pwrusr.com

mySQL cli is a fast and nice tool to manage your DBs. I suppose we'll never get rid of it because of it's extreme usefulness.

I bet you already know what it means to "slip your hands in the jam" (just an italianism, not to be taken too seriously), and end up searching for that darn query command, re-learn its syntax, copy-paste and repeat until you found that combination that simply works™…

Hopefully, some clever devs came to our help and invented GUIs (well, sort-of), like phpMyAdmin, (and plenty others too!).

These tools allow poor sysadmins, pwrusrs and the like, for an easier DB administration and a frustration-free INSERT query.

Today, through programmazione.it newsletter, I discovered this two-years old new kid in town: Adminer.

Basically, it's just a 200k, single-file phpMyAdmin alternative. You simply upload it to your "DB-powered-website", toggle some switches and you're good to mess-up your DB!

If you're using Joomla!, WordPress or Drupal, you can have it as an installable plugin too (here: J!, WP or D).

The author of this tool is this European czech guy called Jakub Vrána, who does seem to be knowing what he's up to.

Happy new year with the following inspired comic :)

On 4th November 2010, Mr. Mark Shuttleworth provided some guidelines over what Ubuntu will become in the future years.

In addition to adopt Unity as an alternative to the upcoming Gnome Shell, with its latest blog post, he added that, in the coming years, the Ubuntu GUI will be modeled over the Wayland display server (a promising alternative to the omnipresent X Server), with the ambitious goal (over the long term), to eventually replace the gigantic, and, by some explicit comments everywhere (just search for it!), bloated X Server.

The Wayland project integrates at its core kernel mode-setting, Graphics Execution Manager and OpenGL compositor. For the pwrusrs around the globe, that should mean "that we'll never see tearing, lag, redrawing or flicker" anymore.

So say we all!

- for a more in-depth interview with the Wayland main developer, check this out:

https://groups.google.com/group/wayland-display-server/web/frequently-askeds-questions?pli=1

Recently I was making some modifications to my website, in fact, I moved the whole site from a windows server to a linux one.

After almost 24h (and once OpenDNS online servers got updated), I was still browsing the old one, so I discovered the problem was lying inside my client's DNS cache. I found many suggestions, but the bullet proof™ ones (at least for me!) are the following:

how to clean windows dns cache:

ipconfig /flushdns

how to clean ubuntu dns server, dns cache:

rndc flush

how to clean MAC OS X dns cache:

sudo dscacheutil -flushcache

I don't know why, I don't know how, suffice it to say someday I woke up, willing to try vtiger on my own server.

Here it's howto install vtiger 5.1.0 sources on ubuntu 8.04(.3) X86_64

sudo su; mkdir src; cd src

wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/vtigercrm/vtiger%20CRM%205.1.0/Core%20Product/vtigercrm-5.1.0.tar.gz

I'm used to Ubuntu and I appreciate its funny sudo apt-get goodness, but for some reasons (spoiler: new job), I got involved with Centos administration.

After learning some yum quirks (if you're used to apt-get and dpkg, believe me, it's easy!), I was given the task to migrate a 32 bit Centos 4.7 Final install to Centos 5.3.

Some useful yum commands I learned:

• yum install package
• yum remove package
• yum clean all

For the migration task, I followed these guidelines: http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/MigrationGuide/ServerCD_4.4_to_5

I can confirm it worked, except some expected, minor issues, solved by using some sanity. To manually download my packages, I choose a local italian mirror (the garr mirror – ftp://mi.mirror.garr.it/pub/1/centos/5.3/os/i386/CentOS/).

I'm not in the mood for a step-by-step howto (too busy ATM, just follow the wiki over there…), but here are some tips, notes and issues I encountered during the process and how I overcame them.

Follow the wiki guidelines, at the section:

- remove 2.6.9 bits

rpm -e kernel-2.6.9-42.EL kernel-devel-2.6.9-42.EL kernel-doc-2.6.9-42.EL

make sure you remove ALL 2.6.9x kernel iterations. To know how many kernel iterations you have, just type:

rpm -qa | grep kernel

then, when launching your rpm -e command, make sure you choose ALL kernel-2.6.9X, kernel-devel-2.6.9x and kernel-doc-2.6.9x instances.

Today I was reviewing some XHTML syntax. This post is a placeholder for me to remember wich ones are CSS block elements and wich ones are CSS inline elements.

The difference between the two is, according to the specifications, that a block-level element can contain other elements (block-level and inline elements); an inline element can only contain one or more inline elements, but not block-level elements.

The block-level elements:

• h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h5
• p
• div
• blockquote
• ul and ol
• forms

The inline elements:

• em
• strong
• cite
• a
• img

a cool example: 

<p>

     <strong>

          <em>

               <a href="http://www.pwrusr.com/">pwrusr.com

               </a>

          </em>

     </strong>

is a site for 

     <cite>power users!</cite>

</p>

an important rule: symmetry aka we have to strive to keep opening and closing tags ordered simmetrically.

I just reached OSCON website and I discovered that this summer, from July 20 to 24, 2009, there is an exciting party!

The OSCON is a famous annual event, dedicated to the Open Source "movement", held by publisher O’Reilly Media and sponsored by some great industry names like intel and Google.

