I was asked about listing everything in a DreamObjects bucket, which is practically the same thing as listing everything in an Amazon S3 bucket, just on a different server.
This isn’t as easy as we’d like, because while there is a nice Amazon S3 PHP class we can use (and I forked it and flipped it to be a DreamObjects PHP Class), telling people they have to download the S3.php file and then make this separate PHP file is a little annoying.
//include the S3 class
if (!class_exists('S3'))require_once('S3.php');
//AWS access info
if (!defined('awsAccessKey')) define('awsAccessKey', 'MYACCESSKEY');
if (!defined('awsSecretKey')) define('awsSecretKey', 'MYSECRETKEY');
//Bucket Info
$bucketName = 'MYBUCKETNAME';
/* STOP EDITING HERE */
//instantiate the class
$s3 = new S3(awsAccessKey, awsSecretKey);
// Get the contents of our bucket
$bucket_contents = $s3->getBucket($bucketName);
foreach ($bucket_contents as $file){
$fname = $file['name'];
$furl = 'http://'.$bucketName.'.objects.dreamhost.com/'.$fname;
//output a link to the file
echo '<a href=\'$furl\'>$fname</a><br />';
}
I know, it’s not too terribly complicated, but it is annoying to make two files for that, and my DreamObjects listing page is very barebones. You could style it with CSS, make it show the image, make it show in a grid, or even show the file size and have it pop up in a new window.
It does highlight one of my issues with CEPH (AWS whatever) storage, and that it’s still not quite friendly enough. It dumps us back to the old days where we FTP’d our images up to a server and then manually crafted our links. Certainly there are plugins for WordPress that can help us with that, but in general it requires knowing code (or where to get the code) in order to display content.
So you’ve forked a repository from someone and they happen to be using git. This is great and with git (and GitHub) this is so easy and so simple. Heck, on GitHub, they want you to press that fork button. And this is all wonderful except for two things.
You can’t search a fork on GitHub.
Merging back into your fork is confusing.
The first issue drives me nuts.
That it says “currently” gives me some hope, but it’s one of the most annoying aspects of a fork on GitHub.
The second issue is bigger than just GitHub.
Sometimes when you fork, you never want to go back, and that’s sensible. You’ve decided to go a different way. That’s how most of us view a fork, after all, because we’re used to repositories being silo’d and stand alone (like with SVN). But with git, you can actually send your fork repo as a pull request to the original for them to merge in your changes. And the reverse is also true, so if you and another dev have a fundamental difference on something you can’t hack with an add-on, you have options that don’t involve reading every line of code and copy/pasting.
Yes, I did that before.
Thankfully you won’t have to. You can follow three steps to do this.
Add the Upstream
Technically you should do this any time you make a fork, but if you use GitHub you probably forgot. After all, GitHub has that nice ‘Pull Request’ button for you, which takes care of it. They want you to cross contribute and, bless them, they make it quite easy to do so.
Instead, you’ll want to manually tell your repository that yes, Virginia, there is an upstream. This is the parent repository and it’s one command:
Now you want to fetch the upstream repository so your clone of the repository has the code it will need to merge.
git fetch upstream
Yeah, it’s that simple. It’s pretty much making a branch and fetching its changes. At this point, you’ve not made any changes to your own code.
Merge with Upstream
This works best on master to master, but I’ll bet you can also set a branch and merge that way.
git merge upstream/master -m "Merging from upstream"
If there aren’t any commit differences, it fastforwards. Otherwise you get a merge done safely, your changes stick.
But I don’t use Git on the CLI!
According to Hermes Pique, you can do it this way:
Open your fork on GitHub.
Click on Pull Requests.
Click on New Pull Request. By default, GitHub will compare the original with your fork, and there shouldn’t be anything to compare if you didn’t make any changes.
Click on switching the base. Now GitHub will compare your fork with the original, and you should see all the latest changes.
