The key to it is the use of the windows port of ffmpeg. It can convert just about anything to anything. However, it is a command line tool and converts one file at a time which means a lot of typing if you want to convert an entire album. I spent a little time the other day figuring out a small batch file that can be used to convert and entire albumn in on go. I thought I’d share it with you. Just create a file called say, convert.bat and place one of the following in it:

For Monkey’s Audio APE files:

for /f "tokens=*" %%a IN ('dir /b *.ape') do call ffmpeg -i "%%~na%%~xa" -acodec alac "%%~na.m4a"

For FLAC files:

for /f "tokens=*" %%a IN ('dir /b *.flac') do call ffmpeg -i "%%~na%%~xa" -acodec alac "%%~na.m4a"

Then all you have to do is place your batch file, along with ffmpeg.exe into the directory that contains the files you want to convert and run the batch file. It will convert every file in the directory to apple lossless. Easy.

After exhausting all the free options, I made the shift to the commercial tool Beyond Compare 3 a few weeks ago and have not looked back since. So far, it has been awesome. Slick, easy to understand the differences and the pro version even does the three way merging needed for git.

I spend most of my development time, be it C#, VB, PHP or Javascript in the visual studio environment and so when I use git for source control, git extensions is essential. Making both git extensions and Beyond Compare work together is a little bit of trail and error as the very informative source control support page only covers configuring git via the bash. So to save myself the brain ache again and perhaps to help others, I jot these settings down:

Under Global Settings:

Merge tool: BCompare
Path to mergetool: C:/Path/To/BComp.exe
Mergetool command: “C:/Path/To/BComp.exe” “$LOCAL” “$REMOTE” “$BASE” “$MERGED”

Diff tool: BCompare
Path to difftool: C:/Path/To/BComp.exe
Difftool command: “C:/Path/To/BComp.exe” “$LOCAL” “$REMOTE”

Make sure you dont override the tool in the local settings or if you want to set it to BCompare.

The shift from SVN to Git was surprisingly easier than I expected. I remember SVN being a little frustrating to get going when I first started with that and was expecting a similar experience, especially when I was trying to shift a couple of in-progress projects from one to the other. What I did find however, is that the guides out there, although pretty good, did not quite match what I wanted to do. I thought I would jot it down so I don’t forget when I need to go it again. Its all done by logging into your server using putty or whatever your ssh client is. Lets jump straight in:

Git is installed on the (gs) so we can get straight into it. Firstly create a directly where you would like to keep your repositories:

mkdir /home/#####/data/git

Next create a temporary directory to store the git-svn export of your svn repository:

mkdir /home/#####/data/git/myapp_tmp

Next, create a text file (users.txt) to map your svn users to you git users. It should contain something like:

mysvnuser1 = Git User1 <gituser1@mysite.com>
mysvnuser2 = Git User2  <gituser2@mysite.com>

I saved mine to the /home/#####/data/git/ directory.

Next we initialise our git repository, ready to import the svn repository:

git-svn init file:///path/to/svnrepo/myapp/trunk/ --no-metadata

Note that I use the file:// notation to specify a local path to where my svn repository is kept. In my case it was /home/#####/data/svnrepo/ but it depends on how you set yours up. The no-metadata flag just ensures that only the information we need is transferred. We then need to setup our user mapping file:

git config svn.authorsfile /home/#####/data/git/users.txt

Now for the money shot, we import the data from svn:

git-svn fetch

All going well, your svn repository and all the history should have been imported into your git repository.

The final steps are done in order to tidy up your new git repository so that it is just a standard git repository, without all the svn associations. We remove the svn assocations by cloning it:

git clone myapp_tmp myapp.git

This gives you a myapp.git directory with the actual repository (everything in the .git directory) as well as your working files. As this is on the server, you do not need all the working files, just everything in the .git directory. We can fix that as follows:

cd myapp.git
mv .git .. && rm -fr *
mv ../.git .
mv .git/* .
rmdir .git
git config --bool core.bare true

Most of those commands just move everything out of the .git directory and remove the working files. The final command however marks the repository as a bare repository, i.e. one without the working files.

Thats it. You should now have a git repository on your server that you can clone to your development machine and begin work.

It took about ten minutes before we hit the strangest of problems. It was focused around the way we use a virtual directory to share common code and controls across different websites. The premise is that you create a project to hold your common javascript/images/ascx controls/web services and so on. You then use a virtual directory inside each of your websites that points to the common project. With only a small amount of tweaking for the common ascx controls everything seems to work without too much trouble. That is, until you try to do this on Windows Server 2008.

When we started up our web application on our new environment, we noticed almost immediately that the AJAX calls that used the common web service were failing. The error message was suggesting that the project that contained the common web service has not been compiled correctly. By copying the website across to a Windows 2003 server, we deduced that the problem was specific to 2008 as it worked perfectly on 2003. Having exhausted all the developers ideas on why this would be, we called Microsoft and got them involved in troubleshooting the issue.

