This is a post I will be adding to over time all about links I have found useful when learning how to best use Git.

How To Create And Apply A Patch - Really good article, the only thing I would clarify is that the am command can only be used once you have set up mailing (something I have yet to do).

Creating A New Branch On Your Remote Repository - Such a simple task but one I couldn't easily find described somewhere for the layman.

Git By Example - This has all the basic git commands that anyone starting out with Git will want to familiarise themselves with complete with examples.

Branching and Merging - An interesting document on branching and merging within Git.

Thanks to @psynnott for contributing some links.

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Yesterday I attended an event at the Holiday Inn in Belfast regarding some of the legal concerns over software houses incorporating open source code into their applications. This was put on by the good people at Momentum NI.

It was an excellent talk delivered expertly by Rory Campbell from Forde Campbell. I figured I would take 5 minutes to briefly sum up what I got from the talk for those who could not attend (or could attend but wanted to watch Mexico show France up!).

Open source is good although it sometimes gets a bad wrap in the public sector, as developers we all know how good it is to have a nice open community building on the same code you are building on.

There is a wide spectrum of open source licences but generally there are two camps FSF (Which created GPL) and OSI (Who endorse the MIT licence).

GPL2 is almost too open for business purposes, it basically says that if you use any code from this licence then your code also needs to be completely GPL2 as well - this is obviously a massive issue if you are doing this. (Personally I know I use open source code all the time, what I don't know is what licence I have accepted by doing so, do you?)

MIT is more relaxed, it doesn't force you to make your code open source. It does however state that the code is provided as is and basically if it goes wrong it isn't the providers fault, which means if you use some in your code and it breaks you have no leg to stand on when your client starts shouting at you.

So far there have been no court decisions in the UK but people are getting wise to open source law and are arguably getting a bit paranoid over it so it is something we can't afford to ignore. In Germany there have been rulings and one developer used to actively seek out companies who were not complying (Harald Welte).

The main issue is that if you use open source and don't follow the terms your leave yourself open to get sued by the open source supplier for breaking their licence and also your client because you are passing risk onto them. Also if someone attempt to buy your company things like is could throw a spanner in the works.

There are a few things we can do, we can run audits on our projects to make sure we know what open source licences we are currently using, we can educate ourselves and our co-workers in the issues, we can log any new stuff coming in somewhere we can easily reference it and we can always fall back onto lawyers for advice.

That is pretty much it, now I am off to see what licences I have to stop pissing on!

/*
* Edit
*/

Thanks to Rory Campbell for correcting how I described the two camps.
Thanks to Future Perfect for telling me the difference between licence and license.

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Just testing the iPad app for Wordpress, looks pretty slick and responds well.

Typing I have found to be a little sensitive but I am sure I will get used to it in time!

If anyone wants to suggest apps I should be checking out please leave a comment below.

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Robin Christopherson works at Abilitynet and gave an excellent talk last year at FOWA Dublin 2009 about some of the traps to avoid to keep your website accessible to all.

This year he was talking about pretty much exactly the same thing, which would be annoying only the need for accessible websites hasn't went away and people are still making the same mistakes.

I won't go through every example he gave but here are some of the important notes I took from his talk entitled Accessibility in Web Design.

• Adobe Flash is getting more accessible but a lot of the older sites are still completely out of reach.
• Youtube is in the process of moving to HTML5, whilst it is still using flash it is unaccessible.
• Chrome currently doesn't play well with screen readers.
• Google allows you to add captions in Youtube videos really really easily, this would really improve the experience of video for people who are hard of hearing.
• Lots of mobile websites such as m.facebook.com are very accessible because they need to be for mobile devices.

One really cool thing I learned was that Opera Mini as a force single column mode, I have been a user of Opera Mini for ages and didn't know about this, one setting change and my experience on most websites using that browser has improved dramatically, vertical scrolling is basically eliminated.

Robin talked about Project Canvas, the following snippet is from their website and it seems like an interesting an worthwhile project.

Project Canvas is a proposed partnership between the BBC, ITV, C4, Five, BT and Talk Talk to build an open internet-connected TV platform, subject to BBC Trust approval.

Finally here are a few links he shared with us;

• Make Your Site Mobile Friendly in 2 Minutes
• Text Captcha
• Total Validator

He mentioned some really valuable stuff and it was a very enjoyable presentation.

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In my last writeup I mentioned that the content Owen DeLong was covering was a little dry but incredibly necessary.

Eoghan McCabe's and Des Traynor's (both from Contrast.ie) talk entitled Five Lessons We've Learned Sexy or Meaningful builds a lot upon the theme of necessity as they talk about why it is important to not always be chasing the sexy things in life.

They basically go through five areas of business and explain why in most cases the sexy option is the option you want to avoid like the plague.  This was an excellent talk delivered by two fantastic speakers.

