Web Development

What is JSON Web Token (JWT)

JWT basics illustrated and explained.

"The Get Down" of Operations

The Get Down is a Netflix miniseries about a group of kids in the Bronx New York during that summer of 1977 when Disco was dying and Hip Hop/Rap was being born. Life was hard in NYC in the '70s. The Bronx was burning and you had to hustle to survive.

Systems Operations is not like dodging bullets in the boogie down but you do need to be street smart and hustle to survive. Urban decay, absentee landlords, abandoned buildings are synonymous to technical debt, out of date legacy systems, and orphaned applications and tools. You don't learn in school about containerization, cutting edge automation and working with your crew. You learn those things by busting your ass, doing your work and keeping your eyes and ears open.

Thank you Steve Jobs

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I was 16 years old in 1983 when my high school physics teacher, Rocky Trembly, carried a little white box into the classroom. He fired it up and the dark screen lit up and said, "Hello." I didn't know it at the time but that moment turned out to be the cornerstone to a lifetime of exploration and discovery. Throughout my life I've earned a living as a art director, writer, technology manager, web master and systems engineer and none of it would have been possible or probable without that single moment. Now as the screen goes dark I'd like to say thank you to Steve (and Rocky) for making my world and the whole world a better more different place. "Goodbye"

Make: Online | Why Every Maker Should Learn Chinese

via Make: Online | Why Every Maker Should Learn Chinese.

Nǐ hǎo 你好! Permanently on my desk, and everywhere I go is an iPad/iPhone app called Pleco, which has my custom flash cards that I use to quiz myself about 300 Chinese (Mandarin) characters. I’m getting pretty good with the help of a weekly instructor found via Craigslist, daily walks through Chinatown in NYC, and a website called Memrise. In less than a month I’ve been able to specifically translate (a lot of) the data sheets for products I’m sampling/purchasing for my job at Adafruit Industries, and for fun/downtime I’m translating some of the Chinese graffiti in Blade Runner (I always wanted to know what they said).

NGINX + PHP-FPM + APC = Awesome

Here is an excellent article on the merits, install and use of NGINX and PHP

NGINX + PHP-FPM + APC = Awesome

via NGINX + PHP-FPM + APC = Awesome.

www: the origin of the BLINK tag

A very interesting story of the origins of the BLINK tag.

The Origins of the <Blink> Tag

I am widely credited as the inventor of the tag.   For those of you who are relatively new to the Web, the tag is an HTML command that causes text to blink, and many, many people find its behavior to be extremely annoying.    I won't deny the invention, but there is a bit more to the story than is widely known.

Official Google Blog: Holiday templates to keep you organized

| Official Google Blog: Holiday templates to keep you organized | The holidays are upon us, and theres much to do: Gifts to be wrapped, lights to be strung, candles to be lit, and a long list of tasks at the home and the office. A little creativity can come in handy at this time of year. You can save time and money with the Google Docs template gallery for documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Whether youre a small business owner or the chief holiday organizer, the gallery includes a few special templates designed to help you spread a little holiday cheer. Here are a few tips to help you get everything done on time

CherryPy - Trac

CherryPy   - CherryPy is a pythonic, object-oriented HTTP framework.

CherryPy allows developers to build web applications in much the same way they would build any other object-oriented Python program. This results in smaller source code developed in less time.

CherryPy is now more than six years old and it is has proven very fast and stable. It is being used in production by many sites, from the simplest ones to the most demanding ones.

Enhance your Blog Design with JQuery

| Enhance your Blog Design with JQuery | JQuery

JQuery is a JavaScript library that simplies event handling, animation, Ajax interactions and much more. The WordPress admin uses JQuery to enhance a variety of sections - the show/hide tabs in the Write page, the lightbox for the media uploader. So it’s already built into Wordpress, all we need to do is call it from the front end and use it ourselves.

de-co-de: Apache Tomcat connector - mach-o, but wrong architecture

| de-co-de: mach-o, but wrong architecture | If you install the mod_jk.so connector yourself on OS X 10.5 intel you may get the following error.

