Yum is a powerful repository management tool available in all Red Hat / CentOS / Fedora distributions. It allows you to install common packages immediately, removing the need to manually compile from source.
Search Packages in Yum
Searching available packages in Yum is easy, simply issue the following to search (more...)
Foundation, for WordPress 4.0 has just been released, with a slew of new features including a range of neat shortcodes, child theme support, custom headers and backgrounds, and the new ZURB Foundation 4 CSS framework.
This article will show you how to block all IP addresses to a specific folder (wp-admin) and only allow access to your IP address. Additionally, the blocked IP’s will be redirected to a location that you choose. This is a fantastic way to lock down your WordPress installation with minimal (more...)
Good news, I am back in blogging :) In recent years I have spent my time primarily on eazyBI business intelligence application development where I use JRuby, Ruby on Rails, mondrian-olap and many other technologies and libraries and have gathered new experience that I wanted to share with others.
Recently I did eazyBI migration from JRuby 1.6.8 to latest JRuby 1.7.3 version as well as finally migrated from Ruby 1.8 mode to Ruby 1.9 mode. Initial migration was not so difficult and was done in one day (thanks to unit tests which (more...)
Megar (“megaargh!” in pirate-speak) is a Ruby wrapper and command-line client for the Mega API.
In the current release (gem version 0.0.3), it has coverage of the basic file/folder operations: connect, get file/folder listings and details, upload and download files. You can use it directly in Ruby with what I hope you'll find is a very sane API, but it also sports a basic command-line mode for simple listing, upload and download tasks.
If you are interested in hacking around with Mega, and prefer to do it (more...)
Mandrill is the transactional email service by the same folks who do MailChimp, and I've been pretty impressed with it. For SMTP mail delivery it just works great, but where it really shines is inbound mail handling and the range of event triggers you can feed into to your application as webhooks (for example, to notify on email link clicks or bounces).
The API is very nice to use, but in a Rails application it's best to keep all the crufty details encapsulated and hidden away, right? That's what the mandrill-rails gem (more...)
There are a lot of people who think camera’s in tablets are a bad idea. “Nobody should be allowed to take pictures with a large tablet in front of their face.”
But if you can think outside of the traditional camera box for a moment, and start to think what’s possible if you combine a really portable computer with a decent camera, you’ll soon see interesting new possibilities.
Just a couple examples:
Camscanner - turns your tablet or smartphone into a scanner. You take a picture of your notes using camscanner, it enhances the contrast and readability, and truns (more...)
Wow. This year we mark the 20th anniversary of the Visual Basic 3.0 launch way back in 1993.
It's easy to forget the pivotal role it played in revolutionizing how we built software. No matter what you think of Microsoft, one can't deny the impact it had at the time. Along with other products such as PowerBuilder and Borland Delphi, we started to see long-promised advances in software development (as pioneered by Smalltalk) become mainstream reality:
In a couple of years mobile phones will be powerful enough to replace
laptops for most common computing usages. You won’t need a separate laptop.
You walk around with your mobile phone, in the office or at home you put it
in a docking station, attach a keyboard and a bigger display, and you have
all the computing power you need.
Some news this last week indicates we’re getting close (more...)
So eBook sales have surpassed hardcover for the first time, and it is no surprise that the rise of the tablets is the main driver.
There's something quite comfortable about having a nice digital bundle of information at your fingertips, like warm buttered toast.
With relatively open standards and the ubiquity of ereaders, the ebook has become ideal packaging for all manner of information, from training manuals to open source project documentation. Or even that book that apparently 81% of us believe we have inside.
I’m a slow mover here, far behind the hype-curve, but this blog is currently being moved to jekyll. The following are some notes and links from this process.
Reasons to migrate:
Cheaper hosting - this blog is currently hosted on DreamHost. By migrating to a static site using Jekyll, cheaper options become available, for example Amazon S3 or Github.
Learn something new -10 years ago this blog started on Moveable Type, which also generated static html pages. In 10 years we’ve gone from full dynamic back to static, mostely thanks to javascript. The dynamic parts in many (more...)