“Your American Express credit card PIN is here

Please be aware:

• The PIN for your VISA credit card has been sent to you separately
• The PIN for your American Express and Visa credit cards will be the same.

“

and another letter reading:

“Your Visa credit card PIN is here

Please be aware:

• The PIN for your American Express credit card has been sent to you separately
• The PIN for your Visa and American credit cards will be the same.

“

Yep – both PINs were the same: so why did they have to send two letters (doubling the chances of interception of the letters?) giving the same details? Why not just one letter saying “Here’s your new PIN code – it’s applicable to your Visa card (ending XXXX) and your American Express card (ending YYYY) which you’ll be receiving in the next few days. The PIN is the same for both cards, and you can can the PIN on either card via most high street cash machines.”

So where am I going?

Well, my fiancée and I will be starting, on the 3rd of January, a new company called Bairwell Web Development to combine our two talents. Bairwell will be offering WordPress, Perch and LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP 5 : also some Varnish, PostgreSQL, Memcache, Perl and Systems administration) development consultancy services – so if you want a well designed (Katy), scalable and responsive (me) website: then please get in touch with us via our web development site (Katy is still working on it at this time of writing), Twitter or Facebook.

Fingers crossed!

(Disk spaces on Github are “soft-limits”)
All packages include unlimited public projects.

So, what alternatives are there?

BitBucket

Plan	Price	Private repositories	Collaborators	Disk space
Unlimited	$80/month	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
50 users	$40/month	Unlimited	50	Unlimited
25 users	$20/month	Unlimited	25	Unlimited
10 users	$10/month	Unlimited	10	Unlimited
5 users	Free	Unlimited	5	Unlimited

Codebase HQ

Plan	Price	Private repositories	Collaborators	Disk space
Enormous	£95/month	Unlimited (140 active projects – unlimited archived)	Unlimited	25Gb
Large	£40/month ~$60/month	Unlimited (60 active projects – unlimited archived)	Unlimited	10Gb
Medium	£21/month ~$30/month	Unlimited (30 active projects – unlimited archived)	Unlimited	4Gb
Small	£13/month ~$20/month	Unlimited (15 active projects – unlimited archived)	Unlimited	2Gb
Tiny	£5/month ~$7/month	Unlimited (3 active projects – unlimited archived)	2	50Mbb
Free	£0	Unlimited (1 active project – unlimited archived)	10	0.5Gb

All packages, apart from “Free”, include wikis and time tracking. All packages apart from “Free” and “Tiny” include “own branding” and “data export”

Indefero

Plan	Price	Private repositories	Collaborators	Disk space
Going solo	£19/year	25	Unlimited	150MB
Business	£49/year	Unlimited	Unlimited	1Gb
Enterprise	£199/year	Unlimited	Unlimited	5Gb

All packages include issue tracking, file sharing, documenation wiki, code reviews, daily dumps, umlimited public projects.

Any others that I’ve missed?

Here’s my recommendations of products which are available to people in the UK:

JetBrain’s PhpStorm editor
50% off Personal Licences. £38 instead of £77.

OS: Windows, Mac OS X, Linux
I’ve found phpStorm a lot better than Eclipse and Netbeans: and as well as PHP, HTML, Javascript syntax colouring and checking, it also does .htaccess files, YAML, XML and more (along with integration with GIT and others). Jetbrains also has the discount on WebStorm (same as PHPStorm, but no PHP editing) and RubyMine.

1Password password manager
About half price. $24.99 for a single user licence instead of $49.99

OS: Windows, Mac OS, iOS (iPhone/iPad)
Stores and manages your passwords and secure notes. Extremely useful and handy. Compatible with Dropbox, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer: so you can have all your passwords on all your computers.

Apple
Discounts from all the range (£31 off the iPad 2, £81 off a MacBook Air)

Prag Prog (Pragmatic Bookshelf)
40% off all items

Offering 40% off all of their products when the coupon code “turkey” is used. Quite a selection of books, but I’ve not tried them before…

Lavasoft Ad-Aware Pro
Save $20

OS: Windows
Buy the popular anti virus and anti spyware application for $9.95 instead of $29.95. I’ve found their free Ad-Aware application extremely good.

Any other tech deals available today to people in the UK that you know of?

