Byte by Byte

by evelynishere

Let's face it. Most of us realize the benefits of having an organized workspace / home. The problem for most of us though is the thought of how much time and effort it's going to take to get things organized. Unfortunately, this attitude can get you into some tight spaces (literally) if you don't do something to rein in the mess.

I've had a real hard time, especially after moving away for college, trying to keep all my junk organized. Being a pack-rat has run in the family ever since my great grandparents lived through the Great Depression. As a result, I have enough stuff to fill a five bedroom house packed into a single bedroom. Space can be as big of a hindrance to effective organization as anything else.

We, the Unorganized, have no excuse for our condition though. Organization is as much a frame of mind as anything. Hopefully these tips will help give us the resolve we need to break free from our cluttered bonds.

1. Just do it.
   Just suck it up and tell yourself that it has to be done. Once you take the plunge, you'll be surprised how good it feels to finally be able to find that screwdriver you were looking for last month and never found. A lot of what's holding us back is our fear of the work involved. Try taking it in baby-steps or remind yourself of how much more efficient you'll be able to work once it's done. You might also try setting a reward for yourself to help get motivated.
2. Get in the groove.
   I'm serious about this. Putting on some good, lively music to jam to while taking care of tedious tasks can make them fly by in no time.
3. Turn it inside out.
   If you're working in a small space this is especially important. If you don't clear the area out first you'll run into a situation where you have something in your hands you need to put away, but there's a pile of other junk in your way. Just clear the area out as much as possible before getting started. Try using a hallway or another room for temporary storage.
4. Pile it up.
   Now that you have some room to work with, start sorting everything into common piles. For example, put all paper in one pile, all your books in another, and have one pile for that laundry that needs folding. Be quick, don't spend too long investigating a single item; just get it sorted. Once your major piles are established, start subdividing each pile into more piles. Turn the documents pile into stacks for business, school, personal, financial, etc. You should have some pretty manageable stacks at this point that are ready to be put away, folded, or otherwise taken care of. The trick to this tip is that the subdividing of the mess helps make it seems like less work. It also speeds up your sorting process if you're dealing with objects that are somewhat similar in nature.
5. Take a break.
   If the mound of junk is just starting to wear you out, take a quick breather. It will help relax you and get your organizational skills sharp again. Just don't take too long or it'll be difficult to get started again.
6. Give yourself a pat on the back.
   You just tackled a huge pile of junk and destroyed it like an organizational ninja. You deserve to be rewarded. Break out the ice cream, turn on the TV, sit back, and enjoy the fruits of your organizational labors.

Hope these tips help get you back on track and get your space running smoothly again. Organization doesn't stop here. Remember that you have to work to keep your newly organized space the way it is. It'll be well worth it in the long run though. Let me know if you have any organizational tips of your own to share, I'd love to hear them.

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by mangpages

I've been doing some refocusing lately to try and get back on track with everything going on in my life lately. The dread of an upcoming semester of school has been a major catalyst in that. This will hopefully be my last year of college and I think I may have made some mistakes in the amount of commitments that have been made and projects taken on.

So far, this refocusing effort has been fairly effective. I've been getting a lot more accomplished lately and it feels great. I was afraid of the sheer size of some of the things coming my way and wasn't really sure how to handle them. This fear of my to-do list caused me to simply sit around and do a whole lot of nothing this summer while worrying over deadlines. I've managed to get over that fear and have started knocking items off my to-do list this week and started getting prepared for classes to start.

As part of this refocusing theme, I've decided to refocus this blog a little bit. I originally intended this to be a primarily techie style blog for web developers. However, this plan has turned out to be too restrictive and time consuming for me to work with. There are some subjects that are just too much for Twitter, but that don't necessarily fit into a technical blog. I'd also imagine that you, the reader, would also be interested in more than just my rambling on about Python code and Linux server configurations.

