Nginx 0.5.35 released

I don't know of any feeds that track nginx releases, so this is just a heads up for people that missed the release of nginx 0.5.35. Release notes:

    *) Change: now the ngx_http_userid_module adds start time microseconds 
       to the cookie field contains a pid value.

    *) Change: now the uname(2) is used on Linux instead of procfs.
       Thanks to Ilya Novikov.

    *) Feature: the "If-Range" request header line support.
       Thanks to Alexander V. Inyukhin.

    *) Bugfix: in HTTPS mode requests might fail with the "bad write retry" 
       error; bug appeared in 0.5.13.

    *) Bugfix: the STARTTLS in SMTP mode did not work.
       Thanks to Oleg Motienko.

    *) Bugfix: large_client_header_buffers did not freed before going to 
       keep-alive state.
       Thanks to Olexander Shtepa.

    *) Bugfix: the "limit_rate" directive did not allow to use full 
       throughput, even if limit value was very high.

    *) Bugfix: the $status variable was equal to 0 if a proxied server 
       returned response in HTTP/0.9 version.

    *) Bugfix: if the "?" character was in a "error_page" directive, then 
       it was escaped in a proxied request; bug appeared in 0.5.32.

Now go and upgrade your servers!

Public domain?

I'm currently reading "Fundamentals of database systems" by Elmasri & Navathe as part of the curriculum in a database course at my University. The book overall isn't all that bad, but their take on open source databases is really horrid. Quote:

"Personal computers and database system-like software products such as Excel, Visual FoxPro, Access (Microsoft), or SQL Anywhere (Sybase), and public domain products such as MySQL and PostgreSQL are being heavily utilized by users who previously belonged to the category of casual and occasional database users."

Wow. Public domain? I think they should at least invest two minutes to read up about open source software and open source licences, before they wrote about it. Excel and PostgreSQL in the same sentence? That's pretty fucked up if you ask me. And they have this highly patronizing tone which goes something like "commercial dbms > *, lol!". Someone should ship the authors a copy of PostgreSQL, I'm sure they would've been amazed if they tried it.

Easiest way to check IE version with JavaScript

Alright, so I needed a easy way to execute custom JavaScript for clients using versions of IE lower than 7. All the scripts Google showed me were really huge and quite outdated. So I took what I found, and turned it into something really lightweight. Note that this is just a quick hack, but so far it seems to be enough for my needs.

Code:

var Browser = {
  Version: function() {
    var version = 999; // we assume a sane browser
    if (navigator.appVersion.indexOf("MSIE") != -1)
      // bah, IE again, lets downgrade version number
      version = parseFloat(navigator.appVersion.split("MSIE")[1]);
    return version;
  }
}

Which enables me to do stuff like this:

if (Browser.Version() < 7) {
  ... // if client is using IE6 or lower, run this code
}

..or this:

if (Browser.Version() >= 7) {
  ... // if client is using IE7 or a sane browser, run this code
}

It will simply return 999 if the browser is non-IE. Is it safe to assume that navigator.appVersion always will contain "MSIE" in uppercase?

Quote of the year

"I get a little paranoid when stuff Just Works though so it's a good thing 99.9% of our customers run Internet Explorer. I'm pretty hard on IE but I will admit to at least one thing it does really well: destroying any sense of pleasantness a developer may feel when building web applications."

So true. Taken from this post.

Liberate yourself from the evil transparent menubar

In Leopard, of course. Get it here!

Using Git with Lighthouse

I wanted to set up Git integration with Lighthouse. The requirements for this was a bit different from the regular SVN integration, since in SVN every commit goes to a central repository, while Git is distributed. For the projects we wanted to integrate with Lighthouse, we use a shared Git repository which acts like the "main" repos. So when our local commits and changes gets pushed to the main repos, we want it to send a new changeset to Lighthouse, which should include the commit messages of all the new revisions since the previous push. A bit more complex than the Svn use case, but luckily Git provides some nice tools that made it quite easy. Google told me that some other guy made something similar a few days ago. However, his solution uses a post-commit hook, and thus sends every single commit to Lighthouse. Which wasn't acceptable for us, since we do a lot of small atomic commits localy. And it works against one of the nicest Git features: quick and easy branches for experimenting, since all the experimental commits would have been exposed to Lighthouse and filled up the overview screen. Summed up, we wanted to be able to make multiple local commits, and then send them as a "revision bundle" to Lighthouse and the main repos.

I solved this by setting up a both post- and pre-receive hooks on the main repos. I suspect that the pre-receive hook can be avoided, but I did the simplest thing that could possibly work. The pre-receive hook saves the current (pre-push) revision to a temporary text file, so it can be used by the post-receive hook. The post-receive hook runs a Ruby script. Most of it is taken from the script in the earlier link. The coolest line goes like this:

commit_log = `#{GIT} rev-list --pretty=short "#{oldrev}..#{newrev}" | git shortlog`

It sums up each authors commits, and shows the commit messages from each of the commits. (You can see this in action on the screenshot at the top of this post) Perfect. The script isn't as complete or elegant as it should be, but it works for now. I will edit it if I come up with something better. If anyone else makes improvements to this script I would love to hear about it (please leave a comment here, or ship me an email)!

Pre-receive hook: http://pastie.caboo.se/112536
Post-receive hook: http://pastie.caboo.se/112535

Choosing a project management system

Last week we were starting up a couple of small projects for some clients. I saw that as a great opportunity to review our choice of project management system. We were currently using Retrospectiva, a open source rails project. It does the job okay, but it isn't exactly very pretty, and the usability kinda sucks. This is supposed to get improved. Anyway, letting clients into Retrospectiva just didn't feel right. Oh, and currently Retrospectiva only supports subversion. And since we've transitioned completely to Git, thats a problem for us.

So I went looking for a substitute. I looked a bit at a new Rails app named WhoDoes. Its pretty cool, and I really wanted to like it since its extremely cheap compared to Lighthouse. It wasn't quite "it" tho. The biggest problem: it lacks a very basic PM requirement: knowledge capture. You really need to have an external wiki or something, since it doesn't even have simple pages/messages like Lighthouse. But I bet this app will improve in the future, so it's something to look out for. So we ended up with Lighthouse, which has a really really beautiful UI. And it's dead easy to use: everything is a ticket. Client-safe, and a whole lot more fun to use than Retrospectiva! We even got Git integration working, which I will write about next.