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Installing Flarum on Ubuntu 18.04

Andy Balaam from Andy Balaam's Blog

I am setting up a forum for sharing levels for my game Rabbit Escape, and I have decided to try and use Flarum, because it looks really usable and responsive, has features we need like liking posts and following authors, and I think it will be reasonably OK to write the custom features we want.

So, I want a dev environment on my local Ubuntu 18.04 machine, and the first step to that is a standard install.

Warning: at the time of writing the Flarum docs say it does not work with PHP 7.2, which is what is included with Ubuntu 18.04, so this may not work. (So far it looks OK for me.)

Here’s how I got it working (as far as the web installer stage, anyway):

sudo apt install \
    apache2 \
    libapache2-mod-php \
    mariadb-server \
    php-mysql \
    php-json \
    php-gd \
    php-tokenizer \
    php-mbstring \
    php-curl

php -r "copy('https://getcomposer.org/installer', 'composer-setup.php');"

# Get the neat line from https://getcomposer.org/download/
# Don't copy it exactly!
php -r "if (hash_file('SHA384', 'composer-setup.php') === '544e09ee996cdf60ece3804abc52599c22b1f40f4323403c44d44fdfdd586475ca9813a858088ffbc1f233e9b180f061') { echo 'Installer verified'; } else { echo 'Installer corrupt'; unlink('composer-setup.php'); } echo PHP_EOL;"

mkdir ~/bin
php composer-setup.php --install-dir=~/bin/ --filename=composer
rm composer-setup.php

cd /var/www/html
sudo mkdir flarum
sudo chown $(whoami) flarum

# Log out and in again here to get composer to be in your PATH
cd flarum
composer create-project flarum/flarum . --stability=beta

sudo chgrp -R www-data .
sudo chmod -R 775 .

sudo systemctl restart apache2

Go to http://localhost/flarum in your browser, and follow the instructions there to get set up.

If I get further, I will update this post, including on how to set up the MySQL database.

If you want to find and share levels for Rabbit Escape, check up on our progress setting up the forum at https://artificialworlds.net/rabbit-escape/levels.

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nor(DEV):mag Youth in Tech out NOW!

Paul Grenyer from Paul Grenyer

Welcome to our Youth in Tech issue – just in time for the new term! It was no coincidence that our August issue is all about younger developers, but we’ve also included articles about how it is important to never stop learning, even when we might think we know everything!

The world of tech is always evolving, sometimes it feels difficult to keep up with new developments and technologies. It’s important to spend some time investing in ourselves and staff to make sure we keep abreast of this ever-changing sector. We hear from Luminous PR and netmatters about the importance of learning in their articles.

Of course it wouldn’t really be a Youth Issue without the view of an actual young developer, and we knew just the chap. Teenager James kindly gave us his opinion on the best bits of being into technology and where he thinks the future of development will be and student developers Emily and David were also kind enough to give us a developers view of their university project ‘Theia’, which aims to use machine learning to help students.

On the lighter side of things developer Adam sent us an amusing code piece (just try not to spit your tea while reading!) and we were also lucky enough to have an insider view from the recent Apple conference in San Jose, California, so if you’ve ever wondered what actually happens inside Apple, see inside!

Download now: https://www.norfolkdevelopers.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/norDEVmagazine-201808-e05.pdf

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Impact of team size on planning, when sitting around a table

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

A recent blog post by Allan Kelly caught my attention; on Monday Allan sent me some comments on the draft of my book and I got to ask for a copy of his data (you don’t need your own software engineering data before sending me comments).

During an Agile training course he gives, Allan runs an exercise based on an extended version of the XP game. The basic points are: people form into teams, a task is announced, teams have to estimate how long it will take them to complete the task and then to plan the task implementation. Allan recorded information on team size, time spent estimating and time spent planning (no information on the tasks, which were straightforward, e.g., fold a paper airplane).

In a recent post I gave a brief analysis of team size on productivity. What does this XP game data have to say about the impact of team size on performance?

We don’t have task information, but we do have two timing measurements for each team. With a bit of suck-it-and-see analysis, I found that the following equation explained 50% of the variance (code+data):

Planning=-4+0.8*TimeSize+5*sqrt{Estimate}

There was some flexibility in the numbers, depending on the method used to build the regression model.

The introduction of each new team member incurs a fixed overhead. Given that everybody is sitting together around a table, this is not surprising; or, perhaps the problem was so simply that nobody felt the need to give a personal response to everything said by everybody else; or, perhaps the exercise was run just before lunch and people were hungry.

I am not aware of any connection between time spent estimating and time spent planning, but then I know almost nothing about this kind of XP game exercise. That square-root looks interesting (an exponent of 0.4 or 0.6 was a slightly less good fit). Thoughts and experiences anybody?

