Archive
82 posts from 2008 to 2016.
2016
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Changing the Linux Mint Login Screen Background Images
Newer versions of Linux Mint use MintX as the default login screen greeter. By default it comes with a predefined collection of images that display in the background that change periodically in a…
2015
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Raspberry Pi 2 Bitcoin Node
Not long ago I setup up a Bitcoin node on a Debian Wheezy VPS to teach myself about Bitcoin and the blockchain in general. It was a great learning experience but the memory requirements of the…
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Running a Bitcoin Node on Debian Wheezy
Over the last few years I have keenly followed the rise of Bitcoin from its early days trading at around $8USD. I watched with interest when it made its sharp rise to $1200USD and then felt a bit of…
2014
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Android Debug Bridge Tricks
Over the last couple of months I have been doing a lot of work with Cordova and the Ionic Framework creating my own field guide.
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Simple Iptables Blacklist
Anyone that has run a server for any length of time quickly learns that the Internet is full of spammers, bots and other characters you would prefer didn’t exist. A firewall is key to keeping these…
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Creating a Tor Relay on Debian
The TOR project has proven itself an important tool in the fight to protect the anonymity of people online. The project obviously needs servers to route traffic through for the project to achieve its…
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PHP FPM Errors After Upgrade
Recently I noticed a few of my servers had stopped serving my sites, with 502 errors being to visitors. I took a look at my site logs and noticed that they were full of the “Permission Denied” errors…
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Quick Intro To Memcached Stats
A few days ago I was given the job of changing the caching engine used in a Zend Framework based application from a simple flat file system based caching system to a memcached based object store that…
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PNG Crush: PNG image optimisation script
Building a Cordova based mobile application recently at work we were facing an issue with an application size that was literally growing by the day. The project leveraged a lot of PNG templates sent…
2013
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Linux CLI: File Text Search & Replace
Occasionally you need to change the contents of some files easily to save a lot of manual work. In my case it was a server migration, the old IP address of a server was referred to from numerous DNS…
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Tunnelling data over SSH with Putty
An SSH tunnel is used to route unencrypted traffic through an encrypted SSH channel. Its comes in handy for routing traffic over untrusted or hostile networks as the data is encrypted to maintain…
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Encypting Diectories With eCryptfs
eCryptfs is an encrypted file system that works at the file system level. In this post I am going to cover the basic usage of eCryptfs and some of the situations you may want to think about using a…
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Installing SVN support in Aptana Studio 3
Its been a few years since I have worked anywhere that still uses Subversion as their day to day version control system. But the other day at work I needed to check out some old legacy code which was…
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Debugging Web Applications With Fiddler On Linux
Fiddler is by far one of the most popular web debugging proxies available. It allows you to capture, examine, save, edit and replay all HTTP / HTTPS requests made by a web based application. For many…
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Adding MP3 Support To K3b
Being sick of the music selection in my car the other day I decided I needed for fresh blood. But not being motivated enough to replace the car stereo with one that has an auxiliary input. I tried to…
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Installing Safari on Linux Mint 15
Cross browser testing your sites is unfortunately a necessary evil. Installing virtual machines with the required browsers installed is one way to test your code. But a lot of the time I don’t want…
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Tracing Email Sending PHP Scripts On Servers
It happens sometimes, a server you are responsible for seems to be sending out spammy emails, and its normally caused by legacy or insecure code. The mail log indicates there are plenty of potential…
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A Quick Look At Animate.css
I was browsing github today when I came across the very interesting Animate.css repository . Animate.css provides a bunch of cool cross browser CSS3 based animations under an MIT licence that you can…
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Command Line Tips: Program Execution
Executing commands is an integral part of using any Linux system. To follow up on my post about navigating file systems from the command line ( Linux Tips: File & Directory Handling ) more…
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Linux Tips: File & Directory Handling
My desktop and all of the servers I own are Linux or Unix based. So as a result I tend to find myself in a terminal navigating file systems and working with files more often than not. Command line…
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Deleting all mail for a local server account
It happens, cron jobs can and will go wrong occasionally and when they do, they love to send alerts to the job’s owner hoping for a little attention. An alias can always be added to the /etc/alias…
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Nginx: Locking Down The WordPress Backend By IP Address
I recently looked at the server logs for a new site that had just launched and noticed alot of hits by random IP addresses being made to the WordPress login script. Similar to the excerpt below:
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Changing the web root of a cPanel acccount
As a rule I try to avoid cPanel for hosting sites, I find the overhead of the control panel and the limited flexibility too confining for all but the simplest of sites. Occasionally though I need to…
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S3 Video 0.97 Released
A new version of the S3 Video (0.97) WordPress plugin has been released to the plugin repository. This release is a combination of some new functionality along with a number of bug fixes.
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Filling device storage with HTML5 localstorage
A while back I wrote about using HTML5 local storage engine for storing websites data locally on a client device for caching or off line use. The W3 recommendation on web storage recommends a size…
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Speeding Up Google SDK Manager Downloads
I have been doing some work developing Android applications with Phonegap over the last few weeks. Getting the Eclipse and ADT is always a breeze. Downloading the required Android SDK libraries using…
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You will now access javascript:Recaptcha.reload();
I was looking at a Whitehouse petition earlier today asking that Patent trolls be made to pay all costs associated with their lawsuits if they lose, when I can across the gem below.
