☰ Setting up a VM based development system – Part 1

I recently set up a local development server running Ubuntu on VMware player. I thought it would be interesting to document the process and instructions so that it will be useful to others, and you can follow along / correct / improve this guide. On completion of this series you will end up with a complete LAMP local development system..

Installing Ubuntu

You will need:

Install VMware player (VMP). Restart the pc if necessary.

I’m installing the virtual machine on my USB harddisk, this way I can take my whole development with me on the go (home/work) – this is great because you only have to set all this up once, instead of on every machine you plan to use it on.

Start VMP and “Create a New Virtual Machine” and browse to the downloaded .iso. As part of the Easy Install Information write down the login:

username: __________ password: __________

Store the VM on your removable drive.

On the Specify Disk Capacity screen you will want to go higher than the recommended disk size, I chose double (40GB). Make sure you have enough free space available, check this before continueing. I went for double the recommended amount as I want to avoid to repartition later. Accept the other defaults and Ubuntu will start. Keep waiting as Easy Install is installing Ubuntu on your behalf.

If you are a chmod 777 user (jackpot settings), this is a great time to read up on file system permissions by reading the article series starting with “Linux File Permission Concepts” (click next in the summary, there are 5 articles in total): http://articles.slicehost.com/2010/7/17/linux-file-permission-concepts

After a restart the login screen appear and after a successful login you will see the desktop. Because we are going to install a bunch of software let’s make sure everything we already have is up to date. Start the update manager > Settings > Ubuntu Software > Other > Select Best Server. This will speed up downloads. Check again and install updates.

Time to read some more, btw have you created a new tag for all these bookmarks yet? When you are finished reading the above articles, here are some really good resources to read later:

You should now have a running Ubuntu system.

(Source: donationcoder.com)

May 9th, 2012 at 10:18 pm

☰ Link: Stop paying your jQuery tax

Speed up your jQuery powered site by moving scripts to the footer.

Turns out that pushing jQuery to the footer is quite easy for the common case. If all we want is a nice $.ready function that we have accessible everywhere we can explicitly define it without jQuery. Then we can pass the functions we capture to jQuery later on after it loads.

The big lesson learned is that we could avoided this whole problem if we started off with my proposed helper.

via Stop paying your jQuery tax.

February 17th, 2012 at 11:07 am

☰ Combining multiple Subversion repositories

This post describes a step by step guide on how to combine multiple Subversion repositories whilst keeping individual history (and commit messages).

Dumping

Exporting from pagefeedbacktool repository the /trunk/public folder and integrating that into the services repository under /trunk/public/pagefeedback:

Dump the repository including only /trunk/public as follows:

E:\Repositories\pagefeedbacktool>svnadmin dump .| svndumpfilter include --drop-empty-revs --renumber-revs trunk/public > ..\services\filtered.dump

Loading

However as pathnames are stored as part of the dump (and replacing the path with a texteditor corrupts the dump), we have to include the full path under a different parent directory:

In VisualSVN create a /trunk/public/pagefeedback/trunk/public folder structure (try without the final public if import fails) then load the dump as follows:

E:\Repositories\services>svnadmin load . --parent-dir "trunk/public/pagefeedback" < filtered.dump

The dump is successful but at the wrong path:

currently: /trunk/public/pagefeedback/trunk/public
should be: /trunk/public/pagefeedback/

Post-correction

Open two Windows Explorer windows with both paths side by side, select all the files that should be moved, then RIGHT click drag them to the destination folder and choose SVN Move versioned files here...

Commit from the repository root.

It is now safe to remove the trunk/public folders under /trunk/public/pagefeedback/

Commit again.

November 10th, 2011 at 3:30 pm

☰ Host Editor 7 – Hassle free host editing for Win7-XP

I was fedup with the poor experience of editing my host file, which is often needed when developing websites. So I quickly created an AutoHotkey script for the purpose.

15:03:50 – me: anyone knows a host editor app that works under windows 7
15:04:51 – me: fed up trying to first find the hosts file, then not being able to save because I again forgot to run notepad with admin privileges.

Download @ Host Editor 7 – Hassle free host editing for Win7-XP – DonationCoder.com.

July 18th, 2011 at 3:25 pm

☰ Hide Trackbacks – Hide ping- and trackbacks from your comments

Introducing Hide Trackbacks – You can have the benefits of track/ping backs (know when someone writes about posts) whilst keeping the comments clean and uncluttered.

After enabling the plugin, trackbacks and pingbacks are no longer shown on your posts and the comment count is updated correctly to reflect this. You can still access them via the admin panel. NOTE: Although the plugin officially requires WordPress 3.1.2 it might very well work on older WordPress versions (if it does please let me know).
Derived from original code created by  Honey Singh (used with permission of the author).

Installation is simple:

  1. Upload the `hide-trackbacks` directory to `/wp-content/plugins/`.
  2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.

Download link and information:
WordPress.org Hide Trackbacks

May 9th, 2011 at 2:23 pm