How to restore remote Git repo from a local copy

One way would be to re-initialize the remote repository completely cleanly and then do a push from local.

On the server, in the directory where the bare repository should live, do

git init --bare

On the client (local repo), set the new origin if it has changed, and push to the server, and set up tracking again.

git remote set-url origin <Remote_URL>
git push origin master
git branch --set-upstream-to=origin/master master

Sources

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/23397089/how-to-restore-git-bare-repository-from-local-one

Fundamentals of Mixing Video Shoots

As a member of the Media department in church I’ve had the opportunity to mix video shoots on several occasions. Here are some tips I’ve learnt on good mixing.

Have multiple cameras. The more cameras you have, the more variety you can bring into your video mixing. I am accustomed to using 3 cameras: one on the left, right and centre. So, if mixing, shoot for having multiple cameras.

Make sure a camera is still before shooting from it. Before switching to a camera, make sure the camera’s shot is steady and it isn’t likely to shift immediately.

Change views frequently. When mixing you want to introduce variety. Staying on one camera for too long makes a video shoot boring. It is akin to sitting in one spot for hours. We don’t like that now, do we? We like to move around and get different views of things. The same applies to video shoots. Also, if the speaker is moving around, then you need to know which cameras are best suited to capture him or her at any given position and use those cameras accordingly.

Pay close attention to camera men. Camera men often give signals to the mixer on certain occasions. E.g. A camera man might want to tighten a loose tripod stand, requiring him or her to stop camera feed momentarily. He or she may also want to take a break, or something else. Usually he/she will give you a signal. You need to pay attention in order to catch these messages quickly. I suppose that having walkie talkies could make this even easier.

Have frequent crowd shots – When shooting a speaker-audience event e.g. church service, it’s important to capture crowd reaction in addition to the speaker. It’s often tempting to just remain on the speaker, but unfortunately that gives a rather boring video. You want to record crowd reaction especially when the speaker says or does something that elicits an interesting audience reaction.

How to add a SMB Shared Printer on Ubuntu server to Mac

Today I’ll discuss how to add a printer hosted on an Ubuntu server via Samba to a Mac.

First, make sure the printer is on.

Next, download and install the printer driver on your Mac.

Next, open Spotlight Search and type in printers. Printers & Scanners should be highlighter. Press Enter. This will open your printer settings.

Click the + icon to add a new printer. The Add window will appear.

Click IP tab to switch to IP settings.

In the Address field, enter the ip address of the server on which the printer is connected

Under protocol, choose Internet Printing Protocol – IPP. Enter the name of the queue. To find this information, you can open the CUPS admin of the Ubuntu print server, usually at http://{{print server ip}}:631. Go to Printers page, find the printer and copy the link on the printer name. Let’s assume the printer url is http://{{print server ip}}:631/printers/{{printer name}}. In this case, you will enter printers/{{printer name}} for Queue.

Enter a suitable Name and Location.

For Use, click Select Software. The Printer Software window will appear.

Find and click the name of your printer and click OK.

Click Add.

If all goes well, the printer gets added automatically. If doing this for the first time on your Mac, a window will appear showing features you can add to your printer. Click the button to complete the process and you’re done! You can now print from your Mac.

How to stash a single file in Git

Sometimes you may be working on your Git repo and discover that you have made changes in several files and need to stash changes to only some of those modified files. How do you accomplish that? Well, there’s a handy command that goes as follows:

git stash -p

This will go through each modified file and give you an option to stash the hunk by entering ‘y’, not stash the hunk by entering ‘n’, or perform other actions. A full list, found on Stack Overflow is shown below:

   y - stash this hunk
   n - do not stash this hunk
   q - quit; do not stash this hunk or any of the remaining ones
   a - stash this hunk and all later hunks in the file
   d - do not stash this hunk or any of the later hunks in the file
   g - select a hunk to go to
   / - search for a hunk matching the given regex
   j - leave this hunk undecided, see next undecided hunk
   J - leave this hunk undecided, see next hunk
   k - leave this hunk undecided, see previous undecided hunk
   K - leave this hunk undecided, see previous hunk
   s - split the current hunk into smaller hunks
   e - manually edit the current hunk
   ? - print help

Getting Started with Sphinx Search

As a web developer you may run into occasions where your database struggles to handle search queries. Have you ever been in a situation where you search for a query containing a few keywords and your website completely hangs? Not a very good feeling. This kind of issue happens usually on websites with at least thousands or even hundreds of thousands of rows and where search involves accessing several db tables. Today I’m going to discuss a solution to speed up search on a db. Have you ever searched on your website for something and get rather irrelevant results? The tool I’m going to discuss solves that problem as well. It’s called Sphinx. Sphinx is a powerful search engine written in C++ and allows blazing fast search ranked by relevance, much more than a traditional database can handle. Sphinx is open source and also available under commercial license. I’ll talk about how to set up Sphinx and get started with it on osX.