Therefore, I've decided to start focusing on practical, organizational, get-you-through-the-day tips for the developer / freelancer. My tag-line is "The 'one day at a time' life of a webmaster/developer/designer." I plan on making it just that. Practical code and tech articles mixed with practical life skills and sanity tips. Hopefully this will more effective for me as the author as well as for you as the reader. After all, you know what it's like to go through this stuff yourself, right?

I'll be kicking things off tonight with a post on organization tips.

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Yeah, I know, I've been gone a while. I just got caught up in school work and web app projects is all, and I should be able to start posting again now that summer's here. And to kick things off right, I've decided to talk about one of my recent projects. This article is going to be a look at how I got my first Django application running on my HostGator Apache shared host.

First off, if you haven't heard of Django and you're in the web design business, you've probably been hiding under a rock. So far Django is my favourite web app framework, even beating Ruby on Rails by a small margin. It runs on Python, a powerful dynamic language that I have also fallen in love with. However, maybe just because this was my first app, I did run into one sticking point. Getting my finished app to run on my shared host.

I tried to follow the guide on the Django site to get it running, and I also tried following a "guide" I found in the HostGator forums. Nothing seemed worked. After Googling the problem for several hours I started to slowly piece together some idea of what was going on. My final solution below is a sampling of bits and pieces from those different sources. While this worked for me on HostGator, you may need to tweak it a bit further for your unique situation.

First thing I did was to create a sub-domain to tinker around on. I opened up the directory in FTP and found the "cgi-bin" folder. First thing to do upload your media folder to the document root. If you want your media to be served from a different domain, go ahead and get that ready. Next, you'll need to create a folder to hold all of your Python goodies. I placed everything in "~/python". Then upload a fresh version of Django to "~/python/django". You'll want to do the same thing for flup: "~/python/flup" and any other plugins you want added on. I had to call tech support to get MySQLdb installed, because I didn't have the privileges to do so. I also requested jailshell ssh access at the same time.

Once you have all of these prerequisites installed, you'll need to upload your app. I used the "~/python/projects/project_name" directory for this purpose. Next task is to create a FastCGI script to run the app. My host uses mod_fcgid to handle FastCGI requests, but other Apache FastCGI modules should do about the same thing. Here is a look at my "cgi-bin/project_name.fcgi" file:

#!/usr/bin/env python
import sys, os

sys.path.append('/home/bluevan/python')
sys.path.append("/home/bluevan/python/flup")
sys.path.append("/home/bluevan/python/django")
# an extra addon I used
sys.path.append("/home/bluevan/python/tinymce")
# projects folder
sys.path.append("/home/bluevan/python/projects")

os.chdir("/home/bluevan/python/projects/project_name")

os.environ['DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE'] \
    = "project_name.settings"

from django.core.servers.fastcgi import runfastcgi
runfastcgi(method="threaded", daemonize="false")

Be SURE to make this executable, e.g. "chmod +x project_name.fcgi". Next, create a .htaccess file to place in you document root. This seems to be the most finicky of all the steps. It's very easy to mess this up. If you're getting error messages when trying to access your app, try going to "yoursitename.com/cgi-bin/project_name.fcgi". If the site shows up here, your problem is in the .htaccess file. Here's what mine looks like:

AddHandler fcgid-script .fcgi
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^(media/.*)$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(cgi-bin/project_name.fcgi)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ cgi-bin/project_name.fcgi/$1 [L]

The first line allows execution of the script by the Apache module. The rewrite rules allow:

1. Access to the "/media" folder we uploaded earlier.
2. Reroute all requests other than "/media" and "/cgi-bin/project_name.fcgi" to "project_name.fcgi"

With this in place, you should be able to hit your application at the main address. If you change any code you'll need to respawn the FastCGI server to refresh the code. Do this from ssh with "touch  /cgi-bin/project_name.fcgi". You may also need to do "killall python" as well, if that doesn't do the job alone. Hope all goes well for you, and that you enjoy your first Django experience as much as I did.

