MOVED

This blog has moved to http://daveparrish.net/

Drubuntu setup

Starting to work with Ubuntu in developing Drupal sites I needed a little help getting started. I was able to get a great deal of information in setting up a LAMP server for developing multiple Drupal sites from this page.

This page gives even more information on setting up a Drubuntu (Drupal + Ubuntu) development environment. However, I had already been told of Wubi and I'm going to use Komodo Edit instead of Eclipse.

So far my Drupal stack is looking like this:

• Ubuntu through Wubi
• Drupal
• Apache2
• MySQL
• PHP
• PHPMyAdmin
• Komodo Edit
• Mercurial
• Filezilla

So far so good!

Adobe AIR on 64bit Ubuntu

A 64 bit version of Adobe AIR doesn't currently exist for Linux but luckily the 32 bit version will work. Details here.

Upgrading to a newer Drupal minor version

Doing some more Drupal recently I needed a way to quickly update my 6.10 Drupal sites to 6.11. The best way that I have found which seems to be safe was found on this Drupal discussion. The steps go like this:

1. Backup your database.
2. Go user ID 1 and Maintenance mode.
3. Switch to Garland.
4. Disable all custom and contributed modules.
5. Use Grsync (or rsync) to synchronize the versions. (I'm using plain old FTP, Filezilla, because I'm crazy like that.)
6. Run update.php.

Email Testing - Viewing HTML emails

I wanted to write a follow up to my post on email testing. I could now easily capture an email, using DevNull SMTP, but I also wanted to view the email as if I had just received it.

To do this all I needed to do was copy the plain text of the email message to a .eml file and then open the .eml file in a email client. In my case I copied the email from the DevNull SMTP email server applet and into a test.eml file. I then opened up Outlook Express and dragged the test.eml file into the client. Outlook Express was able to render plain text or HTML emails just fine, which is exactly what I was looking for.

Send email testing

Wanting to test the send email code before uploading my latest website I dug around for ways to test a send email script that I had written in PHP.

One suggestion is to code a public SMTP server information into the send script. Some popular public SMTP servers include Gmail or your ISP SMTP. GMail requires TLY encryption so the email library better support TLY to use the GMail option. My email library didn't, I am using the Email component in CakePHP. I didn't try my ISP SMTP because I was too lazy to call up the Time Warner to get my username and password.

Another option is to run your own SMTP server and run your emails through that. One program that does this is ArGoSoft Mail Server and others exist, especially in the Linux environment. While I liked that idea better I didn't really want to send my emails. I just wanted to make sure that they were getting to the SMTP correctly. I also was a little concerned that a spammer might take advantage of my temporary smtp server while I had my firewall open.

Finally I came across some "fake" smtp servers that are designed for testing send email scripts. A few of them include fakemail, dumpster, ndumpster, but I ended up using DevNull SMTP. DevNull SMTP is a Java application that can be loaded as an applet. No installation solution, HURRAY!

Happy testing send email scripts!

XNA, clickonce and MSBuild

The last few months I have been working with XNA off and on. To be honest, mostly working on subversion and clickonce. I don't have a lot to show right now, but that is the nice thing about clickonce is that when I do get more of the game done then it will be automaticly updated.

I am hosting the site from my home computer right now through no-ip.com, so if the site may be down if my computer is off. Secondly, the bootstrap should install all the necessary prerequisites, but if it doesn't then the links are listed below. Here is my current progress. BTW, the images are SUPER large right now, so it might take awhile to download. I am currently working on reducing the size of the images and creating a Xbox 360 version.

XNA Prerequisites for the PC

.NET Framework 2.0
Microsoft XNA Framework Refresh

For those wonder how I got Clickonce to deploy the converted textures and not the source textures, I had to use a little MSBuild hack in the .csproj file. After poking around in MSBuildBinPath and looking through the Microsoft.Common.targets file I realized that some of the Publish functionality can be overriden by overriding MSBuild targets. All I needed to do was add the files to be published in the MSBuild script. Specificly, I needed to override the _DeploymentComputeClickOnceManifestInfo target and add files from my Content directory in my build output. Here is the code to do this:

<!--Override _DeploymentComputeClickOnceManifestInfo Manifest so I can add content files that I need-->
    <Target
        Name="_DeploymentComputeClickOnceManifestInfo"
        Condition="'$(GenerateClickOnceManifests)'=='true'"
        DependsOnTargets="_DeploymentGenerateTrustInfo">

