Let me know what you think.

App Store
Cistec Site

Why?

One of the things we needed to establish for Cistec App Development was some sort of remote version control. Up until now we’d been using the world renowned Dropbox for working on our projects but it had several issues (updated in realtime, so if you attempted to compile after a colleague made a typo..).

After some googling to decide between the two version control systems Xcode will integrate with (SVN and Git) we went with Git thanks to some strong opinions on StackOverflow.

What?

We have a hosted Linux server and we access the Git repos via SSH from a potential 6+ Macs currently. We did initially have access setup via the git:// protocol but there were complications securing this so we moved to SSH.

How?

Server

You may want to have a few Git users (read-only for example) but I’ll let you sort those out yourself.

yum install git
mkdir /home/git/coolNewProject
cd /home/git/coolNewProject
git init --bare


Okay, so we’ve got the git infrastructure and a bare repo. The optional –bare means that the server doesn’t store a working copy, it just handles the source control. We found this to be easier.

Client

If you’ve got Xcode installed then you should have git already, failing that it’s available via Macports. Open the terminal and we’ll do some basic setup first:

git config --global user.name "Your Name/Handle"
git config --global user.email you@yourdomain.com


Now, an optional step is to setup SSH keys so you don’t need to enter the server’s SSH password every time you use git. Here’s a brief overview:

ssh-keygen (all defaults are fine)
cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
*copy the contents*
ssh user@server
nano/pico/vi ~/.ssh/authorized-keys (may not exist yet)
*paste it in all on one line*


Time to now pull down that nice Git repo you made, this will create a directory in your current directory so make sure you’re somewhere you want to keep your projects.

git clone user@gitserver:/home/git/coolNewProject
cd coolNewProject


When working with Xcode we have to tell Git a few things to stop it getting confused:

echo "*.pbxproj -crlf -diff -merge" > .gitattributes
nano/pico/vi .gitignore
*paste the below in*
-----------------------
# xcode noise
build/*
*.pbxuser
*.mode1v3
UserInterfaceState.xcuserstate

# old skool
.svn

# osx noise
.DS_Store
profile
———————–

Okay, almost ready to start using your new source control. We need do our initial add, commit and push. Copy your project into the coolNewProject directory or start a new Xcode project (without local git!).

git add .
git commit -a -m "Initial commit, repo setup."
git push master


That should be your new project files up on the server, ready for anyone else who needs to git clone them down. You can pull down any changes at any time by using ‘git pull‘. It will warn you if there are conflicts etc.

The process for committing and pushing your changes from now on is slight shorter, new files added outside of Xcode will require you to do another ‘git add .‘ but Xcode takes care of that for you if you do it within it’s GUI.

git commit -a -m "I made an awesome change to our cool new project"
git push


Xcode itself should pick up on the repo and you’ll be able to pull, commit and push via it’s source control bits (file->source control). Whilst Xcode is slower than the command line it’s conflict resolution is far superior so it’s worth using.

I find I use a combination of CLI, Xcode and SourceTree (free Git GUI, Mac app store) as they’re all good for different things.

What

A colleague and I have setup Cistec App Development for your app development needs.

Why?

The reasons are two fold:

1. We enjoy app development. There’s some little bit of magic to good app development, even a small piece of clever UI design can make people smile.
2. The company we were previously employed at doing iOS development didn’t want to reassign resources to all the app development requests that were coming in.

So, drop us a line if you’re thinking of having an app developed.

This is the solution we came up with.

First off we decided there were a few bots we could live without so we added some .htaccess rules to 302 these away:

# looking for majestic bot to kick it away.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*MJ12bot.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://go.away/ [R=302,L]
# Ditto Yandex
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*Yandex.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://go.away/ [R=302,L]
# Ditto Baidu
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*Baiduspider.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://go.away/ [R=302,L]

But there were the larger more important ones that we wanted to just delay until less busy periods. Our solution was to 503 (temporarily unavailable) the requests with a header suggesting they come back in 12 hours:

# Other bots we will allow, but during peak hours we will ask them to come back later.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*bot.*$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{TIME_HOUR} ^08|09|10|11|12|13|14|15|16|17|18|19$
Header set Retry-After: 43200
RewriteRule .* - [R=503,L]

The above is by no means entirely foolproof as it’s reliant on the requesting bot having ‘bot’ in it’s user-agent but we found it lowered the load significantly as soon as it was put live.

It did manifest one further problem in that our server is monitored by pingdom which does feature ‘bot’ in it’s user agent as below:

"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 35120 "-" "Pingdom.com_bot_version_1.4_(http://www.pingdom.com/)" "www.domain.com"

1. You’re on an insecure network and want to prevent your traffic being snooped on.
   All your traffic will be sent over SSH so it’ll all be encrypted to the point that it leaves your tunnel end.
2. You want to get local access to a work or home network that’s behind a firewall.
   By tunnelling all your traffic through a host internal to that network requests will appear to come from it’s local address within that network, allowing you to access things you usually wouldn’t be able to remotely as if you were internal to the network.

Amusingly this was actually the best explanatory image on the subject of SSH tunnelling I could find, courtesy of an Engadget post here.

So, if you’ve made it this far then hopefully this is something that’ll actually be useful for you. To start off with you’re first going to need a host somewhere that is running an SSH server and of which you have access to.

So lets go ahead and open our tunnel:

ssh -D 1234 greg@111.112.113.114

The ‘-D 1234′ is assigning this SSH connection to a port on our local machine, you can use 1234 or pick another unused port of your own. Then it’s obviously the user ‘greg’ at host 111.112.113.114. If you’ve already put one of my previous posts about SSH keys into practice then you’ll be connected, otherwise you’ll have to enter your password.

Alright, so that’s the tunnel established, now we just need to tell OS X to use it. For that we’ll be needing System Preferences –> Network:

Select your active network down the left (in my case Ethernet) and click Advanced. Navigate to the Proxies heading and enter in your machine and the port you chose under SOCKS proxy:

Click Okay and then Apply. Now your machine should be routing all it’s traffic via the tunnel you setup earlier.

Now if all that messing around in system preferences is a bit much for you to want to do every time then there is a terminal command to enable and disable this newly setup SOCKS proxy:

networksetup -setsocksfirewallproxystate Ethernet on

OR

networksetup -setsocksfirewallproxystate Ethernet off

So you can script the SSH connection and enabling of the proxy if you’d like, enjoy.

It’s quite short but the awkwardness was in getting StringWithFormat to output what I needed.

+(NSString *) returnNumber:(NSString *)numberIn toDecimalPlaces:(NSString *)decimalPlaces
{
    // Assign the right number of decimal places:
    decimalPlaces = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%%.%@f", decimalPlaces];
    NSString* result = [NSString stringWithFormat:decimalPlaces, numberIn];
 
    return result;
}

Here’s the expanded function managing everything I needed at the time:

+(NSString *) multiplyThenDivide:(NSString *)numberIn by:(NSString *)multiplicationFactorIn divideBy:(NSString *)divisionFactor toDecimalPlaces:(NSString *)decimalPlaces
{
    // Make arguments into floats so we can do operations on them:
    float numberInFloat = [numberIn floatValue];
    float multiplicationInFloat = [multiplicationFactorIn floatValue];
 
    // Do those operations:
    float resultFloat = numberInFloat * multiplicationInFloat;
    resultFloat = resultFloat / 100;
 
    // Assign the right number of decimal places:
    decimalPlaces = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%%.%@f", decimalPlaces];
    NSString* result = [NSString stringWithFormat:decimalPlaces, resultFloat];
 
    return result;
}

By no means a master class, but hopefully it’ll help someone at some point.

Your IMAP server closed the connection. This can occur if you leave the connection idle for too long.

This was rather tedious as it grabbed focus and had to be acknowledged before you could use Outlook again. I edited imapd which I found at /usr/lib/courier-imap/etc/imapd and changed the following:

IMAP_ENHANCEDIDLE=1
IMAP_USELOCKS=1

I also made sure that IMAP_CAPABILITY had IDLE in it”s list and that appeared to fix it. Apparently it”s something to do with shared mailboxes, IDLE and some email clients not playing nice.

In the end I located a web repository that contained the PHP RPM I needed (php-5.2.17-1.el5.i386.rpm) but when I did;

yum local install php-5.2.17-1.el5.i386.rpm

It told me that I needed some other dependencies:

Error: Missing Dependency: php-common = 5.2.16-jason.1 is needed by package php-soap-5.2.16-jason.1.i386 (installed)
Error: Missing Dependency: php-common = 5.2.16-jason.1 is needed by package php-mbstring-5.2.16-jason.1.i386 (installed)
Error: Missing Dependency: php-common = 5.2.16-jason.1 is needed by package php-xml-5.2.16-jason.1.i386 (installed)
Error: Missing Dependency: php-common = 5.2.16-jason.1 is needed by package php-gd-5.2.16-jason.1.i386 (installed)
Error: Missing Dependency: php-common = 5.2.16-jason.1 is needed by package php-mysql-5.2.16-jason.1.i386 (installed)
Error: Missing Dependency: php-common = 5.2.16-jason.1 is needed by package php-ldap-5.2.16-jason.1.i386 (installed)
Error: Missing Dependency: php-common = 5.2.16-jason.1 is needed by package php-imap-5.2.16-jason.1.i386 (installed)
Error: Missing Dependency: php-common = 5.2.16-jason.1 is needed by package php-xmlrpc-5.2.16-jason.1.i386 (installed)
Error: Missing Dependency: php-common = 5.2.16-jason.1 is needed by package php-mcrypt-5.2.16-jason.1.i386 (installed)
Error: Missing Dependency: php-common = 5.2.16-jason.1 is needed by package php-pdo-5.2.16-jason.1.i386 (installed)

Fortunately the web repo also had all the RPMs for the corresponding php extensions that I needed so I downloaded them all;

