Cantoni.org

JIRA OnDemand: Great Solution For Vendors and Partners

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 13:28:01 -0800

Keeping track of technical issues, bugs and tasks between companies can be a real hassle. In my current job, we’ve been using Excel spreadsheets with a couple of partners, emailing them back and forth with changes and updates. These quickly get out of sync, causing us to lose track of important issues. Also, this is only helpful for a very short summary of each issue — forget trying to have a more detailed conversation or screenshot attachments.

For one project we decided to try JIRA OnDemand and couldn’t be happier with the results. For only $10/month for the first 10 users, we’ve got a shared online tracking system that both companies can access. We divided the 10 users up across the two companies, and were up and running in about 10 minutes.

It helps that JIRA is pretty simple to learn and use, especially for anyone who’s used any type of bug tracking system. We’ve got email notifications, attachment support, and the ability to converse in detail on each issue as we resolve them.

Highly recommended!

JIRA OnDemand pricing starts at an easy $10 per month for 10 users

Stack Overflow: Kind of Addicting

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 19:08:26 -0800

Over this past Christmas break I spent some more time on Stack Overflow, answering some questions in a few areas I felt I could contribute. As I answered and contributed more, I saw how the reputation and badges system can really draw you in. Not as a motivator per se, but it’s fun to get “kudos” when someone finds your answers or edits helpful.

Some conclusions so far:

Some questions get answered very quickly - if you watch the most recent questions you’ll see a small number of page views, but a bunch of answers already. Must be a lot of people watching the newest questions and trying to contribute.
Answering older questions is worthwhile if the originator has a decent accept rate. Corollary: it’s not worth bothering with really old questions asked by User1234 with only 1 reputation point.
Editing tag (wiki) descriptions is a good way to contribute for lesser-known tags.
Upvoting good quality questions and answers is a good way to keep up the overall quality level of the site

Check out my sweet Stack Overflow flair badge!

Curl Cheat Sheet

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 19:40:24 -0800

This is a quick introduction and cheat sheet for Curl - a very handy command-line tool for downloading pretty much anything from a URL.

The Curl website describes it as:

… a command line tool for transferring data with URL syntax, supporting DICT, FILE, FTP, FTPS, GOPHER, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, IMAPS, LDAP, LDAPS, POP3, POP3S, RTMP, RTSP, SCP, SFTP, SMTP, SMTPS, TELNET and TFTP. curl supports SSL certificates, HTTP POST, HTTP PUT, FTP uploading, HTTP form based upload, proxies, cookies, user+password authentication (Basic, Digest, NTLM, Negotiate, kerberos…), file transfer resume, proxy tunneling and a busload of other useful tricks.

There are many things that Curl can do, and there is a voluminous man page that lists all of the details.

Here I want to boil down all those options into the most common and useful ones for web or webservices developers (using HTTP/HTTPS protocols). If you don’t already have Curl installed on your system (try running curl from a command prompt), see Getting Curl below.

Basic Usage

The basic form of all Curl commands is:

curl [options...]

For example:

$ curl http://www.google.com/humans.txt
Google is built by a large team of engineers, designers, researchers, robots, and others in many different sites across the globe. It is updated continuously, and built with more tools and technologies than we can shake a stick at. If you'd like to help us out, see google.com/jobs.

Common Options

Options are the real power of of Curl. Here we’ll cover the most common ones that I’ve used for typical web and webservices development. (You can get the full set of options on your system with curl --help or curl --manual.)

-A / —user-agent AGENT: Set the HTTP User Agent string if you don’t want the default “curl” string
—compressed: Add the HTTP header to request compressed content, if the server can provide it
-d / —data DATA: Set data to be sent with a POST request
-D / —dump-header FILE: Save the response headers to a separate file
-H / —header HEADER: Set a custom HTTP header
-i / —include: Include the response headers in the output
-k / —insecure: Skip SSL certification verification
-o / —output FILE: Write output to a file rather than stdout
-s / —silent: Run silently (i.e., don’t show progress meter)
—trace-ascii FILE: Write request and response headers and data to local file
-x / —proxy HOST:PORT: Route data through the given proxy
-X / —request METHOD: Set custom HTTP method (GET, PUT, POST, DELETE)

Examples

Fetch and Save Web Page

$ curl --silent http://boston.com -o boston.html  
$ head boston.html





Boston.com - Boston, MA news, breaking news, sports, video

Check Size Without Downloading

$ curl --head http://s3.amazonaws.com/hanselminutes/hanselminutes_0300.mp3
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
x-amz-request-id: 31D80700E3C2811E
Date: Wed, 11 Jan 2012 04:01:35 GMT
Last-Modified: Sat, 07 Jan 2012 02:49:49 GMT
ETag: "1d08609ab5434eea651e95af332ddb3a"
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Type: audio/mpeg
Content-Length: 24474192
Server: AmazonS3

Getting Curl

If you’re running Mac OSX, Linux, FreeBSD, or similar systems, you’ve probably already got Curl installed. (Try curl --version to double-check your version.)