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Version 0.96 of S3 Video for WordPress Released
The latest version of my popular S3 Video plugin has been released to the WordPress plugin repository.
2012
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Empty Directories In Git
Occasionally when working on a code base the application at hand requires a directory for the storage of log files, uploads etc. You often like to keep the directory itself in the repository but you…
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Useful Keyboard Shortcuts For Aptana Studio
The last couple of years I have been using Aptana Studio exclusively as my IDE of choice, after deciding it offered the power of Eclipse in a more user friendly format. I find the standard Aptana…
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Executing PHP Code Server Side In .html Files
On a recent project we needed to provide a client our contribution to the site code base as static .html files. To make the development process easier though a number of the developers wanted to…
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Debugging Mobile Web Pages With Opera Developer Tools
If experience has taught me anything its that debugging mobile pages can be a massive pain. Replicating page display issues without a device on hand can prove problematic, and something as simply as…
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Sydney AWS Price Comparison
Its no secret I love AWS, a great API combined with their flexible pay as you go model has made it my platform of choice for many projects including my popular “S3 Video” plugin for WordPress . So…
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Mirroring a website with wget
Clueless clients and bad briefs can make a developers life very difficult at times so sometimes it comes in handy to be able to replicate a site in its entirety to review.
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Bad Day For Electronics
My new GERTBoard an extension board for the Raspberry Pi GPIO interface arrived after a long wait this week. I brushed off my soldering iron all ready to put it to together only to find it had some…
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HTML5 Offline Storage
HTML5 introduces a pretty handy ability to cache remote resources locally for off-line use, meaning the resources are downloaded once. Then when the page is used again in the future the local…
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Easy PHP File Extensions With PathInfo
The other day I was building some file handling functionality into a project I was working on when i came to thinking about the best way to retrieve the extension of a filename with PHP.
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PHP CGI 504 Gateway Timed Out Errors With Nginx
Recently I noticed that the nginx error log for a site I was working with was filling up with timeout messages similar to below:
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Currency Conversion With Google Calculator
Working on a recent project I found myself in the market for a way to simply calculate what one currency is worth in relation to another. After some looking around I was surprised to find currency…
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Sorting tabular data with tableSorter
The jQuery tableSorter script is one of those indispensable scripts for a web developer, as most applications have a need to display tabular data to the user at some place in their application. The…
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Creating Rounded Edges With CSS3
Rounded corners are often lauded in the design world, UX / UI people claim rounded edges are easier on the eyes and makes information easier to process by our brains. A few years back it used to be a…
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Text Drop Shadows With CSS3
A few years back i worked at a digital agency where one of the guys on the team loved to look at pages and exclaim “its almost there it just needs a drop shadow and we are done”. For years now if you…
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Magic Quotes In PHP
The Symptoms Recently I was trying to debug a piece of code it worked fine in the development and staging environments. But when the code was uploaded to the production server it would break! Looking…
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Raspberry Pi Overclocking
Like just like alot of other people as soon as the Model B Raspberry Pi went on sale in March I eagerly rushed out and ordered one from Element 14 .
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Watching the progress of a dd action
dd is one of those indispensable Unix / Linux utilities whether its cloning or wiping a drive or simply creating a bootable flash drive from an image file. The problem is operations like wiping a…
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Client Side Image Place Holders Made Easy
For years designers and developers have used “Lorem ipsum” as a standard placeholder text when creating page layouts. When incorporating images into the body design though the standard approach is a…
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Display & Visibility CSS Differences
Today I ran into some issues with hidden elements and the visibility CSS attribute on a project I was working on. The elements were not visible but they were still taking up space in the layout.
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Using The Panoramio Wrapper Class
Ever been working on a project that was area specific and wanted nearby local images? I did recently, and knew after seeing images over layed onto Google maps that it must be possible. Looking around…
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Quick Recursive Code Count
Although the “lines of code” in a project is not the worlds most useful metric. Curiosity sometimes gets the better of us and after many days / weeks of typing you think “gee I wonder exactly how…
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Magic constant not working with require_once
Its funny when a new feature is added to your language of choice how quickly it gets embraced and used within your code. Today upon uploading some code to a clients shared hosting environment I was…
2011
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Replace The Default Firefox Google Search In Linux Mint
The recent release of Ubuntu’s Natty Narwhal forced me to reassess my usage of Ubuntu on my work and home machines. As I found the Unity interface drives me crazy and the release on a whole to be…
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Anonymizing CURL Scripts With TOR & Polipo
Last week I received a typical run of the mill phishing email littered with the usual bad Engrish making the instructions far from believable but being bored I decided to take a look at the link they…
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Removing Stolen Content From Google
From time to time its not uncommon to find sites stealing your content in its entirety with no link back to its original source whilst plastering ads around their page to make money off your hard…
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Installing Internet Explorer On Ubuntu Natty
For years Internet Explorer 6 was the bane of every web developers life but as with all great tales it seems the characters change but the story always remains the same. While IE6 is generally not…
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Near Realtime File Replication With Lsyncd
Ever wanted real time backups of directories on your server? To replicate static media files for a website to a separate box to reduce load? An easy solution lays with lsyncd it allows you to watch a…
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Blocking VocusPR Spam With Iptables
VocusPR has a dubious reputation their main line of work is aggregating the contact details of journalists and bloggers and then selling access to that database so companies can contact them. Press…
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Logging PHP Errors For Production Environments
Good security practices dictate PHP should be configured to never display error messages and notices to screen in a production environment due to its potential to reveal information about your server…
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Changing an elements visibility with jQuery
Adjusting the visibility of element within a web page comes in handy from time to time for features like tool tips, extending content after a short excerpt etc. This technique adds greatly to the…
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HTML5 Placeholders With jQuery
HTML 5 brings many new features to the browser including a lot of enhancements to the way forms are created and handled. One of my favourite features is the introduction of the placeholder attribute,…
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Removing The WordPress Toolbar
One thing that has caused me some grief since the release of WordPress 3.1 is the admin bar that appears up the top of the blog when you are logged in.
