Author Archives: Niccolò Favari
Serious about Web Design? Start using the right tool (Fireworks CS5)
First of all a word of caution: I’m a Developer, not a Web Designer.
I’m a PHP and Java Developer who happens to make designs for clients’ websites as well. I’m in no way a Designer. I have null knowledge and education in principles like colors, shapes, interface usability, design and so on.
I seek tools that let me get the job done in the shortest time possible, with the least possible effort, while giving me the chance to come back to my work and easily make huge changes in little time.
Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid – Issues with external monitor and Ati Radeon card
After an upgrade I had issues with tearing and waves corrupting the desktop on my external monitor (no issues on my laptop screen). I decided to format and reinstall everything. It solved a tons of other small issues but not this one. External monitors (LCD or CRT) won’t work with Ubuntu 10.04 notebooks with Radeon cards (I have a Mobility radeon x1600). You’ll see a distorted image. Waving like the refresh rate is incorrect.
Solution
I just did the following (on a bare install of Ubuntu 10.04)
Fire up the terminal and type
gksudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/radeon-kms.conf
Audience is dumb. Reading is fatigue. Discussion is effort.
Statistically, you’re not going to read this. That’s the name of the blog post that struck me today.
The concept behind the post is that writing for the web is different than writing books or printed articles. Been there, done that? Not really.
The idea in that post is introduced to the reader via a plain, simple truth: a great number of readers just skip reading and skim through the content. Then the author goes on with a couple of actions blog owner could take to avoid that, effectively easing the lecture process for readers.
Enable cURL PHP extension with XAMPP on Windows XP
You may need to enable the cURL extension in your XAMPP setup, just like I had to do to install Magento locally.
curl is a command line tool for transferring data with URL syntax, supporting FTP, FTPS, HTTP, HTTPS, SCP, SFTP, TFTP, TELNET, DICT, LDAP, LDAPS, FILE, IMAP, SMTP, POP3 and RTSP. curl supports SSL certificates, HTTP POST, HTTP PUT, FTP uploading, HTTP form based upload, proxies, cookies, user+password authentication (Basic, Digest, NTLM, Negotiate, kerberos…), file transfer resume, proxy tunneling and a busload of other useful tricks.
Get cURL working with XAMPP
Just 3 easy steps.
Ubuntu server setup part II – Tweaking the system
We’ll set up shell colors, aliases and install useful packages that you may need. This is not something you need to do (you could skip this blog post altogether) but it may simplify you life while operating via the SSH shell.
Shell colors and aliases
To add some colors to your sheel promt just do the following
nano ~/.bashrc
Go to the end of the file and add the following lines.
Aimlessly wandering from Rackspace Cloud Servers to Amazon AWS; a WordPress mu perspective
Cloud Computing lets you scale and pay only for computing resources you actually use like storage, bandwidth, server uptime and so on. You get no upfront costs (unlike VPS services) and a great level of service (unlike shared hosting) because you’re in control of the box. This is a nice new paradigm for developers.
I know of two big providers for cloud services: Amazon (AWS) and Rackspace (cloud servers/cloud files).
Why Rackspace Cloud Servers?
Well, you may have heard about their fanatical support: basically they’ll help you with pretty much anything. They’re helpful with noobs and ready to help on pretty much any hosting related topic.
rackspace cloud server setup part I – Ubuntu 9.10 configuration
The rackspace cloud server is an alternative for VPS products. It comes with a low pay per use cost ($0.015 hourly) instead of a monthly fee, and it’s ideal for development as well. I’m working on a personal project so I don’t need huge amount of resources in terms of data traffic. Instead of using Amazon EC2 ($0.085 per hour) I figured that I could save something with rackspace cloud server.
Note that this blog is still hosted at MediaTemple (gs) as it has nothing to do with the project I’m working on right now.