timjdavey

Reverting a git push

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 12:30:45 +0000

So say you’ve accidently pushed something live with takes everything down. Don’t panic there’s an easy way to fix this.

If its just one file do…
git checkout master~2 settings.py
this will jump that file back a revision!

If you’ve really messed up. Simply create a new branch based on a previous commit
git checkout -b before_death b2197nf9382dh08j2ed
where before_death is the name of the new branch which is the old version.

Enjoy!

http://www.ted.com/talks/bobby_mcferrin_hacks_your_brain_with_mus...

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 13:51:08 +0000

http://www.ted.com/talks/bobby_mcferrin_hacks_your_brain_with_music.htm (via @jasecoop)

Working version of solango on github

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 11:09:33 +0000

Working version of solango on github:

People are getting the following error with the one of google

ConfigParser.NoSectionError: No section: 'formatters'

So here’s an other version which I use and works!

Installing Solr on Mac OSX

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 10:54:00 +0000

So if you’re installing this on Mac OSX, its a pretty safe bet that its for development rather than production. This means you can cut some corners, not install tomcat6 and use the pre-bundled server that comes with the example solr download.

Install Java on Mac OSX

For Mac users this is simple. Just head to the apple download centre, choose you’re version and follow along - pointing and clicking to you’re hearts content.

Install Solr 1.5

Get the latest nightly build from here. Unzip it. Then all you need do is…

cd apache-solr-1.5-dev/example/;
java -jar start.jar;

It is now up and running. Hit http://localhost:8983/solr/ you should get apache “Welcome to Solr!”.

Solango settings

For those using solango (django-solr-search) below are some example settings. The installation tutorial is here.

SOLR_SERVER = 'localhost:8983'
SOLR_ROOT = '/Users/timjdavey/Library/apache-solr-1.5-dev/example'
SOLR_SCHEMA_PATH = "".join([SOLR_ROOT, '/solr/conf/schema.xml'])
SOLR_DATA_DIR = "".join([SOLR_ROOT,'/solr/data'])

Hosted full-text search for your web app

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 17:24:00 +0000

Hosted full-text search for your web app:

from dctanner

Installing Solr with Tomcat6 on Ubuntu 8.04

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 12:10:00 +0000

A quick and simple tutorial/guide. Its not particularly difficult but its always nice to have a clear reference. If you get into any troubles, get in contact and I’ll try sort you out/update the docs.

Install Java on Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron)

This should work for all newer versions of Ubuntu as well, but I’ve not tested it. As soon as the next supported release stands up I’ll whip out a brand spanking new tutorial.

So to get started, we need to add multiverse to the apt-get packages

# backup you're old settings file
sudo cp /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.bak;
# this is a weird way of doing it but its incase you want to add this bit to a script
sudo echo deb http:// us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hardy multiverse >> /etc/apt/sources.list;
sudo echo deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hardy multiverse >> /etc/apt/sources.list;
sudo echo deb http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hardy-updates multiverse >> /etc/apt/sources.list;
sudo echo deb-src http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ hardy-updates multiverse >> /etc/apt/sources.list;
sudo apt-get update;

Then once the packages are available to you, run the following in your console (NOT IN A SCRIPT). This will throw you into an install window, which you need to go through and accept the terms and conditions on.

sudo apt-get -y install sun-java6-jdk sun-java6-bin sun-java6-jre

Once thats over you’re done.

Install Tomcat 6.04

Next you’ll need Tomcat6. This is the apache server which will be running lucene where solr lives.

To do this get a stable core release from here. The package version I used is here. So just download the source and unzip (standard for mac, wget and tar for ubuntu). Then move it to a prime location. Personally I’m partial to /usr/lib/ but you can put it anywhere, just keep a note of where.

sudo wget http://mirror.lividpenguin.com/pub/apache/tomcat/tomcat-6/v6.0.20/bin/apache-tomcat-6.0.20.tar.gz;
sudo tar xvzf apache-tomcat-6.0.20.tar.gz;
sudo mv apache-tomcat-6.0.20 /usr/lib/tomcat6;
sudo rm apache-tomcat-6.0.20.tar.gz;

Then just check that “It works!”.

sudo /usr/lib/tomcat6/bin/startup.sh;

Hit http://localhost:8080/ and see if everything if alive and well.

Install Solr 1.5

This gets a little fiddly. First step is goto here and find the latest nightly build. I’m going to assume the version used was solr-yyyy-mm-dd.tgz and solr-1.5 but substitute as appropriate. Again I’m using /usr/lib/ to store the packages, so keep track if you install them anywhere else!

# make somewhere for it to go
sudo mkdir /usr/lib/solr-1.5/;
cd /usr/lib/solr-1.5/;

# download
sudo wget http://people.apache.org/builds/lucene/solr/nightly/solr-yyyy-mm-dd.tgz;
sudo tar xvzf solr-yyyy-mm-dd.tgz;

We need to setup lucene (tomcat6) to act as the bundle operator.

