Dmitry Dulepov

Various approached to problem fixing

2018-12-04T16:15:00.002+03:00

I worked with many programmers in my life. I saw two types of solutions for the same problem:

Using X hours and writing 300 lines of code without any comments and zero maintainability
Using 3*X hours and writing 50 lines of self-explaining, fully maintainable code

I always prefer the second approach. It costs more at development time but it always pays back in the long term and have nearly zero costs after deployment. But this approach is very rare unfortunately.

How stupid those spammers can be...

2017-05-13T16:09:00.000+03:00

How stupid do they have to be to make so many errors in one mail and hope that I believe it is a legitimate PayPal message?

So, what do we see here?

Wrong style (PayPal messages do not look like this)
Wrong "From" name and email
Spaces before commas
Missing spaces
Wrong spelling of the name (WFT is “PaYpal”?)
Comma in places, where it should not be

Really, how stupid is this?

Thoughts about notebooks

2016-08-12T12:25:00.001+03:00

Since 2008 I use Apple Mybook Pro for all my activities. I migrated from Windows to OS X because of better quality of the screen, higher resolution, better fonts and colors. If you have to spend 50 hours near the computer weekly, you should have a really good one.

My last Macbook Pro was late 2011 model. I was really reluctant to change it because it was a HiRes model (not Retina though) with a matte screen. I hate glossy screens. But time goes on and after five years I had to buy a new one. The old one stays as a backup and it is now being services by Apple authorised service center.

Meanwhile I thought about criteria that I would use to select a computer. I started to think about it because I saw a very good deal on Dell E7450 ultrabook. I am not going to run Windows on it but a certain kind of Linux. So here is what I got as my criteria and how the current Macbook 2015 matches to E7450:

Criteria	Macbook Pro 2015	Dell E7450
CPU power Need highest possible	2.8GHz, 4 cores	2.3GHz, 2 cores
RAM 16GB at least	16GB, 1600MHz	16GB, 1600MHz (upgraded from 8GB)
Storage The more the better	1TB USD	256GB SSD (upgraded from 128GB)
Video Only need good quality screen	Retina looks great but screen flickers when switching from integrated to discrete graphics and there are artefacts on the screen sometimes when using discrete graphics	Screen is excellent!
Screen size	15"	14" Not really noticeable difference comparing to Macbook Pro
Non-glossy screen	Not available	Non-glossy
Touchpad with multitouch	+	+
WWAN connectivity	No	Yes, with Dell WD5809e card (GPRS/EDGE/3G/LTE)
Real battery life Maximum possible	About 6 hours	About 6.5 hours
Weight	2.04 kg	1.54 kg
Upgrades possible	No	Yes
General stability	Excellent	Excellent
Price	3200€	990€+320€ for upgrades

As you see, suddenly Dell beats Macbook Pro in overall comparison. Also given all kind of issues with video, privacy and upgradability, Dell becomes much better choice than a Macbook Pro. I also found that using Linux on Dell is a very good experience.

Probably, I will use more and more Linux on Dell Ultrabook and less and less Apple notebook. It still remains my main work computer but for side research and private activities I would prefer Dell & Linux.

RealURL 2.0

2016-03-03T15:49:00.000+03:00

RealURL 2.0 is finally in TER.

Now I can relax for a couple of days...

Thanks to everybody, who helped:

My employer, snowflake productions gmbh, who donated many hours to this work and personally Patrick Aubert de la Rüe for his support
René Bigler, who was one the first to try it and submitted a big piece of code for integration
Benjamin Serfhos
Mathias Brodala
Artus Kolanowski
Robert Vock
François Suter
All those, who dared to install a pre-release version

You can help to develop the extension further:

Removing merged git banches

2015-10-14T13:14:00.001+03:00

If you work in a team, create many git branches and push them to the server, you may end up with many local branches that were merged and removed on the server. The following simple command will clean up your repository from local branches that track missing remote branches:

git fetch --all -p

Set environment variable when "cd"ing to the directory

2015-10-12T18:45:00.002+03:00

I love automation! It saves a lot of time and helps to avoid mistakes.

