The Mercurial version control system offers a powerful mechanism to let you perform automated actions in response to events that occur in a repository. In some cases, you can even control Mercurial's response to those events. No comments

The name Mercurial uses for one of these actions is a hook (aka trigger).

One of the most popular hooks is the ability to reject multiple heads.

What are multiple heads?

Multiple heads are a case where the code repository contains changes from two (or more) developers, that haven't been merged. These changes may potentially overlap and break the application flow.

Having multiple heads occurs in two cases:

* As part of a merge (generally temporary)
* Bugfix versions (generally permanent)

At any time, you can view the head(s) of a repository with the command: hg heads

Pitfalls to watch-for with Multiple Heads

Consider the following scenario:

* It's Monday morning. Bob and Linda each pull a copy of the repository to their local Mercurial HG.

* Bob makes a few changes to index.php and pushes them to the server Monday afternoon.

* Linda makes a few additional changes to index.php and pushes them to the server on Tuesday morning.

Since Linda doesn't have the most recent copy of index.php (with Bob's changes), her copy of index.php will create a second "head" to the project.

There are now two development branches - the one with Bob's changes and the one with Linda's changes, neither one having all changes in place.

While TortoiseHG will often block Linda's push with a warning that it will create multiple heads, it is possible to push with -f (force). Some Mercurial plugins automatically push with -f, creating the second head on the live server repository.

Yes you can run 'hg merge' on the live server to merge Bob and Linda's changes (the two heads) locally, but you never ever want to run hg merge on a live server.

Running 'hg merge', adds "<<<<< local >>>>> other" comments into the source files, as part of its file-diff process. This temporarily breaks the syntax of your source files for the duration of the merge.

If this is a live server, your scripts will all STOP WORKING until the merge is complete and the "<<<<< local >>>>> other" notations are removed from the source files.

Rejecting Multiple heads - Do the merge offline

Instead of allowing multiple heads on the live server, a much better approach is to reject multiple heads, forcing the engineers to merge changes locally, before pushing any change that will create a second head.

In the example above, when Linda attempts to push the changes on Tuesday, her push will be rejected with an error message of "Trying to push more than one head, try run hg merge before it."

Linda then has to pull the recent changes, retrieving Bob's additions, merge the changes locally and then push a version that incorporates both her changes and Bob's into the server.

The benefits of this approach are:
#1. Server scripts are never rendered inactive by a local 'hg merge' run

#2. Engineers always need to retrieve (and test) the latest version, prior to being able to upload changes that may conflict with others.

#3. The live server always has a single development graph, containing the most recent changes.

Installing NetBeans Forbid2Heads Mercurial hook

Step 1: Locate your HG extensions folder

The folder name is 'hgext' and it is typically installed under Mercurial's home folder. For example:

/usr/home/mercurial/work/mercurial-1.3.1/hgext

Step 2: Install forbid_2heads Python script

Create a new folder named 'forbid_2head' under 'hgext' and save this file under /hgext/forbid_2head/forbid_2head.py:


Step 3: Add hook to Mercurial config file

Update your Mercurial hgweb.config, adding the new hook under the 'hooks' section, like this:

[hooks]
pretxnchangegroup.forbid_2heads = python:forbid_2head.forbid_2heads

--

Attempting to push changes to the repository that will create multiple heads is now blocked.

Users will be presented with an error message and the transaction rolled back, until the user merges changes locally, so that no multiple heads are created:


--

The live server repository will always have a single development branch. Engineers will be forced to merge changes locally, before new changes can be pushed:



View 1 Comment(s)

If you're doing any PPC affiliate marketing, chances are you've heard what's been going on these last 3 days...

Google just completed another round of banning PPC affiliates, providing no information on the cause, other than a canned email.

Unlike a "Google Slap" which is a temporary increase of bid-prices due to low quality-scores, a "Google Ban" is permanent and prevents you from ever advertising on Google using your credit-cards or ip-addresses that you previously used with Google.

