Month: February 2010

Symfony development

Last week the second incarnation of Symfony Live came to an end and I just had the time to check a couple of shared slides from the event.

Definitely interesting stuff going on there, especially the preview release of Symfony 2.0 whose code is available on GitHub since a couple of weeks and which makes major changes to the “good old way” one used to write symfony applications (actions are now “controllers” and extensions “bundles” and well, a dozen of other things changed as well of course… you can read everything in detail here).

Also, Doctrine 2.0 seems to be the first PHP ORM which decouples the modelling approach from the actual database abstraction layer, skips the need for base classes and enables the model definition via annotations. Also, they seem to fight against the overly complex magic from Doctrine 1.x (one of my top complaints on Doctrine in comparison to, f.e. Propel) – maybe I’ll revisit Doctrine again when the next version gets stable.

The guys at Sensio labs do really have a fast development pace and I get more and more the impression that the Symfony ecosystem is the major competitor for the Zend framework. Community-wise I think Symfony is already much bigger than any other PHP framework.

Twitter

A hail to all the twitter users posting “I’m currently at XXX” status messages, otherwise useful information like those on pleaserobme.com would not be possible.

Darling, do you happen to know where I’ve put my lock pick in…?

guitone 1.0rc1 released

I’m proud to announce the immediate release of guitone-1.0rc1. This is the first release in a series of smaller releases which aims at the stabilization of the guitone codebase. Many (if not most) of the features one would consider needed for a “1.0” release have been implemented, a couple of outstanding bugs (noticable FS#39, FS#41 and
FS#42) have to get fixed beforehand though before that happens. Please test and report bugs if possible.

Outstanding news of this release:

  • Synchronization with other monotone nodes is no possible
  • Workspace action implementation almost feature-complete (add, drop, revert, rename, ignore, unignore and update finally work)
  • guitone can now create new monotone databases and setup new projects
  • Much improved key management with the ability to change the passphrase of keys, filter the key output and also drop keys
  • Many more bugfixes and smaller improvements as well as stabilization of the codebase

For a complete list of changes please check the NEWS file. I’ll try and prepare a Windows binary in the next couple of days, but probably won’t get to that before Wednesday, so if you want to help out, drop me
a note. A binary for Mac OS X should arrive shortly as well.

Tip: Enforce specific key usage for a single SSH connection

In case you have to access a very restricted SSH server which only accepts a single key (ie. the one which is set up in `~/.ssh/authorized_keys`) and otherwise fails, its the easiest to set the specific key in your local `~/.ssh/config` file as follows:

Host very.secure.server
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_dsa
    IdentitiesOnly true

The second entry, `IdentitiesOnly`, forces SSH to only use known identity files and not look for more available identities f.e. from a running `ssh_agent` instance (which are always tried in first instance as it seems).