| httpd: Syntax error on line 484 of /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf: Syntax error on line 3 of /private/etc/apache2/other/mod_jk.conf: \ | Cannot load /usr/libexec/apache2/mod_jk.so into server: \ | dlopen(/usr/libexec/apache2/mod_jk.so, 10): no suitable image found.\ | Did find:\n\t\ | /usr/libexec/apache2/mod_jk.so: mach-o, but wrong architecture

This error is because apache is compiled as a 64 bit executable and configure builds a 32 bit shared library

Google Web Toolkit - Google Code

| Google Web Toolkit - Google Code | Google Web Toolkit (GWT) makes it easier to write high-performance AJAX applications. You write your front end in the Java programming language and GWT compiles your source into highly optimized JavaScript. Writing web apps today is a tedious and error-prone process. You spend 90% of your time working around browser quirks, and JavaScript's lack of modularity makes sharing, testing, and reusing AJAX components difficult and fragile. It doesn't have to be that way.

iMovie '08 Library Compressor | iNik

| iMovie '08 Library Compressor | iNik | This is a simple program to reduce the size of your iMovie 08 library.

I love iMovie ‘08. I know, I know, it has less whizzy features than iMovie ‘06 does, but darn it, it’s so darn fast and easy to build videos. I can create a whole hour-long movie in about ten minutes! (Not a very good one, of course — but none of my movies are very good.)

Mac mini dual monitors using DualHead2Go - voice.firefallpro.com

| Lessons Learned: Mac mini dual monitors using DualHead2Go | When we first set up the office here in NYC, we made an early decision to go with Apple products for development. Now don't get me wrong, I love Apple, indeed I am a recent inductee into the Apple Fan Club. However, I have noticed a few... insufficiencies with the platform, many of which have little to do with the company itself. For example, the lack of a good time management system (apologies to iBiz).

perl.com: Hidden Treasures of the Perl Core

an old article but very handy...

| perl.com: Hidden Treasures of the Perl Core | The Perl Core comes with a lot of little modules to help you get thejob done. Many of these modules are not well-known. Even some of the well-known modules have some nice features that are often overlooked. In this article, we'll dive into many of these hidden treasures of the Perl Core.

Nobody learns if nothing is brok3n: Turning a dmg into an iso

Nobody learns if nothing is brok3n: Turning a dmg into an iso

Here is how you turn a dmg into an iso on OS X:

1. Open a terminal.
2. cd into the directory where the dmg is located
3. Type this in where newfile is the name of the iso you want, and yourfilename.dmg is the dmg

hdiutil makehybrid -iso -o newfile.iso yourfilename.dmg

This was found by cbro and erasei on #macosx on efnet a long time ago.

Time For A Grown-Up Server: Rails, Mongrel, Apache, Capistrano and You | codablog | Coda Hale

| Time For A Grown-Up Server: Rails, Mongrel, Apache, Capistrano and You | codablog | Coda Hale | More and more Rails developers are finding out that deploying a Rails application isn’t as simple as upload and rename; Rails apps work best when running all the time, and many Rails programmers are moving from traditional, shared hosts, like Dreamhost, to virtual private servers, like Rimuhosting, which allow them full control and responsibility of production servers.

How to Querying the RPM database - tuxfiles.org

| Installing software from RPM packages in Linux | How to Querying the RPM database

| As you already know, the RPM database contains a list of all installed RPM packages on your system. You can query this database to get info of the packages on your Linux system. To query a single package, you use the -q option. For example, to query a package whose name is "software": | # rpm -q software

Microsuck | Microsofts Really Hidden Files

| Microsuck | Microsofts Really Hidden Files | There are folders on your computer that Microsoft has tried hard to keep secret. Within these folders you will find two major things: Microsoft Internet Explorer has not been clearing your browsing history after you have instructed it to do so, and Microsofts Outlook Express has not been deleting your e-mail correspondence after youve erased them from your Deleted Items bin. This also includes all incoming and outgoing file attachments. And believe me, thats not even the half of it.