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The Rich Get Richer – baron m.

baron m. from thus spake a.k.

Sir R-----! I must say that it is a relief to have the company of a fellow nobleman in these distressing times. That I have had to sell not one, but two of my several hundred antiquities to settle the burden of tax that this oppressive democracy has put upon me, simply to enrich slugabeds I might add, is quite intolerable!

Come, let us drown our sorrows whilst we still have the means to do so and engage in a little sport to raise our spirits.

I have a fancy for a game that I used to play when I was the Russian ambassador to the Rose Tree Valley commune. Founded by the philosopher queen Zway Remington as a haven for downtrodden wealthy industrialists, it was the purest of pure meritocracies; no handouts to the idle labouring classes there!
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Migrating videos from YouTube to PeerTube inside a Docker container

Andy Balaam from Andy Balaam's Blog

I have quite a few videos hosted on YouTube that I would like to upload to my new PeerTube location, but I don’t want to install all the PeerTube dependencies on my machine, so I did it all inside a Docker image.

First I built and started a Docker container:

$ git clone https://github.com/chocobozzz/PeerTube /tmp/peertube
$ cd /tmp/peertube
$ docker build . -f ./support/docker/production/Dockerfile.stretch --tag peertube
$ docker run --tty --interactive peertube bash

Then I ran these commands inside it:

# yarn install --production=false
# node dist/server/tools/import-videos.js -u "https://peertube.mastodon.host" -U "andybalaam" -t "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TG0qRDrUPpA"

Of course, it would be better to write this up into its own Dockerfile to make this a one-liner.

References: PeerTube Docker setup, PeerTube video import.

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2018 in the programming language standards’ world

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

I am sitting in the room, at the British Standards Institution, where today’s meeting of IST/5, the committee responsible for programming languages, has just adjourned (it’s close to where I have to be in a few hours).

BSI have downsized us, they no longer provide a committee secretary to take minutes and provide a point of contact. Somebody from a service pool responds (or not) to emails. I did not blink first to our chair’s request for somebody to take the minutes :-)

What interesting things came up?

It transpires that reports of the death of Cobol standards work may be premature. There are a few people working on ‘new’ features, e.g., support for JSON. This work is happening at the ISO level, rather than the national level in the US (where the real work on the Cobol standard used to be done, before being handed on to the ISO). Is this just a couple of people pushing a few pet ideas or will it turn into something more substantial? We will have to wait and see.

The Unicode consortium (a vendor consortium) are continuing to propose new pile of poo emoji and WG20 (an ISO committee) were doing what they can to stay sane.

Work on the Prolog standard, now seems to be concentrated in Austria. Prolog was the language to be associated with, if you were on the 1980s AI bandwagon (and the Japanese were going to take over the world unless we did something about it, e.g., spend money); this time around, it’s machine learning. With one dominant open source implementation and one commercial vendor (cannot think of any others), standards work is a relic of past glories.

In pre-internet times there was an incentive to kill off committees that were past their sell-by date; it cost money to send out mailings and document storage occupied shelf space. In an electronic world there is no incentive to spend time killing off such committees, might as well wait until those involved retire or die.

WG23 (programming language vulnerabilities) reported lots of interest in their work from people involved in the C++ standard, and for some reason the C++ committee people in the room started glancing at me. I was a good boy, and did not mention bored consultants.

It looks like ISO/IEC 23360-1:2006, the ISO version of the Linux Base Standard is going to be updated to reflect LBS 5.0; something that was not certain few years ago.

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Visual Lint 6.5.3.296 has been released

Products, the Universe and Everything from Products, the Universe and Everything

This is a recommended maintenance update for Visual Lint 6.5. The following changes are included:

  • Added the ability to override the analysis tool installation folder on a per solution/workspace or project basis [Visual Lint Enterprise and Build Server Editions].
  • The analysis tool executable pathname can now be overridden on a per project basis as well as per solution/workspace [Visual Lint Enterprise and Build Server Editions].
  • Fixed a minor resizing bug in the Analysis Configuration Dialog.
  • Fixed a minor bug in the "Active Analysis Tool" dialog.

Download Visual Lint 6.5.3.296

Posted on

Visual Lint 6.5.3.296 has been released

Products, the Universe and Everything from Products, the Universe and Everything

This is a recommended maintenance update for Visual Lint 6.5. The following changes are included:

  • Added the ability to override the analysis tool installation folder on a per solution/workspace or project basis [Visual Lint Enterprise and Build Server Editions].
  • The analysis tool executable pathname can now be overridden on a per project basis as well as per solution/workspace [Visual Lint Enterprise and Build Server Editions].
  • Fixed a minor resizing bug in the Analysis Configuration Dialog.
  • Fixed a minor bug in the "Active Analysis Tool" dialog.

Download Visual Lint 6.5.3.296