First, let’s prepare some data to work with. We assume our website is for car catalogs. Note: I got this sample data and PHP file courtesy of a very good Sphinx tutorial at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/os-php-sphinxsearch/

Create a database testdb and add a few tables to it using the following SQL statements:

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `Assembly` (
  `id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `label` varchar(7) NOT NULL,
  `description` varchar(128) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB  DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 AUTO_INCREMENT=8 ;

--
-- Dumping data for table `Assembly`
--

INSERT INTO `Assembly` (`id`, `label`, `description`) VALUES
(1, '5-00', 'Seats'),
(2, '4-00', 'Electrical'),
(3, '3-00', 'Glasses'),
(4, '2-00', 'Frame'),
(5, '1-00', 'Engine'),
(7, '101-00', 'Accessories');

-- --------------------------------------------------------
--
-- Table structure for table `Inventory`
--

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `Inventory` (
  `id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `partno` varchar(32) NOT NULL,
  `description` varchar(256) NOT NULL,
  `price` float unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
  UNIQUE KEY `partno` (`partno`) USING BTREE
) ENGINE=InnoDB  DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 AUTO_INCREMENT=10 ;

--
-- Dumping data for table `Inventory`
--

INSERT INTO `Inventory` (`id`, `partno`, `description`, `price`) VALUES
(1, 'WIN408', 'Portal window', 423),
(2, 'ACC711', 'Jack kit', 110),
(3, 'ACC43', 'Rear-view mirror', 55),
(4, 'ACC5409', 'Cigarette lighter', 20),
(5, 'WIN958', 'Windshield, front', 500),
(6, '765432', 'Bolt', 0.1),
(7, 'ENG001', 'Entire engine', 10000),
(8, 'ENG088', 'Cylinder head', 55),
(9, 'ENG976', 'Large cylinder head', 65);

-- --------------------------------------------------------

--
-- Table structure for table `Model`
--

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `Model` (
  `id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `label` varchar(100) NOT NULL,
  `description` varchar(256) NOT NULL,
  `begin_production` int(4) NOT NULL,
  `end_production` int(4) NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB  DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 AUTO_INCREMENT=8 ;

--
-- Dumping data for table `Model`
--

INSERT INTO `Model` (`id`, `label`, `description`, `begin_production`, `end_production`) VALUES
(1, 'X Sedan', 'Four-door performance sedan', 1998, 1999),
(3, 'X Sedan', 'Four door performance sedan, 1st model year', 1995, 1997),
(4, 'J Convertible', 'Two-door roadster, metal retracting roof', 2002, 2005),
(5, 'J Convertible', 'Two-door roadster', 2000, 2001),
(7, 'W Wagon', 'Four-door, all-wheel drive sport station wagon', 2007, 0);

-- --------------------------------------------------------

--
-- Table structure for table `Schematic`
--

CREATE TABLE Schematic (
  id int(10) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
  partno_id int(10) unsigned NOT NULL,
  assembly_id int(10) unsigned NOT NULL,
  model_id int(10) unsigned NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (id),
  KEY partno_index USING BTREE (partno_id),
  KEY assembly_index USING BTREE (assembly_id),
  KEY model_index USING BTREE (model_id),
  FOREIGN KEY (partno_id) REFERENCES Inventory(id),
  FOREIGN KEY (assembly_id) REFERENCES Assembly(id),
  FOREIGN KEY (model_id) REFERENCES Model(id)
) ENGINE=InnoDB;

--
-- Dumping data for table `Schematic`
--

INSERT INTO `Schematic` (`id`, `partno_id`, `assembly_id`, `model_id`) VALUES
(1, 6, 5, 1),
(2, 8, 5, 1),
(3, 1, 3, 1),
(4, 5, 3, 1),
(5, 8, 5, 7),
(6, 6, 5, 7),
(7, 4, 7, 3),
(8, 9, 5, 3);

-- --------------------------------------------------------

--
-- Structure for view `catalog`
--

CREATE OR REPLACE VIEW Catalog AS
SELECT
  Inventory.id,
  Inventory.partno,
  Inventory.description,
  Assembly.id AS assembly,
  Model.id AS model
FROM
  Assembly, Inventory, Model, Schematic
WHERE
  Schematic.partno_id=Inventory.id 
  AND Schematic.model_id=Model.id 
  AND Schematic.assembly_id=Assembly.id;




A bit of explanation of the tables. Assembly tables is for storing various modules of a car. Inventory stores all the parts we have in store. Model stores the car model. Schematic stores information required to put together a car of a given model with a specific part and for a specific assembly. Finally there’s a view called catalog which brings together the fields we need to serve as source to Sphinx, including the inventory id, part number, description, assembly id and model id.

If we inspect catalog the contents should look like:

+----+---------+---------------------+----------+-------+
| id | partno  | description         | assembly | model |
+----+---------+---------------------+----------+-------+
|  6 | 765432  | Bolt                |        5 |     1 |
|  8 | ENG088  | Cylinder head       |        5 |     1 |
|  1 | WIN408  | Portal window       |        3 |     1 |
|  5 | WIN958  | Windshield, front   |        3 |     1 |
|  4 | ACC5409 | Cigarette lighter   |        7 |     3 |
|  9 | ENG976  | Large cylinder head |        5 |     3 |
|  8 | ENG088  | Cylinder head       |        5 |     7 |
|  6 | 765432  | Bolt                |        5 |     7 |
+----+---------+---------------------+----------+-------+

Next, install Sphinx by downloading the latest release version from http://sphinxsearch.com/downloads/release/. At the moment the latest is 2.2.9. It takes the form of a tar.gz archive.