A few days later an answer came: do not pre-compile your website. Sure enough, build the website without pre-compilation and it worked perfectly. Microsoft’s explanation was that it was due to a change in the way that Windows Server 2008/IIS7 worked. Fairly cryptic I must say and certainly does not leave me satisfied as to why it would not work and what have they done to stop it working. For us, using Windows Server 2008 and IIS7 is more important than the slight performance hit you get when deploying without pre-compilation. For others it may not be such a desirable solution.

In development, things are usually not so forgiving when it comes to language. If you don’t get the spelling or grammar correct, it just will not compile or operate as expected. That is, except for HTML. Browser rendering engines are not fussy at all when it comes to HTML and will render pages happily, even when the code is all over the place. There is historical reason for this but unfortunately it seems to have lead to complete complacency in developers.

HTML is not a difficult language, it is simple to understand, there are not that many grammar rules and the vocabulary is tiny. So why then is there such a massive quantity of web developers who are just not that fluent in the language? I am not talking about just being able to get a page to look like the design. I am talking about expressing the content of the page using correct elements and combinations there of. There is a reason behind every html element, they were created because of a need, and each should be used where it is appropriate to do so.

If you are from the school of thought that does not worry about this, as long as it renders as the designer imagined, then there are good reasons why you should be thinking otherwise. Every day, web bots will be viewing your pages and trying to understand them. Screen readers do the same thing and a badly constructed page can be totally confusing to a blind person. You could be losing out on valuable traffic because of this. You could also find yourself with more work down the line. A site like Css Zen Garden shows just how much can be done with design without touching the html. That is not so easy when you have to work with a badly created page.

So what if that is not a big enough reason for you? Well, look at it this way. People who can speak correctly and have an extensive grammar, find themselves in a much better position than those who don’t. It can give a great first impression. The same thing is true for development. You may consider yourself pretty good in your chosen programming language but if you are sloppy in such a simple language like html, it could be the deal clincher in a job interview. It would certainly change my impressions of a potential candidate if they don’t have a decent grip on something that they should be able to in their sleep.

So how is yours? Time to brush up perhaps? Are you really that fluent? Be honest with yourself. How well do you speak html?

Edit: To all those that have taken this opportunity to pick holes in my use of language in this article: I do not consider myself an expert in English, by any means. I make as many mistakes as the next person. I now live away from England and on a daily basis I hear non-English people use phrases and pronunciations I was taught are incorrect. I don’t try to preach the way I was taught or consider that way the only way it should be done. My point was that something like Html should not have such variance. There is a worldwide standard we are all supposed to adhere to and were it not such a forgiving markup language, things would be much better.

1. Ensure you have putty, puttygen and psftp installed/downloaded
2. Login to your MediaTemple account using putty
3. Type: ssh-keygen -t rsa
4. Follow the instructions to generate the keys. Do not use a pass phrase as we want autologin.
5. You should now have id_rsa and id_rsa.pub in the .ssh directory
6. Change directory into .ssh and type: cat id_rsa.pub >> authorized_keys2
7. FTP into you MediaTemple account using psftp and download the id_rsa file. For Vista users, watch out for UAC. Its best to ensure you download to a safe directory like your desktop
8. Open up puttygen and select from the menu: conversions->Import Key
9. Select the id_rsa key file you downloaded and puttygen should then import it
10. Click Save Private Key and save the .ppk file in a place of your choice
11. Open up putty and fill in Connection->Data ‘login username’. Then go to Connection->SSH->Auth and select your newly created .ppk file when you click on ‘private key file for authentication’
12. Save the putty session. This session should now login automatically

The important point here is that the keys were created on the server and then imported to putty. Many of the guides I found create the keys with putty in the first place and that just did not work for me.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqeJFYwnkjE

It really nails the reason that as developers, we try to refactor regularly. Unfortunately refactoring is not something that people outside of the development community tend to understand and it is considered a waste of time all too often. I think use of this metaphor may just help those people understand.

Given John’s reputation in web development, I immediately followed the link and watched the introductory video on the site, expecting to be amazed. It looked all very pretty and the creation of an rss reader with just a few clicks of the mouse gave suitable wow-factor to the demonstration.

However, I could not help thinking that I had seen this idea somewhere before. I use it at work every day – Microsoft Visual Studio. The same concepts are there for web development – a drag-and-drop interface, with built-in controls that are supposed to take most of the grunt work away from you.

At first look, this idea is great – creating fully-fledged application in no time at all. However, in my experience with Visual Studio, this ends up being more of a hindrance than a help. I avoid the drag-drop functionality of VS like the plague, not because I am a glutton for punishment but because of the intrinsic limitation it places on you and because most of the time the same functionality can (and should) be achieved in a faster, more flexible and more maintainable way. The biggest gripe I have with web development in VS is the constant struggle to make it produce tidy html that is standards compliant.

Atlas might not be like that at all. I have only seen the video. However, I don’t think it is revolutionary as the buzz today would lead us into thinking and it may not be all that people hope it is. It could endup just being a Visual Studio type development environment based in a browser.