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Tracking Bandwidth Usage With vnStat
Outside of internal networks bandwidth is paid often for by the gigabyte and as such it becomes important to be able to see the bandwidth consumption of machines and plan future quotas accordingly as…
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Free Wireframe & Prototype Creation With Pencil
Wireframing is an invaluable technique when starting the development of a new project, both to set functionality expectations with project stake holders and to give the build team a concrete idea of…
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Ruxmon Is Coming To Sydney
Next Friday will see Sydney hold its very first Ruxmon meetup and by the look of the presentations its not going to be one to be missed.
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Ubuntu Natty Narwhal Invisible Scroll Bars In Eclipse
Since its release on April 28th Natty Narwhal (11.04) seems to have gained it fair share of haters. The Unity interface is a huge change to the UI and in most peoples experience its buggy and doesn’t…
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Restore The Refresh Button Placement In Firefox 4
The recent release of Firefox has been the new look, features and speed are simply amazing. One issue I am having trouble adjusting to though is the refresh button location. It used to live as a nice…
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Installing Firefox 4 on Ubuntu 10.10
The latest release of the popular browser Firefox is now here with Firefox 4.0 boasting speed improvements, location aware browsing, improved HTML 5 support plus much more . Getting Firefox 4 for…
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Easily Rip Youtube Videos On Ubuntu Maverick
Downloading youtube videos to your local machine for offline veiwing is easily on Ubuntu 10.10 with the youtube-dl utility .
2010
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Hate the new Google sidebar? Get rid of it!
If you are like me you are not a great fan of the new Google side bar. Luckily for users of Firefox its easy to revert back to the “Classic” look Google using the Grease Monkey Firefox extension.
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Disabling CPU Scaling With Ubuntu 10.04
If your like me it annoys you that your desktop keeps messing with your CPU speeds when all you wan’t is performance. Fortunately its easy enough to fix.
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Ubuntu Lucid Lynx A Quick Look
The newest Long Term Support (LTS) version of the Ubuntu distro labelled Lucid Lynx was released earlier today. This release is packed with new packages and enhancements, making me keen to try it…
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Lucid Lynx Is On Its Way
Time to start getting excited the next release of Ubuntu is almost here!
2009
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WordPress 2.9.0 Is Here!
The 2.9.0 version of WordPress has been released some of the main new features include:
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Setting Up PowerDNS With A MySQL Backend On Ubuntu 9.10
Bind9 has treated us well over the years, but its lack of support for database back ends in a default install is very annoying, especially when an application needs to control DNS services…
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Zend Framework 1.9.6
Zend Framework 1.9.6 has been released today with over 60 bug fixed included, most of which where found during the bug hunt days last week. The official Zend Framework site reports this release is…
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Firediff For Tracking DOM Changes
A major problem with developing AJAX applications is trying to follow data flowing back and forth between the server and client and the changes being made to the DOM.
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Online Games to be banned in Australia
Everyone’s favorite communications minister Stephen Conroy today confirmed what had long been suspected. That under the new filtering regime online “adult” games of those perceived to have adult…
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Google opens up internal speed tool
The loading time of a webpage is crucial it can mean the difference between a user staying to enjoy your content or heading to a competing site to find the information they are after.
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Client Negotiations
If you have ever done any freelancing or run your own business you have no doubt come across clients like this. For some reason they won’t pay full fare but want full service and will hound you…
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Jailbreaking An Ipod Touch 2nd Generation
I have had my ipod touch ( 2.2.1 firmware ) now for almost two months and i have found it to be a great little gadget. Although i have continually been annoyed Apple’s efforts to cripple the…
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Australian Pirate Party
The Pirate Party in Sweden seems to be making waves after four men where found guilly of helping run the infamous bit torrent tracker site known as The Pirate bay.
2008
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Linux Iptables
A tutorial showing the creation of simple Iptables firewall rules.
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Installing TOR Onion Router On Ubuntu 8.0.4 (Hardy Heron)
1. The state or quality of being anonymous.