chandraonline.net

Sequel Pro (http://www.sequelpro.com/) is the best MySQL UI for the Mac. You can connect to your MySQL running locally or to remote instances over SSH and it has a ton of features. Best of all its free to use but I highly recommend donating (http://www.sequelpro.com/donate/) if you use it a lot. One of the features of Sequel Pro that I put to good use recently was Bundles. Bundles are simple extensions to Sequel Pro that you can write. They execute in many different contexts like when selecting a table, selecting a row in a table etc.

One of the painful things while writing unit tests for database access code is getting your database in a particular state. This requires inserting rows into these tables as part of the test setup. If you use frameworks like DBUnit for Java or PHPUnit for PHP, one would use the FlatXMLDataSet or XMLDataSet to populate these rows. For eg., this is how an employee table might be populated using FlatXMLDataSet:


<dataset>
<employee id="1" name="Steve Jobs" title="CEO" dept="1" />
<employee id="2" name="Steve Wozniak" title="CTO" dept="2" />
</dataset>


This is pretty simple but as you add tables with more columns, you spend quite a bit of time writing these XML files by hand.

If you have tables with BLOB columns, you would need to use XMLDataSet which is even more verbose than FlatXMLDataSet:


<table name="employee">
<column name="id"/>
<column name="name"/>
<column name="title"/>
<column name="dept"/>
<row>
<value>1</value>
<value>Steve Jobs</value>
<value>CEO</value>
<value>1</value>
</row>
<row>
<value>2</value>
<value>Steve Wozniak</value>
<value>CTO</value>
<value>2</value>
</row>
</table>


Obviously nobody wants to do these by hand. In the past I have generated these using DBUnit scripts or using Jailer. I thought it would be easier if I could simply select one or more rows in Sequel Pro and then right click to convert to the appropriate XML format. I have created two different bundles one to Copy as FlatXmlDataSet and another to Copy as XMLDataSet to do just that.

I have submitted a pull request to SequelPro and you can also look at my fork in github: https://github.com/chandraonline/Bundles

To install these bundles:

• Download CopyAsDataSet-1.0.tgz
• tar xvzf CopyAsDataSet-1.0.tgz
• copy the two directories to “~/Library/Application Support/Sequel Pro/Bundles”
• In Sequel Pro do Bundles->Reload Bundles

Now you can select one or more rows, right click Bundles -> Copy -> CopyAsFlatXMLDataSet or Bundles -> Copy -> CopyAsXMLDataSet and you will have the data in that format in your clipboard.

Everyone likes free especially free Wifi. We are all on devices that need an internet connection and we are more than happy to connect to these free Wifi hotspots to get internet access. There is of course a big problem with all this. If your Wifi is not secure (most free Wifi hotspots are not secured by encryption) , anyone that is using the same Wifi connection can snoop on the information exchanged between you (the browser) and the website that you are connecting to. This is ok if you are just surfing the web reading news articles and such or if the website that you are using uses https (where s in https stands for secure). However, we tend to use services like Facebook, Twitter etc that don’t use https. There is a firefox plugin firesheep that can actually show you how trivial it is to hijack another person’s facebook / twitter account if they happen to be logged into facebook from the same coffee shop you are logged in from.

Obviously I still want to be able to use free hotspots in places like starbucks. To be secure, I typically use the following setup in my mac to keep my stuff off snooping eyes. Here is a very short HOWTO on how to you use an ssh tunnel to do secure web browsing in a Mac (this will work in Windows and Linux as well with small tweaks)

Ingredients:

• openssh (I installed openssh using mac ports: port install openssh)
• Firefox add-on called quick proxy (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1557/)
• a shell account with ssh access (this could be your hosted account or if you are a geek perhaps a dd-wrt router at home)

HOWTO:

