how to duplicate a project in Xcode

 These steps seem to work for me in Xcode 3.2:

1. In the Groups & Files pane, control-click on the project name (e.g. "ExampleProj") and choose the "Reveal in Finder" option.

2. Make a copy of that folder (e.g. "ExampleProj copy") and rename it to the name you desire for your duplicate project (e.g. "ExampleProjDuplicate").

3. Go inside the new folder and rename the .pch and .xcodeproj entries (e.g. rename "ExampleProj_Prefix.pch" to "ExampleProjDuplicate_Prefix.pch" and "ExampleProj.xcodeproj" to "ExampleProjDuplicate.xcodeproj".

4. The .xcodeproj is actually a folder, you can see its content in Finder by control-click it and choose "Show Package Content". You should see a project.pbxproj file in there.

5. Open the project.pbxproj file in a text editor and replace all old references to the .pch file to the new one that you renamed at step 3 (e.g. replace all "ExampleProj_Prefix.pch" to "ExampleProjDuplicate_Prefix.pch")

6. Load the new project file (e.g. "ExampleProjDuplicate") in XCode and choose the "Build"->"Clean all Targets". 

7. Done.

how to run PHP in interactive mode

One way is to invoke the interpreter from command line like so:

php -a

That seemed to be acting up lately for me, especially in failing to display any output sent with echo.

So I was looking for an alternative replacement, which I found here, courtesy of Facebook. It has all functionality I need.

It depends on Python to be installed on your machine. Once installed you invoke it by simply typing phpsh at the command line.

how to use your own domain name to point to Amazon S3 content

If you use S3 to store content viewable on the web, it may make sense to keep your options open, for a possible switch to a different provider later on, if need be, that wouldn't result in broken links.

To do that you need to control the URL of your content, the full URL, including the host name, hence its full domain. I've been looking for a solution to this problem and I found an excellent post.

The gist is to create a subdomain for your content, e.g. content.example.com and map that subdomain through a CNAME DNS record to the Amazon's S3 domain. The essential thing is to have the name of your S3 bucket containing your content match exactly the name of your subdomain, that is, your bucket name for our example should be "content.example.com".

The post above mentions adding a trailing dot at the end of Amazon's domain. I guess that's dependent on your domain management console. In my case I'm using Godaddy's tools and found that trailing dot not necessary.

how to upload in bulk to Amazon S3

Recently I had to upload a folder containing many files (over 60000) to Amazon S3 storage service.


Amazon doesn't have a tool for this, and their APIs seem to support transferring only one file at the time. I was looking for a solution that wouldn't tie up my computer for a long duration while doing the transfer piecemeal. So I thought why not make a tarball with my files and transfer it in one fell swoop via ftp on a Linux box running as an instance of Amazon elastic computing cloud EC2. Then the plan was to run some scripts to unpack the thing and transfer the files fast between EC2 and S3 servers, through Amazon's internal network.


Assuming you already have a subscription to Amazon's services, and know your way around EC2, here are the steps to take (you may need to change the things in pink to match your needs) :


1. look for a suitable AMI to base your instance on:
ec2-describe-images -o self -o amazon | grep getting-started


2. pick and run an instance
ec2-run-instances ami-3c47a355 -k gsg-keypair


2.5 wait until your instance is running, check on its status with
ec2-describe-instances 


3. log in to the instance
ssh -i id_rsa-gsg-keypair root@ec2-184-73-124-245.compute-1.amazonaws.com


4. on the instance, look for and install ftp
yum list vsftpd
yum install vsftpd.i386

5. configure the ftp server (uncomment "#anon_upload_enable=YES") in
/etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf

6. start the ftp server
/etc/init.d/vsftpd start



7. prepare the destination for anonymous ftp (with total disregard for the security implications)

mkdir /var/ftp/pub/upload
chmod 777 /var/ftp/pub/upload


8. from your computer ftp the tarball to the server (ftp anonymous@ec2-184-73-124-245.compute-1.amazonaws.com/pub/upload)

9. after the ftp transfer completes, go back to the instance and unpack the tarball

10. install an awesome script from http://timkay.com/aws/
cd
curl timkay.com/aws/aws -o aws

11. configure the tool with your Amazon credentials, by creating/editing an .awssecret file and placing your Access Key ID on the first line, followed by your Secret Access Key on the second line

12. save the .awssecret file and set its permissions
chmod 600 .awssecret

13. install the tool
perl aws --install

14. give it a try, make a destination bucket to S3
s3mkdir tartordesign

15. go where your files are
cd /var/ftp/pub/upload

16. prepare an awk script to do the upload and, optionally, set the visibility of your files to public (I needed mine to be available on the web), edit a vi do.awk file with the following content:

{
printf "putting %s\n", $1
cmd = "aws put tartordesign/ " $1
system(cmd)
cmd = "aws put tartordesign/" $1 "?acl --set-acl=public-read"
system(cmd)
}

17. run the script that does the job
ls | grep .jpg | awk -f do.awk  -
note: sometime the piping construct above may fail because "ls | grep .jpg |" produces truncated names. A more robust approach is this:
ls | grep .jpg > list
awk -f do.awk list

18. go about your business until it's finished (you may choose to send the output of that script to a file and later check on the progress by tailing on that file, that way you may end your ssh connection established at step 3, so you're not tied up to anything, instead you reconnect only periodically to check the progress)

19. once the script is done terminate your running EC2 instance, the one you started at step 2
ec2-terminate-instances i-2b57bf41

That's it folks.