the devmin quest

An alternative to google analytic : piwik

Olivier El Mekki — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 09:52:38 +0000

If you are a webmaster, the traffic analysis must be one of the most important tasks for you, just after the development itself. You certainly know google analytic, but nowadays, there is also an interesting alternative ( meaning : not totally outdated comparatively to analytic).

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How to get a clean html code when using the rails erb template system

Olivier El Mekki — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 14:35:12 +0000

That’s may be a minor issue, but I find it quite annoying to have the html code messed up by the few logic in the erb templates.

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safari on linux hangs when I enter an url

Olivier El Mekki — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 16:09:31 +0000

That’s because the needed fonts aren’t installed in your wine directory.

Winetricks is a good shell script to fix that. To fix, simply run, as a normal user :

wget  http://www.kegel.com/wine/winetricks

chmod +x winetricks

./winetricks corefonts

Note : I had to comment the line :

 *[23]) SOURCEFORGE=http://easynews.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge ;;

for it to work, but it may be a temporary problem.

Fast website update with SVN

Olivier El Mekki — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 13:10:10 +0000

If you manage websites on a remote dedicated server, you probably waste many time on transferring code from your local machine to the remote one. You can script some ftp transactions, but it’s somehow not really secure. You can use scp, but it can be a pain with the need for password.

What I’ll discuss here is an other method : using SVN. The main advantage is to update the site in a simple command, and to be able to revert modifications easily.

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new mail alert in bash prompt

Olivier El Mekki — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 17:22:27 +0000

Bash has a mailcheck feature supposed to warn you whenever you received a new mail. This use the $MAIL, $MAILCHECK and $MAILPATH environment variables. I had many problems with this. Most of the time, it only warns me on login, and sometimes not at all, making it quite unreliable.This article discusses a simple way to include a check for new mails directly in the bash prompt.

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link / alias tables in mysql

Olivier El Mekki — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 12:07:43 +0000

This article discusses the way to make a table point to another in mysql. (more…)

using a secure dynhost as a postfix trustee

Olivier El Mekki — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 16:45:25 +0000

In the two past posts, we saw how to setup a dynhost service and to secure it. If you’re a postfix user, you may like the “mynetworks” variable that lets you use postfix from a list of ip without needing any other identification. This, obviously, can’t work with a dynamic ip. I searched and asked for a while, but I just can’t find any way to use a domain name instead of an ip. So, this post discusses how to read the mynetworks value from a mysql table, and how to integrate this in secure_dynhost_server. (more…)

secure dyndns service with authentication server

Olivier El Mekki — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 14:54:05 +0000

In the last post, we saw how to setup a dyndns service with bind. This works well for webservices, in order to provide a domainname to users, but it has some security flows if you want to integrate a dynamic ip’d computer in a business network. The issue is about letting someone acquire your old ip when you disconnect, and thus being considered as a part of your network. In this post, we’ll discuss a method to build an authentication server upon ssl. (more…)

How to setup your own dynamic host (dyndns) server / service with bind

Olivier El Mekki — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 15:12:48 +0000

Today, many ISP provide their clients dynamic IP. This is a good security practice, as an attacker cannot tracks your system, and you simply have to reconnect to teleport you on the net. Anyway, that’s quite tricky if you want to include your personal system in a domain. This article discusses how to setup an dynamic host system that lets you change the IP a domain points to without needing to edit the config files of your nameserver each times. (more…)

Group ownership in object oriented programming

Olivier El Mekki — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 05:59:28 +0000

This post discusses the concept of ownership in oriented object programming, and more precisely, how to deal with instances shared by several instances of an other class. (more…)