        <!-- Grab just the serialization assemblies for a referenced assembly.  There may also be a symbols file in ReferenceRelatedPaths -->
        <CreateItem Include="@(_ReferenceSerializationAssemblyPaths)" Condition="'%(Extension)' == '.dll'">
            <Output TaskParameter="Include" ItemName="_SGenDllsRelatedToCurrentDll0" />
        </CreateItem>
        <CreateItem Include="@(_SGenDllsRelatedToCurrentDll0->'%(FullPath)')">
            <Output TaskParameter="Include" ItemName="_SGenDllsRelatedToCurrentDll" />
        </CreateItem>

        <!-- Flag primary dependencies-certain warnings emitted during application manifest generation apply only to them. -->
        <CreateItem Include="@(ReferencePath)" AdditionalMetadata="IsPrimary=true" >
            <Output TaskParameter="Include" ItemName="_DeploymentReferencePaths"/>
        </CreateItem>

        <!-- Create list of items for manifest generation -->
        <ResolveManifestFiles
            EntryPoint="@(_DeploymentManifestEntryPoint)"
            ExtraFiles="$(IntermediateOutputPath)$(TargetName).pdb;$(IntermediateOutputPath)$(TargetName).xml;@(_ReferenceRelatedPaths)"
            Files="@(ContentWithTargetPath);@(_DeploymentManifestIconFile);@(AppConfigWithTargetPath)"
            ManagedAssemblies="@(_DeploymentReferencePaths);@(ReferenceDependencyPaths);@(_SGenDllsRelatedToCurrentDll)"
            NativeAssemblies="@(NativeReferenceFile);@(_DeploymentNativePrerequisite)"
            PublishFiles="@(PublishFile)"
            SatelliteAssemblies="@(IntermediateSatelliteAssembliesWithTargetPath);@(ReferenceSatellitePaths)"
            TargetCulture="$(TargetCulture)">

            <Output TaskParameter="OutputAssemblies" ItemName="_DeploymentManifestDependencies"/>
            <Output TaskParameter="OutputFiles" ItemName="_DeploymentManifestFiles"/>

        </ResolveManifestFiles>

        <!--here is where I add the extra content-->
        <CreateItem Include="$(OutDir)Content\**\*">
            <Output ItemName="ExtraFiles" TaskParameter="Include" />
        </CreateItem>

        <CreateItem Include="@(ExtraFiles)" AdditionalMetadata="TargetPath=Content\%(RecursiveDir)%(Filename)%(Extension);IsDataFile=false;DependencyType=Install;">
            <Output ItemName="_DeploymentManifestFiles" TaskParameter="Include" />
        </CreateItem>
        <!--END - here is where I add the extra content-->

        <CreateProperty Value="ClickOnce">
            <Output TaskParameter="Value" PropertyName="_DeploymentManifestType"/>
        </CreateProperty>

        <!-- Obtain manifest version from ApplicationVersion and ApplicationRevision properties -->
        <FormatVersion Version="$(ApplicationVersion)" Revision="$(ApplicationRevision)">
            <Output TaskParameter="OutputVersion" PropertyName="_DeploymentManifestVersion"/>
        </FormatVersion>

        <FormatUrl InputUrl="$(_DeploymentUrl)">
            <Output TaskParameter="OutputUrl" PropertyName="_DeploymentFormattedDeploymentUrl"/>
        </FormatUrl>

        <FormatUrl InputUrl="$(SupportUrl)">
            <Output TaskParameter="OutputUrl" PropertyName="_DeploymentFormattedSupportUrl"/>
        </FormatUrl>

    </Target>

Publish resume using Google docs

Taking a que from a fellow employee I work with I decided to publish my resume which has gone neglected for some time. The process was easy enough and it is nice to simply be able to send a link out for whomever whats to look at the resume.

So, here is it. Feel free to critique it all you want. BTW, it is only half completed currently.

2 in 1

I just finished up with Halo 2 tonight and I finished Final Fantasy 3 this morning. Haha! Halo 2 was awesome! I am really looking forward to the Halo 3 now. Final Fantasy 3 wasn't all that great, but I felt obligated to finish it. Well, now that I have those two titles under my belt, I can rest easy tonight. I need the rest after 12 hours of video gaming. Goodnight! ;-)

Subversion service (cont.)

As I was helping a friend setup a Subversion service I realized my last blog was missing some important information.

First of all, the service is NOT installed in the Subversion install by default. To get the service exe, which is a wrapper for svnservice, click here. I couldn't remember where I had gotten the svnservice wrapper so I had to search Google again, and this time came across a very helpful blog. This blog has all the information needed to setup a Subversion server/service from scratch.

Souls of Rebirth

After about 5 hours of game play I made it through the GBA Final Fantasy II bonus game, the Souls of Rebirth. It wasn't too tough except for the beginning part. Sometimes the game would force me to fight monsters that I couldn't defeat. I would have to save often and reload in these cases.