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by Laughing Squid

The web has been full of discussions about Twitter's emerging business model. Why all the talk? Business models for web 2.0 sites have a big effect on the community that drives it. This is especially true for social media sites like Twitter. We've seen a lot of business models lately for different sites.

• Facebook: Ad and data mining driven.
• Twitter: Adopting a fee for business users (so we're told)
• Anything Google: Ad driven
• Flickr: "Pro" accounts

Plus, there are other prominent business models that we could easily take and adopt for a web 2.0 business.

• Linux: Selling complimentary services.
• iPhone Developer Program: Charging for a development platform.
• And many more…

Being an internet addict myself, I understand the importance of getting this aspect of a 2.0 company right. The consumer can be easily turned away by a bad decision in the business model. So, instead of guessing what the users want, I've decided it's time for us, the users, to speak out and decide for ourselves what we want from the next web 2.0 business. Make your voice heard in the twtpoll below and help out by telling others to do the same. Thanks for your time, you guys are great.

(Link to the twtpoll.)

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openSUSE is the easiest Linux distro I've seen for incorporating into a Windows Active Directory environment. This makes it ideal for deployment in an existing enterprise network. Add Wine into the mix and you can even run your Windows apps on top of that. So, what you end up with is a Linux workstation in a Microsoft environment that still performs all the essential Windows roles, making everyone happy. Well, most everyone at least.

If you ever want to change any of these settings later on you can access them from the Yast Control panel. Wine also installs very easily with the Yast package manager, allowing you to run most Windows applications on your new openSUSE workstation. Remember though, unless you change the DNS settings you will have to refer to any servers by their fully qualified domain name, i.e. "server.ad.domain.com". Have fun breaking the corporate Microsoft bonds and let me know what you thought of this article in the comments, I'd love to hear from you.

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I see a lot of people today that are still stuck in the mindset that money = quality. This concept is especially prevalent in the world of software products. Money = quality is a ridiculous notion to cling to. That's why those cheap Hondas only last 50,000 miles right? Not only is it ridiculous, but it's also risky for several reasons.

• You could wind up paying more for a product than you needed to, wasting your money. (a bad mistake to make these days)
• You could wind up with a lower quality product that costs more.
• You could wind up missing out on the great community that surrounds many open/free products and services. (You know, those intangible benefits.)
• You could end up becoming a slave to "The Man".

Many people don't realize that there are free goods and services out there that are better that many of their paid counterparts. Take for example, the software world.

Many free, or open-source software products are better than their paid-for buddies because of the great community that has evolved around them. Linux developed a very strong community early on in its development, that remains strong to this day. This community is responsible for creating the system itself through contributing programmers. Thus, the responsibility for the project is divided among many highly qualified minds who each gladly contribute their bubble of expertise to the project, making it better as a whole. In turn, these same people who contributed to the code, with others like them, become the main support group for the rest of the community. Then the community helps itself by sharing ideas and solving problems as they come up. As the community comes up with new ideas for improving the product, the programming members of that community contribute these changes to the code. The project progresses as the community progresses it along.

Compare the community effect that develops around open-source software to the proprietary software world. In the closed-source world, the programming is done by a select group of individuals who may or may not enjoy what they're doing. (Hey, it's a job, right?) These elite few control where the project is going, and what user requests get added to the requirements. Essentially, these people get to decide what you get, and you just have to deal with it. More often than not, the user gets a product they are half satisfied with and is forced to shell out the big bucks to pay for these programmers who obviously know what's best for you because they're the "experts". Support is handled by another elite group that, ironically enough, know very little about the product, since they didn't work on it. These people make all your decisions for you and restrict you in how, when, where, and why you use their product. Why would you pay more money for this kind of treatment?

I see this mindset the most in the corporate world, and for good reason. IT departments have been using IBM mainframes, Oracle, and Microsoft products for years. Why change now? It still works just fine. These guys have the money to pay for this stuff, so they aren't too worried. However, with budget cuts eminent during the coming year, some of you guys will need to start tightening your belts a little. For those of you who are willing to take the dive and try open-source, John Perez has an excellent article on open-source alternatives to many of your enterprise apps. Why not take the plunge? You'll be grateful you did.

