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Martin, a robotics researcher friend of mine, showed me this video at the weekend:
Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop from Keiichi Matsuda on Vimeo.
It certainly got us talking about where augmented reality may be headed, particularly for advertising. While the video is perhaps a little over exaggerated, the technology is rapidly getting there. Take, for example, the new augmented-reality mapping from Microsoft:
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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 | <script src="http://platform.twitter.com/anywhere.js?id=YOUR_APP_ID&v=1"></script> <script type="text/javascript"> twttr.anywhere(onAnywhereLoad); function onAnywhereLoad(twitter) { twitter.hovercards(); twitter('.follow-me').followButton("yourtwittername"); }; </script> |
Demo:
* hover card – @markrocky || @markrocky
* follow button – #
Plesk can be handy if you want to get a simple hosting situation up and running but is an absolute nightmare if you want to get into any nitty gritty on the server that might require some custom configuration. So how do you go about installing Symfony on a server running Plesk? As it is one of the common frameworks that we frequently need to be installing, I thought it worthwhile publishing my notes on the steps we need to take:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 | # change to your directory - under plesk, you will need to switch to root first > su - > cd /var/www/vhosts/domain-name.co.uk # create a directory for symfony > mkdir /var/www/vhosts/domain-name.co.uk/symfony # remove old httpdocs > rm /var/www/vhosts/domain-name.co.uk/httpdocs # create symbolic link so that requests to httpdocs are routed to symfony/web > ln -s /var/www/vhosts/domain-name.co.uk/symfony/web /var/www/vhosts/domain-name.co.uk/httpdocs |
To allow deployment via rsync from Symfony – in Plesk, enable user to access via SSH by checking: “Shell access to server with FTP user’s credentials (/bin/sh)”
No TagsAs you move differently in bed during the different phases of sleep, Sleep Cycle uses the accelerometer in your iPhone to monitor your movement to determine which sleep phase you are in. Come morning and it plots out a graph of your nocturnal activity. Here’s mine from the last couple of nights:
Sleep statistics for 30 – 31 Jan
Went to bed / woke up: 01:18 / 08:27 | Total time: 7h 08m
Sleep statistics for 31 – 01 Feb
Went to bed / woke up: 23:21 / 06:30 | Total time: 7h 08m
Can you guess when I woke to tend to our son? 
Now I *know* when I woke at night…
We are a small development team, at Harvest Digital, handling multiple tasks throughout the day, across different environments and projects. It makes for an exciting challenge. Our roles/ skills are clearly defined and our small size means we can react quickly to change, with little margin for communication errors and so on (see Getting Real and Less is more: Jumpstarting Productivity with Small Teams). But, when it comes to deploying to a staging or production server, I am ashamed to admit that we had often introduced a huge potential for human error by doing much of the work manually. Each project is different and so there is no consistent deployment process across the board.
Deployment is often the last step in the process to get any attention and it is one that can be unnecessarily tedious and prone to error. With more agile development projects, where deployments may be required several times a day, we obviously cannot afford the time nor the potential mistakes that may be made by manually deploying a project.
At its simplest level, deployment may just involve making sure that the target server (i.e. staging or production) has the latest revision of files from the project’s source control repository (we use SVN). But factor in tests and database migration and you can see how easily things can go wrong. Especially if you are deploying several times a day. You need to automate as many steps in the process as possible, thereby eliminating any manual tasks that introduce potential error and duplication.
Whenever we reach a point in a project where the code can be considered stable, we should tag it in SVN as a release. This gives you the ability to deploy a particular release based on its tag, instead of just the latest revision in the repository. By convention you never create revisions in the tag folder - tags are simply named snapshots of the source repository. We typically use version numbers as tags with some scheme based on feature-set or milestone and release date that can be ordered alpha-numerically e.g. “rel_belfast_2.04″. This allows us to say with certainty what is deployed at any one time, without having to scan logs etc. Tags give context to a release name (you can easily associate the release with project milestones) that revision numbers and timestamps do not. Tags are usually kept in a ‘tags’ subfolder, in the top level of the repository.