I noticed in the Souls of Rebirth that Blink is an awesome skill. I realized that it stacks! It can be cast repeatedly until the characters evasion is so high that they can't even be hit! Unfortunately, most monsters use spells at the end of the game, but the most devastating spell, confuse, doesn't effect the party much either because even the other party members can't hit each other.

Puzzling

Over Thanksgiving, my brother Jake and I worked on a jig saw puzzle. OMG, it was the hardest puzzle I have EVAAAR worked on. I suppose it would have been harder if we had done it upside down but just barely. I kept egging my brother on by saying, "Just keep helping, It will get alot easier real soon." Well, that was when we had about 100 pieces left. Then it was 50, 30, 20, 10, 5, ummmmmm still not easy. Honestly, when we had gotten down to the last 2 pieces we still didn't know which spot they went in without trying all the combinations to make them fit. Amazing.

It was a 1000 piece puzzle of the painting "Pleasant Day" by Cao Yong. The colors in the puzzle seemed like they may have been a bit faded, because it seemed like all the peices looked alike. The only sections that were easy was the sky and he water.

HAPPY NEW YEARS!

Last blog for today, I promise. ;-)

Final Fantasy II defeated!

I finally beat Final Fantasy II for the GBA. Man it took alot longer than I thought it would. I had went through the game before on a translated Famicom rom, but the GBA version is much better.

It took me 35:42 hours to go through the game but I went really slow, and even fell asleep a couple of times when I was playing. :-) Final Fantasy games always put me to sleep when I play for some reason. All of my characters where basically tanks. I used one handed weapons and a shield except for the rare occasion when a bow was more powerful. I only cast spells when I needed heals or when a monster had really high defense and was weak against a spell.

I think that this game is a BIG improvement over Final Fantasy I. The story is much more developed and the spells, weapons, monsters, and characters are much more interesting. I thought that the music and graphics were alittle bit better to. The only problem I had was that it took TOO long to level up spells. I wanted to see all the level 10 spells but it just took too long for me to level them up that far. All-in-all this was a very fun game and it definitely kept me busy through Christmas. Oh yeah, I still have the bonus game, Soul of Rebirth, to do too!

Looking forward to Final Fantasy III on the DS!

HAPPY NEW YEARS!

Subversion Service

Installing a subversion service on Windows is pretty straight forward, but I got tripped up on a couple of things installing it a second time.

1. First, get Subversion and install using the MSI. The version I installed was 1.42.
2. Install the windows service. I can't remember if the installer does this automaticly or not. To do it manually just run the following command: svnservice -install -d -r C:\YourRepositoryRoot. This will configure the Subversion service to run as a service and it will look in the C:\YourRepositoryRoot directory for Subversion repositories.
3. To change the repository root later just run the with the setup argument: svnservice -setup -d -r C:\YourRepositoryRoot.

That should be all that is needed to get the Subversion service up and running. You will of course need to create subversion repositories in the root directory, but I'll leave that to another blog.

HAPPY NEW YEARS!

Pasting code into blogs, forums, etc

I just found out that this can be a real pain. Since I write my code in the Visual Studio editor I was able to use a macro to copy the code in a nice way. Modifying the code snippets by hand just sucks.

.Net 2.0 Forms DataBinding - Manual refresh

I recently discovered how nice it was to use DataBinding. I liked using it so much that I spent 4+ hours making it work for my application. In my application my data was being changed in the background by a continuously running thread. I suppose because it was being modified outside the scope of the form, the bindings were not being updated. It took me awhile to figure out how to manually refresh these binding.

The solution was to subscribe to the CurrentItemChanged event and then to run ReadValue() on all the controls Bindings. Here is the code that resulted.

private delegate void CurrentItemChangedCallback(object sender, EventArgs e);
private void BindingSource_CurrentItemChanged(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
 if(InvokeRequired)
 {
     CurrentItemChangedCallback d = new CurrentItemChangedCallback(BindingSource_CurrentItemChanged);
     this.Invoke(d, new object[] { sender, e });
 } else {
          foreach (Binding b in myControl.DataBindings)
     {
         b.ReadValue();
     }
 }
}

The code only updates the myControl control, but it could have just as easily iterated through all the controls in the form and refreshed all their bindings as well.

XNA Beta 2

XNA Beta 2 just came out! Lucky for me I'm on my vacation. :-) Can't wait to look at what was added.

Supreme Commander

Supreme Commander beta came out the other day. Hopefully I'll be able to get my hands on it soon. This will definitly be a must buy for me.

My first blog

I just wanted to try out this blogging stuff. Hopefully, this blog can serve as a gateway to share some information I collect during my journey through the software development world and life itself. Well, here's hoping!