Archive for the ‘Computing & IT’ Category

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My Setup


2010
05.10

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I was speaking with a good friend the other day who pointed me to http://usesthis.com/. A simple idea: talk to the big players in the now & future space of the software industry and get some insight on who, how they do what they do.

I good ideas deserves copying … And so here is my background on the hardware, software and future desires:

The Hardware:

I recently upgraded to a 15″ MacBook Pro - it works great and doesn’t overheat unlike the baby mac I previously had. I used to use a Lenovo T61 – ugly beast but its served me well and worked hard. When I’m near my desk I connected to a 500GB segate drive, 24″ IIyama display and a overpriced but good mighty mouse.

Also at home I like to listen to music from my old Project Debut II turntable and Mission 701 speakers. I love my vinyl even if I have to constantly get up to flip it over. And for pictures I’ve a second hand Canon 40D. Its not that fancy but very robust – I’ve broken far too many digital cameras so I appreciate its metal chasis. Speaking of which I had to succumb to a marware condom for my iPhone for the same reason.

The Software:

Most of the day to day grind involves Chrome, TextMate and the terminal. Our office has moved very successfully to Google Apps for domains so this frees me from Outlook. I use Aptana for some development work, Tweetdeck to keep up with the world and then theres XCode, Skype, Picasa, Axure, Excel & iTunes. On the server side I’m a big fan of Ubuntu but also resort to Redhat on production environments. In these places its vi, bash, mysql, apache, rails, php & subversion.

What would be the dream setup?

I actually think I’m pretty lucky already. Not to much to add, a QNAP media server and playstation 3 would ease the burden of course and a SSD hard drive would make things move faster – always a necessity. Oh and a Fonera_2.0 router, currently on a bogo cheap thing that needs to be regularly rebooted.

Ideally I’d have a moogle device which would be some kind of google for the mind – it would index the stuff I can’t and do forget every day, oh and can it do the research and the work too please.

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HTML 5 – what the web could look like


2010
04.19

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Shortcut: Very quick post on HTML5. Checkout this great round up of the feature available in HTML5 by the good fooks at apirocks.com. apirocks.com/html5/html5.html#slide1

You’ll need a capable browser like Google Chrome or modern Firefox to view.

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Apache – Name Virtual Host errors


2010
02.27

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For some time now apache has been bugging me that there is a configuration issue with my virtual hosts, so I decided to find out what the issue was and try to resolve it. As it happens the fix was easy but not well documented.
Issue:
[warn] NameVirtualHost *:80 has no VirtualHosts
Resolution:
You can resolve this by ensuring that you virtual hosts are configured correctly. To do this you should have a NameVirtualHost for each of your ports and then be using ServerName within each virtualhost. By configuring apache this way you allow it to correctly interpret requests for different virtual hosts on the same IP Address.
Example:
In my apache2.conf file I have the following declaration
NameVirtualHost *:80
And then each of the virtual hosts is configured:
<VirtualHost *:80>
RailsEnv beta
ServerName my-app.redjamjar.net
DocumentRoot /home/rails/beta/my-app/current/public
<Directory “/home/rails/beta/my-app/current/public”>
allow from all
AllowOverride All
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>
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Compiling Mysql Gem on Mac OS X 10.6


2009
11.15

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Is not that easy to get hooked up and working (well it wasn’t for me)…

So in an effort to save you a hunt around google follow these steps:

  1. Download the 64 bit version of Mysql and install
  2. You may need to update your PATH variable with the location of mysql, on my machine its /usr/local/mysql-5.1.40-osx10.5-x86_64/
  3. And then follow this command to compile the mysql gem: export ARCHFLAGS=”-arch i386 -arch x86_64″ ; sudo gem install –no-rdoc –no-ri mysql — –with-mysql-dir=/usr/local/mysql/lib –with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config

You’ve hopefully arrived at a working mysql gem.

Good Luck!

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Responsive Design


2009
09.07

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Just been reading an interesting article by Kent Beck in this months Pragprog over at Pragmatic Programmers

http://pragprog.com/magazines/download/3.pdf

The temptation is to put these design ideas in the system now because you just know you’ll need them eventually. Over-designing early leads to delaying feedback from real usage of the system, makes adding features more complicated, and makes adapting the design more difficult. By the same token, under-designing makes adding features more complicated, increases defects, and makes adapting the design more difficult.

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Secure Copy How to


2009
09.07

Posted in Computing & IT, web development | No Comments »

Heres a rough and ready introduction to using the power of SSH to perform a secure copy of a file or directory between computers.

> scp

usage: scp [-1246BCpqrv] [-c cipher] [-F ssh_config] [-i identity_file]
[-l limit] [-o ssh_option] [-P port] [-S program]
[[user@]host1:]file1 [...] [[user@]host2:]file2

So how does this matter for me well if you wanted to move a file from a server called Mojo.com to a server called Louis.com you’d enter


> scp file.txt my_login_name@louis.com:remote_directory

or if I want to copy a folder:


> scp -r my_login_name@louis.com:remote_directory my_files

Hope this helps.

By the way for those on Windows Penguinet has scp built in with a nice looking file browser/selection UI.

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quiet afternoon – try this…


2009
08.16

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Felt like a little distraction and a link to this popped up on twitter so I just couldn’t resist having a play909

Try it for yourself over at http://www.themaninblue.com/experiment/JS-909/

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SSH – How to proxy connections


2009
07.19

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Rough Cut: Recently I’ve been in the situation where I need to SSH to a server which I can only reach from a particular location. And of course I’m not always in that location when I need to get into the server.

No problem installing the excellent Dante SSH Socks proxy server allows me to configure my client (the excellent penguinet) to pass all ssh connections to the proxy server.

By following the installation and configuration guide at http://wiki.kartbuilding.net/index.php/Dante_Socks_Server I had the issue resolved inside of 5mins.