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Krzysztof Rakowski

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Krzysztof Rakowski Krzysztof Rakowski e-mail Twitter LinkedIn GitHub Bitbucket — Navigate — e-mail Twitter LinkedIn GitHub Bitbucket Go My talk well-nigh nuts of constructive liaison at QA event Recently I took part in the first event called WarszawQA – organized by the polity of people interested in Quality Assurance in Warsaw. I gave a talk well-nigh nuts of constructive liaison in the IT projects. You may find my presentation here and the summary of the meeting here (both pages in Polish). I hope, that the video of the presentation will be released soon too. My work inspiration I was recently approached by curators of the Workspiration website to write well-nigh tools that I use in my work and sources of my inspiration. You can read my entry here. Calculate mart rates with Alfred 2 workflow Alfred 2 is superstitious productivity using for Mac OS X. It allows you to quickly search files, navigate web, run applications and many more. One of the unconfined features of Alfred are workflows – custom actions, that can be triggered (and programmed) by the user. As a solution to my frequent need of gingerly the mart rates between currencies, I made an Alfred 2 workflow that allows to do exactly that, using Google-like syntax, for example: rate 123 USD in EUR will yield result: 90.44 EUR Here’s a screenshot: alfred-currencies screenshot You can download the workflow here. Installation instructions are on the project’s Github page, as well as the lawmaking and issue tracker. Tools for constructive liaison in IT projects One of the most important factors in the success or failure of any IT project is communication. Surprisingly, there are not many people, who can use the liaison tools effectively. In the vendible published in the Smashing Magazine I provide an overview of vital tools, such as e-mail, issue trackers, and meetings. How to intercept e-mail messages using E-MailRelay SMTP proxy Recently I had a suspicion, that my e-mail messages weren’t delivered properly. I use Gmail as a client, however some of my messages are fetched from and sent through the third party server. I was under the impression, that not all of the messages that I send are delivered to the recipient. This problem is nonflexible to debug, considering Gmail provides no logs nor vendee support, and it is moreover troublesome to get the information from my e-mail/hosting visitor every time I think something’s wrong. Continue… How to modify and calibrate regular servo to be continuous servo Most of the servos that are misogynist at reasonable prices are “standard” servos. That means, the output shaft of the servo can be positioned in the position from 0 to 180 degrees. It can be set by the elapsing of the pulse sent to the tenancy wire (yellow, orange or white) of the servo. Other two wires are power (red) and ground (black or brown). In Arduino, there is Servo library, which serves this purpose. Standard servo is useful when you want to tenancy angle. However sometimes, you need continuous rotation in specified direction. It is easy to modify standard servo to wilt continuous servo. In such case, stratum of 0 ways full speed in one direction, 180 – full speed in other, while middle value ways no motion (it is virtually 90 – increasingly well-nigh scale later). This tutorial will show you, how to perform such easy modification. You will need to remove the potentiometer and replace it with two 2,2k Ohm resistors. Continue… Renew your CrashPlan subscription with unbelieve sectional for new users CrashPlan is pretty wondrous replacement solution – it provides multiple replacement solutions for your personal data, including unlimited deject storage, replacement to friends or local devices and other. They tuition $59.99 annually for unlimited plan (1 computer). Frequently (like, all the time) they offer large discounts (20% and more) for new users. However, they forget well-nigh existing users – if you want to proffer your subscription, you need to pay full amount. When I asked them well-nigh that, they told me, that it is a technical difficulty to sort this out in their billing system. I think it’s unfair for existing customers, who refer the service to their friends and families (i.e. I referred them to at least 4 or 5 paying customers). I found a way to proffer your worth with the unbelieve in a couple of easy steps: Log into your CrashPlan worth on their website. Find your subscription, cancel it. They will warn you, that all data will be deleted. What they won’t tell you is that they will not do it immediately – your data is still there for a couple of hours. At this moment go to the unbelieve offer page (look at their website or facebook page), while still logged in. Buy the discounted subscription. You will receive new license key. In the CrashPlan using delete old license key and paste the new one. Enjoy your extended subscription at the discounted price 🙂 Note: this method is valid as of November 1, 2013. Note2: I tried