• Create an ssh tunnel to your server. If you have private/public key pair setup, this will be quick and easy
  /opt/local/bin/ssh -D 9999 user@host
• Now create a proxy configuration in firefox->Preferences->Advanced->Network->Settings
  Click on the Manual Proxy Configuration and set just the SOCKS host to localhost and Port to 9999
• Now install the QuickProxy add-on to be able to switch between the proxy being on and off.
• To avoid people from knowing where you are surfing or from having the malicious one do a DNS phish, change in the following setting by typing in about:config in firefox address bar and then search for network.proxy.socks_remote_dns
  network.proxy.socks_remote_dns = true
• When you are in an insecure wifi hotspot , simply turn the proxy on in the status bar of firefox. This will make all traffic go through the ssh tunnel created in step 1.
• Go to http://www.whatsmyip.us to see what the server sees as your IP Address. you will notice that when the proxy is on, all traffic flows through the SSH tunnel (encrypted) and the IP address is different from when you connect directly.

CAVEAT:

• Remember that only your browser is using the SOCKS proxy.

OpenVPN support is one of the things sorely missing from the iphone. And there is very little information about how one could go about getting OpenVPN working even on a jailbroken iphone. There is iopenvpn.com if you are running 2.x and it costs $29. This post is my attempt to fill this gap with step-by-step instructions on how to get openvpn working for free. But please be forewarned that I am not liable for any problems this might cause your iphone. Having said that, I have followed the instructions given below and have been successful in getting access to resources behind the corporate network using OpenVPN. Before we get started, here are some of the pre-requisites:

• Jailbroken Iphone (I run 3.1.2 jailbroken using Blackrain)
• Putty (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/download.html)
• WinSCP (http://winscp.net/eng/download.php or something similar)
• OpenVPN certificates and openvpn configuration file (.ovpn). The certificate should not be password protected if you want to use this through SBSettings toggle. There is instructions to take the password off below. The .ovpn file should be renamed conf.ovpn and should also be pointing to the certificates without any path.

Step-by-Step instructions (Please run these as root by doing su root and entering your password)

• In Cydia: Install Openvpn toggle for SBSettings
• In your windows/mac assemble your certificate, .ovpn files etc into a local directory
• rename your .ovpn file to conf.ovpn and add the following two lines to the end of the file. Here is a sample ovpn file. You need to change the remote host, cert details to yours.


up /var/mobile/Library/OpenVpn/update-resolv-conf
down /var/mobile/Library/OpenVpn/update-resolv-conf


• download the update-resolv-conf
• Open a WinSCP session and copy all the files you assembled locally to /var/mobile/Library/OpenVpn
• In the winscp session edit the /var/mobile/Library/SBSettings/Commands/com.offinf.openvpnup and change as follows:


#!/bin/sh
/bin/rm /var/mobile/Library/SBSettings/Toggles/OpenVpn/OFF
cd /var/mobile/Library/OpenVpn/
"/usr/bin/openvpn-iphone --script-security 2 --config /var/mobile/Library/OpenVpn/conf.ovpn" &


• Open Putty and login to your iphone as root.


$ cd /var/mobile/Library
$ chown -R mobile.mobile OpenVpn
$ cd OpenVpn
$ chmod +x update-resolv-conf
#### If you have a key with password. Remove the password with the command below.
#### You will be asked for the password one last time
#### Important: Leaving your certificate without a key is a security risk. Please turn on passcode lock in your settings
#### This will ensure that if your phone does fall into the wrong hands they cant get into your network.
$ cp my.key my.key.orig
$ openssl rsa -in my.key.orig -out my.key
#### Now test your vpn setup by doing the following:
$ openvpn-iphone --script-security 2 --config conf.ovpn
#### You should see it connecting to your vpn server and setting up routes. Try to use Safari to look at something
#### behind the openvpn server.


• Reboot your phone for the sbsettings toggle changes to take effect
• After reboot, open SBSettings and turn on OpenVpn

Note: For trouble shooting install top from cydia and run top to see if the toggle spawns the openvpn-ip process.

I came across a very cool library in Ruby that allows Web UI testing using OLE automation. One of the problems with running automated tests of Web applications like a end user is the effort it takes to use libraries like Http Unit to setup test cases and execute them as part of your build process. WATIR (pronounced Water) is a ruby library that allows you test you web applications using OLE automation in your windows machine.

