Thanks to Lucas Gonze and Starfrosch I’m currently enjoying a great minimal(?) techno mix of various netlabel artists called ‘Klänge der Nacht Vol.3′ by Tom Larson. Nice side effect is that this also pointed me in the direction of an interesting looking DJ sets website named Mixotic.

Enjoy ze musica!

Just a quick note:

Using a MSI S271 Laptop with Ubuntu (32-bit) needs the following kernel parameter to make ACPI work:

hpet=disabled

I never got around blogging this, but after cleaning up my harddrive I came across this screenshot of the NRC Next blog’s html code.

It states that NRC Next uses Wordpress as the technology behind the blog. Pretty cool to see Wordpress being used by one of the major Dutch newspapers.

I also use Wordpress (and Wordpress Mu) a lot for my clients and I also have created some custom plugins of which some will be released as open source plugins anytime soon now.

A quick tip for those that need to access less protected websites also know as websites without the possibility of secure http or commonly known https.

If you’re at a conference it’s really easy for somebody to eavesdrop on all the traffic going over the line. Especially as most conference nowadays have wireless networks for all participants which makes it even easier to do. The only thing you need is a laptop and a packet sniffer. This means that if you would access your blog without encrypting the connection anyone can ’see’ what you are doing. Worse, enter your credentials and these will go over the network in the clear. In other words: anyone listening in can grab your credentials and has access to your blog.

By using an SSH tunnel we can make it a bit more safer although it would be better to use https, because you are only protecting the connection from your local machine to the SSH receiver which forwards the request and makes a NON-encrypted connection to the requested webpage using http.

In order to create a SSH tunnel you’ll need a server to which your local machine can connect and which will forward your requests and act as a proxy server.In this example I want to browse more safely using Firefox.

1. Open a Terminal
2. Type the following (N means we only want to tunnel and no shell, 1080 is the local port, username is your username on the server, server is the computer which will act as your proxy server):
   
   ssh -N -D 1080 username@server

3. Open Firefox and go to Preferences->Advanced
   
4. Select the Connection Settings
5. Change the settings to: Manual Proxy Configuration, select SOCKS v5 and enter the following settings:

   SOCKS host: localhost
   Port: 1080
   No proxy for: localhost, 127.0.0.1

   

6. Press Ok
7. Your ready to use your SSH tunnel to browse the web using Firefox.

If you would like to make the ssh tunnel to become a background process you can press CTRL-Z within the terminal and the process will be put into the background. You can retrieve it using the fg (foreground command).

If you want to make sure it works, you can quit the tunnel by pressing CTRL-C while the tunnel is in the foreground and try to browse. If you cannot connect, create the tunnel (steps 1, 2 and 3) and try again. Now it should work again. Off course you can also check which ip address is being used. This should be the same as the server to which you connect your tunnel aka the proxy server.

Thanks to Asheesh for help with this!

Just two time-saving and structured working tips for OS X:

How to set the preferred screenshot location while using the excellent built in screenshot utility of OS X (source)

1. Create the folder in which you want the screen captures to be saved in the location of your choice.
2. Open a Terminal window and type this:

   defaults write com.apple.screencapture location /Full/Path/To/Folder

3. Log out and log back in, and the change will have taken effect.

How to set the preferred location for pdf downloads when you actually choose to directly view it with Preview (source)

To redirect the PDF download to a specific location, launch Safari and open its Preferences panel, click on General, and set the ‘Save downloaded files to’ selection box to the spot where you’d like those PDFs to land.

Thanks to macosxhints.com!

Just came across this website and it’s slogan is hilarious and sad at the same time:

A sign of the times?

I just hope he didn’t had to do this because some ignorant people would assume a not-so Western sounding Middle Eastern name equals terrorist….that would be truly sad

Then use this ‘magic’ key combination to change the whole interface into a high contrast black and white version. Press these keys together (note the dash is only there to make this combination more readable):

CTRL-ALT-COMMAND -8

Very useful if you happen to sit in a train and need to do some work while the sun is shining.
If you want to change it back just use the same combination. I wonder if Ubuntu has something similar?

I just stumbled upon this nice little tool to translate from/to Arabic and English. Apparently my name spelled in Arabic is: بجورن

Can any Arabic speaking person tell me if this بجورن really means Bjorn?

Update: two people confirmed that it indeed says Bjorn. Thanks  Amanda and Reem! And for those looking to have their name in Arabic. Check out Reem’s blog at http://www.mynameinarabic.blogspot.com/

Quick guide to installing Xdebug on OS X with php5.2 (installed using macports) and apache2 (also installed using macports).

1. Open up a terminal (personally I like iTerm more than Apple’s Terminal, but any terminal application will do fine). The default terminal program can be found in Applications->Utilities->Terminal.app.
2. Type the following: sudo pecl install xdebug-beta. This should download, compile and install the xdebug extension
3. Add the following line to your php.ini: zend_extension=”/opt/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613/xdebug.so”

Just a few sidenotes:

- I could not set the php.ini path in pecl.
Somehow sudo pecl config-set php_ini /opt/local/etc/php.ini gave me “config-set (php_ini, /opt/local/etc/php.ini, user) failed, channel pecl.php.net” So I manually added the extension path (point 3) to the php.ini file.

- My php.ini file could be found here: /opt/local/etc/php.ini

- Don’t forget to include the full path to the xdebug extension. Do not use the extension_dir option in the php.ini as this does not seem to work. I learned this the hard way when I could not get the extension to load and saw these error messages appearing in the Apache2 log: Failed loading xdebug.so: (null)

- In order to check if the extension was succesfully loaded, create a file with the contents here below:

<?php

phpinfo();

?>

Save the file as info.php in your webdirectory and navigate to this file using the browser. Now you should see the phpinfo overview and Xdebug should be part of it. If you don’t see Xdebug, then check your Apache error logs (path to my apache logs: /opt/local/apache2/logs/) to see what went wrong.

The Dutch critic/comedian Wim de Bie apperantly made a song about updating Windows. I never heard about until today. I couldn’t stop laughing when I listened to it. Really funny in a geeky way. Too bad his blog does not support permalinks otherwise I could have linked to it directly, but now I’ve copied the text of the song verbatim:

Er zit een lek in m’n windows,
m’n windows, m’n windows
Er zit een lek in m’n windows
M’n windows is lek.

Ze sturen een update
een update, een update
Ze sturen een update
maar het helpt ons geen reet.

Enzovoorts.

Everybody, sing along:

Het Bieslogkoor zingt: ‘Er zit een lek in m’n windows!’
(Note: annoying Real stream no download )