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With virus, spyware and phishing scams so common on the web today, what's an average user to do?  Even if you're not a computer savvy geek there are still at least 6 simple steps everyone can take to have a more secure computer or browsing experience.

1. Create secure passwords.

Simple security starts with a password. Even if it's not a super secure password, it's better to have something than nothing at all. But why not go a step further? Creating secure passwords isn't that tough to do. Here's a few tips:

1. Longer is better (if you can remember it)
2. Add numbers and symbols($#@?) to mix things up.
3. Don't base your password on a dictionary word like "bigdog123".

If you'd like some more tips, head over to Linux-Tip.net which has a pretty decent guide to follow, or if you want some deeper explanations take a look at Bruce Schneier's article, "Secure Passwords Keep You Safer".

2. Keep the passwords secure.

I would hope that this goes without saying, but for those who need it, here it is. DON'T GIVE ANYBODY YOUR PASSWORD! This includes help desk employees or anybody, unless you absolutely have to. 99.99% of the time, tech support personnel do not need your password and shouldn't be asking for it in the first place. If you do give your password out to someone, please do yourself a favour and change it as soon as you can to protect your information.

Also, be sure to change your passwords regularly. Every couple months is a good rule of thumb.

3. Dot your "i"s and cross your "t"s.

Be careful when typing in a url. Phishers often set up sites on common misspellings of the site they're attemping to get your information from.  Here's an example of how it works: you type in "www.ebbay.com", a site that looks like eBay shows up and asks for your password. Well, the rest is history from there I'm afraid.

Another variation on this form of attack involves the use of e-mail or other electronic communications. This is what happened to Twitter just recently. An e-mail was sent out with a link to a Twitter page. Instead of being taken to the official Twitter site, users were taken to twitter.access-logins.com/login/ where a very offical looking Twitter login screen asked them for their password. The site was not part of Twitter, but was part of a phishing website (hence the access-logins.com part of the address) that stole their twitter accounts and did crazy stuff to it. That's why you should NEVER follow a link from an e-mail to login to any site.

This sort of thing happens all the time, even with online banking sites sometimes. Watch that address before you enter your username and password.

4. Bring in … the ANTI-VIRUS!

Anti-virus programs are such a simple way to improve computer security, yet some people still don't use them. If you don't like spending the extra cash, why not get a free version? AVG offers an excellent free product that is just as effective against viruses as any paid application. In fact, AVG is the only anti-virus program I use now. You can download it here.

5. Man the firewall!

Firewall? I don't need no stinking firewall! What's a firewall? A firewall is like putting a lock on your back door to keep burglars from waltzing straight in. A simple firewall will keep out an entire host of viruses and hackers. If you use Windows XP, just check out this guide for help on how to turn on your firewall.

6. Think before you click.

This kind of ties in with those notes in #3 about phishing. A lot of people (you may be one of those) will click on anything that grabs their attention. Yeah, those "shoot the monkey 5 times and win a plasma TV" ads, you know the ones. Sometimes people will login to a phishing site like the Twitter example and accidentally give away usernames and passwords to their online banking site. It is a very dangerous thing to just click on anything in front of you. Think first, use some common sense, and ask yourself, "how could they afford to give away all those plasma TVs if all you have to do is shoot the stupid monkey?"

7. Update, update, update.

Keeping up-to-date is an important part of computing and security. The recent worm attack on Windows is a prime example of this. Most operating systems make this easy with automatic updates so that you don't have to worry about it.  However, you should make sure that those automatic updates are enabled. Click here for information on how to double check this on a Windows PC.

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Finally got my sandbox server for my web development work all set up today. Basically, I wanted a test server that I could run all my PHP / MySQL dev work on, and have complete control over. Being the Linux techie that I am, I wanted something local that I can administer the way I like.  It just so happens that I had a Dell PowerEdge 2600 lying around not getting used.  With dual 1.8 GHz Xeons and a couple SCSI drives, it's perfect for what I need.

