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Great external HDD solution

john — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 00:10:06 +0000

I have a few external USB drives and needed a new one and was looking either to upgrade the capacity of one of the drives or buy a new unit. I wanted at least a 500GB drive whose sole purpose would be a Time Machine backup drive hanging off my Mac. I have an existing 500GB unit, at the time the cheapest I could find, but it recently died (you get what you pay for!). So, temporarily, I started using an older 250GB drive. But that was filling up; considering I need 200+ MB for backup and Time Machine was starting to delete the older weekly backups.

Was considering one of the Drobo units, to take advantage of increasingly cheaper HDD, but didn’t really need the ultimate flexibility, and didn’t want the price either. To not make that decision, I was going to settle for a cheap enclosure/ATA drive. But, while doing my normal surf habit, I saw a reference to Thermaltake BlacX Docking Station and did some research on it. Basically a toaster like unit to swap SATA drives, both 3.5 and 2.5 units. Everything looked good and I started shopping. Found it on Newegg for $37 and picked out a nice (well-reviewed) 750GB SATA drive for $59. Great solution for < $100!

Now, I’ll continue to look for SATA deals and I’m all set to roll over to a new Time Machine backup, or swap in a drive temporarily to copy to/from archives, etc..

Up and running in no time. Flawless.

BTW… Time Machine is a great app… I know, I know, it is just a backup and lots of other solutions out there, but the fact that it comes as part of Max OS X, and extremely simple to plug in a drive and go is tremendous.. Already saved my bacon after my main drive failed. After the drive was replaced, I was up and running after a simple restore from Time Machine — didn’t lose a thing. Actually, in this case, the drive was not completely shot — it wouldn’t boot but I was able to inspect via DiskWarrior (another great tool) and actually made emergency backup from there before I took in for repairs, but ultimately used the restore from Time Machine

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Magento api with Java Client — problem with XML-RPC interface

john — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 23:56:41 +0000

One of the features touted by Magento is the api exposed via both XML-RPC and SOAP. I quickly (and successfully) tested the SOAP interface using the amazingly complete (and free) soapUI. I wanted to use XML-RPC, and decided to build a test client in Java. While trying to build a client, using the apache ws-xmlrpc library, I ran into a roadblock. The initial login and some other calls would work just fine, but some calls such as product.info would always cause an exception, similar to:

Exception in thread "main" org.apache.xmlrpc.client.XmlRpcClientException:
Failed to parse servers response: Unknown type: nil

I posted on the magento forum to no success (except to find a few others with the same problem). So I was on my own..

After some research, I determined that the problem (IMHO) is that the Magento api is incorrectly using the nil type in responses. According to the XML-RPC spec, nil is an extended type, and can only be used with a namespace (e.g. ex:nil) — see the data types section on the apache site. But, luckily, the ws-xmlrpc library can be easily extended to provide a work around, and the following solution worked for me.

All you need to do is extend the builtin TypeFactoryImpl class and the assign the client TypeFactory to your custom class. Most of the work by this custom TypeFactory can be done using the super class, so just check for the incorrect nil usage when getting a parser. e.g the TypeFactory I used :

public class MyTypeFactory extends TypeFactoryImpl {

    public MyTypeFactory(XmlRpcController pController) {
        super(pController);
    }

    @Override
    public TypeParser getParser(XmlRpcStreamConfig pConfig,
      NamespaceContextImpl pContext, String pURI, String pLocalName) {

        if ("".equals(pURI) && NullSerializer.NIL_TAG.equals(pLocalName)) {
            return new NullParser();
        } else {
            return super.getParser(pConfig, pContext, pURI, pLocalName);
        }
    }
}

and then created my XmlRpcClient as follows:

XmlRpcClientConfigImpl config = new XmlRpcClientConfigImpl();
config.setServerURL(new URL("http://mymagentoserver.com/api/xmlrpc/"));
XmlRpcClient client = new XmlRpcClient();
client.setConfig(config);
client.setTypeFactory(new MyTypeFactory(client));

Notes:

There is a enabledForExtensions property used by the client (and server) classes, which can be set by XmlRpcConfig:: setEnabledForExtensions(), but that has no effect here since the Magento server is doing it wrong.
You would use a very similar method if you needed to implement a custom type (if your XML-RPC server defined one), but would need to provide a custom TypeSerializer as well, by overriding the getSerializer() method in MyTypeFactory. There is an example of this on the ws-xmlrpc site in the advanced techniques section.

As usual, your milage may vary.

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Playing with Magento

john — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 21:22:28 +0000

One of my side interests is eCommerce, primarily for building stores, and even more so from the programming side… I’m not really sure why, but it is an area that has always intrigued me… And recently, lucky enough to have the chance to “play” with it while working on some side projects. We were looking at osCommerce for a while, but eventually decided to focus on Magento. Both freeware, php-based platforms, but in the end, Magento had fewer warts.

