Setup A Hosted Git Repository With Gitolite

Posted by Peter on November 15, 2011 None comments

Git LogoGit has gotten a lot of hype recently, especially among smaller development teams and contractors, for its flexible, distributed environment, ease of use and while Subversion is the old kid on the block, there are pros and cons for each. This article assumes that you already know the intrinsics of the different version control systems and you’ve decided that Git is for you.

Gitolite is a package that allows us to host our repositories using one dedicated user that has restricted access to the host OS and provides access to the source code.

The following steps helped me successfully install and setup Git on a Ubuntu Server 11.04, install gitolite to host my Git repositories and allow secure access over SSH. I’ve not tested other Linux versions, but assume it should be very similar.

The basic steps include:

  • Create User
  • Generate SSH keys
  • Install Git
  • Install Gitolite
  • Administer Gitolite

Read more »

Facebook New Features And Changes Announced At F8

Posted by Peter on September 26, 2011 None comments

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his crew presented the latest Facebook features at f8 today, to a crowd of developers and reporters during Facebook’s F8 keynote. There are many of new changes and features coming to Facebook and we have an outline of them for you.

News

A wide range of new social apps, such as Digg, Gizmodo, USA Today, The Guardian, Flipboard, Yahoo and many more will provide apps tailored to Facebook.

Music and Video

Like apps, music providers will think of ways to engage users on Facebook, like listening to the same music at the same time with your friends. And so will video providers, such as Hulu, Netflix, Flixster and others. Read more »

Tweak User Interface In OS X Lion

Posted by Peter on August 15, 2011 None comments

OS X LionThe user interface changes of Apple’s new operating system, Lion, are obvious to experienced Mac users. But some of the changes might have you scratching your head, when you don’t for example see traditional scroll bars, the mailbox and folder list, or large enough icons in the Finder sidebar.

You might also be annoyed by the new “reverse scrolling” feature, and the reappearance of that ping sound when you receive new mail messages. Plus, you may be wondering what the “Arrange” button and the extra items in the Finder sidebar are all about.

If you’re a veteran Mac user, you probably have figured out how to change a few things in Lion to get them back the way you like. But if you’re still confused, read on. Read more »

Create mobile and iPad versions of your WordPress site

Posted by Peter on August 4, 2011 None comments

WPtouch ProHaven’t you thought of creating mobile/iPad versions of your WordPress site? Is it worth the effort? If there just was an easy way to get them created and maintained. Well, there is..

WPtouch is a WordPress plugin for self-hosted WordPress websites that shows a well-designed mobile theme version of your site when visitors use their favorite touch mobile devices like the iPhone/iPod touch, Google Android phones, Motorola Droid, Palm Pre/Pixi, Samsung bada and Blackberry Storm & Torch devices. There is a free version and a paid Pro one. Read more »

Linux jobs get more demand

Posted by Peter on July 25, 2011 None comments

Linux logoLinux Foundation director Jim Zemlin, has some advise for Linux world professionals. He was as of late quoted saying, “Linux’s increasing use across industries is building high demand for Linux jobs despite national unemployment stats.

Linux.com reaches millions of Linux professionals from all over the world. By providing a Jobs Board feature on the popular community site, we can bring together employers, recruiters and job seekers to lay the intellectual foundation for tomorrow’s IT industry.”

Current requirement is for 8,000 Linux-based technical jobs. Unix is being replaced by Linux in a fast pace and most of todays devices run on a changed version of Linux kernel from servers, HDTV desktops to supercomputing data centres. Read more »

Apache Prefork Vs Worker Threads

Posted by Peter on June 27, 2011 None comments

Apache Worker ThreadsWe often get questions like: What is the difference between Apache Worker Threads vs Prefork? Is it bad to have the values the same configuration? Is it bad to have them different?

In this quick article we like to shed some light between the two modules and assess in what given circumstance, certain os and application would call for which solution.
Read more »

Best Free Beat Making Software

Posted by Peter on May 23, 2011 1 comments

Beat Making Software Beat Making can be a great way to earn money and build a career in the music industry. Up to now, you only had a couple of options when it came to selecting a beat maker.

The first was to pay a high price for high priced high end equipment.  The other option was to get affordable software that you could afford, but made beats that sounded like crap.
Read more »

View Progress Of MySQL Dump Restore Or Import

Posted by Peter on May 7, 2011 None comments

Ever wondered why the MySQL command line tool don’t have any sort of progress information or status update? Well, you’re not alone if you do. Especially importing a GB sized dump file can take a long time, especially if the table engine was InnoDB.

There are some clever utilities which can be used to accomplish just that, by giving the user simple, yet useful information about the progress of their process. Let’s look at them.

Bar (Command Line Progress Bar)

The Bar utility, or in full terms Command Line Progress Bar can be downloaded from Sourceforge. If you are running Ubuntu, it’s as simple as running ‘sudo apt-get install bar’ to install it. You then simply pipe your MySQL import and get a nice status bar.

shell> bar -if=mysql_db_data.sql | mysql
Bar utility screenshot

Read more »

Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal with Unity UI

Posted by Peter on April 28, 2011 None comments

Ubuntu 1104 Natty NarwhalApril and October are the months where Canonical releases new versions of their OS Ubuntu. And that means it’s time for a new Ubuntu release now, with what may be a ground-breaking user interface and major changes from previous versions that come together nicely.