Well, the OS was obviously going to be Linux, and I remembered that Ubuntu was pushing that whole 15 minute LAMP server install not too long ago.  My file server is running Ubuntu 8.4 and I decided to stick with long term support version for now.  Although, now that 8.10 is out it's awefully temping to switch.  Anyways, love Ubuntu for the server.  It's extremely stable and easy to administer, also appreciated the LAMP configuration in the installer.  The only thing I have against it is that Synaptic loaded Apache and the other server apps with non-standard config files.  Apache, for instance didn't have the standard httpd.conf file for configuration.  Instead, the configuration was broken into several smaller files that were Included into the configuration file.  Makes sense, just threw me off when I first tried to work with it.

I guess that brings us to the topic of server apps.  Obviously, I'm using Apache 2.  I've used lighttpd in the past and like it for running on a barebones server, but Apache was just a no-brainer here.  MySQL for the database of course, and PHP5 for Apache.  I went with proftpd for my ftp server which is nice, especially when you combine it with the gproftpd GUI interface.  Sure, I could configure all this stuff from the command line, but I'm always in a big hurry it seems and I always wind up forgetting commands.  The GUI configuration tools just made sense to me at the time, I may decide to switch the GUI off later though to get the practice in.

Configuration was the biggest problem for me.  Proftpd went alright, except that the NAT feature didn't seem to work as expected and actually messed up any connections I tried to make to it, from the local network or outside.  Turning it off seemed to do the trick though.

Apache is a different story though.  As I said earlier, the config files were a little strange from the get-go.  My goals for Apache were: SSL, authentication for each subfolder, mod_rewrite for the php work I'm doing.  SSL was pretty straight forward using this guide on the Ubuntu site.  Certificates are weird, that's all I'm going to say about that.  I ran into a few problems with the authentication here.  First, I never could get it to recognize my .htaccess files.  I finally found the virtual host configuration and found out this line was stopping me:

<Directory /var/www/>
	...
	AllowOverride none
	...
</Directory>

So, it was only a matter of changing this to "AllowOverride all" to get the .htaccess files working.  Next, I had to redirect all http traffic to https to enforce the encryption.  I managed to scrounge this up off a website, I forget the address now.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}

Pretty basic, but useful.  I actually added this to a second virtual host entry.  Now I have a "*:80" and "*:443" host.  The unencrypted "*:80" host got the RewriteRule above, the encrypted "*:443" host did not.  The reason I set up the dual hosts is mostly because of the problem I ran into of the dreaded "double log in".  The reason this occurs is that with the basic setup the authentication rules are applied regardless of whether or not you are accessing the http host or the https host.  This causes the client to ask for a password when you access the http version, the RewriteRule gets processed next, then the client recognizes the https host as a new host and asks for credentials again.  The oh so elegant solution is this: split the host as described above into ":80" and ":443" versions, only appy authentication for the ":443" host.  Which in my case, since I'm storing that in .htaccess files, was to change to "AllowOverride none" for my ":80" host.  No content can be accessed over standard http anyways, all trafic is rewritten to https.  Https is then the only host asking for authentication and you are left with one login, over a SSL connection.  The last requirement I had was friendly urls for my apps.  This of course is done with mod_rewrite, which apparently does not come already activated after an apt-get of Apache.  A quick "sudo a2enmod rewrite" readily fixed that though.  I also found a good article on mod_rewrite on Sitepoint if you're new to the concept.

After a quick setup of phpMyAdmin, my sandbox server is now set and ready for use.  I used it today for my final project in Web Application Development class and have started to put some of my other works in progress up there as well.  I'm excited to have a test environment like this that is essentially the same as a full production environment with the exception of the extra security (to keep the projects private while in development).  Time to get back to work on my CMS I'm trying to develop.