40 Tips for optimizing your php Code - reinholdweber.com

| reinholdweber.com | 40 Tips for optimizing your php Code

| 1. If a method can be static, declare it static. Speed improvement is by a factor of 4. | 2. echo is faster than print. | 3. Use echo's multiple parameters instead of string concatenation. | 4. Set the maxvalue for your for-loops before and not in the loop. | 5. Unset your variables to free memory, especially large arrays. | 6. Avoid magic like __get, __set, __autoload | 7. require_once() is expensive | 8. Use full paths in includes and requires, less time spent on resolving the OS paths. | 9. If you need to find out the time when the script started executing, $_SERVER[‘REQUEST_TIME’] is preferred to time() | 10. See if you can use strncasecmp, strpbrk and stripos instead of regex | 11. str_replace is faster than preg_replace, but strtr is faster than str_replace by a factor of 4 | 12. If the function, such as string replacement function, accepts both arrays and single characters as arguments, and if your argument list is not too long, consider writing a few redundant replacement statements, passing one character at a time, instead of one line of code that accepts arrays as search and replace arguments. | 13. It's better to use select statements than multi if, else if, statements. | 14. Error suppression with @ is very slow. | 15. Turn on apache's mod_deflate | 16. Close your database connections when you're done with them | 17. $row[‘id’] is 7 times faster than $row[id] | 18. Error messages are expensive | 19. Do not use functions inside of for loop, such as for ($x=0; $x < count($array); $x) The count() function gets called each time. | 20. Incrementing a local variable in a method is the fastest. Nearly the same as calling a local variable in a function.

How To Create a Web App - readwriteweb.com

| How To Create a Web App | Written by Matt Rogers / October 4, 2007

This is the second post in our series on how to run a startup and develop a product. In part one, How To Bootstrap Your Startup, we outlined the process of bootstrapping your company into existence. In this post, we show you how to go from idea to specified product. By the end of it, you’ll know how to build a mock-up of your business idea and write the most important document you’ll write for the company: your functional specification.

Ubuntu Linux view the status of my NIC

| Ubuntu Linux view the status of my network Interfaces/card | Q. How do I view the status of my network Interface card under Ubuntu Linux ? How do I make sure connectivity exists?

A. You can verify connectivity or status of your network Interfaces/card using standard Linux command. Open your terminal and use following commands:

| Ifconfig command use to view status of network Interfaces card or use to configure a network interface itself. | Task: View network interface card

Filmmaker's Tool Kit: Creating a Movie with Web 2.0

| Filmmaker's Tool Kit: Creating a Movie with Web 2.0 | In this post I will show you the tools you need to go from idea to finished film using as many web 2.0 products as possible. In June, I wrote about 8 online video editors that could be used to slice together your masterpiece. But there's more to being Kubrick than editing. You have to write your film, cast it, shoot it, edit it, and distribute it to the masses. Web 2.0 applications and services can help with (nearly) all of these phases.

Everything You Need To Know To Get Started With Content Management Systems -- InformationWeek

| Everything You Need To Know To Get Started With Content Management Systems -- InformationWeek | Free and low-cost enterprise wiki tools and open-source content management systems are plentiful. Here's a quick guide to the available options.

It can be easy to dump thousands of dollars into a content management system that no one in your company will want to (or can figure out how to) use. Here are some solutions that keep costs in check but deliver a useful, easy-to-use system with lots of capabilities.

Please backup your hard drive now… twice - goodCRIMETHINK

| Please backup your hard drive now… twice at goodCRIMETHINK | There is a tightness in my chest, and I am crying right now. I have just suffered a catastrophic data loss for the second time in my life. Fool me once, shame on, shame on, fool me can’t get fooled again, or something like that.

In college, a freak transformer explosion and subsequent power surge killed my hard drive. From that point on, I swore to always back up my data, and mostly I did just that. As of mid this summer, I had a ridiculous mirrored RAID drive setup with external SATA drives and all sorts of doohickies. I had about 1 terabyte of data backed up locally and had started to upload it offsite to a service called Mozy. But then I started selling off my desktop in preparation for my move from Boston to NYC. I purchased a LaCie 1TB Big Disk and put all my media files and documents from my “Atlas” drive on it. That drive literally held my world on its shoulders.

CSS Juice » The Color Of Design - Important Points About Color Theory

| CSS Juice » The Color Of Design - Important Points About Color Theory | Guest post by Simon Ward from Pingable Blog, where he writes about blogging tips, SEO and web design.

Some color combinations work and others look absolutely terrible; this is a subject that anyone interested in design should consider examining. The following article looks at different types of color schemes, how to use them and why they work.

