BlissOfBeing TechBlog

Front-end for dinner with some back-end for dessert

Upload Directly to Amazon S3 With jQuery

I wrote a simple Sinatra app to upload files directly to Amazon S3 using SWFUpload, check it out on GitHub Most of the inspiration (and a lot of the core code) came from Tom Pesman’s post on how to do the same thing, just in rails. I ported Tom’s code to use jQuery and the jQuery swfupload plugin. I also converted most of the views to HAML.

A couple of notes about the code: The ruby code I borrowed from Tom used a couple Rails specific helper functions like ‘hours’ but thankfully these helper functions are all easily accessible in sinatra by including the active_support gem.

Customizing the call back: The javascript now simply POSTs to /upload with the file name uploaded as the data. You will probably want to change this function to pass the whole object, and modify your controller to suite your needs.

Also, you must put the crossdomain.xml file in the root of your S3 Bucket and give it read privileges.

This is my first open source contribution! If you have any questions, ideas on how to make the code better, or even feature requests let me know! Its pretty bare bones right now, maybe I’ll add some styling and some progress indicators later.

The Sinatra App is available on github. It is usses by these libraries:

Ruby: sinatra active_support/core_ext base64

Javascript: jQuery jQuery SWFUpload SWFUpload

Modified Dvorak Keyboard: I U Switch

To make the Dvorak keyboard layout even faster, and to take a que from the Colemak layout, I have created a modified Dvorak keyboard layout.

‘I’ is used far more than ‘U’ so it makes since for me to have I be where U currently is on the Dvorak layout, i.e. right under the left forfinger on the home row.

It took me about a week and a half of using this new layout until I was up to my old speed on the official Dvorak layout. I really like this layout, I move my fingers even less now and type at the same speed!

If you are interested here are the layout files for Mac and PC:

For Mac: Download this file Dvorak-ItoU Mac Place this in /Library/Keyboard Layouts/ and then select it in Settings -> International.

For PC Download this file Dvorak-ItoU PC Open the .exe, it should install fine (Note Vista users might have to run the .exe in XP mode)

Thanks to Code Axe for the inspiration and the tutorial on how to get the custom keyboard working on a PC.

Enjoy!

How to Install APC on a Fresh Ubuntu Install

APC speeds up PHP, and will be built into php6. But before then here is how to install APC on a freshly installed Ubuntu box:

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apt-get update

apt-get install libpcre3-dev #an APC dependency

apt-get install php5-cli

apt-get install php5-dev

wget http://pear.php.net/go-pear.phar #downloading pear, the php package manager

php go-pear.phar #installing pear

pecl install apc



vim /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini #edit your php.ini and add extension=apc.so

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart #restart apache to reload your php.ini file

test by running <?php phpinfo(); ?>

APC is installed. Enjoy your speedup.