AGORA GAMES

Our very own Devon Smith (Agora’s multi-talented QA Lead) had an article published in this month’s T.E.S.T Magazine. You can see her article online (http://www.testmagazine.co.uk/2010/03/keep-the-user-in-mind/), or buy it in print later this month.

When I joined Agora, one of the first things I did was talk up git and how it’ll cure cancer, AIDS, and solve world peace. All at once. What that means for me is I’ve basically been tasked with the job of migrating anything that’s not git to git.

For some things these kinds of migration are first class citizens. Conveniently SVN, our old VCS is one of those. One of my new migrations was, less conveniently, Bazaar. Now we have nothing against Bazaar at Agora but we agreed we would rather only have one VCS in house.

After looking around and trying some fancy tools that didn’t work (read: tailor), I stumbled on a really quick solution that seems like it does everything necessary. Both Git and Bazaar (via plugins) support the fast-import/export format. I’m not sure about the mystic ways of how this format works but I do know it made my Bazaar repository a Git repository, and that makes me pleased.

Getting the bzr plugin

The first step would be to get the fast-import plugin for Bazaar from the launchpad mirror.

mkdir -p ~/.bzr/plugins
cd ~/.bzr/plugins
bzr clone lp:bzr-fastimport fastimport

You can make sure it installed properly using a bzr fast-export --help and ensure that it doesn’t complain.

Copy the repository

Now that we have all the tools, time to copy it over

mkdir ~/project.git
cd ~/project.git
git init
bzr fast-export --plain ~/path/to/bzr/branch | git fast-import
git checkout master  # only needed for a non-bare repository, like I made above

Wait a little while (or a long while if you’re testing the above code on a netbook for some reason like me). And that should be it.

I’m not sure how well this works with multiple Bazaar branches. There may be some crazy --flags on each side to make it work but running the code I put above on a full repo makes fast-export complain that I’m not pointing it to a valid branch. Please give us your comments if you know how to do this :).

As a SysAdmin, my job more-or-less exists by knowing miscellaneous arcana that most software engineers aren’t aware of.

When a particular co-worker here at Agora has a problem with his Linux machine, I provide advice and show him how to fix it. Some months after he had joined Agora, I discovered that after each troubleshooting session, he copy-and-pastes the entire text terminal log into a text file that he keeps on his desktop. He has dozens of transcripts at this point; I bet if I were to look through it, it would read something like the Tao te Ching or Bhagavad Gita, only concerning UNIX instead of right living.

(Of course, there’s not much of a difference between UNIX and right living, but that’s a topic for another day.)

In the spirit of allowing you to build your own little collection, here is a simple trick that came in handy to me yesterday.

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Yesterday I started looking at ways to do inter-application communication. In a number of projects we’ve done here at Agora Games, we’ve used queues to make that happen. Redis has been on my radar for awhile now, but yesterday I drove my Chevy to the levee and guess what? The levee is NOT dry people. I mean, who drinks rye anyway these days? Old people.

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I had occasion tonight to give a quick demo of CouchDB.  This is so simple its almost not worth blogging about, but hey, good software is supposed to be simple.

Install
On your Mac:

sudo port install couchdb
sudo launchctl load -w /Library/LaunchDaemons/org.apache.couchdb.plist

On Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install couchdb

You’re done; now to play.

Futon Admin Interface
This allows you to create a DB, create records, etc.

1. Open http://localhost:5984/_utils/
2. …
3. Prosper

Using our old friend curl

curl -X PUT http://localhost:5984/mlg/ #create a db
curl -X GET http://localhost:5984/mlg/ #get a whole bunch of info about the db
curl -X POST http://localhost:5984/mlg/ -H "Content-Type:application/json" -d '{"body": "Here is a paragraph"}' #create a record