TechUP presentation on TYPO3 Flow
The presentation I held covered some of the history and why we now have got a new shiny PHP framework and showed some of the features that I personally like and also use when I develop stuff with TYPO3 Flow. Find the slides as PDF - or watch them on Speakerdeck TechUP Lucerne is a monthly meeting of web developers from central Switzerland where different topics are presented each month by another participant. You’re invited to join us - we don’t bite, it’s free and they usually have beer!
Icinga missing additional information in notifications
Recently we found out that the additional information was missing in mails sent from Icinga 1.6.x for any service notification. After fiddling around we compared our notification concifiguration against the “original” one and found out, that the “\n” after the $SERVICEOUTPUT$ macro was missing in the mail body. Adding a newline ("\n") after the macro fixed the problem. This is how our notification command looks like now: # 'notify-service-by-email' command definition define command{ command_name notify-service-by-email command_line /usr/bin/printf "%b" "Notification Type: $NOTIFICATIONTYPE$\n\n \ Service: $SERVICEDESC$\nHost: $HOSTALIAS$\nAddress: $HOSTADDRESS$\n \ State: $SERVICESTATE$\n\nDate/Time: $LONGDATETIME$\n\nAdditional \ Info:\n\n$SERVICEOUTPUT$\n" | /usr/bin/mail -s "$NOTIFICATIONTYPE$ \ Service Alert: $HOSTALIAS$/$SERVICEDESC$ is $SERVICESTATE$" \ $CONTACTEMAIL$ }
Running a quiz - a short Retrospective
A bit more than a month ago, I published my web developer quiz at - now it’s time to note down some insights I gathered since launching the quiz: The facts The quiz was launched on Friday, 13th of September 2013 around 20:00 which could have been a bad choice so short before the weekend. But it worked and many visitors found the quiz: So far, Google Analytics has seen 653 unique visitors from the three top countries Switzerland (37.7%), United Kingdom (17.4%) and Germand (16.5%). This is remarkably, since I don’t really know anyone from the UK :-)
Running acceptance tests with Codeception
I stumbled over Codeception and thought it looks pretty nice based from what I’ve seen in their docs. So I tried to install it and “play” with it. Where the troubles started Just adding the codeception package as a dependency in the composer.json file and running composer update installed a bunch of other packages. So far everything went fine. But then, my Flow based app didn’t work anymore. Running a ``./flow flow:cache:flush` (or warmup) just ended in some heavy-duty low-level Exceptions:
Takeaway of the week: Sharpen your saw!
Some days ago, Marcel pointed me to the Tech Blog of Zalando. I expected some rather technical success stories of how they manage their server infrastructure and how they solved some of the challenges while scaling up. I was wrong. Zalando publicly shares some behind-the-scenes insight into their team which is at least as interesting as the technical stuff (which is also a relevant part of the blog of course). In May 2013, Martin Bell published a blog post about some fun retreats Zalando organized for their teams and he starts the post with an anecdote:
Takeaway of the week: Avoid losing your energy at work
Ivan Blatter published some ideas, what one would do, if the week would have one additional day (original article in German). As a response, Jens Uhlemann has published a slightly different view on that topic: What if the week would have one day less? (original article in German) He then identified some evil stuff, which should be avoided at all, to not loose the energy for useless stuff - which is my take away for this week:
Vagrant on Windows
Recently, we started using Vagrant boxes for our local development. As a base we took the Vagrant config that I’ve built during the last weeks - which worked perfectly, performant and satisfying on Mac. NFS vs. Windows But then our first developers started complaining that the box doesn’t work on Windows at all. Basically this was due to the fact that Windows as a Host system does not support NFS - but NFS is the default behaviour of my Vagrant box to mount some shared folders into /var/www/. OK, this problem can be fixed pretty easily by just removing the :nfs => true part from the Vagrantfile and retry to start the box with vagrant up.
Issue 16534
A long time ago, I noticed a small issue in indexed_search, the search component of TYPO3 CMS. It’s about not being able to start crawling external URLs if the base URL of the crawler job is initialized with a base URL that doesn’t point to a Domain itself, but e.g. to a file with a link list to be indexed. But let’s see what happened in a chronological order: The bug was found on a TYPO3 v4.0 installation and reported in the old bugtracker as bug with the ID 4167 on 2006-09-06 20:13. The first patch was based on SVN rev 1734 and uploaded 5 days later.
f.lux - Screen lightning tool
Today I’ve seen two mentions on f.lux, a software that changes the color-temperature of your screen. While it’s ok to be light and blue-ish during the day where the screen has to compete against the sunlight - it should be different when there’s no sun. The application is available for a range of platforms and I’ve just installed it on my MacBook Air without troubles. The first impression is a bit strange as everything looks a bit “mis-colored”, as if you’re watching at a horribly calibrated screen - but I think that’s just a matter of some hours or days to get used to it.
Testing SSL certificates on remote server
Testing your SSL certificates From time to time I need to verify the SSL certificate configured for a server - either within the webserver or the mailserver. Here are a few commands I regularly use on a Linux host to verify the configuration on the remote server to test: (replace HOST with either the hostname or an IP address) Testing on a webserver This is probably one of the most used commands when working on this topic: