Converting a WordPress blog to a 'One-Click Install' on DreamHost

We set up a WordPress blog on DreamHost a while ago for a client. It was a custom install due to a bunch of craziness related to him getting booted from his old hosting setup. It all worked fine, and then DreamHost sent me a "nag email" (their term) asking me to upgrade because the old version had security issues. Fair enough.

I had another site to upgrade, but it had been installed as a one-click install. The upgrade for that was one click (plus some backing up). I could have manually upgraded this custom install, but if I did that, I knew I'd have to continue doing manual upgrades. Therefore, I wanted to convert this custom WP install to a one-click install.

DreamHost didn't seem to have any instructions, but how hard could it be? Basically, the procedure was pretty similar to what you'd go through to move a WP from one server to another.

1. Backup the database and the old site: I backed up the old DB using mysqldump, and I tarred up the old site.
   
2. Export the old site: from the WP admin page, select Export and dump all authors.
   
3. Create a new database in the DreamHost control panel. In theory, you could drop all the tables in the old DB and re-use it, but I was being paranoid, which paided off later.
   
4. Move old site out of the way: just move the old site directory to a new name - e.g., mv site.com save.site.com.
   
5. Create a new 'One-Click Install' WordPress site using Advanced Mode, since we had a custom theme and a bunch of other content (pictures). This was put in the new database. After DreamHost emailed me to tell me that was done, I logged in and changed the admin password.
   
6. Import the old content from the Admin Import function. Actually, DreamHost's email included the URL for that page. One issue I ran into was the "user name" for the old posts: WP thought the old posts by admin were from some other user because in the old blog, the admin user had a different display name.
   
7. Copy in the custom theme and other content from the old saved directory into the new blog site. Enable the theme. Set up Akismet - this is where having the old DB around was useful; I just looked in the wp_options table to find the API key instead of having to dig around for it.

enjoy,
Charles.

Jython talk at SJUG

Here are the slides of a talk I gave last February at the Salem Java Users Group - SJUG. Although it looks like it's primarily about Python and Jython, my bigger emphasis was on extension programming - scripting existing Java code. In other words, a form of polyglot programming.

Jython: Integrating Python and Java

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: jython python)

Enjoy,
Charles.

Book: Java Power Tools

Java Power Tools by John Ferguson Smart
ISBN: 978-0-596-52793-8

Java Power Tools provides a fairly detailed introduction to a number of tools for Java programmers. It fits nicely between the O'Reilly Hacks series and having a dozen books like Ant: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition. Like the Hacks books, Java Power Tools provides an introduction to a bunch of tools. The Hacks books are great for answering the question "I've heard of that tool, but where does it fit?" But whereas the Hacks books provide just an appetizer, this book provides a main course, enough to get seriously started with the tool being discussed. And then, if you want all the gory details, a Definitive Guide could provide the full five-course meal.

The selection of tools presented was really good, at least for me. For example, I know about continuous integrations servers, but I haven't set one up. At one client site, they were using Hudson, which I had some exposure to, but didn't know much about the others like Cruise Control, Continuum, and LuntBuild. Similarly, I've been using JUnit 3.x for years, but I didn't really know what was different in JUnit 4 or how that compares to TestNG. This book provided me with a great overview of these and other tools. Java Power Tools provides a great way to get up to speed with a general area of tooling (e.g., continuous integration servers) or a good cross-section of the majority of the Java tools in use today.

If I had to pick something to complain about, it would be Part II - Version Control Tools. These aren't really Java tools, although every programmer (Java or otherwise) should be using them. Or given the decision to include version control tools, I'd suggest excluding CVS because it's old and including at least one distributed version control tool like Mercurial (used by the Open JDK project and NetBeans) or git (used by the Linux kernel).

So, in conclusion, unless you have no free will about tool selection or you already know all of these tools backwards and forwards, I highly recommend this book to almost any Java programmer.

enjoy,
Charles.

Groovy at SJUG

On January 6th, I spoke at the Salem Java Users Group on Groovy. The premise was not to replace Java, but rather to show how it can be used in addition to Java. Here are the slides.

Groovy a Scripting Language for Java

View more presentations or upload your own. (tags: java. groovy)

Enjoy,
Charles.

Book: The Productive Programmer

The Productive Programmer by Neil Ford
ISBN: 978-0-596-51978-0

I've always had a more-than-passing interest in productivity porn, as Merlin Mann calls it. I'm not obsessive about seeking out productivity books (I can quit any time), but I've read more than a few such books in my day, and I do keep my tasks organized with OmniFocus. When I saw The Productive Programmer at the Powell's table at OSCON 2008, I confess I got pretty tingly, kinda like "when we used to climb the rope in gym class." Here was a book talking about productivity aimed specifically at what I do every day - programming, not management, not sales, not coaching a football team, but programming. In the words of Cartman, "sweet."

That said, I wouldn't classify this book as hard-core productivity porn. It doesn't lay out a dogmatic formula, nor does it suggest or require specific tools or techniques. And that's probably a good thing; in my experience, programmers can be some of the most opinionated people I've known, especially when it comes to their craft (e.g., editor wars). If the author had attempted to prescribe a specific set of practices, I think almost every programmer would have found something to hate about the book, and what's the point of that - we could just as easily go back to ragging on emacs, Windows, or Steve Jobs.

Instead, Mr. Ford offers a number of possible suggestions that one can take or leave. These are organized into two parts: mechanics (the productivity principles) and practice (philosphy), or what I would call tactical (little picture) and strategic (big picture) techniques. Mechanics includes things like controlling interruptions from things like email and using tools like Quicksilver (which I finally started using after reading this book). Philosophy includes things like test-driven development/design (TDD) and using things like static analysis tools.

The various suggestions were all very well and good, but what I liked most about this book is that it made me thing about mom-and-apple-pie topics like TDD (of course, we all write unit tests, right?) from a totally different angle - productivity. Of course, that what the agile folks have been saying all along, but somehow this book shed a whole new light on it and helps drive it even deeper. And the whole book got me thinking about the bigger question - "how can I be more productive and effective in my programming?"

Like I said, this isn't hard-core productivity porn, but it's a very useful and approachable guide to productivity by a programmer for programmers. Maybe that makes it productivity literary erotica?

enjoy,
Charles.

In Praise of TDD and Mocking

As noted elsewhere in the blog, I've been doing a bunch of work to script ESXi using Vmware's (sometimes troublesome) RCLI tools. I'm developing a higher-level set of code written in Python. (In theory, using Vmware's Perl toolkit would be cleaner, and I wouldn't have to bitch about the RCLI tools, but I've done enough Perl for one lifetime.) In addition to the mom-and-apple-pie goodness of TDD, I'm also getting a huge productivity boost by employing TDD via mocking.

In the code I'm writing, each method typically makes one or more RCLI calls. Each RCLI call takes 3-5 seconds. I structured the code so that the RCLI invocations all funnel through one point in the code which can easily be monkey-patched to go through a mock function. (More details on that in a later post.) After mocking, the result is that I can execute 20 tests with dozens of mocked RCLI calls in less than a tenth of second. After the unit tests pass, I can push the code out to a real host and run real RCLI comannds, and for the most part, "it just works."

When I started, I figured mocking was the only way to unit test this code, and it was more convenient to develop the code on a machine where I don't have the RCLI installed. The performance boost was unexpected but by far the most significant benefit of the unit tests. And when I needed to perform a couple of refactorings during the development, I got to enjoy wicked fast speed plus safety - two great tastes that taste great together.

Charles.

Vmware RCLI and exit status

Yet another gripe about Vmware's RCLI commands: they almost always return an exit status of zero, even if the command failed. For example, 'vmware-cmd -s unregister' for a non-existent virtual machine, return a status of zero (which is the same as if the command succeeded). One has to look at the standard output of the command to see "No virtual machine found." This is OK for an interactive user, but it's a pain-in-the-ass if you're trying to write scripts, as I happen to be. For every command, I have to parse the output to see if it succeed or not.

But then some commands (e.g., vifs) do return useful exit codes, at least some of the time. This whole process has to be handled on a case-by-case basis.

Speaking of parsing output, the outputs are not consistent. For example, when that unregister command is successful, it returns "unregister() = 1". Note there is a space on both sides of the equals sign. When the corresponding register command succeeds, it returns "register() =1". Note that there is no space on the left side of the equal sign. As I write code to parse these outputs (because I can't count on the exit status), I can't help but wonder how brittle this code will be...


Charles.

Book: Working Effectively with Legacy Code

Working Effectively with Legacy Code by Michael Feathers
ISBN: 0-13-11705-2

"...legacy code is simply code without tests... Code without tests is bad code."
From those statements, it doesn't take much to figure out what this book is about - how to write unit tests for code without tests. Of course, if you've ever tried to do that, you know that it's easier said than done. Many/most programmers who inherit a big ball of mud of code without tests (legacy code) just punt; the existing code has no tests, I can't see how to get any of it under test, so I'll just hack and pray - just like the original author(s) did.

That's where this book comes in. It's a primarily large collection of recipes about how to write unit tests for legacy code. That said, the focus is not really on how to write the tests but rather how to get chunks of the legacy code into a test harness so that you can write unit tests to characterize the existing functionality before adding or modifying functionality. It also contains techniques to add new functionality in such a way that you can test it immediately and possibly execute the "clean up" that the original author(s) promised would happen as soon as that next deadline was reached - all those years and deadlines ago.

The bulk of the book (Part 2) is organized as a series of complaints or excuses and how to deal with them. These include such topics as "My application has no structure," "Dependencies on libraries are killing me," and "This class is too big, and I don't want it to get any bigger." In each chapter, the author provides examples (in multiple languages - Java, C++, C, etc.) of these problems and specific techniques that can be used to address them. The last chapter (Part 3) is an encyclopedia of the techniques for easy reference.

If you're lucky enough to do only green-field development, you might think this book would be useless. However, one interpretation of this books is that it is a list of sins to avoid while your playing in the green field. And, many of the techniques can be interpreted as best practices for how to write you code to ensure it's testable. (Of course, you're following test driven development and achieving near 100% coverage, so that would never be a problem with your new code, would it? :-)

My one disappointment with this book was that I was hoping it would provide ideas about how to create higher-level (e.g., functional) tests. Of course, high-level tests are no substitute for unit tests. It's just that I was tasked with creating "some tests" quickly for an entire application, and unit tests are not practical in this particular case, which is my problem, not the author's.

This book is an excellent resource and cookbook for how to add unit tests to an existing code base that lacks tests, and it also provides design and implementation templates to ensure that new code is testable as it's created.


enjoy,
Charles.

vmware-cmd: SystemError=HASH(0x95d8d70)

More tales from the dark side. Trying to start a VM out on an ESXi host:

vmware-cmd  [conn options]  '[datastore] path-to-vm/conf.vmx' start hard

Returns this output:

Fault string: A general system error occurred: Internal error
Fault detail: SystemError=HASH(0x95d8d70)

I spent hours permuting the parameters. And vmware-cmd's -v option doesn't dump out all of the SOAP guts, so I had no view on what was going on. Finally I ran a vifs --dir out on the VM dir and found a bunch of vmware.log files. I fetched one that showed a normal startup and then this:

Nov 05 05:51:51.883: vmx| [msg.License.product.expired] This product has expired.
Nov 05 05:51:51.883: vmx| Be sure that your host machine's date and time are set correctly.

There was a botched version of ESXi that we installed that contained a time bomb, and it had come home to roost. Fair enough - our bad, but certainly there could be a better error message than SystemError=HASH(0x95d8d70).


Charles.

Vmware ESXi - Unable to clone virtual disk

To import a VM from VMware Server to ESXi one must convert the disk by cloning the old one using vmkfstools. Fair enough. Doing this using the ESXi RCLI tools should look something like (based on what I've seen for non-RCLI for ESX):
vmkfstools [conn-options] -i old-disk new-disk -d thin

However, when you do this with RCLI, you get the following useless error message:
Unable to clone virtual disk : A general system error occurred: Internal error

Using the --verbose flag to look at the gory SOAP details I could see that the thin option wasn't getting sent. Looking through the Perl code it looks like one needs to specify both the -d and -a (adapter type) options. Once I added -a lsilogic it worked like a charm.

My big complaint (and I have other examples of this up my sleeve) is if the user makes a simple, bonehead parameter error, the command should point it out rather than saying "general system error...internal error." I hope this post will help someone else out if s/he is unlucky enough to encounter this error message.

Charles.