Official Google Blog: Controlling how search engines access and index your website

| Official Google Blog: Controlling how search engines access and index your website | I'm often asked about how Google and search engines work. One key question is: how does Google know what parts of a website the site owner wants to have show up in search results? Can publishers specify that some parts of the site should be private and non-searchable? The good news is that those who publish on the web have a lot of control over which pages should appear in search results.

Official Google Blog: Robots Exclusion Protocol: now with even more flexibility

| Official Google Blog: Robots Exclusion Protocol: now with even more flexibility | This is the third and last in my series of blog posts about the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP). In the first post, I introduced robots.txt and the robots META tags, giving an overview of when to use them. In the second post, I shared some examples of what you can do with the REP. Today, I'll introduce two new features that we have recently added to the protocol.

The Secret Language of Babies - Amazing Medical Breakthroughs

| Amazing Medical Breakthroughs: The Secret Language of Babies Video | After testing her baby language theory on more than 1,000 infants around the world, Priscilla says there are five words that all babies 0–3 months old say—regardless of race and culture:

| Neh="Im hungry" | Owh="Im sleepy" | Heh="Im experiencing discomfort" | Eair="I have lower gas" | Eh="I need to burp"

Those "words" are actually sound reflexes, Priscilla says. "Babies all around the world have the same reflexes, and they therefore make the same sounds," she says. If parents dont respond to those reflexes, Priscilla says the baby will eventually stop using them.

Daring Fireball: BBColors 1.0

| Daring Fireball: BBColors 1.0 | One feature still lacking in BBEdit which I’ve wanted for years is a way to easily save and switch between different text coloring schemes. BBEdit’s text colors have been configurable ever since syntax coloring appeared in BBEdit 4.0 in 1996, but there’s no means to save or change them en masse. Nor is there any way to share color schemes with other users.

So, I’ve put together a little command-line tool called BBColors; it lets you save, load, and share text color preference schemes for BBEdit and TextWrangler.

Macworld: First Look: First Look: ModBook

| Macworld: First Look: First Look: ModBook | Third-party modifications turn MacBook into a tablet computer - By Jonathan Seff

Ever since the Newton came—and went—in the 1990s, a small but vocal group of Mac users have clamored for a tablet Mac. At least to this point, Apple has shown no interest in getting into the tablet business. So it’s up to third parties to come up with a product that may finally determine the level of demand for a Mac tablet computer.

Installing the W3C HTML Validator on Mac OS X

| Installing the W3C HTML Validator on Mac OS X | Building a website is a complicated process, and testing your finished product | on every possible browser can be even more daunting. However, because modern | browsers such as Safari, Mozilla, and Internet Explorer 6 are compliant with the | World Wide Web Consortiums W3C standards, testing your pages with the W3C | Validation Tool is a great way to ensure that your pages work with modern | browsers. The W3C Validator provides a line-by-line level of feedback, such as | error information with references to the standards, on any URL you submit or | HTML file you upload.

Illustrator CS2 crashes on Intel Mac 10.4.8

Adobe Illustrator CS2 crashes on an Intel Mac Pro running Mac OS 10.4.8 when a designer tries to use a tool on the pathfinder palette. This only happens when a circular path is involved. For example you want to Unite a round/circular path and a square path. Yo highlight both paths and select Unite from the Pathfinder palette. The program will crash.

The solution was buried in the comments of this post on Real World Illustrator.

Using Sun Java Studio Creator 2 on Mac OS X

Using Sun Java Studio Creator 2 on Mac OS X

Java Studio Creator is an easy-to-use visual tool for developing Web applications with Java. Designed for the corporate developer who needs to be productive and doesnt have the time to learn the details of Java technologies, the product combines the Java integrated development environment IDE with a rapid visual designer, a smart code editor, synchronized editing, and easy deployment resulting in rapid iterative development of Web applications and Portlets.

macosxhints.com - An assortment of potentially interesting free apps

macosxhints.com - An assortment of potentially interesting free apps

<http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20061220065842930>`__

At times, I will run hints here which are pointers to third-party apps that seem to do interesting things. The decision as to whether to run such a hint is purely subjective; if it seems like the program does something interesting, then I'll usually run it. If it's open source, the odds are even higher, as perhaps someone will learn something by looking at the source. And almost always, these apps will be from small one-person shops, who typically have trouble getting the word out about their programs.

