October 31, 2013

Pure-ftpd virtual users

Long ago I attempted to setup my first FTP daemon on linux. One point that constantly caused me issues was how to setup users. The basic setup I wanted was for an FTP user to be able to login, upload some files and the web server to serve them. When I was first looking at this I was thinking in terms of real users. This issue with this was that the real user would have real file permissions.

October 29, 2013

i3 wm

Had a nice play recently with the i3 wm for Linux. It’s a really nice paradigm for working with when programming. It uses the same style of keyboard navigation as vim for moving around your windows. The windows key can be bound as your modifier key and then used to navigate to a particular workspace (e.g. Windows + 2 to go to the browser workspace). Particular applications can be configured to open only on certain workspaces.

September 23, 2013

SSD upgrade MacBook Pro

Tutorials I recently updated my hard drive on my MacBook Pro to an SSD drive. I used the following tutorials to do the upgrade, which was pretty stratightforward: The second video is particularly interesting. You can purchase a cradle for another hard drive. This can be used either for you existing hard drive, or a second identical SSD that you can then put in RAID configuration. Parts I picked up the pieces from Amazon UK here: Optical Bay Caddy Samsung 840 Series SSD

September 19, 2013

Google Reader Replacement (follow up)

I spent a bit of time today customising my RSSOwl setup to make it more to my liking. I now have it looking like this: That’s one long reader with all my feeds. Here’s how I did it. Select View -> Layout -> Newspaper Deselect View -> Toolbars -> Feed Toolbar Deselect View -> Status Right Click Main Toolbar and select Customise Toolbar Delete everything except New, Update All, Mark Read, Mark All Read, Search (or whatever is your preference) Right Click Main Toolbar and select Lock Toolbar Click Search, do a search for all titles not containing something impossible (eg asjdlfjkasdfkdaj) Save search (I called mine “All News”) Select the newly created “All News” category from your feeds (More details on this here: http://tutorial.

May 22, 2013

Axure - Wireframing Application

I recently started using Axure as my primary wireframing application. I’ve tried a couple of other solutions in the past, such as balsamiq and Adobe Illustrator. There’s a good article here which discusses some of the other alternatives: http://www.creativebloq.com/wireframes/top-wireframing-tools-11121302 My own criteria for selection were: No web apps While I love cloud based solutions for some stuff, for my core apps I loathe anything that requires connectivity to use. If I have my laptop, I should be able to do my work, regardless of whether I have access to the internet.

April 8, 2013

Google Reader Replacement

Google Reader is going the way of the dodo. I am/was an active Reader user. Mostly from the browser while I had some spare minutes I would dip and read some of the latest news. The news hast left me somewhat wary of online alternatives. There have been quite a few mentioned: http://www.newsblur.com/ http://www.feedly.com/ http://www.netvibes.com/ https://www.pulse.me/ While all of these seem perfectly reasonable, it’s all coming back to the same issue for me.

April 1, 2013

Swift Keys

I recently installed on my Galaxy S3 a new keyboard called Swift Keys. I’m amazed at how good it is. Ok, I can still type on a keyboard faster, but still it’s a marked improvement from other keyboards out there. I have felt lately that whomever can find a way to make text input on a tablet/smartphone would go a long way to bridging the gap between the traditional PC and current hand held devices.

March 25, 2013

First Flare3D project

Where I work in Brando we got an opportunity recently to work on an interesting project. The project was a website for Qatar based Agency 222. They wanted the site to have as it’s central point a 3D cube. While evaluating the project, it became apparent that the web has reached an interesting point in it’s relationship with 3D. 3D in the Browser Since the days when Director was one of the main web plugins for advanced multi-media projects there has been something of a dearth in 3D capable plugins for the web.

March 18, 2013

Something to be said for concentrating on one language

I recently have been thinking about some of the above I’ve seen in some corners I’ve seen in relation to how programmers should learn some different programming languages. The accepted thinking seems to be that learning a couple of languages is advantageous to a developer because: See different ways to solve problems View different tool sets Freshen things up, just in case you get bored Maybe force you to look at how you are doing things in a different light Keep you skill-set strong and up to date I’ve been finding recently though that learning a new programming for website development isn’t generally applicable.

March 11, 2013

One weekend with Ubuntu

I have an itch. This itch has been bothering me for probably ten years now. I am drawn to idea of doing most of my work on Linux. Every year or so I attempt to scratch this itch to see if it’s finally possible. Why do I want to move to Linux? Lately I’ve become conscious about where Microsoft and Apple seem to be taking the desktop experience. Closed Wall == Max Profit.