5 Reasons to Love Your Chromebook

I'm still adjusting to my gorgeous CB5-571 - Acer 15.6 Chromebook with 1080p Full HD display after using the

Acer C720 for nearly two years.  I love my itty bitty little C720 and it' still fantastic for traveling and throwing on the couch, but wait until you see the 15.6" Acer Chromebook.  Screen is amazing.  Videos and sound are awesome!  It's big, so if you want to lug a big laptop, this one's for you.  I'm holding off on the full review until I've had a full month with the beast, but it really is an amazing piece of technology for the money.  Gushing on my Chromebook made me list the 5 things I love about my Chromebook the most.

Using Apache's Swiss Army Knife - mod_rewrite for RESTful endpoints (part III)

This is the last blog in my series on Apache's mod_rewrite.  In my previous blogs I've explained a little bit about how you can use this Apache module to redirect URLs both internally and externally.

Using Apache's Swiss Army Knife - Part I

Using Apache's Swiss Army Knife - Part II

I've provided a few examples and talked about some of the gotchas that I've encountered.  Today we're going to discuss how to use mod_rewrite to provide an API endpoint that is an alias for your web server's name without creating another virtual host.  In most cases, it makes sense to create another virtual host configuration file to implement your application API, however in the event you don't have access to Apache's configuration files, you can use mod_rewrite rules in an .htaccess file to achieve nearly the same operations.

Serving up POD & The five Cs of Good Documentation

I'm a fanatic about documentation.  As a developer that has been involved in creating tools for other developers all my career, I understand the importance of good documentation.  Creating good documentation is not easy, which is why so few people write good documentation.  Here's an easy to remember grading system for your documentation.  Does it meet the five Cs test?

 Is your documentation...

1. Correct
2. Complete
3. Comprehensible
4. Current
5. Convenient

I probably don't need to go into too much detail here, but if ain't complete, correct, comprehensible and current it may be worse than no documentation at all.  If it ain't convenient it really doesn't matter how correct, complete, comprehensible or current it is, now does it?  It's not easy meeting all 5 Cs all of the time.  Most likely your documentation will transition through various permutations of those Cs during the software development lifecycle.  So how can we at least make our documentation more convenient and accessible and at least allows us to make an attempt to meet the 5Cs?

What happened to MySQL TIMESTAMP columns?

Imagine you are using MySQL for some application (not so hard to do) and you're running successfully on version 5.x.  For some reason you are forced to, or decide to upgrade to 5.6.  As always, version upgrades of your software's dependencies should be done with your eyes wide open and your tests ready to run.  As the title of this blog entry suggests, MySQL TIMESTAMP column behavior has changed is some dramatic ways.

Using Apache's Swiss Army Knife - mod_rewrite (part II)

This blog was supposed to introduce some tricks to allow you to create a new subdomain for your RESTful endpoints, but I think before we launch into more details about creating your RESTful API endpoints I should share a few relevant discoveries regarding using mod_rewrite that might be of interest.

Using Apache's Swiss Army Knife - mod_rewrite for RESTful endpoints

As I've been exploring using Bedrock for creating RESTful APIs, one of the requirements for a well crafted API is to create appropriate URIs that make sense.  I've read the phrase "you don't write RESTful APIs you DESIGN them" in more than one blog.  This usually boils down to exposing the API in a logical and hierarchical manner.  Apache's mod_rewrite is a versatile and useful tool for allowing you to create meaningful, well crafted endpoints that also work with Bedrock.

<include --optional>

Bedrock 2.4.1-10 now includes a new option of the <include> tag.  The new --optional argument, will prevent Bedrock from throwing an exception if your include file is not found.  This might be useful for those situations where you might want to conditionally include a file.

<include:foo --optional>

There a couple of old school ways of achieving the same thing.

<if -e --file ($config.INCLUDE_DIR + '/foo.inc')>
  <include:foo>
</if>

or

<try>
  <include:foo>
<catch>
</try>

Either way you slice it, the old school way seems forced.  The --optional tag is admittedly syntactic sugar, but a welcome sweetener!

Cookieless Sessions - Automatically Login Your Users

The default Bedrock persistence store, implemented via the $session object has the ability to create a token (session identifier) you can use to automatically log your users into your applications.

This is a useful feature for resetting passwords and perhaps creating convenience links for fast access to application specific pages that would normally require a user to login to the application.  Here's how it works...

Bedrock + Barewords = Bug

This morning, after being sufficiently caffeinated with a full pot of coffee, I was able to isolate a Bedrock bug that has been bugging me.  Bedrock was failing to throw an exception on what I would consider a syntax error (missing right end tag >).  

  <null:foo $baz.some_method()

  <var $foo>

Bedrock however, happily parsed the expressions and went along it's merry way...argghhh!

Is it a bug in Bedrock?  Probably, but IMHO it's really a problem with Bedrock's loosely defined grammar.

Love me some more Chromebook!

New beta channel release appears to have fixed memory management issues.

For the first time since I've owned my Chromebook I experienced a lot of "He's Dead Jim" out of memory issues.  So far the new update of January 8th seems to have corrected the problem.

New 15.6" Acer Chromebook

Looks like Acer is going to enter the 15" market.  They were giving sneak peeks at the CES in Las Vegas of a new Acert 15.6" Chromebook.

According to the representive they'll have several models including an i3 4GB model.  Lower end models (2GB, lower resolution) will start at $249.  Since it comes in at almost 5lbs I don't think it will replace my current C720 as my go to road device, but the increased screen size will make this a nice addition to the den.

The experiments with crouton and running Ubuntu on my 2GB model were very successful, so I suspect there will soon be an emerging Linux laptop pattern fueled by these Chromebooks.  I'd go with the 4GB model for those contemplating running unity.

Love me some Chromebook!  Can't wait to get my hands on one.  Rumors suggest March...