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I had a friend get a hold of me Friday asking about installing Ubuntu on her computer.  She mentioned that she had heard dual booting with Vista could cause problems.  I've personally been running Vista and Linux side-by-side for about a year, until I swapped Vista for XP, but that's another story.  This got me to thinking though, why not make a full blown how to article out of this?  So, here you go.

This how to will cover instructions on how to take a PC with either Vista or XP installed and turn it into a dual booting Ubuntu and Windows machine.  Hopefully the instructions should be easy to follow, and I also put together a video I'll link to at the end of the post in case you would rather follow along that way.

Before we get started, make sure first of all that you have room on your harddrive to to install Ubuntu.  Ubuntu's website recommends 4-8 GB to install, but you may need more depending on how you plan on using the system.  More is usually better if you can afford it because it can be a pain to resize the partitions after you realize you needed more room.  Also, make sure to make a backup of your data somewhere because there is always the slight possiblity of messing up your harddrive when you start messing around with partitions like this.  As a side note, you should probably be keeping regular backups anyways.  You'll also want to do a full defragment on you're harddrive.

After that's all said and done, begin by going to http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download and downloading the latest "Desktop Edition" CD image.  I'll be using version 8.10 which is the latest version at this time.  Use whatever CD software you have installed to burn the .iso CD image to a disk.  If you don't have CD buring software already, you can download InfraRecorder for free at http://infrarecorder.org/.  Once that's done, put the disk in your drive and reboot the machine.

If your computer is not configured to boot from the CD drive, you may need to change your BIOS settings, please refer to your computer's user guide for more information.  When the CD boots, select English or whatever language you wish to use.  Select "Install Ubuntu" from the menu and the LiveCD will continue to load and bring you to the next screen.

Select your language again, followed by timezone and keyboard selection.

The next screen gets into the disk setup.  This is where you need to decide how much space to give to Ubuntu, and how much to reserve for Windows.  This could be a basic 50/50 or whatever you feel like you need.  Once again, at least 4-8 GB is recommended for a basic install.  All you do to setup your disks is drag the slider around until you're satisfied.  You can also do a manual disk setup if you know what you're doing and have a little more control over it.  Click "Foward" and you will likely recieve a prompt titled "Write previous changes to disk and continue?" click "Continue" and click on "Forward" again to go to the next screen.

Here you will enter information for the primary user, you.  It asks for your full name, a username, and password.  Fill these out and continue.  Be sure to create a secure password, read this article for help creating one.

This next screen allows you to import all sorts of things from Windows to help make your transition much easier.  Things like: documents, web browser settings, wallpaper, etc.  Make your selections there and continue to the final screen where you will see a summary of the information you just entered.  Confirm these details and click "Forward".

The install process may take some time depending on your computer's hardware, but be patient.  Restart your computer when prompted to do so, ejecting your CD when told so.  You will be welcomed by a GRUB bootloader screen as shown.  This will default to start Ubuntu after a few seconds.  Go ahead and boot Ubuntu and login using the username and password you setup earlier.

Now, click on the "Applications" menu at the top of the screen and then "Add/Remove Applications" to open the package manager.  Once that opens, you will be prompted to update your package list, click "Reload".  You will need to wait a few seconds for the system to process the list.

Eventually, you will get a message in the top menubar telling you there are updates that need to be installed.  Close the package manager and click on the update icon at the top of your screen.  Install the updates, which may take a while again.  When the updates are complete, you will need to reboot the computer once more.

Once rebooted and logged back in, you can reopen the package manager by clicking on "Add/Remove Applications".  Here you can add programs you may want for your Ubuntu system, there are many to choose from.

That about wraps up this how to.  It was a little longer than I expected, but hopefully it can help a few of you out there who are new to Linux.  Ubuntu is a great, easy to learn Linux distro that I'm sure you'll love.  Have fun and check out the video below if you want to see these steps in action.

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Just wanted to give a quick shout in-between posts to point everyone to my Twitter at twitter.com/mybluevan. If you don't have a Twitter account yet, check it out at twitter.com.

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