We've heard from hundreds of PPC affiliates who got banned on this recent round. Search Engine Marketing forums are exploding with angry marketers who've lost their entire business over-night.


Is affiliate marketing on Google Adwords dying a slow death? This remains to be seen.

The recent ban wasn't limited to affiliates running rebill offers but rather a mix of accounts promoting anything from Clickbank products, CPA offers, poor landing pages, etc.

If you're a PPC marketer, you're going to be forced to evolve or close shop.

Remember this -

Google accounts for about 15% of the traffic available online.

Look into other avenues such as Email Marketing, PPC on other engines such as Yahoo and MSN, Media buys, Product launches and Social media marketing, as a way of driving traffic to your offers.

View 3 Comment(s)

This post will walk you through the process of installing PHP 5.2.11 to run under NGinx using PHP-FPM.

NGinx doesn't have built-in support for running PHP, it uses a third-party daemon to spawn instances of php-cgi and then communicates with those instances over sockets.

PHP-FPM is a replacement for spawn-cgi. Runs faster and is more reliable.

Step 1: Download PHP 5.2.11 and apply PHP-FPM patch


Step 2: Configure PHP


Step 3: Install


Step 4: Start PHP-FPM

PHP ChartDirector is a powerful PHP extension that allows to generate very complex charts. You can visit their Web site here.

This tutorial will show you how to install it under FreeBSD.

1. Download PHP ChartDirector

The download page is located here -
http://www.advsofteng.com/download.html

Make sure you pick the FreeBSD version for PHP, and make sure you choose the good version between 32 and 64-bit. At the time of writing this post, the latest 32-bit version available for FreeBSD was this one -
http://download2.advsofteng.com/char...freebsd.tar.gz

Now that you have the download link, the first thing to do is to find out where is your PHP extensions directory. You can find it by checking at phpinfo()'s output or in your php.ini file (which is usually located in /usr/local/lib/php.ini). Just search for "extension_dir" in php.ini - you will find it right away. In our case, our extensions directory was "/usr/local/lib/php/extensions/current". We can now download and extract ChartDirector...


When extracting ChartDirector, it creates a "ChartDirector" folder that contains these files/folders:


We are mainly interested by the "lib" directory. Let's copy the files that we need...


You can get rid of these 2 PHP files:


2. Determine the right version

To determine the right version of the DLL that you must use, refer to this page -
http://www.advsofteng.com/doc/cdphpdoc/phpinstall.htm

For example, if you have PHP 4.4.9, you will use this one -
PHP Version 4.2.1 and above: phpchartdir421.dll

Even if it's FreeBSD and not Windows, you are going to specify a DLL as the extension in your php.ini file. You can delete all the others DLL's that you are not using, but make sure you keep the "fonts" folder and the "libchardir.so" file - they are required. So your extensions directory might look like this:


3. Configure the extension in php.ini

Now that we have all we need, we're going to configure php.ini to add the PHP ChartDirector extension.

Open your php.ini and add a line like this one in the extensions section:


Make sure you use the right DLL for your PHP version. Save your php.ini file and restart your PHP engine and/or Web server (Apache, FastCGI, etc.) to reload your PHP configuration.

To test PHP ChartDirector, you can use the "phpdemo" directory that you can find in the PHP ChartDirector archive. Just copy the folder in the root of your Web server and point it with your browser (ex: http://yourWebAddress/phpdemo). This demo is also very convenient for charts examples.

View 1 Comment(s)

This nifty one-liner will count the number of unique visitors in an NGinx web-server access.log file, for a given day:


Replace 04/Nov/2009 with the date you'd like to count the number of unique visitors for.

When installing a FreeBSD system, you're asked if you would like to install the Ports Collection. If you chose no, you can follow these instructions to obtain the ports collection:

Option 1 - CVSup


Option 2 - Portsnap