This is how it works:

You write unit test cases using WATIR and it actually invokes IE and actually does what a end user would do by entering form data, clicking on links, clicking buttons etc. You can then look at the resulting HTML DOM object and check if the web application did what it is supposed to. This is especially useful for testing multi-page wizard like applications where a lot of data entry is involved.

Here is a Step-by-step on how to install WATIR:

Install Ruby for Windows: http://rubyforge.org/projects/rubyinstaller/ (Look for download link)
Install WATIR: http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=104 (Look for watir 1.4.1.exe)

It is pretty straight forward to create WATIR scripts. But, who wants to write these scripts by hand. You are right, I wouldn’t. Instead you can use WATIR webrecorder, which records all your browser actions as WATIR scripts. All you need to do is record your testing once and then refactor it into a test script.

You can also pass -b switch to the WATIR script and it will not open the IE window and will execute the whole test in a headless mode that is ideal for test suites.

There is also another competing tool called Selenium that uses Javascript to drive tests and works across many browsers. I have not used it. But I have heard more people switch from Selenium to WATIR than the other way around.

It has been long rumored that Google was working on a Calendar service and its finally online for everyone to try. The UI is similar to anything Google : very clean and intutive. I use Yahoo Address book and Calendar today and Y!s UI is not as fresh and snappy as Google’s but it satisfies one of my key requirements : Being able to Sync-up with my Palm Treo 600. Until Google adds a way to sync up with PDAs through a PC or over-the-air, there is no big reason to switch to this service.

I stumbled on a new we based project management system called trac that nicely integrates a bug tracking system, wiki and subversion into one little neat package. Since I have a subverison repository at my ISP, I thought I would give this a try. After following a few step-by-step guides and a few thousand lines of shell command line history, I finally had Trac installed and working on chandraonline.net.

Trac has some weird list of dependencies and installing it in a shared server only makes it worse. But hopefully I will put it to good use building some of my hobby projects.

I deviated quite a bit from the step-by-step guide linked above and hope to document it sometime soon.

So. I was wrong. I admit it. I was wrong about ABC’s Lost. I missed the entire first season and was pretty mad that it won Best drama over 24 last year at the Emmys. Now I know why this show is so loved. Its an awesome piece of writing. I started watching it this season and I loved it so much that I watched the entire first season of Lost on video IPod in a couple of days (yes…couple of days…you have a problem with that??). I was a big fan of X-files and this show is in some ways very similar to that show. If you have never seen it , you should give it a chance.

For the lost fans with IPod, checkout Ryan and Jen’s Lost Transmission podcast at http://www.hawaiiup.com/lost. Its very entertaining.

For anyone who has not heard of Subversion , it is an open-source version control system (very much like CVS but much better) to manage your source code. I had started to play with Ruby on Rails using the RailsIDE and I would hate for my source code to be without version control and much worse just kept in my hard drive. So I wanted to have a version control for my personal projects just like I do at work. And I didn’t want to host this subversion repository in my windows box at home, I would rather keep it at the ISP machine where I host my domain. Sounds simple enough, right?. Wrong!!. I found so little on the net about it that I was compelled to write this down for others who might want to do this . Here is a step-by-step guide on running and connecting to a subversion repository in an ISP account.

Before we get started, there are a few assumptions:

Step 1: Installing subversion server

The following instructions are for a linux machine. Surf to subversion site and look for the latest stable source code package. When I did the install , this is what I ended up using: http://subversion.tigris.org/tarballs/subversion-1.1.4.tar.gz. Now ssh into your account and do the following:


$ cd $HOME;
$ curl -o subversion-1.1.4.tar.gz http://subversion.tigris.org/tarballs/subversion-1.1.4.tar.gz
$ gunzip subversion-1.1.4.tar.gz; tar xvf subversion-1.1.4.tar
$ mv subversion-1.1.4 subversion-1.1.4-dist
$ cd subversion-1.1.4-dist
$ ./configure --prefix=$HOME/subversion-1.1.4
$ make
$ make install
$ cd $HOME; ln -sf subversion-1.1.4 subversion


Thats it. Add $HOME/subversion/bin to your PATH variable and you are all set. Now its time to create a svn repository. I chose to use $HOME/svn as my svn repository.

