Git 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

Create Git user on the server

# sudo adduser gituser (enter password when prompted)

Generate SSH RSA keys

On the workstation where you develop and will need access the Git repository, generate a key pair that will be used for authentication. Once generated, we’ll add the public key to the server’s authorized key list file. Ensure that the directory .ssh exists.

# ssh-keygen -t rsa (do not use sudo, specify name as gituser)
# scp .ssh/gituser.pub gituser@hostname:.ssh/

Install Git

You should now be able to login to the server using the certificate and not have to supply a password. Let’s login and proceed with the Git installation.

# ssh gituser@hostname

# su
# apt-get install gettext
# wget http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian/pool/main/g/git/git_1.7.2.5.orig.tar.gz
# tar xzvf git_1.7.2.5.orig.tar.gz
# cd git-1.7.2.5/
# ./configure
# make
# make install

Install Gitolite

Now that we have Git installed, we can use it to get the latest source code of Gitolite. During the checkout, the console output should resemble closely to what’s displayed below.

# su - gituser
# git clone git://github.com/sitaramc/gitolite gitolite-source

Cloning into gitolite-source...
remote: Counting objects: 5425, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (2180/2180), done.
remote: Total 5425 (delta 3812), reused 4762 (delta 3192)
Receiving objects: 100% (5425/5425), 2.01 MiB | 947 KiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (3812/3812), done.

Next we run the Gitolite install script. It’ll among other things create two new folders as you can see in the output.

# gitolite-source/src/gl-system-install

The Gitolite install script relies on the path to gl-setup, so we need to add it. The easiest way is to add this line to the .bashrc file in your home directory.

PATH=/home/gituser/bin:$PATH

With the path set, we can now finish the installation.

# gl-setup ~/.ssh/gituser.pub

If everything went as planned, you should see a similar output as below.

The default settings in the rc file (/home/gituser/.gitolite.rc) are fine for most
people but if you wish to make any changes, you can do so now.

hit enter...
creating gitolite-admin...
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/gituser/repositories/gitolite-admin.git/
creating testing...
Initialized empty Git repository in /home/gituser/repositories/testing.git/
[master (root-commit) 4c9dbe8] start
 2 files changed, 6 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 conf/gitolite.conf
 create mode 100644 keydir/gituser.pub

Finally remove the public key file.

# rm -f gituser.pub

Administer Gitolite

Gitolite is administered by getting a clone of it’s configuration file from the client, modify it and pushing it to the server. This is how we add users, set permissions and create repositories.

#  git clone gituser@hostname:gitolite-admin

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.

Timeline

The new “Timeline” is your new digital scrapbook that lets you highlight more significant moments going all the way back to your birth if you like. Today, with the stream up updates coming in, it’s difficult to draw attention to things that are important to you, Timeline is supposed to solve this.

Ticker

Ticker is much like Twitter, where less important updates stream like a news feed. It will appear in a separate area.

Opengraph

With the new version of Opengraph, you can now categorize on word types, such as a noun or verb. You could say that Mike watched a movie, which allows to connect to an exponential increased amount of things.

The 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.

Scroll Bars and Sidebar

Likely the first thing you see missing in Lion are the accustomed scroll bars in Finder windows. The newly designed, leaner grey scroll bars look like by default when you move your cursor over to the edge of a window. This might be okay for some users, but if you want scroll bars back, open System Preferences and click General.

Where it says, “Show scroll bars”, you get the other two options to show scroll bars “Constantly,” or “When scrolling.”
Whilst we’re in this General section, you might as well want to difference the size of the icons in the Sidebar of the Finder, from the default small size to larger. On my MacBook Air, the icons by default were as well small.

Trackpad Gestures

Whilst we have System Preferences open, you might want to click on the Trackpad settings and see what new multi-touch gestures are at hand in Lion. The new gestures are great, but they are still not as advanced as what you will find in BetterTouchTool.

If you like using BTT or a similar multi-touch application, deselecting “Three finger drag,” under Point & Drag might accommodate you better functionality in BTT.
As well, if the reverse scrolling direction of the scroll bars is not your cup of tea, simply deselect “Scroll direction: natural” and you can scroll the way you constantly have on your Mac.

Finder Preferences

There are additional items in the Finder Sidebar, and most of them you likely want to keep there. But if you don’t need something like  AirLose or any other item, you can select Finder > Preferences > Sidebar and deselect any items you don’t want visible.
As well notice that by default, status information is missing at the bottom of Finder windows. If you click View > Show Status Bar in the Finder menu bar, you get back useful information like the number of files in a folder, or the amount of memory room you have at hand in the internal drive of your computer.

