Urban Puddle

There are lots of great instructions out there for using Git so you may not be interested in another one. Mine is no doubt imperfect as well, but I didn't find a front-to-back tutorial for getting rolling with Git on your own centralized server. I ended up cobbling information together from a bunch of sources (which I will list below). Mostly for my own benefit, I'm posting what I learned here. Feel free to ignore or read on as you desire.. By the end of it we'll have installed Git on a server, created a repository on that server, and checked in code from our local machine.

I've been using Ferret to do searches in BuyIndie for a quite a while now. It works ok but I know there are better solutions out there. One of those that I'm experimenting with is Sphinx. If you want to play along and install it along with the Thinking Sphinx plugin, here's how you do it.

I really enjoy free software. I love benefiting from it and I sleep easier knowing that no person or company is going to screw me out of money for an 'upgrade' or take away features under the same guise. Still, programmers have to make a living and the maintenance model of giving away the software and charging for support leaves me wondering what happens to a company/individual when too many people opt for the free option over the other. As a developer I cringe at the thought that my livelihood is dependent on donations or people clicking ads. It makes me wonder: can we charge for applications anymore in a world of free software?

There's no doubt that sometimes mistakes happen. If you make a terrible terrible subversion error and need to start over, rather than check in your code again, use this command to erase all the hidden .svn entries:

find . -type d -name '.svn' -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rdf

It's not perfect, but if svn export doesn't work and you've got no other choice the above command will help you out in a pinch.

I love free software. But, there is something to be said for paid support. When it comes to email, sometimes a robust mail server is just what the doctor ordered. Communigate Pro has been doing the job for large scale ISPs for a while now so back when one of my clients needed a solution I didn't hesitate to recommend it. I've no regrets except for one: the initial install was on a CentOS machine. Nothing against CentOS or Red Hat, but I prefer Debian based distros. And while the CG Pro mail server install instructions exist for Windows, MacOS X, FreeBSD, and many Linux distros, Ubuntu is currently not one of them. Fortunately it turns out it's not that bad to get it going. Here's what you need to do.

I've been searching around the Internet trying to find an appropriate command for ffmpeg that will let me convert video for my PSP in 480x272 resolution. There's a ton of outdated info out there.. no matter what I tried I couldn't get anything beyond 320x240 or 368x204 to work. Finally, I managed to get a recipe that does the trick. The resulting railscasts are viewable on the PSP (barely) so if you've been wanting to convert video in linux to use on the PSP this script is for you.

If you've ever wanted to run your own private Instant Messaging Server, you'll be pleased to know that it's a fairly simple process. I'm no expert on the topic, but I will show you how to get started.. you can lock it down using help from the experts later on. With those caveats out of the way, let's get going.

Getting subversion going isn't really that hard.. the steps aren't that much different whether you're installing on your local Debian machine or deploying to a server where you'll host lots of projects. Here's how you can set up subversion on Ubuntu's Hardy Heron distribution in a few simple steps.

The other day I was playing with Pandora. It's an awesome website but I wanted a way to play it through the remote Ubuntu server I have connected to my stereo. Since that server is headless lots of remote options like xnest and vncserver don't work (without me logging in to the remote server first). I remembered Nomachine's NX server and decided to give it a shot. It works great. Even though the packages haven't been updated for Hardy, the Gutsy packages work fine. Here's how you get it working.

Do yourself a favor, if you get a 502 error using the fastcgi script for nginx, check your /var/log/nginx/error.log file. If you see something that looks like this:

Then make sure you have this line in your php fastcgi_script:

That'll save you a whole lot of head scratching and googling.