For a while now at Harvest, we’ve been working with symfony - an excellent PHP framework - that includes a few tools to help simplify the deployment process (such as Pake). These tools allow for remote syncronisation of files with rsync (the benefits of synchronisation over standard FTP are much touted elsewhere) via SSH (with the shell command: e.g. symfony sync staging) and semi-automate the build process (including database schema changes, data dumps etc: e.g. symfony propel-build-all myApp) by using Pake on the target machine.
But there is still a lot of room for improvement, particularly when it comes to database migrations and SVN integration. Plus, symfony is not our only set-up. We need an automated deployment process that can be applied across all our projects. This is where I’ve previously seen shell scripts being used but Phing can do much of this heavy lifting work for us, as it has many standard deployment tasks built-in to it. According to the Phing blurb:
Features include file transformations (e.g. token replacement, XSLT transformation, Smarty template transformations), file system operations, interactive build support, SQL execution, CVS operations, tools for creating PEAR packages, and much more.
Phing (PHing Is Not GNU make) is a project build system based on Apache Ant and is available through the PEAR installer. If you use --alldeps on Phing, it’ll grab, funnily enough, all the dependencies. But most are good packages (e.g. PHPUnit, PHPdoc and VersionControl_SVN). It can be used in a multitude of ways, including unit testing, creating docs, running SQL - which allows us to keep database schema changes in version control. The beauty of Phing is everything can be configured easily through the build.xml file (and then further with properties files) - so that the project’s deployment configuration can be kept in version control too.
In short, we love this thing called Phing!
For more detail on advanced tasks such as database migration take a look at these posts from Federico Cargnelutti and Dave Marshall.
No TagsI’m not much of a “gamer”, although I have to admit I am able to reference my life by what computer game I was playing since I was about 10 years old (for the record - Jet Set Willy, on the trusty ZX Spectrum) - maybe before then, if you include the clunky Radio Shack games I played on my Dad’s computers.
Jet Set Willy (1984: ZX Spectrum), Sonic the Hedgehog (1991: Sega Megadrive), Monkey Island (1990: PC), Doom (1993: PC), Worms (1995: PC), Abe’s Oddysee (1997: PS1), Grand Theft Auto (1997: PC), Rainbow Six (1998: PC) and many more; they all chart a certain personal view of the evolution of console and computer gaming. And it’s incredible to think how things have changed.
I can mark eras of my life in the same way you might signpost your autobiographical memory with where you were living. Sad but true. It tends to be just the one game as I don’t devote masses of time to gaming - when I find a game that I like, I stick with it.
Recently, I persuaded my wife that a PS3 would be a great addition to our family because “a PS3 is so much more than just a games console - you can use it to view all those digital photos and videos of our son”. And I’m glad I did as I think I’ve found the game to mark the next era -Â LittleBigPlanet. This game is incredible. It has brought the traditional platform game into the future with a fun, creative and collaborative online world that is constantly changing and ever evolving. Irrespective of what it represents in terms of incredible media and technological innovation, it also represents a return to pure and simple platform based game-play, with a few twists. And, possibly most importantly, it is impossible not to feel happy playing this game. It looks like we’re going to have some fun with this one…
LittleBigPlanet - UK Launch Trailer from Media Molecule on Vimeo.
Last night Google “mistakenly” released a comic book presentation of a their new Chrome browser application. Well it certainly got the buzz going and has whetted my appetite to give it a whirl. Less than an hour ago, Google made the download available and I’ve just been in a live walk-through (that hung my Firefox - oh the irony!), looking at some of its major features. In a nutshell - it is quick. More later…
[UPDATE: The verdict - it is fast. Much more screen space. Ideal for web apps. Won’t replace Firefox/ IE / Safari. Yet.]