All My Files

You will as well notice a new sidebar item labeled, “All My Files”, which shows and sorts all your files by Kind, Contacts, Images, PDF Documents, etc. This is a great idea, but you might be overwhelmed by as well a myriad of files displayed at once.
So you could us the Arrange lose-down menu, described below, to sort your files by a certain genre. Or you may consider altering the settings for All My Files. You can control-click on it and select, “Show Search Criteria.” From there, you might add a criteria (by clicking the + button) to limit the files that show up. For instance, you may only want to see files created in the week or few days.

Arrange Button

Whilst we’re talking about the Finder, you might have noticed that there’s a new item in the toolbar labeled, “Arrange.” If you find your Desktop or any Finder window of items in chaos with files having no semblance of order, the lose-down menu in Arrange can quickly support you tidy things up. You can order items by Kind, Date Changed, Size, etc.

Mail

The new Mail interface is likely the most noticeable of all changes in Lion, which provides a widescreen display of your messages and neatly arranges and groups your messages—conversation style—in a single column.
However, when you open Mail you might wonder what happened to the sidebar that includes your list of mailboxes and folders. It’s not there by default, but simply click View > Show Mailbox List to get the sidebar back. There’s as well an icon in the upper-left of Mail in which you can conceal and show the sidebar.
As well, Apple by default turned back on the Ping sound for new Mail messages. If that sound annoys you, open the Mail’s Preferences > General and select “None” under “New messages sound.”

New Folder with Selections

One great little feature new to Lion is the ability to Control-select items on your desktop or in any Finder window, and then  choose “New Folder with Selection (…Items)” to have those items put into a folder. You will find this nifty feature a small boost in your productivity for organizing files into folders.

Though there are a myriad of interface changes in Lion, Apple has kept the option open for you to do some customizing to get things back the way you like. Let us know what changes you have made to tame Lion or which ones you wish Apple had added.

Haven’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.

WPtouch Pro works by automatically detecting these devices and serve its mobile/tablet-friendly themes. Desktop visitors are unaffected and still see your traditional theme, and changes to it do not affect WPtouch Pro and vice-versa.

The plugin just doesn’t glue together RSS feeds, or use a proxy server to modify your site’s look. It rather creates a full-fledged theme, completely separate from your desktop theme that offers most of WordPress native features & works with other plugins as well.

Easy to use organized controls for colors, fonts, images, logos and more put you in the driver’s seat to define how WPtouch Pro will look. It’s easy to enable/disable a variety of display options for things like author names, categories, tags, and more. You decide what’s shown and what’s not.

With the WPtouch Pro Developer License you can add custom settings in themes easily. So if you’re theming for a client you can customize the backend just like the front-end to your heart’s content.

The WPtouch Pro plugin requires WordPress 3.1 or higher.

Linux 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.

IT Professionals

Linux beginners can get ahead of the pack and acquire wide Linux skills from sources such as the Linux Qualified Institute where there is vendor also as distribution neutrality. For IT employers using Linux distributions, a in reference to employee with a suite of certification from company vendors such as Red Hat or Novell will whisk greater demand than general Linux expertise.

For the ‘self –learner’, there are innumerable online resources that are offered free. An excellent industry supported example is the IBM developerWorks. With more than 70 articles, resources IT pros looking to benefit and build on their Linux skills, the opportunity at hand is unlimited. The platform alone draws over 300,000 visitors a month and you could just imagine the extent of reach possible at hand to mid-level Linux developers.

Developers

The most professional of Linux developers are the ones in most demand because now it is businesses who are seeking to employ masters of the Linux kernel. Today, these industries need Linux qualifieds who have ‘already- done-it’ and would necessarily step in and resolve the IT problem swiftly and efficiently because of their proven track record.
Consequently, listing all projects handled by you such as Solaris-to-Linux carries more weight age than just your Linux certification.

Salaries

Presume it or not, but the latest salary considerations are not startling primed for Linux qualifieds. Despite similar job titles, a Linux IT professional has a considerably higher commercials in comparison to proprietary software colleagues (Windows …) Moreover, the alarming growth curve of open source mobile computing, enterprise applications is exploding the employment scenario for open source professionals.

It looks as if the Penguin is finally poised for ascendency and it is time for all you closet Linux developers to smarten up, clear your cluttered desktops and set to work on your Linux resumes and set the Penguin to waddle amongst your employers. It is probably that at the least the next half decade is for Linux professionals who are early adapters. Now is the time to get the right skill sets, certifications to rule the world with open source mobiles, tablets and what-have-you-on-Linux.

We 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.

It all goes back to the old NCSA server where Apache 1 grew up in a UNIX environment. It was a multiprocessing server, where each client would be serviced by one server instance. If there were more concurrent clients than server processes, Apache would fork additional server processes to deal with them. Under normal operation, Apache would preserve a pool of at hand server processes to deal with incoming requests.

