Thanks, Habitat for Humanity of Oregon, for the opportunity to lend a hand!

Out of the box, though, its column sorting feature does not work unless your grid is hooked up to a server-side data source.  Here is a svn patch that adds this functionality to the current head branch of flexigrid.js:

flexigrid-sort-in-place.diff

This patch is built on the current trunk revision of flexigrid.js, which is r3.  I am currently unable to create a patch for the current release version (”1.0b3″), which is slightly different; but to apply these changes to that version is pretty simple, since I only made 3 changes:

1. add “sortorder: ‘asc’” to the default properties struct up at the top
2. add the “else if (!p.url) this.inPlaceSort();” clause to the end of the changeSort method
3. copy in the inPlaceSort() function

Nick: <typing carefully>

Nick:  <clicks button>

[some time passes]

Internet: “Oh, sorry, no trailing period? I’ll just assume you mean to send this
email to freakin Nepal. MORON.”

So you are hypothetically deploying your ant-built tar’d up software release. Let’s further say for the sake of argument that it contains some business-critical scripts that must keep their executable mode to be run from cron. Oops, those files are no longer executable! You will soon be disappointed at the failure of your cron job to do anything at all, and you may experience some increased email volume accompanied by mild irritation.  If this condition persists, call your doctor, or go back and RTFM again because as the docs imply, this shortcoming can be easily overcome.

Your job is to identify all the files that need to keep their mode, username, or groupname, and specify said property in a special fileset called tarfileset.  In my ant build, let’s say the build root is ${builddir} and contains 2 components called src and lib.  I’ve got one specific file src/foo/exec.sh, and a whole tree of stuff at lib/bar, that have to be executable.  I will need to call the Tar task with two tarfilesets: one to include the executables and set their mode, and a second to include everything else while excluding the executables.

Before:

<tar destfile="${buildfile.name}"
     basedir="${builddir}"
     longfile="gnu"
     includes="src/**, lib/**"/>

After:

<tar destfile="${buildfile.name}" longfile="gnu">
     <tarfileset dir="${builddir}" filemode="755">
         <include name="src/foo/exec.sh"/>
         <include name="lib/bar/**"/>
     </tarfileset>
     <tarfileset dir="${builddir}">
         <include name="src/**"/>
         <include name="lib/**"/>
         <exclude name="src/foo/exec.sh"/>
         <exclude name="lib/bar/**"/>
     </tarfileset>
</tar>

Works for me!

The other day, someone at Site5 decided they had to respond to a vague and specious rumor circulating about a vulnerability in OpenSSH.  Their response?  To disable all customer ssh access.  Wheeeee!

Yesterday they finally turned back on SSH access.  But without any notice, they disabled ssh1 access on my server.  I don’t dispute that I should probably have been using ssh2 keys for accessing my svn repo over svn+ssh, but I wasn’t.  And since I am sort of a doofus sometimes when it comes to sysadmin type stuff, I got to spend half a day looking for some problem with my svn client before I thought of the obvious fact that while Site5 claimed all ssh access was restored, that claim may not have been entirely true.  Thanks Site5, you totally owe me a beer.

Update – SANS said yesterday it was indeed a hoax.

The launch was nearly 100% smooth, the only exception being when I broke Habitat’s email for a half hour or so.  Turns out that if you move DNS for a domain, you move it for, you know, the whole domain, and stuff.  Who knew you could be a professional web developer while having such a crappy grasp of DNS?  Well, I’m living proof that it’s true.  Or false, depending on your definition of “professional”.

Update:  DNS caching is a giant PITA.

• PageSpot
• Media2Layout

So far today I have compulsively checked the download statistics and somehow 60+ people downloaded PageSpot within about 6 hours of it being published.  I know there are a lot of WordPress blogs and users out there but there must be even more than I assumed.