When I work on projects, I sometimes need to set environment variables in the shell when I cd into a directory in the terminal. I ended up with a shell function that replaces the standard cd command. It checks if there is a .env file in the current directory and executes it on entering. When you leave the directory, if checks if the file .env_off exists and calls that. That file can contain normal shell commands, not just environment variables.

Do not forget to export variables in the .env file!

The script is here.

Evernote plugin for browsers

2015-07-15T18:42:00.004+03:00

Just discovered a nice feature of Evernote plugin for Safari: if you search in Google it can show related results in your notes:

Chinese IP camera user name and password

2015-06-14T18:52:00.001+03:00

I forgot what was the default user name and password to access one no none IP camera. However I found those settings "encrypted" in the configuration file:

acID=61656F6A6A
acPW=313131373131

After a couple of minutes the solution came with the help of phpsh:

php> $arr = array(0x61,0x65,0x6F,0x6A,0x6A);for ($i = 0; $i < count($arr); $i++) echo chr($arr[$i] ^ $i);
admin
php> $arr = array(0x31,0x33,0x31,0x37,0x31,0x33);for ($i = 0; $i < count($arr); $i++) echo chr($arr[$i] ^ $i);
123456

Yeah, really "strong" encryption...

Why scam emails fail

2015-04-03T12:22:00.001+03:00

Dear scammers!

PayPal is spelled like "PayPal", not like "paypal".

There should be no space after the punctuation mark.

And, please, improw yor Ingiz before you write those emails, ok?

I am bored to get this in my mailbox. You can do better than this!

realurl and dd_googlesitemap are released for TYPO3 7.0

2015-03-15T15:08:00.001+03:00

realurl still supports 4.5 LTS while dd_googlesitemap requires 6.x or newer now. Also in preparation to support the newer news extension, former news sitemap is renamed to tt_news.

I think realurl and dd_googlesitemap can be used with TYPO3 7.1 too but I did not test that version yet. O hope to make it soon.

If you wonder why this happens slowly, the answer is simple: there is daily work and family, which takes priority over free work. As to 7.0, my employer is interested in getting these extension work with TYPO3 7.0, so they sponsored it with certain amount of time. This is how I could get these extensions out.

Apple is over

2015-03-10T11:23:00.004+03:00

Does anybody else think that it is a complete lack of style or it is only me so conservative?

I am getting really disappointed by Apple recently:

Killing Aperture - the "best quality" RAW processing program!
All those stability and Wi-Fi issues in all recent hardware
Maps flop
Abnormal prices when everything else goes cheaper
Annoying "continuity" forced in Yosemite
Inability to make something as convenient as DropBox but creating iCloud Drive, which nobody wants to use
Trying to block Spotify instead of doing something similar

I start thinking about alternatives. Not because of the price but because it seems that Apple has finally lost its main key thing: usability.

I am still using iPhone 4s because all newer devices were not worth the money. And I am still on Macbook Pro 2011 with HiRes matte screen and Mavericks because it is the best working environment available now.

What will I do if my iPhone 4s or Macbook Pro breaks? What should I get next? Definitely not Samsung or Lenovo or Acer. But what? What notebook has the same great matte display with good resolution and colors suitable for photo manipulation? What phone works nicely with decent battery life?

Status update about RealURL

2015-03-03T11:21:00.004+03:00

There are two things I want to tell today:

RealURL 2.x is still in the work and it will take time until it will become ready & public
A new release of RealURL 1.x will be out this or next week and it will be compatible with TYPO3 from 4.5.40 to 7.1.999 (without core compatibility layer). The same extension for all supported TYPO3 versions. 1.x releases will come out until 2.x is available and if there are bug fixes to publish.

Getting OS X keychain password from terminal

2015-02-18T12:45:00.002+03:00

Sometimes I have to run curl queries in the terminal for hosts that have password protection. If I do not remember a [usually random] password or forget that the site is protected, I get a 401 response:

Atlas:~/Projects/**** [development] $ curl -I 'http://host.example.com/'
HTTP/1.1 401 Authorization Required
Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2015 09:41:18 GMT
Server: Apache
WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="Preview"
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

Than I have to go to my keychain to look up the password. Thanks to Alfred, it is easy to invoke the keychain but it means switching applications and entering the password for the keychain. I looked for the way to do this from terminal.