If you’re running Windows, you’ll need to download it yourself. Start at the Curl downloads page and find the Win32 section. I suggest the “Win32 - Generic binary, with SSL” option. You will also need the Windows OpenSSL libraries; I suggest using the “Win32 OpenSSL v1.x Light” installer. Make sure to put both Curl and OpenSSL libraries in the same location, and add that location to your path.

Simple Webservice Echo Test

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 13:59:33 -0800

While troubleshooting some PHP Curl issues, I found and used http://respondto.it/ (and later http://requestb.in/) which allows you to create a dummy webservice endpoint which reveals the full request made to it by your code.

An even simpler use case would be a webservice that simply returned data about the request directly to the calling application. I just created such a simple echo webservice on my scooterlabs.com domain.

Plain text example

$ curl http://scooterlabs.com/echo
Array
(
    [method] => GET
    [headers] => Array
        (
            [User-Agent] => curl/7.19.7 (universal-apple-darwin10.0) libcurl/7.19.7 OpenSSL/0.9.8r zlib/1.2.3
            [Host] => scooterlabs.com
            [Accept] => */*
        )

    [request] => Array
        (
            [foo] => bar
        )

    [client_ip] => 68.125.160.82
    [time_utc] => 2012-01-08T21:33:28+0000
    [info] => Echo service from Scooterlabs (http://www.scooterlabs.com)
)

JSON example

$ curl --silent curl http://scooterlabs.com/echo.json?foo=bar | json_xs
{
   "info" : "Echo service from Scooterlabs (http://www.scooterlabs.com)",
   "request" : {
      "foo" : "bar"
   },
   "headers" : {
      "User-Agent" : "curl/7.21.3 (i386-portbld-freebsd7.3) libcurl/7.21.3 OpenSSL/1.0.0e zlib/1.2.3 libidn/1.22",
      "Accept" : "*/*",
      "Host" : "scooterlabs.com"
   },
   "client_ip" : "66.39.158.129",
   "time_utc" : "2012-01-08T22:07:54+0000",
   "method" : "GET"
}

Source

Source code is up on Github: https://github.com/bcantoni/echotest. If anyone has any comments or feedback, let me know here or on Github.

Tech Advent Calendars

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 13:54:07 -0800

Several awesome tech and programming communities create advent calendars each year with a different article or demo for each day of December. Here are the ones I’m following.

I’ve also created a Yahoo Pipe to combine all of these RSS feeds into one: 2011 Tech Advent Feed.

Performance

website: http://calendar.perfplanet.com/2011/
feed: http://calendar.perfplanet.com/feed/

24ways

website: http://24ways.org/
feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/24ways

Perl

website: http://perladvent.org/2011/
feed: http://perladvent.org/2011/atom.xml

PHP

website: http://phpadvent.org/2011
feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/phpadvent

Clean Up Android Downloaded Files

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 11:32:13 -0800

Today I randomly noticed on my HTC Evo a “Downloads” app which brings you directly to all of the downloaded files and attachments.

Look for the Downloads application

I didn’t realize there was a separate app for this, but had wondered if there was a way to return to browser downloaded files. Within Downloads, I found over 65MB of files, some of which I downloaded over a year ago. With a few taps I cleaned them all out. These are treated separately and outside of the browser cache, so if you download a lot you should periodically clean them up.

The Downloads app shows how much space is used by everything you’ve ever downloaded

Effective Android Screenshots

Sat, 03 Dec 2011 19:39:00 -0800

Taking screenshots from an Android device is similar to other platforms, although a bit more setup is needed. With a little bit of additional editing, your screenshots can look clean and professional.

To get your PC ready for taking Android screenshots, refer to addictive tips for a good set of instructions; setting up a Mac is a similar process.

In the instructions below, we’ll clean up the extra icons that appear in the notification area (the top left corner of the screen) when the device is connected via a USB cable. In this example screenshot, notice the extra icons that we want to clean up:

Follow these instructions on your Mac to take better screenshots and clean those up:

Prepare the Android device with the screen or application you’re taking a shot of
Connect to your PC/Mac via USB cable
Take the screenshot and save as a PNG file (refer to addictive tips for instructions)
Open the PNG file in the Preview Mac app
Zoom in once or twice and scroll to the upper left corner
Select a rectangular area that is “clean” (showing just the header background)
Copy
Paste
Use the arrow keys to move the pasted block to the left (using the keys keeps the copied rectangle in the proper vertical position)
Repeat as needed to cover the undesired icons

This close-up screenshot show the copy area from the clean background:

And here we have the clean area being pasted over the icons we are hiding:

Finally, the end result:

Using Splunk to Analyze Apache Logs

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 21:13:14 -0800

Splunk is an enterprise-grade software tool for collecting and analyzing log files and other data. Actually Splunk uses the broader term “machine data”:

At Splunk we talk a lot about machine data, and by that we mean all of the data generated by the applications, servers, network devices, security devices and other systems that run your business.