Click on Click to create a pull request for this comparison and assign a predictable name to your pull request (e.g., Update from original).
Click on Send pull request.
Scroll down and click Merge pull request and finally Confirm merge. If your fork didn’t have any changes, you will be able to merge it automatically.
also i’d like you to either never submit pull requests again or at least try to not put harmful code in them
That was what a developer said when I made a derp pull request, adding in a check for 0 that should have been better as a check for not -1.
Regardless of the fact that he and I fundamentally disagree on the usefulness of the code (and frankly, that’s why I assumed he’d be punting my pull request), his reply is something I’m very glad I got now and not 10 years ago.
Like pretty much everyone on the planet, I have moments where I wonder if you’re all going to figure out that I don’t know a damn thing and I’ve been faking it all these years. It’s Imposter Syndrome, and we all suffer from it to a degree. And it’s comments like that developer made that reinforce it.
Now, I know this guy’s history. And I know at first glance his reply may seem terse but not all that bad. Sadly, this is probably the nicest I’ve ever seem him tell someone they sucked. He’s not nice. At all. His support forums are filled with him calling people demeaning names, or saying they’re stupid for not understanding his code, and frankly on the list of humans I would willingly interact with for fun, he’s not there. He’s not even on the reserves. But I still respect his code (though not his documentation, inline or otherwise) and I use it every day. I won’t be contributing to it anymore because I don’t have any need to be in an abusive relationship.
“Curse your sudden, but inevitable, betrayal!”
And that’s what this is! He’s abusive and behavior I don’t care for and wether he means it or not, he’s being mean. It feels silly and petty to put it that way, but that’s what it is. He’s a mean person. I don’t care that he’s mean, and it didn’t actually hurt my feelings though it did make me momentarily angry at him, but I do care that meanness like that will convince someone to stop and never get better at things. Did it hurt my feelings? Yes, it did. It sucks to be told your code sucks, but it sucks more to be told in a way that makes you feel like you’ll never be good enough in any way, which is precisely what many people will read from that comment.
When you ask me “Where does Imposter Syndrome come from?” I say “People like that.” People who reinforce the belief that you’re not good enough, that you’re crap and don’t deserve their time to learn better, and you can go eff yourself.
Is he required to be nice and handhold me through the code and explain why? Hell no! But he made an open source product which he opened to the public, put on GitHub, and allowed for pull requests. He’s naive to think everyone will come to his product knowing everything, and I suspect part of his attitude issue is because he doesn’t want to help people. Which again, is fine. Obviously I don’t feel the same way, but I also don’t think everyone can be good at support. I do think that if you’ve got all this in the open, you’re going to get people who are far less experienced than you are. How you treat them will set the standard for what kind of help you get from your community in the future.
Let’s contrast this. I was talking to people about a change in some laws recently and fiddling with an add on to code I use because of it. When I reached a point at which the code worked, I put it on Github and said “Pull requests and fixes welcome!” I knew the code wasn’t good enough. I knew I wasn’t sanitizing everything yet, some of it was terribly inefficient, and some of it was bad code. I knew this. I knew it wasn’t perfect at all, but I put it up and then pinged a developer for the product I was using. His reply?
mind if I fork that and we distribute it either on [our] site or in (pending yet another round of core team discussion) in core?
Boom. He knew it wasn’t perfect. He saw the value in the attempt and proof of concept, and he ran with it. Naturally I told him to use and enjoy, because I’d licensed it GPL. He also said he’d try and do a pull request to make it so when you used the code, it stopped you from picking the wrong thing. That was something I’ve yet to sort out, even though I’ve been playing with the code some more. I’m learning something new. I’ve never written for that code project before (except a typo fix). This is all new for me.
The difference is pretty bold. One guy pretty much insulted me, one encouraged. The insult, justified or not, discouraged me from wanting to pitch other suggestions or improvements. The encouragement is making me think about an offer they made a while ago more seriously. It also inspired me to sit and study the code, read what it did and why (seriously awesome inline documentation there), and be able to go from zero to add-on in 4 hours while prepping for a holiday dinner.