Here is the command:
Read more »

rsnapshot, anyone?

2015-02-18T10:45:00.001+03:00

Recently I came across rsnapshot as a backup solution that can do hourly, daily and monthly backups. I am interested in any experience but it is hard to find except for this.

Does anybody have experience with it?

bash completions for my "Projects" directory

2015-02-13T12:01:00.001+03:00

Linux bash shell has a nice feature called “completions”. You type a command and you press a TAB key. This will bring you a list of options that the command supports for completions. You type the first letter of any option and press TAB again. Now the list is reduced only to options starting from that letter. And so on.

I use terminal quite a lot. All projects for my work are located under ~/Projects/Snowflake (I work for snowflake productions gmbh). To quickly go to that projects from terminal I added the following to my ~/.bash_profile:

alias "cds=cd ~/Projects/Snowflake; cd "

Now I can just type cds projectname and get to ~/Projects/Snowflake/projectname. But I have to remember project names. Many of them are German and it is hard to remember for me. Why not use autocompletion for that? So I made a new file in /opt/local/bash_completion.d:
Read more »

GIT: show log since the branch was created

2015-02-12T15:32:00.008+03:00

Quite often I have to use a git log command to show what was made in the branch:

git log development...feature/add-solr-news-search

One thing that I'd like to know is about using short notations. If I am on feature/add-solr-news-search, than I can use this:

git log development...

Git will be smart enough to figure out that it is about the current branch. Sadly it is not smart enough for this:

git log ...

I hoped it will figure out that I want a log from the parent branch to the current branch...

How good are you at Git?

2015-02-12T09:00:00.000+03:00

Find out using Git Game! You need to clone the repository and look at README.md for the next clue. Ten levels, getting more difficult with each level.

Can you pass?

Quality is no compromise

2015-02-11T00:41:00.001+03:00

When it comes to the code quality, there are no compromises. You either write good code or bad code. There is nothing in the middle.

Many years ago I read an excellent book about code quality named “Clean Code”. That book goes to extreme and not all recipes are acceptable but I read and re-read, thought again and again until I set my own rules to writing code.

I think I have a certain advantage over people, who start using PHP as their first programming language. I started with Pascal and used assembler in parallel during my first five years of programming. Neither allows compromises. Pascal is very strict and assembler is just a razor sharp to errors: one minor error and your head is off. Next I used C++, which was more relaxed but than coded in Java for a couple of years, which was also very strict programming.

PHP is very relaxed when it comes to quality standards. You can assign a string to a variable and compare it to the number or to virtually anything else. You can assign any type to any variable, return anything from the function or do not return anything at all. If the programmer did not have good practice with other languages, he may start writing code, which is not that good. It is not necessarily true but it happens.

These things came to me today when I tried to use my TYPO3 extension named sentry. This extension automatically catches all kind of PHP warnings and exceptions (that you do not normally see) into a centralised repository when warnings and exceptions for various projects can be viewed, analysed and processed:

Details screen for the first warning looks like:
Read more »

SVN one-liner

2015-02-10T18:00:00.001+03:00

Using SVN command on the old host to find modified files:

svn st | grep '[^MAD\?]'

Looks mad? ;)

When it fails...

2015-01-27T00:26:00.002+03:00

Failures happen all the time in every aspect of our life. While I am going to discuss failures of software developers, methods to handle those failures can be also applicable to other situations, even for families and friends.

When something fails, we all are unhappy about it. When developers screw up an important launch, when hotfixes break the system even more, when the site does not go online in sync with related sites, it is a failure. Failures has to be handled.

How do people handle failures? There are different ways. One of the most dangerous and bad ways to handle failures is to start looking for the responsible person and blaming him for errors.

