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Adding a startup script on Ubuntu server

Marko Tomic — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:35:44 +0100

This is a useful tip for my reference. I've been creating some startup scripts on my Ubuntu server lately and her are a couple of steps required to get this working.

Write your startup script and place it in /etc/init.d/ directory. Let's say you called your startup script - myScript. You then install your script by using update-rc.d debian utility:

{xtypo_code}update-rc.d myScript defaults{/xtypo_code}Have a look at man update-rc.d for more info.

And finally, Read More...

HOWTO convert and shrink your DVD into a web-playable format

Marko Tomic — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 07:48:02 +0100

HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.

It is my tool of choice when it comes to backing up my DVDs. It allows me to shrink DVDs to a relatively small size and convert them to a web-playable format, such as mp4.

I use the Command Line version of HandBrake simply because it is more efficient and I love typing geeky commands in my terminal window. So here it is, the simplest command tRead More...

yellowtrace blog

Marko Tomic — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 21:57:06 +0100

I would like to welcome my dear sister to the blogosphere - the yellowtrace blog. She has been blogging for about a month and I'm amazed with the number of ideas and thoughts she has shared in such a short period of time. I find her blog posts very inspiring even though we have completely different careers and characters.

She's a very talented Interior Designer and I'm just a code buster.
She's cool and I'm not.
She's extremely creative and I'm not.
Her bRead More...

Flex and Red5 simple demo

Marko Tomic — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 14:52:01 +0100

I've been using Red5 Flash Streaming Server for a while and the more I use it, the better I like it. Sure, Adobe Flash Media Server is an excellent commercial product which does the same thing and supports server-side ActionScript. Red5 doesn't support server-side ActionScript at the moment (this will probably change), but it is an open source Flash server and with a little bit of Java knowledge you can achieve the same result and possibly more.

The following example shows how toRead More...

Recursively remove .svn directories from your project

Marko Tomic — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:06:21 +0100

Occasionally I find .svn directories in my old projects that are not in Subversion. The quickest way to recursively remove them is to run the following command:

{xtypo_code}find . -name .svn -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rf{/xtypo_code}You need to cd into your project directory before running it.

You can also run the command to quickly disconnect your project from Subversion.

Installing Tigase Jabber Server using console installer

Marko Tomic — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:50:54 +0100

Couple of months ago I installed Tigase server on my laptop and it was working beautifully until this morning. I've installed quite a few major OS updates on my laptop since then and I must've done something to upset Tigase. I visited Tigase Website to download a fresh copy of the server and see what the command is to install it using console. The Website seems to be in the middle of some sort of upgrade and many links appear to be broken. Thanks to Google cached search results I managed Read More...

Generate Self-Signed SSL Certificate - HOWTO

Marko Tomic — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 21:12:45 +0100

This is another one for my reference. I've had to generate a self-signed SSL certificate quite a few times and I'm sure I'll do it again in future. First of all, self-signed SSL certificates provide the same level of security as any other commercial ones, such as Verisign certs. The 2 main differences are:

1. Self-signed certificates are free
2. Self-signed certificates are not recognised by web browsers by default. They need to be installed in browsers manually in order to Read More...

SSH Tunneling - Add secondary address to your loopback interface HOWTO

Marko Tomic — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:14:44 +0100

I'm writing this one for my own reference because almost everything I do for work, is done through SSH port forwarding. If you're not familiar with SSH port forwarding, you'll have to read up on it elsewhere. And the reason why we use SSH port forwarding is because it is secure and powerful.

I generally set up my port forwards to run on my local computer on an arbitrary port and configure SSH to create a proxy connection to the normal port on a remote computer. Then I configure myRead More...

MAMP vs Entropy PHP on OS X

Marko Tomic — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 05:15:36 +0100

Following my post on Snow Leopard Gotchas, I discovered another problem you might run into. SL comes with currently the latest version of PHP 5.3.0. However, not all PHP projects will play nice on v5.3.0. What you could do is:

1. build and configure an older version of PHP from source - e.g. 5.2.11
2. Install Entropy PHP (note: this will modify your SL Apache config files).
3. Or just be lazy and install MAMP (Macintosh, Apache, MySQL, PHP) in a few seconds.

I choRead More...

Snow Leopard Gotchas

Marko Tomic — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 01:29:48 +0100

I recently upgraded to Snow Leopard from 10.5 and everything went relatively smoothly. I was particularly pleased to see extra 13GB of hard drive space.

However, I noticed a couple of things that I wasn't so pleased about:

Apache unable to start
PHP disabled
MySQL unable to start

I've already walked a couple of people through this, so if you run into the same problem you can try the following:

1. For some reason Snow Leopard modified the following file:

Hello Computer

Marko Tomic — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 01:03:09 +0100

I've been thinking about blogging for a few years now and one of the main reasons for my hesitation was the commitment. These days, I feel a lot more settled :) and I feel that I should start contributing to the community, which has been very helpful to me and my professional career.

For those of you who don't know me, I come from an engineering background. I graduated from the University of Technology, Sydney in 2003 with a Computer Systems Engineering degree under my belt. I currRead More...