How you represent yourself, as a developer, creates your community. How you treat others can help or hinder their entire lives. You may not think about your words as having that much power because you’re just someone who helps in a support forum, or you wrote a simple two line plugin, or you translated a file, but they do. Your words matter a lot.
As for the people reading this who don’t code well either, don’t be afraid to code badly. You can’t know it all from the beginning and don’t let people get you down about that. Tell them you’re learning, that you’re trying to be bold and step out, and you won’t get any better in a vacuum. Some of us have to learn by doing, after all. We can’t all read the code and know the answers, and that’s okay.
By the way, yes I’m still using the code from the other guy. I’ve forked it (and now I get to learn about syncing your fork back with master changes) and I’m keeping my one change in there. I’m sure there’s another fix, with a filter perhaps, but given the lack of documentation and assistance, I’ll be stuck with this for a while yet. But you know what? That’s actually okay.
I honestly have no hard feelings on a personal level. I’m not obligated to like him or agree with his choices. He’s not obligated to agree with mine. That’s why open source is great. I can fork it and go. But what won’t happen is that I won’t be afraid to make changes, to get things wrong, and to keep learning.
Wednesday is the Great Internet Slowdown where websites all over the world are going to protest the cable conglomerates getting together to tell us how fast our internet can be to specific sites, when they want it to be fast or not.
I’m going to do this one simply. You know how you can dial anyone on your phone, and it’s your responsibility to not dial up sex numbers if that offends you? The phone company doesn’t limit your ability to do that. It doesn’t stop you from sexting your ex at 2am when you’re drunk and that was a really bad idea, wasn’t it? They don’t tell you, as you dial a psychic, that you should dial this other one instead. No, they let you shoot yourself in the foot.
Well that’s not how they want it to work on the Internet.
Cable companies are spending billions to gut the heart right out of net neutrality and create fast lanes and slow lanes on the Internet. A company that pays them more will get their site loading faster. A company that doesn’t, even if it has superior products, would be slower.
This isn’t about how quickly our cat videos load, it’s about the future of our ability to communicate, to learn, to create, and to rebel. It’s about the future of humanity.
I know that sounds a little heavy handed, but it’s true. The ability to use the Internet for communication is massively important. I work with people all around the globe, I fix websites all over the place and I talk constantly with people everywhere. I need to be able to do this to succeed at my job. If cable companies get their way, it might make it impossible for products like WordPress to develop as quickly as it does today.
It’s already hard enough, with nations putting up firewalls and blocks preventing China from reaching Google for fonts, to get things done. But now we’re letting companies you and I might not even use decide they know what’s right?
Come on! Let me decide if I want to go to that site and talk to those people! It’s just like the phone, after all.
If you’re on WordPress, grab the Cat Signal Plugin. You can install it and leave it on, it’ll turn itself on when needed.
I touched on this when I talked about a project that forked, and I’ve said it before. I don’t use WordPress for everything, and I don’t think I should.
A lot of you will probably disagree with me, especially since it’s well known much of what I love about WordPress is the fact that I don’t have to remove features. The problem is where WordPress started from has determined what kind of product it will be. But let me step back.
When I spoke at WordCamp Miami, I said that the kind of WordPress user you are defines the future you will have with WordPress. What we are before WordPress is what makes us use it the ways we do, and the way we use it makes us who we are today. That makes sense, I hope. What we are is what makes us do what we do.
So WordPress started as a blog. This means that no matter how many times we say “It’s a CMS and you can use it for anything!” it still shows blog at it’s heart. I use it for a store, it’s great at it, but there are aspects that remain bloggy. Similarly, MediaWiki was an ‘encyclopedia’ first, so while I know people who blog on it, it’s made for that cross-referencing. Certainly plugins can make these products fit the bill but at their base, you’re talking about the fundamental core of a product.