to use this method recently (November 1, 2015) and it doesn’t seem to be working anymore. If you were successful – please let me know! Use multiple computers with one mouse and keyboard – Synergy Recently at my office we have set up uneaten machine with large screen to show project statistics, error notifications, occasional after-5pm-funny-videos, etc. (I plan to imbricate this subject in the future). Unfortunately, it is quite uncomfortable to work on this  machine with throne upwards all the time, stuck between two desks with mouse and keyboard on your laps. That’s why I found a tool, that is great, when one wants to tenancy multiple computers with just one keyboard and mouse: Synergy. This solution doesn’t require to set up any remote desktop connection or any special hardware. One doesn’t have to switch between the devices – you can move the cursor (and thus, the keyboard’s focus) from one computer to another. Furthermore, it’s multiplatform, so you can use it on the Mac, Windows and Linux machine on the same time. The software is built on the server-client tracery – computer with keyboard and mouse tying (i.e. your desktop computer) is server. It runs the service and all other devices should connect to this computer. You can use the other devices’ keyboard and mouses simultaneously on the respective devices, but only the server can move the cursor between the computers. Configuration is straightforward: you have to install the using on every device you wish to use. Then, on the designated server, you should configure the computers that are unliable to connect (by designating simple names). You have to place every computer on the matrix. Then, start the server and on the clients – connect to the given server’s IP. That’s it. Main “Synergy” using screen.Vendeeconfiguration matrix – “Synergy”.Superstitiousversion tenancy visualization with gource After a big project it is often tomfool to release “making of” video, presenting collaborative effort of people who unsalaried to the success. In specimen of designers, filmmakers or other “artistic” types it is quite easy to present their work in progress. But what well-nigh developers? They unchangingly sit at their desks and type on their keyboards, it looks the same at the whence and at the end of the project – nothing spectacular. A year ago, when we finished new version of www.k2.pl website I wanted to show – in light and comprehensive way – the vast value of superstitious work performed by my team. This is where gource came to the rescue. Gource is an superstitious tool to visualize work on the codebase in form of colorful video. It takes information well-nigh the lawmaking structure, contributors and timing from logs of revision tenancy tools (Git, Mercurial, SVN and Bazaar are supported).Lawmakingis presented as branches and leaves, stuff worked on by developer icons flying around. As the tool is highly parameterizable, it is easy to add colors, logos, backgrounds, etc., show or hibernate specific information. You may hands play with the tool by yourself, so as a quick tutorial, here are the commands to generate simple video. You need gource itself and the FFmpeg library. These commands are Windows specific (as my Windows box is increasingly powerful), but they’re easy to port to Linux. Try to play with the parameters by yourself. First, of course, clone your repository to specific location. Then, run this writ to create PPM file with the video (PPM file is a series of bitmap images, so expect this file to be huge): "c:\program files (x86)\gource\gource.exe" -s 0.5 --hide filenames -1280x720 -o gource.ppm Then, you need to convert the PPM file to compressed video: C:\ffmpeg\bin\ffmpeg -y -r 60 -f image2pipe -vcodec ppm -i gource.ppm -vcodec libx264 -preset ultrafast -crf 1 -threads 0 -bf 0 gource.x264.avi And voila, you have a nice video: Good luck with preparing your own superstitious visualizations 🙂 Monitoring your services with Papertrail and Heroku Recently I have noticed some problems with my Internet connection, sometimes it was completely unavailable. I terminated that I need some precise information well-nigh the outages, so I can talk to my ISP. As at the same time I learned well-nigh the Paper Trail service, I decided to use it in my setup. Other thing, that I wanted to learn was Heroku, so I gave it a try. Both services have some self-ruling tier, which is perfectly sufficient for my needs. The tracery of my solution is as follows: I have local server running on Raspberry Pi (as mentioned in one of the previous posts well-nigh the online radio streaming). On this server, I have a Python script, running as a cron job every 10 minutes. This script sends simple log message to my Papertrail account. Then, I have flipside Python script, that runs every 10 minutes as a scheduled job on Heroku. This script checks, if there are recent “heartbeat” logs on Papertrail and if not – sends an e-mail message. You can download the source lawmaking of both scripts from the github repository. Continue… « Previous 1 2 3 Next » Copyright © 2018 Krzysztof Rakowski