With regards to business strategies they discussed things that didn't work;

• Filling a hole in another product very rarely works.
• Being a middle man doesn't work.
• Generally relying on third parties for your business model to work isn't going to work.
• Being first to market has no real advantage.
• Creating copy cat apps isn't going to work (in personally, find that really boring)
• Trendy businesses never seem to work (SEO companies for example)

And they concluded that we should be looking long term and to focus on the things that aren't going to change.

With regards to the people you are involved with they mentioned a couple of things;

• Talent without discipline is bad.
• Having a friend become a colleague can ruin the friendship.
• You should always choose people for the right reasons.

Their third topic for discussion was about investments, basically they highlighted the fact that investment is sexy and reminded us that our business doesn't really need that much start up so why would you really need to chase money in the beginning?

Fourth on their list was the section on design, they warned us to watch out for trends and don't immediately follow them.  I couldn't agree more with this, it is so tempting to make all your corners rounded now and have a nice shadow effect around divs, but just because it is the flavour of the moment doesn't mean you are giving any real value to your users.

They gave an example of a good meaningful website - Craigslist.  They point out that the design hasn't changed and whilst it isn't sexy, it is very functional.   I would argue that sites like Amazon and Ebay would be in the same boat, not great to look at but usually easy to use.

Their talk ended with a section on marketing, here they listed some more key points;

• Build your product first, then look at the marketing.
• Let the product do the talking.
• Don't chase overnight success.
• Ignore tabloids.

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I wanted to play about with Google's Skipfish to see if it could automate any of my security scans and grabbed the source code from the code library.

When I tried to make the file whilst running Ubuntu 9.10 I was presented with the following error:

cc -L/usr/local/lib/ -L/opt/local/lib skipfish.c -o skipfish -O3 -Wno-format -Wall -funsigned-char -g -ggdb -I/usr/local/include/ -I/opt/local/include/ -D_FORTIFY_SOURCE=0 \
http_client.c database.c crawler.c analysis.c report.c -lcrypto -lssl -lidn -lz
In file included from crawler.h:26,
from skipfish.c:39:
http_client.h:26:25: error: openssl/ssl.h: No such file or directory
In file included from crawler.h:26,
from skipfish.c:39:
http_client.h:189: error: expected specifier-qualifier-list before ‘SSL_CTX’
skipfish.c: In function ‘main’:
skipfish.c:154: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘SSL_library_init’
http_client.c:37:25: error: openssl/ssl.h: No such file or directory
http_client.c:38:25: error: openssl/err.h: No such file or directory
http_client.c:39:18: error: idna.h: No such file or directory
http_client.c:40:18: error: zlib.h: No such file or directory
In file included from database.h:29,
from http_client.c:45:
http_client.h:189: error: expected specifier-qualifier-list before ‘SSL_CTX’
http_client.c: In function ‘parse_url’:
http_client.c:285: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘idna_to_ascii_8z’
http_client.c:285: error: ‘IDNA_SUCCESS’ undeclared (first use in this function)
http_client.c:285: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once
http_client.c:285: error: for each function it appears in.)
http_client.c: In function ‘parse_response’:
http_client.c:1516: error: ‘z_stream’ undeclared (first use in this function)
http_client.c:1516: error: expected ‘;’ before ‘d’
http_client.c:1521: error: ‘d’ undeclared (first use in this function)
http_client.c:1531: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘inflateInit2’
http_client.c:1531: error: ‘Z_OK’ undeclared (first use in this function)
http_client.c:1532: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘inflateEnd’
http_client.c:1537: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘inflate’
http_client.c:1537: error: ‘Z_FINISH’ undeclared (first use in this function)
http_client.c:1540: error: ‘Z_BUF_ERROR’ undeclared (first use in this function)
http_client.c:1540: error: ‘Z_STREAM_END’ undeclared (first use in this function)
http_client.c: In function ‘destroy_unlink_conn’:
http_client.c:1636: error: ‘struct conn_entry’ has no member named ‘q’
.

.

. SNIP SNIP!

.


http_client.c:2188: error: ‘struct conn_entry’ has no member named ‘next’
http_client.c:2192: error: ‘struct conn_entry’ has no member named ‘q’
In file included from database.c:33:
http_client.h:26:25: error: openssl/ssl.h: No such file or directory
In file included from database.c:33:
http_client.h:189: error: expected specifier-qualifier-list before ‘SSL_CTX’
In file included from crawler.c:30:
http_client.h:26:25: error: openssl/ssl.h: No such file or directory
In file included from crawler.c:30:
http_client.h:189: error: expected specifier-qualifier-list before ‘SSL_CTX’
In file included from analysis.c:28:
http_client.h:26:25: error: openssl/ssl.h: No such file or directory
In file included from analysis.c:28:
http_client.h:189: error: expected specifier-qualifier-list before ‘SSL_CTX’
analysis.c: In function ‘maybe_xsrf’:
analysis.c:397: warning: implicit declaration of function ‘time’
In file included from report.c:33:
http_client.h:26:25: error: openssl/ssl.h: No such file or directory
In file included from report.c:33:
http_client.h:189: error: expected specifier-qualifier-list before ‘SSL_CTX’
make: *** [skipfish] Error 1


Some digging about made me realise this is a fairly common problem even if your machine has a fairly good set of dependencies downloaded.

