Looking for an online Pomodoro timer is the first thing most of us do after reading about Pomodoro technique. I also did the same and found many Pomodoro Timers online. But I did not like the ones I found very much. Most of them were Flash based (I am sorry I am not a big fan of Flash based apps =D), and some Pomodoro Timers were more than just Timers. I was looking for a minimalist interface.

The Pomodoro Timer created by Ryhan Hassan was a very good fit for what I was looking. He had done a very good job in creating a Pomodoro timer. But it was not using desktop notifications and the timer was not available online.

Therefore I decided to fork the his github repo and add the missing features to suit my requirements. I also hosted the modified tool along with my blog.

You can access the Pomodoro Timer from http://a5anka.github.io/pomodoro/.

Screenshots

Normally when you use GIT for a long time, you end up with a huge list of branches in both local and remote repository. In this post I explain how you can get rid of that clutter.

Deleting branches in the local repository

I assume you know how to list local branches in the repo (Simply use

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git branch

$ git branch -d <branch-name>

You will get the following error if you try to delete a branch which is not fully merged.

$ git branch -d <branch-name>
error: The branch 'branch-name' is not fully merged.
If you are sure you want to delete it, run 'git branch -D branch-name'.

In that case you can use

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-D

$ git branch -D <branch-name>

Deleting branches in remote repository

There are couple git commands you can use to delete a git branch in a remote repository. Please note that the following examples assume the remote name as “origin”. After Git v1.7.0 you can use the `–delete’ option with git push to delete a remote branch.

$ git push origin --delete <branchName>

If you are using an older version you can use the command mentioned below.

$ git push origin :<branchName>

Both the commands have the same effect. Therefore you can use the one you like. For me the first command feels more natural.

Creating a Git alias to delete both local and remote branches

You can create a Git alias if you find yourself executing these two commands together most of the time.

$ git config --global alias.purge-branch '!git branch -d $1 && git push origin --delete $1 && echo Purging done for branch'

Now it is simple as issuing following command to delete a branch from both local and remote repositories.

$ git purge-branch <branch-name>
Deleted branch <branch-name> (was 1cde3f).
To git@github.com:a5anka/<repo-name>.git
 - [deleted]         <branch-name>
Purging done for branch <branch-name>

“If you don’t like testing your product, most likely your customers won’t like to test it either.” - Anonymous

A message broker or any other software should always be tested extensively to make sure it is working as expected. That is why we always try to improve the way we are testing WSO2 MB. Since WSO2 MB is used mostly in clustered mode, we need to test and see how WSO2 MB behave in a clustered environment. Prior to WSO2 MB 3.0.0, this was a manual process which resulted in wasting valuable time and resources. I am writing this post to tell you how to configure and run the clustered integration tests introduced in WSO2 MB 3.0.0.

We have not still automated the MB cluster creation process yet. In a future release we will be able to automate this process also. But for the moment we have to create the cluster manually. With the removal of Apache ZooKeeper dependency from WSO2 MB, this is not very hard to do. I am not going to describe how to setup a MB cluster in this post. You can follow the WSO2 MB documentation to properly setup a MB cluster.

Configuring test framework

I am using a two node WSO2 MB cluster for this example. Let’s assume the MB Node details in the cluster are as follows,

MB Node 1

• Host name/IP: 192.168.1.5
• HTTP port : 9763
• HTTPS port : 9443
• AMQP port : 5672
• MQTT Port : 1883

MB Node 2

• Host name/IP: 192.168.1.6
• HTTP port : 9763
• HTTPS port : 9443
• AMQP port : 5672
• MQTT Port : 1883

1. First We have to enter this node information in the automation.xml file of the tests-clustering module. An example configuration is mentioned below

<!--
    This section will initiate the initial deployment of the platform required by
    the test suites.
-->
<platform>
  <!--
      cluster instance details to be used to platform test execution
  -->
  <productGroup name="MB_Cluster" clusteringEnabled="false" default="true">
    <instance name="mb002" type="standalone" nonBlockingTransportEnabled="false">
      <hosts>
        <host type="default">192.168.1.5</host>
      </hosts>
      <ports>
        <port type="http">9763</port>
        <port type="https">9443</port>
        <port type="qpid">5672</port>
        <port type="mqtt">1883</port>
      </ports>
      <properties>
      </properties>
    </instance>
    <instance name="mb003" type="standalone" nonBlockingTransportEnabled="false">
      <hosts>
        <host type="default">192.168.1.5</host>
      </hosts>
      <ports>
        <port type="http">9763</port>
        <port type="https">9443</port>
        <port type="qpid">5672</port>
        <port type="mqtt">1883</port>
      </ports>
      <properties>
      </properties>
    </instance>
  </productGroup>
</platform>

2. Also edit the datasource information in the automation.xml to match your MySQL database configuration for the message store. Please note that we currently only support MySQL database for Cluster Testing even-though WSO2 MB supports several database systems like MySQL, MSSQL, and Oracle.

<!--
Database configuration to be used for data service testing. DB configuration in dbs files will be replaced with
below configuration at test run time
-->
<datasources>
  <datasource name="mbCluster">
    <url>jdbc:mysql://localhost/WSO2_MB</url>
    <username>root</username>
    <password>root</password>
    <driverClassName>com.mysql.jdbc.Driver</driverClassName>
  </datasource>
</datasources>

3. We have to also change the value of “skipPlatformTests” property to false in the pom.xml of tests-clustering module to enable clustered integrations tests.

<properties>
  <skipPlatformTests>false</skipPlatformTests>
</properties>

4. Now we can run the clustered test by executing

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mvn clean install

GIT trick to configure quickly

It is a pain to do all these configuration every time we need to run cluster tests. What I do to avoid that is keeping all these configuration changes in GIT stash. Then when ever I need to run the cluster tests, I can simply apply the stash and run tests.

Double Curly braces are reserved characters in the Jekyll world. Double curly braces can be used to refer to internal variables and functions. Therefore we have to escape them if we want to have them as texts. The common use case is when you want to show some Jekyll examples like in this post. You can achieve this by using the “raw tag” available in Jekyll.

See the code below for an example.

{% raw  %} {{ some.var  }} {% endraw  %}

An alternative method is to use double quotes to make part of it a string literal.

 {{ "{{ some.var "}} }} 

Hope this helps you in writing your next Jekyll posts.

To create an absolute path for a resource without hard coding the host-name, simply prepend the path with

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{{ site.url }}

See the code below for an example.

<figure>
    <a href="{{ site.url }}/images/tetsImage_a.png">
        <img src="{{ site.url }}/images/testImage_b.png" alt="">
    </a>
</figure>