Posts

For the last few months I’ve been attempting to practice Stoicism and wanted to share the effects of what regular stoic practice has had. If you’ve never heard of Stoicism I’d recommend fourhourworkweek.com’s introduction, which is very pragmatic. Essentially, what happens after several weeks of watching your emotional reactions, evaluating what’s in your control and feeling indifference to what isn’t. Certainty The first noticeable effect was stoicism seems to have cultivated a sort of centred calm feeling within my decision making. A certainty that wasn’t there before, like a rational backbone on which decisions are made. This is a net effect I’ve never gotten from say tradional mindfulness practice(simply as it’s a topic not addressed). Say I’m facing a difficult meeting or presentation and I need to make a decision on something important I’m going to say. Instead of feeling this vague anxiety or dread and avoiding the problem, I force myself to make a note of it. I hold the feeling in my awareness and remind myself of the preparation I’ve done. If my decision either way makes me look foolish, well that’s out of my control. The emotional background noise is suspended and it’s reduced decision fatigute by a significant amount. It’s a very useful default technique to go to. ...

PHP-Resque, the PHP equivalent to Ruby’s really nice background process runner is a great way to execute long running PHP processes. Supervisor is a python-based process control system, essentially it’s a convenient way to manage custom system processes you need to handle. Combining the two to manage long running PHP jobs makes a lot of sense but it takes a little bit of work to get them talking. Once you’ve gotten PHP-Resque installed on your project, you’ve added items to your queue and written the workers to handle the background tasks. You’ll need to plug PHP-Resque into supervisor. Here’s a sample config file I used to manage php resque queues within Yii projects but it should work with anything that’s using php-resque. ...

If you’ve ever had to try unit test code that’s dependent on external services, you’ll know the pain of trying to mock-up fake API requests by hand. It’s painful to setup and painful to maintain, this little tutorial attempts to make the whole process as easy as possible. Step 1: Capturing a live set of API requests. So firstly download and install Charles Web Proxy. Here’s a good description of what Charles can do from their site. ...

I use salt quite extensively to deploy SugarCRM installs and I wanted a scriptable way to setup the correct permissions for Sugar running on a linux box. This script is based on the Sugar documentation and this handy post here. Simply fill in your apache user details and the path to the Sugar install and you’re away. #!/bin/bash APACHEUSER='www-data:www-data' SUGARPATH='/var/www/sugarcrm' find -P $SUGARPATH/ -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \\; find -P $SUGARPATH/ -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \\; find -P $SUGARPATH/ -name *.js -exec chmod 755 {} \\; chmod 664 $SUGARPATH/config.php chmod 664 $SUGARPATH/config_override.php chmod 664 $SUGARPATH/sugarcrm.log find -P $SUGARPATH/cache -type d -exec chmod 775 {} \\; find -P $SUGARPATH/custom -type d -exec chmod 775 {} \\; find -P $SUGARPATH/data -type d -exec chmod 775 {} \\; find -P $SUGARPATH/modules -type d -exec chmod 775 {} \\; find -P $SUGARPATH/include -type d -exec chmod 775 {} \\; find -P $SUGARPATH/upload -type d -exec chmod 775 {} \\; find -P $SUGARPATH/cache -type f -exec chmod 664 {} \\; find -P $SUGARPATH/custom -type f -exec chmod 664 {} \\; find -P $SUGARPATH/data -type f -exec chmod 664 {} \\; find -P $SUGARPATH/modules -type f -exec chmod 664 {} \\; find -P $SUGARPATH/include -type f -exec chmod 664 {} \\; find -P $SUGARPATH/upload -type f -exec chmod 664 {} \\; chown -R $APACHEUSER $SUGARPATH And the salt config to get this running. ...

Four years ago(to the day) I wrote a post on why I was Giving up on wikis and I have to admit, four years later my opinions on the topic really haven’t changed. It’s been 4 years, 700 questions(with 800 answers) and several server moves later and by and large the process hasn’t changed all that much, everything is just little more streamlined. Tagging: When I started I simply used tagging to reflect the technology the ...

I find myself setting up salt minions a LOT. So I figured I’d write down the steps in this concise format. On the minion sudo add-apt-repository ppa:saltstack/salt sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install salt-minion sudo echo ' salt' >> /etc/hosts //Or whatever the salt master is sudo salt-call -l debug state.highstate Then on the master sudo salt-key -L sudo salt-key -a Then back on the minion sudo salt-call -l debug state.highstate ...

The new Sugar subpanels look great but they do take up quite a lot space, without any ability to remove Subpanels via studio I’ve had to come up with a few ways to hide them. Note: Original Props go to Robin Larsson who wrote the original on the Sugar Community. What Robin’s code does is essentially hide fields based on a specific value within a record, I didn’t really need that ability much so I’ve altered his code based on use cases I’ve come across. ...

I needed a simple cron job, that just took backups of my project folders, should the worst happen to my laptop. Google brought up nothing obvious, so I figured I’d share it here. tar zcvf /tmp/snap.tgz ~/Projects && rsync /tmp/snap.tgz user@remotebox:/home/backups/snap_`date +%F_%T`.tgz && rm /tmp/snap.tgz Okay, I’ll admit it’s a bit of a long one-liner.

This is the SugarCRM 7 equivalent to this post here, because Sugar has dropped the process record logic hook, we need to come up with a new solution. Here’s how you can add a new column to a list view, I have to admit this is one of the really powerful additions to SugarCRM 7, no more crazy config files or hacks to try cheat your data in. By leveraging javascript events with a decent restful API you can come up with some really nice solutions, with lots of hooks to do custom things. Once you see the difference in implementation you’ll see why I’m so pleased. ...

There doesn’t appear to be a documented way to do this but in SugarCRM 7 this is how I’ve added actions to the listview. For this example it’s showing how to add a button to an animal module, which adds the animal to a related circus event. 1. Adding thebutton This first thing you need to do is copy the global recordlist.php file into your module and create a custom recordlist.php which overrides the existing one. You can copy the base one SugarCRM has or simply take this file below and alter the add_to_circus button. Note the addtocirus:fire action, we will create javascript code that is called when this event is fired. This code should go into custom/module/animals/clients/base/views/recordlist/recordlist.php ...