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Still Alive!

libjack — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 15:46:41 +0000

Ok, so I have not been active lately… hoping to change that… just upgraded WP to 2.7.1, upgraded several plugins, got to get back to managing … No related posts. Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. No related posts. Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Virtual happiness

john — Thu, 15 May 2008 02:45:58 +0000

I should add “on the Mac” to that title, but I’ll avoid any born again references for now. By virtual, I’m referring to the ever so wonderful virtualization, the ability to run a guest OS within another (see wikipedia entry on virtualization for more). For me, on my iMac, I’m using VirtualBox. It’s opensource, from a company which was recently purchased by Sun. My primary use will be quick access to an OS to test configurations or run (windows-only) software. I currently have debian and ubuntu versions, will get a Windows (Vista probably) as soon as I am willing to shell out the $$. Right now, for the few windows-only apps I have, I VNC to my seldom used windows boxes (Vista, Win2k).

VirutalBox has guest edition software for Windows and Linux which adds nice features such as mouse pointer integration and integrated windows. Plus, sharing host directories is very easy. These features are available in the other commercial virtual host solutions I’ve looked at.

OS installation was a breeze for the Linux distributions, as I simply downloaded the iso images and mounted it as cdrom for the guest installer to use.

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Wordpress + Google Analytics

john — Thu, 01 May 2008 06:43:43 +0000

Since I’m more into blogging now, it means I’m also into Wordpress; especially exploring it from the technical side. So don’t be surprised by more blogging about Wordpress. And with a more constant online presence, it allows me to explore and use a few technologies I haven’t had much exposure to yet, AdSense, Google Analytics, SEO, etc.. So, signed up for all my accounts and now time to integrate… hmm how to put the Analytics code onto every page of my blog? … Probably have to edit something… maybe a plugin exists? After a bit of searching, found the perfect, simple how-to on Trent Mueller’s blog … simple editing of footer.php..

Great external HDD solution I have a few external USB drives and needed a...

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Automator

john — Thu, 01 May 2008 05:17:17 +0000

More fun stuff, played with Automator recently because I wanted to find a quick way to set image tags for multiple images. You can do it manually in Preview.app, but wanted a drag and drop solution. I guess I got inspired after watching a recent ScreenCastsOnline podcast (http://screencastonline.com/); as a demo, they showed building a workflow for scaling images by 50%. After a bit of searching, I found an Write IPCT Tags action on automator.us (http://automator.us/leopard/downloads/index.html)

With that action, can create static workflow, or can prompt for all the tags to set.

Great external HDD solution I have a few external USB drives and needed a...

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Wordpress upgrade

john — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 02:59:46 +0000

woo woo… managed to upgrade to wordpress 2.5, plus installed several plugins as I try to explore Wordpress a lot more.. Related posts:Still Alive! Ok, so I have not been active lately… hoping to... Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. Related posts:

Still Alive! Ok, so I have not been active lately… hoping to...

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Using Spotlight to find system files (Leopard)

libjack — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 13:45:34 +0000

Well, I just get done writing a happy shiny post about being on a Mac, and now I have to grumble a little bit..

It all started because I was trying to find the location of the apache root by searching for a file I knew would be there, index.html.. But no matter what I did, Spotlight would not show the files I knew had to be there…

After some trial and error and some Google searching, figured out this was because of something new in Leopard… Only way to search system files is via the finder:

enter the search term on the finder window
(after the search bar shows up) click the “+” to add search option
In first menu, choose “Other …”
Choose “System Files” from the list that pops up (and check to place in menu to avoid this step later), click “OK”
Now back at the Finder, choose “include” from the second menu

Now you can use this to find all system files

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Return to all things Mac

john — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 03:26:05 +0000

I became a Unix/C geek back in ~1983; before that, not much mattered, although I do remember by DG Eclipse RDOS days rather fondly. I purchased a Macintosh in 1985 and was fully entrenched in everything Mac both for work (development along with Unix/X) and personal use until about 1999. After that it was just occasional use as, although I continued with Unix/Linux, I eventually wound up Windows based — primarily to co-exist with various company IT. I picked up a used iMac (lime) in 2003 and loaded up OS X (Panther) and started to enjoy it a little bit, mostly hampered by the underpowered iMac. Can’t say I did much except use it as a browser and iTunes station (without any iPod) for most of the time.

But I finally got fed up with the lame Windows releases and convinced myself that a new iMac was the way to go… So, around Thanksgiving 2007, I bought a shiny new 24″ iMac 2.4 Core 2 Duo, 2 GB, 500G….. Ah, life is good once again! Can’t believe how I lasted this long — computer nirvana once again!

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