aviewfromafar.net/aviewfromafar-home

...and geeks like being correct, right? :D

I just bought a CanoScan LiDE 25. Apparently I'm not the only person that thinks Canon's scanner software is a crime against humanity. I now use Yep for scanning, so I just need the TWAIN driver provided by the Canon installer. But the closest I got to making it work was seeing it install the files, then delete them immediately after. Yes, that's right. I WATCHED THE FILES DISAPPEAR from /Library.

I think Bart Simpson has the best phrase to describe this software - it sucks and blows at the same time.

My installation guide follows...

I got my first two text messages today - one for this blog and one for www.patchspace.co.uk. I've got the polling resolution set to five minutes and to alert after 30 minutes' downtime, so I was pretty confident it was a power cut (and I was right). It's the second we've had lately, the last was in the middle of the night, before I subscribed to Pingdom.

I guess I was wrong in my last post - the real weak spot in my setup is being on a residential power grid. But then, it's not like I'm not hosting paid-for clients' sites from my home server, so the worst it does it make me look like a fool when nobody can access my blog.

Next step: buy a UPS. (A generator seems a bit excessive.)

As part of starting my own business I've decided it's about time I get some essentials done right - namely backups, uptime monitoring, DNS hosting and email hosting. I'll also detail some of the other software and hardware I use. Nothing ground-breaking - but some of these services may be new and/or useful to my readers (24 now!!!).

UPDATE: Many Ayromlou wrote a blog post about setting Google Apps up with easyDNS, which is exactly what I've done.