Ubuntu code named Natty Narwhal, or version 11.04 is here and sporting some radical changes from previous editions of the Linux distro. The most distinguished being the arrival of the Unity desktop environment, which was previously relegated to netbooks. It has integrated search, a combination of launcher and a taskbar, and app menus that have been moved to the top of the screen much like in Max OS X, effectively implementing the best ideas from Apple and Microsoft and a new design. Read more »

iFrame problems in WordPress solved

Posted by Peter on April 20, 2011 None comments

There seems to be a know problem with iFrames in posts, starting with WordPress 2.2.1, which happens when editors use the internal WYSIWYG editor. A lot of users have reported this issue in frustration.

Initial saving of the content was fine, but subsequently editing and re-saving is would strip iFrame tags. A less than ideal solution was to avoid using the WYSIWYG editor and edit the post using HTML code. Now there is a Mozilla Firefox extension for those that don’t like write pure html code, called Xinha Here!.
Xinha Firefox addon
It’s a pretty cool add-on, that opens either in a new window or  in a bottom bar and let’s you use it as WYSIWYG editor until you’re done, then hit ok and save the article in WordPress. Just ensure that html editor is selected during this process, especially at saving.

I have to say, Xinha works like a charm and has more features than the built in wordpress WYSIWYG editor. For more info, check out xinha’s web site.

Firefox Extensions For Web Developers

Posted by Peter on April 5, 2011 None comments

Firefox LogoWith the release of Firefox version 4 last week, we thought it’s time for a fresh list of most powerful Firefox extensions for web developers. Even though couple of our mentions are not yet compatible with this latest release, we’re convinced they’ll be available in no time.

While release 4 also includes some HTML 5 enhancements, we like to see some new extensions to help developers with canvas, forms, local storage and other new features in the future.

In case, we mean just in case you don’t have Firefox yet, you can get it here.

FireBug

Javascript debugger, live DOM & CSS inspector and so much more. The de-facto single greatest web developer add-on for Firefox.

Web Developer Toolbar

Another great developer tool and addition to FireBug, adds a toolbar with powerful web developer tools at your fingertips.

Live HTTP Headers

As you browse, view live HTTP headers of any page loading in real time.

ColorZilla

An advanced eyedropper, color picker, page zoomer and various colorful goodies.
Read more »

Enable Digest Authentication In Apache

Posted by Peter on March 7, 2011 None comments
Auth Digest

Digest Authentication

Basic http authentication in Apache (mod_auith) has been available for a while, but one major downside still exists, which is the exchange of plain text user name and password information over a possibly unsecured network.
That is where Apache Digest Authentication takes over and provides us with MD5 encrypted values, using the mod_digest apache module.

Here are the steps to create a password file to store all account information, install the apache module mod_auth_digest and the necessary configuration parameters to enable security of our restricted area.

Create Account file

For digest authentication we need to use a utility called htdigest, unlike with basic authentication where we used htpasswd. The application takes the file name, realm and username as arguments, then prompts twice for the user’s password. The flag -c creates a new file, it overrides the existing one if exists. Read more »

Move a SVN Subversion Repository

Posted by Peter on February 24, 2011 None comments

Subversion SVNAt some point in a developers life, we have to upgrade, switch hosting providers or replace broken hardware and with that comes the inevitable. Moving al lof our apps, data and configuration settings, and eventually our holy repository.

Moving an SVN repository from one Subversion server to another, while carrying over the entire version history information may seem like a daunting task, but fortunately it’s rather quite easy and straight forward.

Backup your old Repository

Step one is the generate a dump file of the existing repository which we can later move to our new server.
We create this dump with the following command:

# svnadmin dump /path/to/old/repository > repository.svn_dump

This dump file contains now all the revisions that have ever been made and committed to our SVN repository, and therefore this file may get rather large, depending on how active and old the repository is. Read more »

Install ffmpeg on Mac Snow Leopard

Posted by Peter on January 24, 2011 8 comments

WebmFfmpeg is the de-facto open source standard for encoding audio and video. Especially with the arrival of html5 which uses codecs like Ogg, Theora, Vorbis, h264, webm among others, and the increasing popularity of devices from Apple, such as iPod, iPad and the iPhone, all of which require a different standard from flv, the version so widely in use by Adobe Flash.

Another positive aspect is that ffmpeg has a much revived developer group, posed to enhance the application on a much faster pace than it has been in recent years.

Installation on Linux systems is really straight forward, especially on common distro’s like Ubunty and Fedora. On a Mac, we will have to build it from source (if you’re not a fan of ports like me), including encoder/decoders we plan to use. Here is the breakdown to get ffmpeg installed on a Mac running Snow Leopard.

Install Git

If you don’t have Git installed, download the Git installer here, install the package and run the script in the source of the mounted image. CVS is included in XCode and that is located on the snow leopard installation disc.

Install LAME (latest version from cvs)

cd ~
cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@lame.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/lame login
(at the password prompt, press Enter)
cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@lame.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/lame co -P lame
cd lame
./configure
make
sudo make install

Read more »

Create Your Own Folders On The iPad

Posted by Peter on January 9, 2011 None comments

iPad FoldersQuick intro for creating folders on an iPad

Creating our own folders to organize files has always been on top of the wish list for the iPad. With iOS 4.2  we finally have the capability of creating desktop folders to store applications, photos, videos or any other content.

In addition, creating folders on the iPad is an easy way to limit the number of screens we have to scroll through when searching for a file or an application.

Create the folder

Create a new folder by tapping and holding down any of the application icons that you want to organize into a folder. Hold it until the icon starts wiggling.

Drag it

Drag the icon on top of any other icon which you want to include in your folder. This will cause the home screen on your iPad to fade. A folder display will appear containing both of the application icons which you touched. Read more »

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