Why is it bad?
Read more »

Opening images directly in Photoshop on Mac

2015-01-24T19:20:00.004+03:00

I work with Adobe Photoshop CC 2014 quite a lot. Often I have to open JPEG images there from Finder. By default, JPEG images are opened in Preview. To open them in Photoshop I have to right-click on the image, scroll down to Open With..., wait until the pop up menu appears (or click it to open faster), find Adobe Photoshop CC 2014 there and click it. Too long.

Can this be simplified? Oh, yes!
Read more »

Strange localisation code in the Extbase persistence layer

2015-01-16T09:30:00.003+03:00

Quite often I see that people do mistakes when they work with localisation in TYPO3. This topic is quite complex and often misunderstood.

TYPO3 localisation is defined by the Frontend Localisation Guide document, which was written by Kasper. I was one of the early reviewers of the document before it was published. While screenshots there are old, the document is still accurate. Let's have a quick look how localisation of records is handled in TYPO3.

Record localisation in TYPO3

Note that we are talking about records here, not pages. Pages are localised slightly differently.

All localisable records can be logically divided into the records in the main language and in other languages. This is an important distinction. Main language in TYPO3 always had id equals to zero. Other languages are defined on the tree top level and have id values starting from one.

The record in the main language is very important because it contains all fields. Records in other languages may either contain all fields or only some fields that depend on the localisation. For example, a record like Event can have the following fields:
Read more »

TYPO3 7.0 and RealURL

2014-12-05T10:24:00.004+03:00

RealURL is not compatible with TYPO3 7.0 because old compatibility classes were removed in TYPO3 7.0 but RealURL must be compatible with TYPO3 4.5.

I plan to release a new version of RealURL somewhere in March 2015. It will compatible with TYPO3 6.2 and newer TYPO3 versions (not with TYPO3 4.5). That new version will use different principles for building URLs: faster and more reliable. This will be completely new code. Configuration will be compatible with existing version with the exception of redirects: they will not be included into new RealURL because I strongly believe it is not a RealURL functionality and redirects should be done in a different way.

That's all news for now.

Zend Certification Study Guide

2014-11-24T16:45:00.000+03:00

I understand why they give 50% discount to it. Not worth the money at all.

It costs $15 at Zend web site and it is absolutely useless. If you can read headings of PHP manual at php.net and 2-3 sentences of each section, this is what this $15 guide gives you: heading at a couple of [worthless] sentences.

Lost money, total crap. Don't buy.

Why I wouldn't upgrade to Yosemite, iOS 8.1, etc.

2014-11-23T13:42:00.001+03:00

Usually when Apple makes updates I upgrade fast. For regular users (non-developers) such updates are easy and bring new cool features. For developers it is a certain amount of pain because developers have to reinstall all kind of tools they use (java, macports, Xcode, and so on). It takes some time but still it is usually worth upgrading.

This time when Apple released Yosemite and iOS 8.x I decided not to upgrade. Why? Because it causes more problems than it is worth. See yourself:

Apple broke TRIM for 3rd party SSDs. It is pretty bad not to provide TRIM by default for all drives but to complicate TRIM enabling is even worse. Yes, this can be overruled but the cost is lowering security of the OS. Bad.
Continuity. Sorry, no. I do not wish to pick up phone calls on my Mac or iPad. I do not want all my devices to ring at the same time, especially when I am on a call with my boss over Skype. Yes, it can be switched off. But I do not want to go and switch it off everywhere somewhere deep inside settings. I want either a question at installation or this feature to be off by default to preserve compatibility.
Stability issues. OS X should not come with wi-fi connectivity issues.
Performance issues. Nether iOS, not OS X should be that much terribly slower because some head at Apple decided that transparency is cool and windows now should be transparent. Yes, can be turned off but why the system comes with non-optimal settings?
Why does it enforces iCloud on me? I do not want to use your iCloud, Apple!

Apple devices and OS are still the best combination to work with. Nobody made even anything remotely close to the convenience of Apple production for the same price. So I stick with Apple for now but I am looking for something else. Not Windows. May be some Linux, which is optimized for humans (no, not Ubuntu). And good hardware that works smoothly, with multitouch touchpad and proper keyboard work. 404, not found so far.