If you run the following command it should act as a catchall and set you up to be able to play with this tool.

sudo apt-get install libssl-dev build-essential zlibc zlib-bin libidn11-dev libidn11


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Onto number 5 with my run down and onto a talk by Owen DeLong entitled Content Providers must lead the way to IPv6.

Owen is an IPv6 Evangelist with Hurricane Electric who gave a rather worrying talk about how we are going to need to move to IPv6 sooner rather than later.

Networking is a very dry subject matter and even an Evangelist like Owen could do little to spark up too much in the way of excitement about the topic but it is very important and something we need to be paying attention to.

Basically his talk focused on the fact that IPv4 addresses are running out and could be gone in 2011.  What this means is ISPs and hosting companies have very little time to get their infrastructure sorted in order to deal with both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic.

The main action point I took from the talk was that I need to contact hosting providers for my websites and find out what provisions they have made for IPv6, because it was clear from the talk that the days of IPv4 are drawing to a close and whilst there will be IPv4 legacy systems in place for some time it will begin to get phased out sooner rather than later.

Owen hosted a University session later on in the day which covered how you can prepare your servers which I will talk about in a later post.

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My fourth post about FOWA is about a University Session that was organised during the first break, it was given by Microsoft's Martha Rotter and was on their new tool Pivot.

Martha is a developer and part of the Platform team at Microsoft Ireland and gave a pretty interesting live demo of the Pivot system.

Essentially Pivot is a free tool from Microsoft that can take huge datasets and display them in a user-friendly way.  I don't want to talk too much about the tool because I haven't played about with it myself but it is ran on Silverlight and therefore will work on anything from Vista up on Windows and OSX.  The website for finding out more is getPivot.com

After some preamble about the product Martha gave a live demo, which as I said was pretty interesting and whilst I can't see a good reason to use the product myself I can see the benefit of creating the datasets required by Pivot to allow other users to access your information via this tool (so long as there was a solid user base behind it).

Martha delivered the demo well (even with the occasional technical hiccup) and it was refreshing seeing a Microsoft employee running Windows 7 via a virtual machine on a mac.

It will be interesting to see how Pivot develops in the coming months and what the general publics opinion of it is.

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I had read some tweets earlier today about the Google Font API and thought I would check it out.

Normally the way these things go down is I view the demos and have every intention of trying it myself but there are usually just a couple too many steps involved for the time I have allotted to dicking around the interwebs but this was so quick and so straight forward that I have eliminated cufon from this site in about 5 minutes.

Here are the steps I used;

1. Follow the link above.
2. Click on the font you want.
3. Click get the code.
4. Copy and paste the link into the head of your page.
5. Update your CSS with a copy/paste.
6. Done! (well, I also had to jump onto Wordpress and turn off Cufon in a settings page, but that is specific to my template.)

I am not a designer so I don't really know if those fonts are any good or not from a design point of view, but the potential for breaking away from the standard websafe fonts is huge!

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The third talk at FOWA Dublin 2010 was by Renier Lemmens, the GM of PayPal Europe.

You may think it odd that a PayPal head would be invited to talk at a developer conference (Apart from the fact they were the main sponsor of the event) but early on in the talk Renier proved his tech-chops by listed some past things he had done (he has a background in computing) and even made light of the fact that he was no longer creating cool things on the web. (Paypal, on the other hand, have created some really cool new things which I will be talking about in a later post).

The mobile space isn't somewhere I have played in really but we all know it has huge potential, Renier emphasised this by through out some mind blowing figures and projections (which unfortunately I didn't take down with any context... If I can get my hands on the presentation I will update this).

One point he made which I don't think can be stressed enough is that the online and offline world is blurring into one, very few people are ever truly offline and it is because of this that developers and creatives need to take advantage of the mobile revolution and that there would be some serious downsides to ignoring it.

One stat I did note down was that a figure of $400 Billion has been thrown up as a projected worth of mobile commerce, although nobody really knows what its full potential could be.  This figure leads on to what I believe has to be the main point of Renier's talk (or at least the main thing I took from it), which is that you need to make it as simple as possible for that $400 Billion to come your way, you need to remove any barriers between the user and them parting with their money on your mobile site.

You can achieve this by keeping one eye on the mobile world as you create your ecommerce processes and design your interfaces.  One example given was iPhone apps which make you fill in all this information before saying you need to be at a computer to create your account.

Overall I thought this talk was interesting but I already had an idea that the mobile market was huge and that there are different things to consider when designing say shopping carts on mobile devices than you would on the web.

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