[root@server2 php5.2.17]# ls -al
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 May 12 13:23 .
drwxr-x— 15 root root 4096 May 12 13:19 ..
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 1244645 Jan 7 05:13 php-5.2.17-1.el5.i386.rpm
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 2449935 Jan 7 05:13 php-cli-5.2.17-1.el5.i386.rpm
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 281663 Jan 7 05:13 php-common-5.2.17-1.el5.i386.rpm
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 565327 Jan 7 05:13 php-devel-5.2.17-1.el5.i386.rpm
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 124288 Jan 7 05:13 php-gd-5.2.17-1.el5.i386.rpm
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 51924 Jan 7 05:13 php-imap-5.2.17-1.el5.i386.rpm
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 33537 Jan 7 05:13 php-ldap-5.2.17-1.el5.i386.rpm
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 33537 Jan 7 05:13 php-ldap-5.2.17-1.el5.i386.rpm.1
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 1111156 Jan 7 05:13 php-mbstring-5.2.17-1.el5.i386.rpm
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 27890 Jan 7 05:13 php-mcrypt-5.2.17-1.el5.i386.rpm
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 83622 Jan 7 05:13 php-mysql-5.2.17-1.el5.i386.rpm
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 64944 Jan 7 05:13 php-pdo-5.2.17-1.el5.i386.rpm
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 146634 Jan 7 05:13 php-soap-5.2.17-1.el5.i386.rpm
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 114790 Jan 7 05:13 php-xml-5.2.17-1.el5.i386.rpm
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 55025 Jan 7 05:13 php-xmlrpc-5.2.17-1.el5.i386.rpm

and ran:

yum localinstall *

Updating:
php i386 5.2.17-1.el5 /php-5.2.17-1.el5.i386 3.0 M
php-cli i386 5.2.17-1.el5 /php-cli-5.2.17-1.el5.i386 5.8 M
php-common i386 5.2.17-1.el5 /php-common-5.2.17-1.el5.i386 739 k
php-devel i386 5.2.17-1.el5 /php-devel-5.2.17-1.el5.i386 2.7 M
php-gd i386 5.2.17-1.el5 /php-gd-5.2.17-1.el5.i386 358 k
php-imap i386 5.2.17-1.el5 /php-imap-5.2.17-1.el5.i386 96 k
php-ldap i386 5.2.17-1.el5 /php-ldap-5.2.17-1.el5.i386 41 k
php-mbstring i386 5.2.17-1.el5 /php-mbstring-5.2.17-1.el5.i386 1.8 M
php-mcrypt i386 5.2.17-1.el5 /php-mcrypt-5.2.17-1.el5.i386 32 k
php-mysql i386 5.2.17-1.el5 /php-mysql-5.2.17-1.el5.i386 171 k
php-pdo i386 5.2.17-1.el5 /php-pdo-5.2.17-1.el5.i386 108 k
php-soap i386 5.2.17-1.el5 /php-soap-5.2.17-1.el5.i386 320 k
php-xml i386 5.2.17-1.el5 /php-xml-5.2.17-1.el5.i386 269 k
php-xmlrpc i386 5.2.17-1.el5 /php-xmlrpc-5.2.17-1.el5.i386 87 k

Installing for dependencies:
libXaw i386 1.0.2-8.1 base 324 k
libXmu i386 1.0.2-5 base 62 k
t1lib i386 5.1.2-1.el4.rf rpmforge 353 k

Updating for dependencies:
libevent i386 1.4.13-1 base 112 k
nfs-utils i386 1:1.0.9-50.el5 base 394 k

You can see above that Yum was then happy to install php 5.2.17 combining the RPMs with other bits from repos it was already aware of. The only downside of this approach is that if I needed another php extension I would have to source the RPM and install via a similar method.

I threw this process together because I was already an avid dropbox user and needed to start doing some joint iOS development with a friend and suggested we make use of dropbox as a centralized project store. Naturally I wanted to keep mine and ours separate so I needed to run dual instances because I didn’t want to be logging in and out all the time.

Please don’t just use this to get around the 2GB free limit.

The following terminal command will get a secondary dropbox instance running in the background and independent of your terminal window (copy and paste all as one line):

HOME=/Users/$USER/.dropbox-alt; nohup /Applications/Dropbox.app/Contents/MacOS/Dropbox &

However, even with a bash alias like ‘dropbox2′ setup this still wasn’t very ‘nice’ so I decided to explore some way to have it masquerade as an app so I could have it on my dock.

My research led me to Platypus; It can be used to create native, integrated Mac OS X applications from interpreted scripts such as shell scripts or Perl. So I just needed to bung my terminal command into a .sh file, open Platypus, choose an icon and tweak the following:

- Switched ‘Output’ to ‘None’.
- Confirm ‘Script Type’ is ‘Shell’.
- Untick ‘Remains running after initial execution’.

(I went with this icon btw)

Dual apps showing in applications folder:

After some searching I came across hping which allowed me to generate large packets quickly. I yum installed hping, from RPM forge I believe.

The below command then generated about 25Mbit per second until it was stopped:

hping2 targethost -d 65400 --faster