So it has been a while since I first talked about creating amandaharlin_v2, and I figured it was time for an update.

So I spun up a Ghost blog on OpenShift. Opinions are over here: http://ghost-cthos.rhcloud.com/ghost-on-openshift/

Today while I was talking in #techlahoma, the topic of chatbots came up. Being something of a chat bot connoisseur, I (with @amandaharlin's blessing) have set out to tell you how to get your very own hubot up and running on IRC.

I recently decided to get an IRC server up and running to see how complicated it would be compared to installing ejabberd.

So, I was working on getting a particular view which rattles off a list of categories working to link off to another view that has a Contextual Filter on said category field to list off all matching content items with said value in the field. Similar to Taxonomy terms, but being linked from a select dropdown. I was using the output as link option, with a replacement filter to put the value of the item into the url. Everything was pretty straightforward, except for one little snag. One of my categories had a forward slash in it.

Just a very quick note, as I had to do a bit of hunting to find where the heck Aegir was generating my virtualhosts for all of the domains I was managing through it.

By default it is located in /var/aegir/config/server_master/apache/vhost.d/, where that server_master part might change depending on what host you're modifying (if you're in a complex hosting situation, for example).

This comes in handy if you want to install SSL certificates yourself instead of going through Aegir to handle the certificates.

I am betting that everyone who has occasion to read this didn't know that I was an Android developer in addition to all of the other random stuff that I do. Well, I'm happy to announce that a project I've been working on for some time is now open sourced.

Introducing the Pathfinder Player Toolkit!

Github Project Page: https://github.com/cthos/pfpt

Yesterday, during a conversation with my coworkers on how Dependency Injection works with the Service Locator pattern, we were talking through what would happen with cyclical dependencies. Basically, what would happen if you told a Service locator to load a dependency for one class, and that class had a dependency for the class that was originally calling the Service Locator.

My last post was about using ab and jmeter to get some performance benchmarks on a website. Now, I figure I should probably mention how to profile your application to look for memory leaks, bad calls, and what portion of the code is taking the most amount of time.

First thing to do is get xdebug installed. There are several ways to go about this, the easiest being using a package manager to do the hard work for you. For example, if you're running Ubuntu with the default php from apt-get, you would do:

sudo apt-get install php5-xdebug

I've recently been evaluating different website benchmarking tools, so I though I would take a moment to highlight two of them I have used recently.

ab

ab is the Apache Benchmark tool, and it comes bundled with Apache. It's a pretty simple cli tool, used to test the throughput of a website. It has a bunch of different options you can pass to it, but the most important are -c (number of concurrent connections) and -n (number of requests). It's man page is pretty well written, so I'll let you explore the other options on your own.