LornaJane

There's a little command line utility on *nix which I use a lot - it's wc or "word count". This is especially useful to because I live in a world where everything is plain text right up until I have to send it to someone else (and sometimes not even then). Despite its name, word count can count more than just words - it can do characters, words, lines and can tell you the length of the longest line while its at it.

Counting Lines

The biggest problem with counting lines is remembering the name of the utility, since its called "word count" and not "line count". I tend to use this for doing things like piping grep to wc and counting the lines to give me an idea of how many occurrences of something there are. I also use it to count errors in weblogs or really anything else that I could do with summarising. The syntax is something like:

Using a count like this is especially good for things like auditing code, where I need to know how prevalent something is - or refactoring, where I'm looking for how many of a particular pattern are outstanding. Counting lines is also very compatible with my habit of making lists in text files.

Counting Words

This is the feature that the utility was originally designed for, and as you can imagine, its pretty good at that. As with most things, this blog post started life as a text file and when I got to this point I saved it and ran:

It outputs the number of words (272) and the name of the file, which is useful if you're giving it a pattern to match.

Word Count

Its a really convenient and versatile little program; I use it often and I hope others will find it useful too.

Last weekend I was privileged to speak at the inaugural PHPBenelux conference in Antwerp, Belgium. Since Ibuildings is partly a dutch company I combined this with one of my regular trips to meet with the people there, visiting both our offices in the Netherlands and catching up with a bunch of colleagues in both locations before making my way to Belgium for the main event.

The conference itself was very well organised and the venue worked very nicely. I liked the hotel (I'm accustomed to London hotel rooms so European ones always seem huge), which was nice and had an English slant on breakfast since sausages were available alongside the cheese and pastries! The venue itself was just across the car park and had plenty of rooms with an open exhibition space which worked nicely - the two tracks were on opposite sides of this space so the footfall for the exhibitors was hopefully good! Full marks go to the crew:



I gave my talk "Passing the Joel Test in the PHP World" with some updates since I first gave it at PHPNW09 in Manchester. This is a nice best practices talk and although I didn't have a lot of people in my talk, this was no surprise since Ivo was speaking in the same slot as me with his "PHP and the Cloud" talk, which I STILL haven't seen! If you are interested my slides are here: http://www.slideshare.net/lornajane/passing-the-joel-test-in-the-php-world-phpbnl10 Thanks to my audience who were great and managed to stay enthusiastic despite my nerves and the late afternoon slot :)

Here's to PHPBenelux 2011!

I'm delighted to announce that the people at SuperMondays in Newcastle have invited me to speak at their event on 22nd February. For this I'll be writing a new talk entitled "PHP and Web Services: Perfect Partners" - looking at how PHP is a good fit for web services and how I'm using it both in my day job and in my hobby projects. Visit the event page itself for the full description, a bit about me, and the arrangements for the night. I am warned that they have limited capacity so although admission is free, if you want to go you should register for tickets ASAP!

If you are attending, let me know and come and say "hi" to me on the night! I don't know this crowd well but so far they are pretty friendly and I'm looking forward to the trip north :)

I'm adding some small features to the API for joind.in when I have a moment and this is my first experience of working with CodeIgniter. I've been getting increasingly impatient with its tendency to try to escape my SQL code for me - this is a really useful default feature but it seems to assume I don't know what I'm doing and so it puts backticks all over perfectly acceptable SQL code, very annoying!

One night when I was getting exasperated with it tangling up my SQL expressions, I tweeted my frustration in the hope that I was just missing something simple. A prompt reply from @damiangostomski told me that this was indeed the case ... I dug around for the API docs on codeigniter - it's an established framework and has a good reputation. I knew it would have API docs even though I hadn't used the framework before, and I found them:

$this->db->select() accepts an optional second parameter. If you set it to FALSE, CodeIgniter will not try to protect your field or table names with backticks. This is useful if you need a compound select statement.

That quote is from this API docs page - so a big thankyou to Damian for replying to me on twitter, and to the good people at codeigniter for adding a useful option to their framework and documenting it so nicely :)

Recently I've been contributing to the code project behind joind.in, the event information and feedback site. I rely on joind.in a lot and after putting up with a frankly astonishing volume of feature requests from me, its owner Chris Cornutt very politely suggested that I might like to fix some of them myself. The project is hosted on github and I haven't traditionally been much of a git fan, but I wanted to contribute so I set off to work out how to begin.

Register on Github

To do anything useful I first needed to sign up for an account. Github has a range of accounts but I found that with one of their free accounts I would be able to get started and contribute to the project. This gives me a project space of my own and a user to tie all my activities to.

Set up SSH Key

In order to authenticate against the github servers, you need to set up an ssh key and give them your public key so they know you are you. You'll then need to tell git to use this key whenever it makes contact with the github servers. I do quite a bit with ssh and ssh keys myself so I was comfortable with this step. Even if you are totally new, its still pretty straightforward and they have a great howto on github itself which will help.

I had issues with git not picking up that it needed to use a non-standard ssh key, but I found the answers in this entry on the git website. In a nutshell, set up an ssh alias, set the key in there and then use the alias instead of the actual URL when giving the repo location to git. This now works like a charm for me.

Fork the Project

Now, github uses "fork" where I might choose to say "checkout" - fork in my world means something else completely. But in this case you're just making your own copy of the project repository. This is where you will commit your changes to and it retains its link with the original repository making it easy for anyone with commit access to that to pull in your changes. Patch files are nowhere to be seen, and although I was wary at first, this is project collaboration at its most painless, I'm impressed! Forking was relatively simple and again there was great documentation on the github site. In particular I recommend that you take the time to follow the bit about adding an alias for the "upstream" repository - this made committing my changes to the main joind.in repo really easy.

The forking instructions linked above also gave a description of how to actually use git, how to get my changes applied to my local repo, and how to push them to my remote repo on github itself.

Make a Pull Request

Once I'd fixed a few things, I was ready to push the code back to the main project so that Chris could consider it for inclusion. This is done by making a pull request from the main project page - you can add a comment about the changes you are supplying to help the maintainers to manage all the incoming patches.

Go Forth and Contribute

It was easier than I expected to get set up to contribute to a project using github, so find something you want to improve and/or be involved with, and do it. I began by fixing the docs for joind.in, which was a great place to start since it allowed me to make a useful contribution without touching the code in the first instance :)

If anyone is able to make it to the PHPNW User Group meet in Manchester next Tuesday 2nd February - I'm the speaker there! I'll be giving a talk entitled "Best Practices for Web Service Design", which covers lots of information about web services and how to write one that your users will love! Details of the event are over on upcoming, you can find out more about the talks, the venue and the group as a whole. If you're able to make it then I'll see you there - its a good crowd :)