Extract the contents from the archive and This will give you a folder like sphinx-2.2.9-release-osx10.10-x86_64

Move the folder to /usr/local/sphinx

Next we need to create a Sphinx config file. Change to /usr/local/sphinx and copy the sample config fiel sphinx-min.conf.in to sphinx.conf.

Next, open sphinx.conf and edit it to contain the following contents:

source catalog 
{
	type			= mysql

	sql_host		= localhost
	sql_user		= testdb
	sql_pass		= testdb
	sql_db			= testdb
	sql_port		= 3306	# optional, default is 3306

        sql_query               = \
            SELECT \
                id, partno, description, \
                assembly, model \
            FROM \
                Catalog;
        sql_attr_uint        = assembly
        sql_attr_uint        = model
}
    
index catalog 
{
    source              = catalog
    path                = /usr/local/sphinx/data/catalog
    min_word_len        = 3
    min_prefix_len      = 0
    min_infix_len       = 3
}

indexer
{
	mem_limit		= 128M
}


searchd
{
	listen			= 9312
	listen			= 9306:mysql41
	log			= /usr/local/sphinx/log/searchd.log
	query_log		= /usr/local/sphinx/log/query.log
	read_timeout		= 5
	max_children		= 30
	pid_file		= /usr/local/sphinx/log/searchd.pid
        max_matches             = 1000
	seamless_rotate		= 1
	preopen_indexes		= 1
	unlink_old		= 1
	workers			= threads # for RT to work
	binlog_path		= /usr/local/sphinx/data
}

Save and close the file.

Some explanation. The source section gives Sphinx information about your database. I use a MySQL db in this tutorial. sql_query is the main document fetch query which Sphinx uses to grab data from our db. sql_attr_uint is used to specify unsigned integers. The index section says how to index value. Update its source parameter to your desired value. The searchd section is for the search daemon

Now configuration is complete. To make command line work easier, add /usr/local/sphinx/bin/ to your PATH.

Next, index the data into Sphinx. Run the following command:

indexer --config /usr/local/sphinx/sphinx.conf catalog

You should see some text appear that ends with something like

total 8 docs, 149 bytes
total 0.062 sec, 2397 bytes/sec, 128.71 docs/sec
total 4 reads, 0.000 sec, 0.1 kb/call avg, 0.0 msec/call avg
total 12 writes, 0.000 sec, 0.1 kb/call avg, 0.0 msec/call avg

That means indexing is complete. We can now run queries against Sphinx. First, we need to start the search daemon using the command:

sudo searchd -c /usr/local/sphinx/sphinx.conf

Note: to stop the daemon run the command:

sudo searchd --config /usr/local/sphinx/sphinx.conf --stop

Now we are going to write a PHP file that gets data from Sphinx.

Create a file called query_cat.php and add the following content to it:



include('/usr/local/sphinx/api/sphinxapi.php');

$cl = new SphinxClient();
$cl->SetServer('localhost', 9312);
$cl->SetMatchMode(SPH_MATCH_ANY); // match any word of the query
$cl->SetFilter('model', array(3)); // filter results to those where model is 3

$result = $cl->Query('Windshield', 'catalog'); // query the word Windshield from the index called catalog.

if ($result === false){
    echo 'Query failed: ' . $cl->GetLastError()."\n";
} else {
    if ($cl->GetLastWarning()){
        echo "Warning: ". $cl->GetLastWarning()."\n";
    }
    if ( ! empty($result["matches"]) ) {
        foreach ( $result["matches"] as $doc => $docinfo ) {
            echo "$doc\n";
        }
      
        print_r( $result );
    }

}

You will get an output like

9
Array
(
    [error] => 
    [warning] => 
    [status] => 0
    [fields] => Array
        (
            [0] => partno
            [1] => description
        )

    [attrs] => Array
        (
            [assembly] => 1
            [model] => 1
        )

    [matches] => Array
        (
            [9] => Array
                (
                    [weight] => 1
                    [attrs] => Array
                        (
                            [assembly] => 5
                            [model] => 3
                        )

                )

        )

    [total] => 1
    [total_found] => 1
    [time] => 0.001
    [words] => Array
        (
            [cylind] => Array
                (
                    [docs] => 2
                    [hits] => 2
                )

        )

)

A warning may appear above the message saying that calling a method isn’t recommended, but you can ignore it.

As you can see from the result, 9 is the single result and is indeed the only inventory id for model id 3 containing the keyword ‘container’. Refer to the printout of catalog above.

That’s it for now. There are many other options that can be explored as you play around with Sphinx. Also, there’s a so-called SphinxQL which can be use to query Sphinx instead of using the API.