Over 160 Free Personal Information Managers

Over 160 Free Personal Information Managers - lifehack.org

<http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/over-160-free-personal-information-managers.html>`__

The best type of software for productivity is personal information manager (PIM). They are softwares which help you oraganising your personal information, such as contacts, calendars, emails, notes etc. To give you choices, find out what are available on the Internet and fits you, Listible has a huge list (over 160) of PIMs. There are Windows & Mac based software; web based, and all of them are free:

Scripts to create an IP info summary display

macosxhints.com - Scripts to create an IP info summary display

<http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060901055801748>`__

I created the following scripts to mimic the ipconfig /all functionality found in the Windows NT operating system. In the unix world, all of the info is available, but not in one place which is where this script comes in handy. It concatenates all of the various pieces of IP configuration into one easy-to-read display. The bonus is all of the functions used are contained in a separate file, which can be sourced into your shell environment and used individually.

Intro to Open Source Scripting on Mac OS X

Introduction to Open Source Scripting on Mac OS X

One of the biggest advantages of Mac OS X's UNIX heritage is the huge range of open source scripting languages available. Scripting languages are often the ideal tool if you want to manipulate text, manage jobs, or link together disparate components without resorting to a compiled language like C or Objective-C. Scripting languages are a great tool for system administrators, application developers, and pretty much any user who needs to perform complex or repetitive tasks, because they were invented to solve these types of problems more quickly than can be done with general-purpose languages.

Handy CSS layout generator for web developers

Someone on IRC pointed me to this CSS generator, and the number of options and output are impressive. The ability to have verbose comments in the CSS is a nice way to learn what browser hacks are being implemented (and gives you an easy way to pull them out if you like). I can take no credit for this tool, so props to the appropriate party...

read more | digg story \<http://digg.com/design/Handy_CSS_layout_generator_for_web_developers\>__

Become Your Own Web Host in 75 Steps

Become Your Own Web Host in 75 Steps

One of the biggest issues involved with becoming a web publisher is the question of hosting.  With an internet clogged with false hosting review sites, hosting companies trying to rip you off, and hosting companies run by 14 year olds, the majority of web publishers are at the mercy of random chance when it comes to finding a quality host.  To solve this huge problem and to grant freedom to all, we have come up with 75 extremely specific steps that will get you up and running with a *nix box (running FreeBSD), along with the most recent versions of Apache, Perl, PHP, and MySQL.

Google Pack of usefull tools

Official Google Blog: Make your computer just work

So you bought a new PC for yourself or a relative during the holidays. There was the initial excitement about its speed and the nice screen %u2013 and then it came time to actually get it running. Which meant embarking on some real work -%u2013 downloading a browser, a couple of multimedia players, a PDF reader, a toolbar, and maybe something for voice and instant messaging. Don%u2019t forget the anti-spyware and anti-virus apps %u2013 you%u2019ve got to have those. Hours, maybe even days, go by. How many wizards have you clicked through, not to mention license agreements and preference pickers? And then you have to ask: did I get everything? And how am I going to keep all of this up to date? This was the experience both Sergey and Larry had a year ago. And they%u2019re computer guys, after all. Which led them to ask more of us to make it easier for everyone. So we created the Google Pack -- a one-stop software package that helps you discover, install, and maintain a wide range of essential PC programs. It%u2019s yours today %u2013 and it%u2019s something we hope you find to be painless, easy, and even fun (if computer setup can ever be called that). And it%u2019s free.

Software - DMS for Mac OSX

AFP548 - Document Management in the Fresh Air

Installing Alfresco to create workflows and manage your documents

Alfresco is a fun open source project that I've been playing around with lately. It's similar to EMC's Documentum, which if you've never played with allows you to create workflows for documents. It's billed as a "content management solution" but that term is very overloaded with all the web CMS systems out there. For those of you still confused, it allows you to manage all of your documents, such as MS Word files and such, and create workflows with them.