# make the directory where solr is going to live
sudo mkdir /usr/lib/tomcat6/data/;
sudo mkdir /usr/lib/tomcat6/data/solr/;

# copy the java plugin (solr package) into lucene
cp /usr/lib/solr-1.5/apache-solr-1.5-dev/dist/apache-solr-1.5-dev.war /usr/lib/tomcat6/data/solr/;

Then we need to configure lucene to actually serve solr. To do this, create the file /usr/lib/tomcat6/conf/Catalina/localhost/solr.xml with the following contents.

<Context docBase="/usr/lib/tomcat6/data/solr/apache-solr-1.5-dev.war" debug="0" crossContext="true">
<Environment name="solr/home" type="java.lang.String" value="/usr/lib/tomcat6/data/solr" override="true" />
</Context>

Next in the solr package you just downloaded, it contains a bunch of system example files. These will happily work in production and save you hours of time. So just copy them over.

sudo cp -R /usr/lib/solr-1.5/apache-solr-1.5-dev/example/solr/* /usr/lib/tomcat6/data/solr

At this point I recommend you make a backup of the setup. Just in case you corrupt the index somehow - you can just start afresh in an instant.

sudo cp -Rf /usr/lib/tomcat6/data/ /usr/lib/tomcat6/data.bak/

Now test it again. Restart tomcat6.

sudo /usr/lib/tomcat6/bin/shutdown.sh;
sudo /usr/lib/tomcat6/bin/startup.sh;

Hit http://localhost:8080/solr/ and see if its alive. If you go to http://localhost:8080/solr/admin there’s a nice console to have a play, check out the schema, stats etc…

Solango

If you are using django. I highly recommend django-solr-search it’s an incredibly flexible and robust wrapper.

"I wish I had a girlfriend which went down on me as much as facebook does"

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 01:38:13 +0000

“I wish I had a girlfriend which went down on me as much as facebook does”

- andy young

Photo

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 00:21:00 +0000

A weekend in review

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 00:21:00 +0000

Musings.

Websites are hard to build - even with lots of help and bagels.
Websites are fun to build - even when everything dies minutes before you get techcrunched.
Caffeine and sugar really can allow you to code for well over 56hrs straight.
Coding for more than 55hrs straight will cause you to have a mental breakdown.

On a more techie note.

RDS… total let down Only available in Virginia (US-east region) and only available with MySQL5.1 (not 5.0). Which considering we’re primarily London based traffic (for now) and 3rd party software support for 5.1 is still low, I recommend against it. At least until the support increases. Servers are one of those things you can’t really afford to go with an unknown player.
CSS… the fat kid Who invited them to the party? I’ve been a designer for years, I keep up with CSS and its changes, but its only hit me now how totally inefficient a language it is. Front-end designers are clearly vastly under-valued and under-paid. They’re stuck with slow moving and antiquated technology, both in terms of the language and browsers that run them. There are other technologies out there, but no-one knows how to use them and to be honest they’ll never get into the main stream. Which means you won’t be able to recruit anyone for open projects or hire them for your company. So learning is - suck it up but way over budget for front-end and UX treatment.

—originally posted on our blog in response to

secretcities techcrunch roundup of dev weekend

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 19:25:00 +0000

secretcities techcrunch roundup of dev weekend

techcrunch covers secretcities

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 19:25:00 +0000

techcrunch covers secretcities

secretcities code is now open-sourced on github!

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 19:25:00 +0000

secretcities code is now open-sourced on github!

First steps for secretlondon

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 17:56:00 +0000

Londoners!

So here’s the deal: I love this city and who doesn’t love secrets… so when I got the chance to help out, I was like “Hell yes!”. I’ve got a couple of years experience building this sort of thing - however if we’re going to make secretlondon amazing - I’m going to need some help. So I’d welcome all the feedback and technical know-how you can muster.

Technical info for the geeks out there: For starters I’m going to be cracking this out using django. I’ll throw the project up on github asap, so you can all have a look and a play. Then it’ll be coupled with the usual - Apache & wsgi for serving the app and nginx for serving static files & cached pages.

Where I’m really worried though is scalability and speed of getting this bad boy to market. So, I’m going to be using our old friend amazon. I’ve got a decent AMI kicking about with most of this already pre-configured. But I have no idea what kind of loads we’ll be getting. So, for a db server I’m toying with the idea of using RDS to try and reduce the management hassle (we can always pull it back from here at a later point). Then just for kicks use ELB as a Load Balancer. I realize this is all a bit Amazon-tastic, but the aim here is go quickly (and I love it).

I know this update is vague so I’m looking forward to hearing what people think.

Tim

— orignally posted on our blog