Now test your subversion install by adding a dummy project to the subversion respository:


cd $HOME;
mkdir projects;
cd projects;

# add the project to subversion
svn import -m "Initial Version" dummy-project file://$HOME/svn/dummy-project


If everything went according to plan, your project is now in subversion.

There is not much use to a subversion server if it can only be accessed locally. There are three ways to front a subversion server to access the repository remotely: using apache webserver (using http://) , using a custom svnserve daemon (using svn:// url scheme) or by tunnelling svn over ssh (svn+ssh://). The first two options are automatically out for a hosted account and the only option is going svn over ssh.

Step 2: Connecting to subversion by tunnelling over ssh (svn+ssh)

This is where I found the least documentation and most difficulty. To connect to the subversion repository you two pieces of software on your client machine : a subversion client (I use tortoise svn) and a ssh client (I recommend Putty) . Install putty and the utilities it comes with preferebly through a windows installer (http://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/latest/x86/putty-0.58-installer.exe). Install Tortoise subversion to c:\TortoiseSVN (The default location in Program Files will create a problem later during ssh configuration).

In order to tunnel svn commands over ssh , you need to be able to ssh to your ISP account without having to give a userid and password every single time the client wants to talk to the server. There is a way to setup a public-private key pair to enable this dialogue without a need for entering a userid and password.


$ ssh-keygen -t dsa -f mykey


You will see two files mykey and mykey.pub, the openssh private and public keys. Now add the contents of mykey.pub to the file $HOME/.ssh/authorized_keys in your shell account. Create the directory and file if you don’t have it already.

Now add the following to the begining of the line you just added to the authorized_keys file. It should look something like this (replace your-home-dir with the right value):

command=”your -home-dir/subversion/bin/svnserve -t -r your -home-dir/svn” ssh-dss AAAA……………

Now move the private key file mykey to the windows machine that you will be connecting to subversion from. Run puttygen.exe, and click the button Load and choose the mykey that you just moved from your shell account . Putty will successfully load it and now you choose the “Save private key” button and save the private key in putty format as mykey.ppl. Save this to c:\TortoiseSVN\bin.

Now run Putty.exe and under Session choose ssh , your host name , in Connection->Data enter your login name, Connection->SSH->Auth section , click the Browse button to choose the private key file. Now choose c:\TortoiseSVN\bin\mykey.ppk. In Session, give it a name like SVNConnection and choose Save. Click the open and you should see the following :

Using username “your-user-name”.
Authenticating with public key “imported-openssh-key”
( success ( 1 2 ( ANONYMOUS EXTERNAL ) ( edit-pipeline ) ) )

This means your ssh connection to subversion is working. Now you just need to get the subversion client (tortoise svn) to use the private key file when connecting to your repository. In the following subversion config file (C:\Documents and Settings\Your-User-Name\Application Data\Subversion\config) look for the section title tunnels:


[tunnels]
### Configure svn protocol tunnel schemes here. By default, only
### the 'ssh' scheme is defined. You can define other schemes to
### be used with 'svn+scheme://hostname/path' URLs. A scheme
### definition is simply a command, optionally prefixed by an
### environment variable name which can override the command if it
### is defined. The command (or environment variable) may contain
### arguments, using standard shell quoting for arguments with
### spaces. The command will be invoked as:
### svnserve -t
### (If the URL includes a username, then the hostname will be
### passed to the tunnel agent as @.) If the
### built-in ssh scheme were not predefined, it could be defined
### as:
# ssh = $SVN_SSH ssh
ssh = C:/TortoiseSVN/bin/TortoisePlink.exe -2 -i C:/TortoiseSVN/bin/mykey.ppk


Now open the Repo-Browser of TortoiseSVN and enter the URL to your dummy project:

svn+ssh://SVNConnection/dummy-project

and you should see the files under dummy-project. If you can’t connect, its probably because you didn’t setup the puTTY session correctly. Verify that you entered all the required information correctly.

You can connect to svn repository from inside RADRails using the following URL (this does not work in TortoiseSVN for some reason):

svn+ssh://your-user-name@your-machine-name/dummy-project