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+---
+date: "2007-10-15T06:16:32Z"
+title: 'Brain Dump: Random Migration Notes'
+---
+
+<!--img src='http://pablotron.org/gallery/misc/brain_dump.png'
+  width='273' height='200' align='right' /-->
+
+<p>I've been using the migration and some recent side projects as sandboxes
+to try out new things.  Here's a semi-random list of useful tidbits I've
+picked up along the way:</p>
+
+<ul>
+<li><p>Better mod_rewrite magic:  Google turns up plenty of <a href="http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_rewrite.html">mod_rewrite</a>
+examples on automatically stripping the dreaded "www." prefix from
+URLs.  Unfortunately, most of them appear to be incorrect.  Here's the
+most common solution:</p>
+
+<p><code><pre>RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example.com$  [NC]
+RewriteRule ^(.*)$  http://example.com/$1   [R=301,L]</code></pre></p>
+
+<p>What it's <em>supposed</em> to do is redirect visitors from
+<code>http://www.example.com/whatever</code> to <code>http://example.com/whatever</code>,
+but what it <em>actually</em> does is redirect visitors to 
+<code>http://example.com//whatever</code>.  It's minor, but it was driving me
+nuts (Arrrrrrr).  Anyway, here is the correct solution:</p>
+
+<p><code><pre>RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.             [NC]
+RewriteRule ^/(.*)$  http://example.com/$1  [R=301,L]</pre></code></p></li>
+<li><p><a href="http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_deflate.html">mod_deflate</a>: Saves a ton of bandwidth, works great in IE7 and 
+Firefox.  The stock settings don't include a couple of common MIME
+types; here's the list I'm using: 
+text/html text/plain text/xml text/css text/javascript
+application/x-javascript text/csv</p></li>
+<li><a href="http://xcache.lighttpd.net/">XCache</a>: Fast PHP opcode cacher that actually works with recent
+versions of PHP.  I tested several <a href="http://wordpress.org/">Wordpress</a>, <a href="http://gallery.menalto.com/">Gallery</a>, and
+custom PHP sites without incident, and my (incredibly rough) benchmarks
+showed about a 4-7% increase in mean transfer speed.</li>
+<li><p><a href="http://extjs.com/download/build">ExtJS Builder</a>: I decided to test the <a href="http://extjs.com/">ExtJS</a> builder for a
+personal project.  The interface is a bit finicky; it took me about 5
+tries to get all the dependencies for my project selected.  Here are
+the results:</p>
+
+<table style='font-size: 9pt; '>
+<tr><td>File</td><td>Minified</td><td>Deflated</td></tr>
+<tr><td>ext-all.js</td><td>468k</td><td>125k</td></tr>
+<tr><td>ext-mine.js</td><td>276k</td><td>77k</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>Note: The "Minified" column is the total file size after being shrunk with <a
+href='http://javascript.crockford.com/jsmin.html'>Douglas Crockford's
+excellent <code>jsmin</code></a>, and the "Deflated" column is 
+the actual transfer size (according to <a
+href='https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843'>Firebug</a>) after being passed through
+<code>mod_deflate</code>.
+</p>
+
+<p>Not too shabby for 20 minutes of work.  I'm a little bit disappointed
+by the stock mod_deflate compression ratio, so that may need a bit of
+tweaking.</p></li>
+<li><p>Backgrounding Mercurial Hooks: The <a href="http://hgbook.red-bean.com/hgbook.html">Mercurial book</a> has an excellent
+chapter on hooks.  What it doesn't mention, unfortunately, is how to
+run hooks in the background.  I have a semi-lengthy <code>outgoing</code> hook
+(roughly equivalent to a client-side <code>post-commit</code> for you Subversion
+weenies) that connects to a web server via <code>ssh</code> and performs some
+deployment tasks, and all attempts at backgrounding a shell script
+eluded me.  Well, it turns out Mercurial has an extra hidden file
+descriptor that has to be closed in order to background a hook.  So
+here's my down and dirty client-side background deployment hook:</p>
+
+<p><code><pre>
+#
+# outgoing hook script that connects to web server and deploys
+# the latest site from tip.  It is run in the background after a
+# successful 'hg push'.
+#
+
+# options
+opt = {
+  # remote hostname
+  'host' =&gt; 'web',
+
+  # remote command (relative to my home directory)
+  'cmd'  =&gt; 'bin/update_site.sh',
+
+  # client-side log (set to /dev/null to disable)
+  # 'log'  =&gt; '/dev/null',
+  'log'  =&gt; '/tmp/site_update.log',
+
+  # delay (in seconds) before update
+  'delay' =&gt; 3,
+}
+
+# fork and run update in background
+pid = fork {
+  # close stdin, stdout, and stderr
+  $stdin = $stdin.reopen('/dev/null', 'r')
+  $stdout = $stdout.reopen(opt['log'], 'a')
+  $stderr = $stderr.reopen(opt['log'], 'a')
+  $defout = $stdout
+
+  # close all other file descriptors
+  # NOTE: mercurial appears to have a hidden fd laying 
+  # around somewhere, so this evil is necessary...
+  (3..99).each { |fd| IO.new(fd).close rescue nil }
+
+  # wait for push to finish
+  # (this should poll the hg server instead, to handle
+  # lengthy pushes)
+  sleep opt['delay']
+
+  # run update command and exit
+  args = ['ssh', opt['host'], opt['cmd']]
+  exec(*args)
+
+  # never reached
+  exit 0
+}
+
+# reap child and exit
+flags = Process::WNOHANG | Process::WUNTRACED
+Process.waitpid(pid, flags)
+</pre></code></p></li>
+</ul>
+
+<p>
+<b>Update:</b> Markdown really mangled my markup this time around.  Usually it's pretty tolerant, but apparently this post was just a bit too much.  Oh well...
+</p>
+