Whereas this scheme works well on *NIX-systems, it’s an inefficient solution on platforms such as Windows, where forking a process is an high priced operation. So making Apache truly cross-platform required another solution. The approach adopted for Apache 2 is to turn the core processing into a pluggable module which can be optimized for diverse environments.

Prefork

The Apache Prefork MPM (multi processing module) is a non-threaded model, basically much like Apache 1.x. The threaded model came with version 2.x. It is a safe option in all cases, and for servers running non-thread-safe software such as PHP, it is the only safe option. For some applications, including a myriad of of those favorite with Apache 1.3 (e.g. simple static pages, CGI scripts), the Apache Prefork MPM may be as good as anything.

Keep in mind that on Linux versions, Prefork is commonly reported to be as fast as Worker. On Solaris, Worker is reported to be much faster than Prefork.

Worker Threads

The Apache Worker MPM is the newer, threaded model, whose advantages include lower memory usage which is imperative on busy servers and much greater scalability than that provided by the Prefork version in particular types of applications.

Both of the stable MPM’s suffer from a limitation that affects extremely busy servers. Whereas HTTP keep-alive is essential to decrease TCP association and network overhead, it ties up a server process or thread whilst the keepalive is active. As a consequence, a extremely busy server may run out of at hand threads. A busy server with the Worker MPM may continue tens of thousands of hits per second, as happens with favorite sites such as Facebook or Twitter).

If you like to read up more on the subject, we highly recommend The Apache Modules Book, some excerpts were taken for this article.

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.

Here you find all types of software for making hip hop beats with software. Find Hip Hop Beat Making Software that is not only easy to use but free too and will support you find the easiest software to use when you need beat making software.

ACID Xpress

ACID Xpress (windows) is probably to most powerful of all free beat making software. It features a killer user interface and automatically increases or decreases tempo and pitch in order to ensure the best beats. A free download is available, simply register for free with Acid Planet.

LMMS

LMMS (windows/linux) feels like FL studio but is not even compatible. LMMS enables you to create beats, compose songs and master mix your entire track. Free beat making software like LMMS are hard to find gems. Download it for fee from sourceforge.

Ardour

Ardour (linux/mac) is a digital audio workstation. You can use it to record audio, edit and blend multi-track audio recordings,  produce your own CDs, blend video soundtracks, or just test out new music and sound ideas. Ardour supports non-destructive, non-linear editing with unlimited undos, 32 bit floating point audio path, unlimited audio tracks and buses and anything-to-anywhere signal routing.

Quartz Studio

Quartz Studio (windows) will certainly please DJs with its myriad of features like “direct to disk” format for recording sixteen individual tracks, editing and synchronization to other music formats and much more. The program as well includes, 4+2 audio tracks, real-time processing effects (Reverb et Chorus) on each track, along with volume and pan, audio track data editing functions, a spacialization interface and Skin difference.

Koblo

Koblo (mac/windows) is an extremely new open source player on the block. Besides audio recording and music making, Koblo has some unusual online collaboration features, as it’s connected to the Koblo cloud and therefore you’ll be able to work online with other musicians or band members.

Rosegarden

Rosegarden (linux) is a well-rounded audio and MIDI sequencer, score editor, and general-purpose music composition and sound editing environment and is an intuitive, attractive application that runs on Linux, ideal for composers, musicians, music students, and small studio or home recording environments. Rosegarden has just introduced the Glasgow Pitch Tracker and it as well supports synthesizers and some plugins unlike a myriad of other free beat making software titles.

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

Piper Viewer

To get a bit fancier, Piper Viewer can be inserted into any normal pipeline between two processes to give a visual indication of how quickly data is passing through, how long it has taken, how near to completion it is, and an estimate of how long it will be until completion. Observe multiple instances working in tandem,  a visual indicator of relative throughput in a complex pipeline. Download pv here.

pv -cN gzip mysql_db_data.sql.gz | gzip -d | pv -cN mysql | mysql

Either utility will undoubtedly shed more light into your restoration processes, and let you know whether the process is still running if in doubt and wondering after an hour or more.

April 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.

The new User Interface is not excluding its detractors and reportedly has some stability issues, but you can choose “Ubuntu Classic” at login to stick with Gnome. The update as well makes Firefox 4 the default browser and replaces the Rhythmbox music manager with the sleeker and more functional Banshee Player.

The OS does recognize the iPhone, as we were able to plug in an iPhone 4, import pictures, and work with files and folders on the device, play songs downloaded from iTunes to the iPhone that were purchased with play-anywhere rights.

The 700MB sized ISO image is available for download and still provides the live CD so you can try out the OS without installing anything.

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!.

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.