Therefore I [...]]]> Today marks a wonderful day, back in 2009 I put together a script which I called cPanelSVNManager, as there was not much interest around at the time I decided not to update it however recently I felt that it was certainly something that needed to be updated.

Therefore I have brought cPanelSVNManager right back into 2012 with a complete update and overhaul. It can now build the 1.7 branch and 1.6 branch of Subversion on cPanel servers. It also now correctly checks for the latest recommended version and if you are game enough can support automagical updates of the Subversion installation on your cPanel Server.

The benefits include a very simple way to install and update Subversion as well as mechanisms to stop Easyapache recompiles breaking after mod_dav_svn has been installed.

You can see all the details on the Technical Notebook Wiki including the outstanding feature requests, bugs and tasks (of which at time of writing there are none). If you would like to request a new feature or encounter a bug you can do so on the cPanelSVNManager project on TechnicalNotebook JIRA to get support.

I have to say, all around with the last few days development not a bad effort.

I look forward to doing more as this semester progresses.

Stuart

Firstly [...]]]> So as I was lucky enough to have a few days off over the break I felt it was time to haul my butt into gear and get some development work done. I have managed to get a good few productive days work in and have the following outputs to share with the world.

Firstly for you bloggers, if you have heard of bit.ly and other such URL shortening services, you might be curious to check out YOURLS, which is essentially a self hosted URL shortener. I will leave it to your own decision as to why that might tickle your fancy but I have written a plugin for YOURLS which provides a social toolbar on shortened URLS.

You can check out the YOURLS Social Bar page on my Technical Wiki for all the details, if you have any feature requests please let me know so that I can start working towards the next major release.

The second item I have been working on is how to get the Atlassian Crowd Authentication connector for Apache compiled on a CentOS System running cPanel. To be honest unless you use the Atlassian suite of products AND run a cPanel server this second one probably won’t interest any of you that much but hey, it is definitely an achievement that I am proud of. You can check the how-to out on my wiki –>  Compile Atlassian’s Crowd authenticator on CentOS server with cPanel.

So that has been my few days relaxation and enjoyment . Geeks and Open Source software FOR THE WIN .

Stuart

This is still [...]]]> Recently I decided to take on @ProBlogger’s challenge of 31 Days to Building a Better Blog (A.K.A. 31DBBB), I managed to get the Elevator Pitch for StuartRyan.com done yesterday and today we have a first attempt at the Elevator Pitch for TechnicalNotebook.

This is still a work in process at the moment and I am only 60% happy with it but I have to start somewhere so it will evolve over time. I certainly welcome any feedback at all that anyone has be it positive or negative.

Elevator Pitch for TechnicalNotebook.com:
“Working in today’s industry as an IT Professional I often come across tips, tricks, creative and thought provoking work-arounds and tidbits that may be useful to both myself and others at some point in time. After working on a personal knowledgebase of this information for some time I wished document and share my experiences. Therefore Technical Notebook is where I share scripts, how-tos, reviews, tidbits, professional learning and experiences.”

If you have a blog and are interested check out the 31DBBB eBook that Darren sells which is the one I am following.
Stuart

I thought however, that this time I would do something slightly different. This time around entrants will need [...]]]> In the spirit of helping out fellow bloggers it is time again that I gave away some free hosting. For some years now I have run my own dedicated server to support my blogs and other sites that have assisted with my degree at University.

I thought however, that this time I would do something slightly different. This time around entrants will need to tweet their entry to the competition, each person is allowed to enter up to five times maximum and all you have to do is answer the following question in a single tweet (for example less than 140 chars).

How would blogging enable you to share what you have with the world?

Entries must end with “@StuartCRyan #BlogHostingComp” so this gives you ~110 characters remaining for your entry. If you also wish to tweet this page to help spread the word please do (however it will have no impact on your entry to the competition).

Rules of the competition:

• Entry will be open until 11:59pm 31st December 2011 and the winner will be drawn on the 3rd of Jan 2012 at 9:00am and the winner(s) notified on Twitter.
• This is a competition of skill and merit and is in no way random. If I see two entrants equally deserving I will award them both a prize.
• I will be reading every tweet and will be making the selection of the winner and my decision is final.
• Entrants must have a twitter account to participate
• Entries must end with “@StuartCRyan #BlogHostingComp” to be considered valid
• If the hosting is misused in any way shape or form, I reserve the right to withdraw the service
• Free hosting will be for 12 months minimum, possibly longer at my discretion
• The winner will have to supply their own domain name
• Entrants do not have to follow @StuartCRyan however I certainly welcome it if they wish to do so

So get the message out and get your entries coming in I look forward to helping out a fellow blogger soon.

The document was written with [...]]]> After having a good handful of projects that I have put up on vWorker (formerly RentACoder.com) I thought it was time to put together some information on lessons that I have learned, some gotchas that could be useful for others to know and things that you should look out for.

The document was written with my experiences from vWorker in mind however the same processes and ideas could be applied to any such project site including sites such as Freelancer.com.

I look forward to feedback, if you have any other experiences, hints or tips please let me know and I will incorporate them into the document.

Guide to putting projects onto vWorker/RentACoder/Freelancer.com

Stuart

The system has a few experimental features (which [...]]]> A few days ago I decided to give CloudFlare a try on my blogs to help speed up the loading time and also act as another barrier of security for them (as we all know WordPress while being great software is often a target for security holes).

The system has a few experimental features (which at this stage unfortunately break certain WordPress plugins) however with all the stable features turned on the system works beautifully. So far the system has improved the loading times of my blogs significantly and was extremely painless to install. Essentially the system is a reverse proxy for your site and has various features inbuilt in that proxy to speed up the loading and also reduce the total load on your server.