HOW TO - Enhanced Podcasts

| MAKE: Blog: HOW TO make Enhanced Podcasts (images, links and more with audio) | Apple's new iTunes 4.9, iPod color, allows you to view (and listen to) "enhanced podcasts" these are audio files that can have slideshows, URLs and some cool features we have discovered. Apple's included documents and a Wiki was all I needed to make our MAKE enhanced podcasts, but I also wrote a how-to. Here's how to get, make and all you need to know about enhanced podcasts! As a bonus, we put together some fun ideas we think many might use...

iPod ebook How To

| MAKE: Blog: MAKE ebooks for your iPod guide! | There’s a somewhat little know and often-unused function of iPod called "Notes" which can actually be quite handy for storing and reading text, creating a locked "kiosk mode", quizzes, games as well a full-length ebooks. The Notes reader is located in Menu > Extras > Notes. Only the more recent 3G and 4G iPods, including the iPod photo and iPod mini both have the iPod Notes application. Here’s our how-to on making them!

Google Sitemaps

| Google Blog: Webmaster-friendly | We're undertaking an experiment called Google Sitemaps that will either fail miserably, or succeed beyond our wildest dreams, in making the web better for webmasters and users alike. It's a beta "ecosystem" that may help webmasters with two current challenges: keeping Google informed about all of your new web pages or updates, and increasing the coverage of your web pages in the Google index.

Initially, we plan to use the URL information webmasters supply to further improve the coverage and freshness of our index. Over time that will lead to our doing an even better job of delivering more search results from more websites.

Linux and Mac OS X, all on one PowerBook?

| Thanks Dave Taylor | In a bit of a break from business analysis, I thought it would be fun to post one of my more technical articles to re-establish my "geek cred", if you will. This article details the trials and tribulations of turning a perfectly good Apple PowerBook into a tri-boot system with Mac OS X, Yellow Dog Linux and Ubuntu Linux. Mac OS X is built of two components, Darwin, the BSD-based Unix underpinnings, and Aqua, the beautiful graphical user interface we Mac heads have all grown to love. However, there are other operating systems and other work environments that can be installed on an Apple system, based on popular open source Linux applications. If you’re looking for Intel-based versions of Linux,... In a bit of a break from business analysis, I thought it would be fun to post one of my more technical articles to re-establish my "geek cred", if you will. This article details the trials and tribulations of turning a perfectly good Apple PowerBook into a tri-boot system with Mac OS X, Yellow Dog Linux and Ubuntu Linux.

Homemade Dot-Mac with OS X, Part 1

O'Reilly Network: Homemade Dot-Mac with OS X [Aug. 09, 2002]

Homemade Dot-Mac with OS Xby Alan Graham08/09/2002 So, still fuming about the .Mac annual fee? The question of whether .Mac is worth $100 is a personal matter, but one of the greatest ironies of this situation is that Mac OS X is packed full of features that make many aspects of .Mac unnecessary.

Homemade Dot-Mac with OS X, Part 2

O'Reilly Network: Homemade Dot-Mac with OS X, Part 2 [Sep. 20, 2002]

| Homemade Dot-Mac with OS X, Part 2 | by Alan Graham | 09/20/2002

Jaguar has made significant improvements to aspects of Mac OS X. These features make setting up a home Web server easier and more powerful than ever, and I'll touch on some of them while digging deeper into the homemade Dot-Mac project.

New study on graphic communications market released

MacMinute: New study on graphic communications market released

| July 17, 2003 - 08:15 EDT | IDG World Expo and TrendWatch Graphic Arts today announced results of their Spring 2003 study of the creative markets during a presentation at Macworld CreativePro Expo. A few highlights of the study show that 82% of respondents use the Mac OS as their primary system, 17% have upgraded to Mac OS X, while only 22% said they use a Mac as their primary system at Internet design and development firms.

Live report from MacWorld NY 2003

| Live Report from MacWorld NY 2003 | Check back for live coverage of Macworld New York 2003. AppleMatters will be reporting live from the keynote address by Greg Joswiak, Vice President of Hardware Product Marketing starting at 9:30 am. Bookmark this page and see you then!

| 7:49 am | What a difference a lack of Steve makes...I was last at Macworld NY when Steve Jobs announced the cube in 2000. Then the line was literally out the door at 7am. This morning, at almost eight o'clock there are only 20 odd...