Relaunching the Amazon EC2 image

1. Log into your Amazon Ec2 account
2. Select your Region again
3. Select “Images->AMI”
4. Select your image and click “Launch”
5. Ensure the number of instances of “1″ and “Instance type” is “Micro” and click “Continue”

Make a backup of the Amazon EC2 configuration

1. Log into your Amazon Ec2 account
2. Under the “My instances” select your Jenkins install
3. Under “Instance Actions” to “Create Image (EBS AMI)” and give it an appropriate name and description

It is advisable to shutdown your EC2 image when you are not using it to avoid billing (not so important with the free Micro instance, but a good practice to get into)

Continued in Relaunching the Amazon EC2 image

Installing and Configuring Jenkins CI

1. Connect to your Amazon EC2 image as per Connecting to Amazon EC2 using PuTTY
2. In the SSH window, run: sudo wget -O /etc/yum.repos.d/jenkins.repo http://pkg.jenkins-ci.org/redhat/jenkins.repo
3. In the SSH window, run: sudo rpm --import http://pkg.jenkins-ci.org/redhat/jenkins-ci.org.key
4. In the SSH window, run: sudo yum install jenkins
5. In the SSH window, run: sudo service jenkins start
6. Whilst we are waiting for Jenkins to start up, we can install PHP and associated modules
7. In the SSH window, run: sudo yum install php git
8. In the SSH window, run: wget http://pear.php.net/go-pear.phar;sudo php go-pear.phar
9. You will be prompted if you want to make any changes to the PEAR installation. Select to change the “Installation base ($prefix)” 1 to /usr
10. You will be prompted if “Would you like to alter /etc/php.ini”, select “Yes”
11. In the SSH window, run: sudo pear config-set auto_discover 1

sudo yum install php-devel gcc make ImageMagick ImageMagick-devel php-dom php-pdo dbus-devel libxml2 libxml2-devel ant php-mbstring swig

12. In the SSH window, run: sudo pecl install xdebug channel://pecl.php.net/dbus-0.1.1
13. In the SSH window, run: sudo pear install pear/XML_RPC2 pear.phpqatools.org/phpqatools PHPDocumentor pear.phpunit.de/PHPUnit channel://pear.php.net/Text_Highlighter-0.7.1 channel://pear.phpundercontrol.org/phpUnderControl-0.6.1beta1 channel://pear.php.net/HTTP_Request2-2.0.0RC2 channel://pear.php.net/Net_URL2-0.3.1 pear.pdepend.org/PHP_Depend phpunit/PHP_CodeBrowser channel://pear.docblox-project.org/docblox-0.15.1
14. In the SSH window, run: sudo su
15. In the SSH window, run: echo 'zend_extension="/usr/lib64/php/modules/xdebug.so"' >> /etc/php.ini
16. In the SSH window, run: echo 'extension=dbus.so' >> /etc/php.ini
17. In the SSH window, run: echo 'date.timezone="Etc/UTC"' >> /etc/php.ini
18. In your web browser, go to http://ec1-23-456-78-901.xx-yyyy-1.compute.amazonaws.com:8080 (where http://ec1-23-456-78-901.xx-yyyy-1.compute.amazonaws.com is the hostname of your Amazon EC2 image)
19. Click "Manage Jenkins" on the left hand side and then select "Configure system" (in Chrome, you may get the "LOADING..." grey screen covering most things for a long time, just try a different browser)
20. Select "Enable security"
21. Under "Access Control->Security Realm" select "Jenkins's own user database" and tick the "Allow users to sign up"
22. Under "Authorization" select "Matrix based security"
    • Along side "Anonymous" select "Overall->Read"
    • In "User/group to add" add your preferred username and click "Add"
    • Give yourselves full access by checking the entire row
23. Scroll down and click "Save"
24. From the home page of Jenkins click "Sign-up now"
25. Enter the same username as you did before and your preferred password, name and email address. Click "Sign up"
26. Once you've logged back in, select "Manage Jenkins" and "Manage Plugins"
27. Select "Available" and check the following plugins:
    • Checkstyle
    • Clover PHP
    • DRY,
    • JDepend
    • Plot
    • PMD
    • Violations
    • Analysis Collector Plugin
    • xUnit

    If you are developing using GitHub, also select "Github Plugin"

28. Scroll down and click "Install"
29. Wait and then select "Restart Jenkins when no jobs are running"
30. Wait whilst Jenkins restarts
31. Go back to "Manage Jenkins->Configure System"
32. Scroll down to "Ant" and "Add Ant" and call it "Ant" and select "Install automatically"
33. Under the "E-mail notification" under the "Default user e-mail suffix" and "@" followed by your domain name and your email address under "System admin e-mail address"
34. Click Save

Continued in Make a backup of the Amazon EC2 configuration





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Connecting to Amazon EC2 using PuTTY

1. Load PuTTY
2. In the Hostname box, enter the Public DNS entry of your Amazon EC2 instance (ec1-23-456-78-901.xx-yyyy-1.compute.amazonaws.com)
3. Click, in the left hand side of the PuTTY window, Connection->SSH->Auth
4. In the “Private Key Field” select the file you saved from “Preparing PuTTY for Amazon EC2“
5. Click “Open”
6. Login as “ec2-user”

Continued in Installing and Configuring Jenkins CI





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