If you have a blog they have a free and a paid service and it in some ways acts like a CDN (Content Delivery Network) by caching most commonly loaded parts of your site. So please let me know if you have any issues in the coming days loading anything on my blogs and I will look to debug them ASAP.

Stuart

Turns out that there *is* an uninstaller. No idea if it works or not but to access it, right click the installer package and select “Show Contents” then under the packages directory there is an uninstaller. This was apparent in the install program however when you selected to uninstall you could not select next. [...]]]> Update:

Turns out that there *is* an uninstaller. No idea if it works or not but to access it, right click the installer package and select “Show Contents” then under the packages directory there is an uninstaller. This was apparent in the install program however when you selected to uninstall you could not select next. Thanks to @gwaterhouse for that one. so if you are still having issues the below will also work for you.

—————

If you took the silly plunge and installed the Apple OSX Broadband Tuner on your OSX Machine only to find that there in fact was no “optional uninstall” available for it fear not, read on to find out how to remove the changes.

Firstly, the requisite disclaimer. DO THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK using the sudo command can be dangerous in nooby hands.

Simple Steps:

1. Open up a Terminal Prompt on OSX
2. Run the command –> sudo nano -w /private/etc/sysctl.conf
3. Delete the following lines of code:
   #
   # Tuning network for broadband
   #
   # START
   net.inet.tcp.sendspace: 131072
   net.inet.tcp.recvspace: 358400
   kern.ipc.maxsockbuf: 512000
   # END
4. Save the file by pressing Ctrl + X (then press Y –> Enter to confirm save)
5. Reboot your machine and you will be back to normal.

Lesson learned… don’t trust that an uninstall will work, I have to say Apple if you have something on your site that makes such intricate changes to the system PLEASE provide an uninstaller if you are going to put it up there.

——–

Update: A mate said that there is in fact an uninstaller in there. No idea how but this is the version I got and there ain’t be no uninstaller in there:

Therefore after researching this in my [...]]]> Running two versions of a browser on one machine is something that should be easy… but not always. Recently I needed to assist with deploying a fix to a slightly larger userbase than normal and provide the ability for Mac OSX users to concurrently run two versions of Firefox.

Therefore after researching this in my own time this weekend I have thrown together these simple launchers to make the process far more easy for everyone. If you follow the steps below you should be up and running in no time. Before we begin though PLEASE back up your existing Firefox Profile.

Firstly download the two versions of Firefox you want, for the latest build see the Latest Downloads page, or for the previous build see the Older Downloads page. Following that get your hands on the launchers I have created: Firefox Workaround Zip File.

The Easy Way:

Assumptions: You already have one version of Firefox installed on your machine and that you would like to run Firefox 3 and Firefox 4.

1. If you have the older version of Firefox installed on your machine open the applications folder, click the existing Firefox Application and rename it to “Firefox 3″. Then install the new version of Firefox in the applications folder.
2. If you have the newer version installed and want to install the older version along side, rather than dragging and dropping the old version to your applications folder to install. Drag it to your desktop first, rename it to Firefox 3 and then move it to the applications folder after it is renamed.
3. Open Terminal and run “/Applications/Firefox\ 3.app/ContentsOS/firefox-bin -profilemanager -no-remote” this will load the Firefox 3 Profile Manager.
4. You will have one profile already showing. If you wish to keep this for the latest version rename it to “Firefox-4″ then create a new profile along side this called “Firefox-3″ the names and case are important as the scripts use these to auto run the different versions. It should now look like this:
   
5. Extract the Firefox Workaround Zip File to a location of your choosing. The two launchers can then be dragged onto your dock to use them for Launching the two versions of Firefox concurrently.

The Hard Way: so the assumptions above don’t apply?

OK so I am a realist, the above will only work for the aforementioned versions of Firefox and we would like to give you the ability to make some changes, or you want to name the folders differently (or whatever issues you may have).

1. After you have downloaded the Firefox Workaround Zip File extract it to the Desktop
2. Run Applications –> Automator
3. Choose to open an existing workflow
4. Open the Firefox 3 file extracted from the above zip
5. In the script there are two things you can edit the ‘-a “Firefox 3″‘ defines the application name so if you wish to change the application name you can do so there, the ‘-P “Firefox-3″‘ defines the profile to use.
   
6. As an example if you wish to call the application Firefox Old with a profile name of Original Firefox you would write:
   
7. Save the scripts and they can now be used.

Because I am nice – A generic version of the loaders:

I figured that it might be nice to have a version of the loaders that will load any version of Firefox, one old and one new. Therefore if you download the Firefox Workaround Generic you can use the following settings:

New Firefox:
Application Name: Firefox
Profile Name: Firefox Default

Old Firefox:
Application Name: Firefox Old
Profile Name: Firefox Old

This should allow you to not have to continuously overwrite the loaders if you wish to have this available as a permanent solution. Then when a new major version is released, before you upgrade just replace the application names.

Let me know if you have any feedback or ways of improving this.

Stuart

Sidebar: I have never actually made a single cent LOL I blog because [...]]]> After having issues with Commission Junction zeroing out my account recently as I had not earned any new commissions in a while I had been hunting around for a better way to get affiliate commissions on some of my posts.

Sidebar: I have never actually made a single cent LOL I blog because I enjoy it, not to make money but I figure I might as well have the links there especially when I am doing reviews of products and that sort of thing.

So today I have installed VigLink to see what will happen, basically it automatically handles all the affiliate stuff I need without me having to do anything. In the interest of complete disclosure this does now mean that any link out of my blog may be an affiliate link but once again I stress that this in no way changes the content that I write and does not influence my opinions at all.

Stuart