I found this nice example of using the Expect Shell to automate an SSH connection providing username and password:

http://bash.cyberciti.biz/security/expect-ssh-login-script/

When automating SSH connections it would be better to have authentication keys setup to avoid the necessity of passing a password to a script, but this is not always possible and in these cases the Expect Shell offers a workaround.

I need this type of automation functionality as I am currently working on automating some Git tasks, so that an application running on the Google App Engine can access Git repositories via a Web API running on a third party system.

Git is gaining more and more popularity as a Software Control system within the Software Development community but it turns out that interacting with it from the Google App Engine is far from trivial – but what’s new!

Micheál Martin’s recent rather amusing gaffe has left people in a lot of different emotional states ranging from the wringing of hands emotional state to the back-of-clasroom giggling emotional state – but what nobody seems to have taken from his statement is that it’s actually 100% correct:

We Irish _are_ very good at software!

Thanks for noticing Micheál!

Most Software Development houses need to roll up their sleeves every now and again and get stuck into some honest to goodness IT setup – somtimes for themselves and sometimes for their clients.

With cloud services maturing there are more options than ever for rolling out capable and cost effective IT infrastructure.

This week, we finished moving a client’s email setup from standard web-hosting mailboxes (POP & IMAP) to Google Apps and Gmail, we found the whole process refreshingly straightforward. The setup included mail and calendar on windows with outlook, Outlook mail and iCal calendar on the Mac and Mobile Sync of mail and calendar on the iPhone, Blackberry and Android.

The only sticking point was that outlook on the Mac does not yet support calendar syncing with anything except Microsoft Exchange and so won’t sync with Google Calendar – hence the use of iCal instead which does happily sync up with Google Apps. Proper syncing functionality has been promised by Microsoft for some time now but hasn’t appeared. Hopefully it will arrive within the next half year or so…

Of the mobile setups the blackberry was amazingly simple – those guys really have thought of everything. All you do is enter your google account name and password when logged into your web account and everything is then setup automatically on your phone, you don’t even have to tell it that it’s a Google Apps account – it figures all of this out itself!

The rollout included the migration of many hundreds of Mib’s of the client’s existing email up to the cloud – this process took a wekend to complete, but again was quite painless.

As well as mail and calender support, Google Apps also has Google Docs and Google Sites which can be used for developing a company intranet.

Anyway I would definitely recommend Google Apps as a good option for small companies out there who need to grow theirr IT infrastructure, but don’t want the extra hassle and cost of having an in-house IT setup. Google really have put a lot of effort in making the user experience on the Cloud as seamless as possible and it seems to have paid off.

Here is an interesting article about the relative strengths of the most popular CMS systems out there:

http://www.dss-int.com/articles/2010/10/15/the-cms-tug-of-war-wordpress-vs-drupal-vs-joomla/

As regular readers will know drupal is my tool of choice for most of my web development work although I have put many a website together with wordpress too and I really like it. I can readily understand why you might choose wordpress over drupal for a particular job and vis versa. I have developed many large and capable web apps with drupal.

What I find harder to understand is why some web designers and developers slog away with the older web platforms like ASP .NET and JSP etc.

I have developed many such systems but after developing web apps using CMS systems over the last few years I would find it really hard to go back – I don’t think that I could handle the sheer amount of wheel reinvention that is necessary to put anything useful together!

Mind you I have been developing in the cloud lately with Google App Engine and the amount of wheel reinvention that must go on there is quite staggering, but then it is the cloud, so that’s ok….! isn’t it?….

I very much enjoyed the GTUG Dublin meeting last night at Google HQ in Dublin. There were very interesting speakers and a nice pint was had afterwards in the schoolhouse! It was nice to meet everybody and have a good chin-wag.

I have uploaded the slides to my talk on integrating paypal and the google app engine, they can be downloaded from here.

Our favourite foody-friends, Cully and Sully have recently launched Chef Factor – a cookery competition for all of you budding Chefs out there. The top prize is 12 week cookery course in Ballymaloe worth €12,000! For more details see the Chef Factor site:

http://www.cheffactor.ie/

We had great fun helping our web design partners Pride Design to develop and launch the Chef Factor site which as usual we developed using drupal, the site called for plenty of Facebook interconnection via Facebook’s Open Graph Protocol!

So if you’re up for a culinary challenge why not don your apron and get cheffing!

Hi, just a note to let you know that I will be giving a talk at the next Dublin Google Technology User Group (GTUG) meeting on how to go about hooking up Paypal payments to the Google App Engine (GAE). The meeting will be held next Tuesday the 28th at 6:30pm.

So if you feel up to being bored to within an inch of your life by some gory GAE & Paypal details then you now know where to go!

More details can be found on the Dublin GTUG page here:

http://groups.google.com/group/dublin-gtug

I have uploaded the slides to my talk on integrating paypal and the google app engine, they can be downloaded from here

Kevin.

For those Software Engineers and developers out there who are thinking of striking it out on their own, the IEEE Computer Society have posted this article with 10 handy tips on how to hack it as a Software Consultant. Looks like I’ve got a bit of brushing-up to do!

Although I don’t agree that it is always good to find a niche and specialise, the world is full of specialists working in their own little boxes and sometimes to do a really good job as a software consultant it is necessary to be able to step back and see the big picture and properly understand a task’s context. When asked what my specialisation is I usually say that I specialise in Generalism!

I think that if you plan to be a software contractor then specialisation is OK and maybe even necessary, but if you plan to be a professional software consultant then just being a specialist may not always be enough – just my EUR0.02 worth, what do you think – am I mad?

Here is an interesting post about the 5 most interesting new features in wordpress 3.0: http://mashable.com/2010/05/10/new-features-wordpress-3/

It certainly seems to be going in the right direction – I will be interested to see what can be done with the new custom content types.  This could lead to the use of wordpress for the development of richer websitse and web applications.

Now if they would only fix up what has to be the world’s most frustrating WYSWYG editor! Mind you I haven’t yet come across a web WYSWYG yet that could be described as complete.

In this gloomy climate it’s great to see some good news – and the Irish Times reports here that Google has seen a sharp rise in its profits for the first quarter of this year – more evidence they say that the web advertising and technology sectors are bouncing back from the recession. It seems that revenue rose 28% which is the the biggest rate of growth since the third quarter of 2008.

 
Good news indeed for Google’s many Irish employees, and good news also for the online industry if this trend continues – it certainly seems that ‘online’ is where we all need to be as there aint much moving and shaking in the traditional marketing arena!