O’Reilly is the good guys that somehow sponsored the creation of the famous Linux Network Administrator Guide (that unfortunately I still had no time to finish…). They may also be considered "innovators" from the point of view of book licenses, since they kinda invented "Open Books", a precious pearl of knowledge on the web, now released as Creative Commons (check and download from here: http://oreilly.com/openbook/ ).

This year, OSCON (Open Source CONvention) is held at the heart of the Silicon Valley, on sunny San Jose, CA, place known also as intel’s HQ.

Well, intel may not have a lot to party, since EU Commission just fined them an incredible €. 1.06 billion, but other than that, intel demonstrated a lot of open intents, like kernel mode-setting key-aspects contribution, unbelievable boot times for netbooks (see moblin.org and Samsung netbook bootup youtube video) and other interesting technological goodnesses. 

OSCON is not just tons of conferences, it’s also where interesting open source projects gains (deserved) mainstream visibility, so Sourceforge.net readied the "Community Choice Awards", a program aimed at allowing you to push your favorite open source project up. Through that site you can nominate the open source projects you like the most and then hope they get selected and presented at the OSCON.

Nominations will be accepted until May 29th, so you are still in time to nominate your favorite projects too! Winners will be declared July 23rd. Note you can cast one vote for every category, and since there are 12 categories, you can wisely choose 12 projects!

Here are some of my favorite 2009 open source projects.

Best Commercial Open Source Project: Alfresco Labs

Best Project for the Enterprise: vtiger

Most Likely to Change the Way You Do Everything: jfusion

This is upcoming and shocking news for the UNIX-world, DB-World, Virtualization-World, Enterprise-software-world, developers-world …

Essentially, the future IT world, is going to be influenced by the choices made by another big software giant like ORACLE, today a SUN-illuminated ORACLE.

The April 20 2009 ORACLE-SUN acquisition is probably going to change the IT World, this is almost a matter of fact, since now ORACLE is becoming the de-facto biggest sponsor and contributor of the open source world.

Till now, ORACLE pursued the "Microsoft way": cleansing and purging every possible competitor, with big bucks (and it seems they largely succeeded with their former acquisitions).

At present, ORACLE made a new demonstration: successful open source can be "bought", even if it is a direct competitor (probably because successful open source moves a lot of money?).

I don’t feel comfortable to argue about the future, but it’s just natural to think about the LAMP-stack, and if it is going to become LAPP-stack in the future!

But I suspect ORACLE plans aren’t to kill mySQL, maybe they’ll relegate it to a "developers experiment", with an "enterprise version", who knows?

ORACLE seem actively involved in the open source, with btrfs filesystem development and previous contributions to ext4, but here I also see two possibly-related projects: ZFS and btrfs. What road will ORACLE choose to pursue?

Another interesting overlapping project is virtualization: ORACLE pushes XEN, and SUN have its own XEN setup on Solaris, so they’ll probably merge the two, but what will happen to virtualbox is not known (SUN acquired innotek and made its own Xvm Virtualbox virtualization solution for the desktop and the workstations): another important choice for ORACLE here.

Another interesting and debatable argument is licenses: it seems now a matter of GPL vs CDDL, and probably ORACLE will have to make some important choices even on this field.

Other than that, my personal concern is non-existant, since I have no direct nor indirect and am in no way related to any (I’m just a GNU/Linux power user): for me they’re two big companies merging, one heavily hit by the downturn and the other still sane, so, for me, this merger is probably a good thing; also, maybe the one makin’money will teach the other how to better monetize, whatever it will cost.

P.S.: I will still sporadically read Jonathan Schwartz’s illuminated blog, given the new situation.

Recently I was evaluating the final Alfresco Labs 3 document management nifty program, inside my little, trusty (and quite overloaded…), Ubuntu home server. I experienced a lot of problems related to the 8080 port, because Zenoss defaults to that and Alfresco wants that too.

I searched for some info on how to change alfresco default 8080 apache tomcat port and here’s what I found (from alfresco wiki page):

Edit those files and change 8080 to something else (like for example 8099):

• $ALF_HOME/tomcat/conf/server.xml
• $ALF_HOME/tomcat/webapps/share/WEB-INF/urlrewrite.xml
• $ALF_HOME/tomcat/webapps/share/WEB-INF/classes/alfresco/pagerenderer-config.xml
• $ALF_HOME/tomcat/webapps/share/WEB-INF/classes/alfresco/webscript-framework-config-test.xml
• $ALF_HOME/tomcat/webapps/share/WEB-INF/classes/alfresco/webscript-framework-config.xml
• $ALF_HOME/tomcat/webapps/share/WEB-INF/classes/alfresco/webscripts/org/alfresco/indexall.get.mediawiki.ftl
• $ALF_HOME/tomcat/shared/classes/alfresco/extension/custom-repository.properties and add an entry to overide the default: repo.remote.endpoint.url=http://localhost:8080/alfresco/service

They say the following about this mess:"It is planned for future versions to allow for central configuration of the port. It is not fixed yet, when this will be included."

I tried the modifications, but essentially I screwed my alfresco setup (more on this later maybe), so I removed and purged my alfresco.

I then decided to search for some info on how to change the default Zenoss 8080 port, and so I found that editing /usr/local/zenoss/zenoss/etc/zope.conf

and uncommenting line 840 with:

port-base 1000

1. Avoid changing Alfresco’s port mess.
2. Proceed with the Alfresco installation process.

Hope that helps!