musings on software development, writing and life

After 8 years or so I finally got around to taking the Coldfusion developers exam this morning. I am now an Adobe Certified Advanced Coldfusion Developer and an Adobe Certified Advanced Coldfusion Trainer! So probably in 6 months time I’ll be listed as such on the adobe websites…

Flex exam in jan then my trainer certs will all be complete.

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There are lots of little stupid things that irritate me. One of the highest on the list has to be people calling Lego “legos”. For God’s sake people – the plural of Lego is Lego. There is no such thing as Legos. It’s Lego. L-E-G-O dammit!

/rant

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CFCamp in Melbourne was brilliant. It wasn’t the greatest turnout but we had a good number of high caliber people there and the talks were excellent.

I particularly liked Peter Bell’s talk about DSL’s and Software Product Lines – I’ll definitely be following up with Peter to learn more about this, as this is exactly where I’ve been heading.

After the camp a bunch of us went for drinks and I ended up having some very long (and slightly inebriated) discussions with Adam Lehman of Adobe and Peter Bell. Mark Mandel piked early but I got to know Adam and Peter pretty well and had a fantastic evening. Thanks to all who turned up and especially those who spoke and organized the day – it’s well worth it, and hopefully we will see more of this sort of thing in the near future.

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It looks as though we’ll be getting a CFCamp in Melbourne after all, through the efforts of Mark Mandel. The downside is he’s conned me into speaking I’m giving a half hour talk on “Enterprise development for the rest of us” – basically what it really means to be an enterprise developer and how to ramp up your career and habits to get to that level. And seeing as I’ll have a captive audience I might see if I can squeeze in a magic trick or two, so if my talk totally sucks there will at least be some entertainment.

Hope to see lots of people at cfcamp melbourne!

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I have seen Trac before but until recently never really used it. In a project I’ve been working on with Codename:Tuesday we’ve been using Trac as the central source for bugs / tickets, documentation, UCTs etc. It’s a very nice tool, with SVN integration and a ticketing system that has just what you need for development.

I run a server on CentOS and had a little trouble getting my install to work, so I decided to post this guide to getting trac up and running. This setup will allow you multiple instances of trac sites to support different projects. At the time of writing, my server runs CentOS 4.5 final.

This guide assumes all trac instances will exist under /srv/trac and all subversion instances will exist under /srv/svn and assumes you have subversion, apache and python installed.

Before you start, disable SELinux.

Repositories
If you don’t have them already, add Karanbir Singh’s repositories:

Code block

cd /etc/yum.repos.d/
wget http://centos.karan.org/kbsingh-CentOS-Extras.repo
wget http://centos.karan.org/kbsingh-CentOS-Misc.repo

Add the gpg key:

Code block

rpm --import http://centos.karan.org/RPM-GPG-KEY-karan.org.txt

Install the prerequisites for Trac:

Code block

yum install mod_dav_svn mod_python clearsilver python-clearsilver python-sqlite trac

Add the following to your apache httpd.conf:

Code block

# load relevent modules
LoadModule dav_module modules/mod_dav.so
LoadModule dav_svn_module modules/mod_dav_svn.so
LoadModule authz_svn_module modules/mod_authz_svn.so
LoadModule python_module modules/mod_python.so
...
### trac
Alias /trac/ "/srv/trac/"
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
# mod_python speeds things up considerably
SetHandler mod_python
PythonHandler trac.web.modpython_frontend
PythonOption TracEnvParentDir "/srv/trac"
PythonOption TracUriRoot "/trac"
# authentication
AuthType Digest
AuthName "wiki-server"
AuthDigestDomain /trac
AuthDigestFile "/etc/httpd/conf/digestpw"
Require valid-user
# authorization is handled internally by trac
### subversion
DAV svn
SVNParentPath /srv/svn
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
# authentication
AuthType Digest
AuthName "wiki-server"
AuthDigestDomain /svn
AuthDigestFile "/etc/httpd/conf/digestpw"
Require valid-user
# authorization
AuthzSVNAccessFile "/etc/httpd/conf/svn-auth.ini"

Setup your svn instance:

Code block

svnadmin create /srv/svn/myproj --fs-type fsfs
chown -R apache /srv/svn/myproj
chmod -R go-rwx /srv/svn/myproj
[/code]
Run the following commands to create a trac instance (replacing "myproj" with the name of your project):
[codesyntax lang="bash"]
trac-admin /srv/trac/myproj initenv
chgrp -R apache /srv/trac/myproj
chown -R apache /srv/trac/myproj/{attachments,db,log}
chmod -R o-rwx /srv/trac/myproj
[/code]
Remove anonymous write access to Trac:
[codesyntax lang="bash"]
trac-admin /srv/trac/myproj permission remove anonymous TICKET_CREATE TICKET_MODIFY WIKI_CREATE WIKI_MODIFY

add admin user priveledges:

Code block

trac-admin /srv/trac/myproj permission add myuser TRAC_ADMIN

setup special privs for other priveledged users

Code block

trac-admin /srv/trac/myproj permission add cooluser WIKI_DELETE

tweak everyone's base priveledges:

Code block

trac-admin /srv/trac/myproj permission add authenticated \
BROWSER_VIEW CHANGESET_VIEW FILE_VIEW LOG_VIEW MILESTONE_VIEW \
REPORT_SQL_VIEW REPORT_VIEW ROADMAP_VIEW SEARCH_VIEW \
TICKET_CREATE TICKET_MODIFY TICKET_VIEW TIMELINE_VIEW \
WIKI_CREATE WIKI_MODIFY WIKI_VIEW

setup svn authorization; create the file /etc/httpd/conf/svn-auth.ini) with the following contents:

Code block

[groups]
projectadmins = adminuser1, adminuser2
othercoolfolks = projectuserA, projectuserB, projectuserC
# repository (r = read, w = write, or none)
[myproj:/]
@projectadmins = rw
@othercoolfolks = rw
* = r
[myproj:/admin-only/]
@projectadmins = rw
@othercoolfolks = r

Code block

htdigest -c /etc/httpd/conf/digestpw wiki-server adminuser

Create passwords for any other users:

Code block

htdigest /etc/httpd/conf/digestpw wiki-server user

Restart apache, and now you should be able to access your project at http://server/trac/myproj - login with the user and password you just setup and bob's yer wossname.

CAVEAT: you may find when you load the trac page you see "Error: Unsupported File Format". If you do, you need to disable the pdo_sqlite module as it's likely conflicting with the version installed by python. Edit the file /etc/php.d/pdo_sqlite.ini and comment out anything in the file by putting a # symbol at the beginning of each line.

Credits: I got a lot of this from here so many thanks to the original author - I've just modified a little and added more basic instructions.

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