Certainly, log files do fall under that umbrella, and are probably the easiest way to understand Splunk’s capabilities. The company offers a free license which has some limitations compared to a paid enterprise license, the most significant limitation being a maximum of 500 MB/day of indexed data. (For more details, see the differences between free and enterprise licenses.) To learn Splunk, or to use it for personal or smaller sites, the limitations are manageable and the free product is a great option.

In this example I’ve uploaded logs from a couple of my websites and let Splunk index them. I also explain the process I used to identify a rogue user agent which I later blocked.

To get started with Splunk, visit the download page and get the appropriate version for your platform. Follow the installation manual (from the excellent documentation site) to get the software installed and configured.

There are several ways to get data into Splunk; for this case I told it to monitor a local directory for files and manually told it the host name to expect. Then I copied down about 6 months’ of compressed Apache logs into that target directory. You can repeat this for each site, using a separate directory and separate hostname.

Splunk will quickly index your data which you’ll see in the Search application. I suggest going through their quick overview to help learn what’s going on. Click on a hostname to start viewing data that Splunk has indexed. Because Splunk automatically recognizes the Apache log file format, it already knows how to pull out the common fields which you can use for searching and filtering, as shown in this screenshot:

In my case after poking around a bit, I noticed a pretty high amount of traffic fetching my RSS feed file (/rss.xml). The screenshot below shows the number of daily requests, normally hovering around 400 but peaking at about 2,000 per day (click for larger image):

By clicking on the useragent field, I found that an agent named “NewsOnFeedsBot” was accounting for over 60% of the total requests (click for larger image):

Once I filtered on just the NewsOnFeedsBot useragent, some more details emerged:

The HTTP status code for all requests was 200, meaning it was doing a full request of the 36KB file each time. (Whereas a well-behaved bot would use if-modified-since or other techniques.)
All requests were coming from a single IP address
The bot was basically continuously fetching the RSS file several times a minute

Blocking this poorly-behaving bot was just a matter of checking for the useragent string and returning a 403 Forbidden response. After I made the change, the bot made a handful of further requests, received the 403, then stopped. At least it has some logic that indicated it should give up trying to fetch this file.

It’s been about a month since I blocked this bot, so I wanted to see an overview of the results. Splunk has a nice built-in charting capability which I used to stack the most popular useragents (again, just for the rss.xml file) and show their portion of visits over the past few months. You can see in the picture below that NewsOnFeedsBot was by far the biggest contributor over the summer, but now it’s gone (click for larger image):

Debug HTTP Traffic From Android Tablets Using Fiddler

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 21:14:02 -0800

Having recently upgraded my Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 to the latest Android “Honeycomb” 3.1 release, I wanted to take a closer look at watching the HTTP web traffic from and to the device. Using the Fiddler web debugging tool on Windows, I was able to set this up rather quickly with these steps:

On the PC, Install Fiddler if needed. After install, configure Fiddler by opening the options panel (menu Tools | Fiddler Options). Select the Connections tab and enable the ‘Allow remote computers to connect’ option. Note the ‘Fiddler listens on port’ option (normally 8888), and close the dialog. Exit and restart Fiddler.

On the PC, determine it’s current IP address (open a command prompt, then type ipconfig).

On the Android tablet, install HTTP Proxy Settings app on the tablet. This app simply brings up the “HTTP Proxy” setting panel so you can make changes. Start the HTTP Proxy Settings app and enter your PC’s IP address as the host, and port number 8888.

Now run the Android Browser and you should see HTTP traffic routed through Fiddler on the PC. Below see an example of visiting Yahoo’s “tablet” home page:

When you’re done, don’t forget to run the HTTP Proxy Settings app again to clear out the host and port fields. (Otherwise your tablet browser will become unusable when Fiddler is no longer running.)

Work Shifting

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 12:01:19 -0800

Now that I’m working at Citrix Online, I’m coming up to speed on the ways in which our collaboration products like GoToMeeting are being used. One of the interesting outreach efforts is workshifting.com, based on a new term workshifting:

If you work out of coffee shops, hotels, airports and your home every bit as much as the office, workshifting.com is for you. We share resources on telecommuting, online tools, travel, technology, business & virtual offices to help you shift when, where & how you work.

If you want to follow along with the latest, subscribe to the website feed and/or follow along on Twitter: @workshifting.