Step back again.
This is something I think is totally okay.
I don’t buy a scooter and get upset it’s not a motorcycle. I don’t buy a tank and get upset that the Fiat has better gas mileage. I understand that each tool has its place, and while I certainly can tow a trailer with the Mini Coop, I’d rather use the truck. And that’s what I mean when I say WordPress shouldn’t be everything.
If I was to use WP as a wiki, and I have, I end up disliking the edit/comment relationship. Regressions are easier with revisions, but prelinking pages and moving them is easier with MediaWiki. Image uploads? Easier on WordPress, as are updates (and don’t get me started on extensions), and html editing in a Wiki can make me drink. At the same time, I have a more flexible template situation, where I can have one that formats a whole page or just bits of one in easy, repeatable ways.
Both projects have a lot to learn from each other. Both should steal bits from each other. But I think both should be separate because I will always have places were WordPress is a better fit than plain HTML or a wiki or a gallery. Oh, yes, I still use plain HTML in some places. I use Reveal.js for slides. I experiment and find the right tool for the right job.
Step back again. I got new furniture on my birthday, and it was flatpacked. That means it came with a couple allen wrenches. You know the crappy Ikea L-shaped thing?
Right. After I put together one chair I announced “Fuck this” to myself and got my ratcheting screwdriver with swappable bits. There was one for this size, I switched to it, and finished three more chairs in the time it had taken me to do one. The tools were similar, but clearly different, and one was better than the other. One was easier, though, in that the chairs came with the less perfect one.
It seems clear cut, doesn’t it? The one I bought was better than the one they gave me. Duh! That’s how I feel about software. Sometimes what I have isn’t right and I have to go get that other one. But I’m willing to experiment, to try, and to be wrong in order to get to what’s right. And ‘right’ means right for me and how I want to use it, not you, which is why WordPress has a bajillion plugins that do similar things.
There is not one right way to skin a cat. So why do you think there should be one right CMS?
One morning I awoke to see that one of the lead developers on an open source product was leaving because of ‘creative differences.’ Those are my words. His were a little more angry and frustrated, because it was clear these differences were in the direction of the product. He felt stifled and restrained, saying that the grip the original developer had on the product was at odds with allowing the community to develop it going forward, and he was tired of the fight.
So he forked it and moved on.
Regardless of what product this is (and really it doesn’t matter), the decision on my end is whom should I follow?
On the one hand, this is the lead dev who has applied most (if not all) of the patches I’ve submitted. On the other, the original dev has been working on this for over a decade. Then again, the jump to making this a product I wanted to use happened when the new devs, including the forker, came on board. And the original dev is clearly facing a case of founderitis, where there’s his way or the highway, and not accepting the fact that open source products develop in their own life.
Taking a deep breath, I do not mean to trivialize the issues here. When angry-making things happen, they happen for more reasons than we can see, and we know that there are always, always, two sides to the issues. At the same time I am not a part of the angry and it’s not my business to delve deep into it, save to come to a place where I can make my educated, thoughtful decision.
I do have to worry about the stability of both products. How much was this one dev (or these few devs) the cornerstone of the product? Of the features added, whose do I use and like more? Of the ongoing philosophies, which do I more align with? How easy will it be to support the separate version? Do I think this guy is up for it?
None of this is easy! It’s a jump of who do I trust more, and much of it is a gut feeling. I review the code, I match the changes, and I base my choices on what makes me feel better. But … what about when I’m not a coder? It’s even harder. I have to wait and see which is better, which devs jump with, which users I respect join forks, and even then I know if I wait too long, it’ll be hard to move.
I moved my photo gallery from a home grown site to Gallery2 to ZenPhoto. I know the pain of hating the changes in a product. I know the pain of forking. But even so, I still can’t tell you how to make that call because even I don’t know.
All of it depends.
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