Mon 30 Jun 2008

Bye Bye Bill Gates

Posted by Abbas under People
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So finally Bill Gates has retired from his active role in Microsoft. It is unbelievable that he used to handle three positions which will now (rather from quite some time) be headed by :

CEO - Steve Ballmer
Chief Software Architect - Ray Ozzie
Chief of Research and Strategy - Craig Mundie

I am a Linux guy and don’t use/like Windows but i respect Bill Gates and like him a lot. No matter how much you criticize his products, company and policies but you cannot deny his role in brining a desktop computer to so many homes in the world. Without Windows personal computing would not have initiated at all.

Bye bye Mr.Bill Gates and all the best for your charity foundation.

 

Thu 24 Apr 2008

Google Summer of Code 2008

Posted by Abbas under Javascript, Open Source, PHP, Web Programming
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Coppermine Photo Gallery is again taking part as a mentoring organization in GSoC and i will be mentoring for coppermine organization for the second year straight in a row. It took us around a month to decide on project ideas and students.

Finally on April 21st 2008 the final student allocation list was published by google. I will be mentoring the project called AJAX functionality for core of Coppermine which will be done by Nuwan Sameera Hettiarachchi from Sri Lanka. After the completion of this project coppermine will be an Ajax rich application. Ofcourse every ajax functionality will gracefully degrade if javascript is not supported by the client browser. We intend to put following main features :

  • Filmstrip carousel
  • Ajax slideshow with transition effects
  • New upload form to reduce the number of steps required to upload files
  • Ajax sorting of pictures/albums/categories
  • And many more cool small features…

The coding period will start on May 26th and will last till August 18th 2008. I am really looking forward for a great summer of code ahead and hope that coppermine interface gets better with student contributions.

 

Sat 8 Mar 2008

Display in Fedora 8 fixed with ATI Radeon driver

Posted by Abbas under Linux
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Recently i installed Fedora 8 on my machine. All went smoothly and i was able to login to the improved KDE for the first time. But to my disappointment the display was all messed up. Poor colors, fonts etc.. This is what i did to fix it.

First i downloaded the display driver for my motherboard. My configuration was Linux x_86 (Fedora 8), Integrated/Motherboard and ATI Radeon Xpress 200 and i downloaded the driver from here.

The driver installation went on fine and i rebooted the system. But to my surprise that didn’t fixed the problem. After searching and browsing few forums i got the solution. You need to run following command after installing the driver

aticonfig –initial -f

And after restarting X, display got fixed.

 

Fri 28 Sep 2007

How page expires when pressing back on banking sites

Posted by Abbas under PHP, Web Programming
1 Comment

On many banking sites you will find that when back or refresh button is pressed the session expires and it shows you a custom page. Well below is a simple PHP code which will do the same. The code is very basic and illustrates just the logic.

Include the below given code in all your scripts.

PLAIN TEXT
PHP:
  1. // First make sure that the page is not cached
  2. header("Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate"); // HTTP/1.1
  3. header("Expires: Mon, 26 Jul 1997 05:00:00 GMT"); // Date in the past
  4.  
  5. // Start the session
  7.  
  8. // If there is a key in session and there is no key in GET then exit with error.
  9. if (isset($_SESSION['key']) && !isset($_GET['key'])) {
  10.   echo "SESSION expired";
  11.   exit;
  12. }
  13.  
  14. // If there is a key in GET then validate the key against the key stored in session
  15. if (isset($_GET['key']) && isset($_SESSION['key'])) {
  16.   // Compare the key passed with the one stored in session
  17.   if ($_GET['key'] != $_SESSION['key']) {
  18.     echo "SESSION expired";exit;
  19.   }
  20. }
  21.  
  22. // Generate a key for next page and store it in session.
  23. $next_key = md5(time());
  24. $_SESSION['key'] = $next_key;
  25.  
  26. // Now $next_key is the key which should be passed in all links
  27. // Something like <a href="second_page.php?key=$next_key">Secon page</a>
  28. // If no key is passed or invalid key is passed then session expire error will be shown

$next_key should be passed in the URL to all scripts.

 

Fri 28 Sep 2007

Upgraded to version 2.3

Posted by Abbas under Miscellaneous
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Today i upgraded this blog to wordpress version 2.3. I had a few difficulties in doing so but in the end i was able to do it.

Everybody - enjoy this wonderful open source application.

 

Wed 26 Sep 2007

Getting Married

Posted by Abbas under Personal
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Yes, you heard it right, i will be getting married on 14th Nov 2007. My would be wife's name is Tasneem and she is from the wonderful city of Hyderabad.

We first met in my cousin's wedding way back in Dec 2004. I am really excited and looking forward to spend the rest of my life with her. I will be busy for the next couple of months in preparations and other things.

 

Wed 26 Sep 2007

Mentoring in Google Summer of Code

Posted by Abbas under Open Source
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Its been very long since i wrote last time and yes i know it is too late to mention this (as GSoC is over) but i was damn busy with work and other things.

Anyways the news is that Coppermine Photo Gallery was one of the open source projects which participated in Google Summer of Code 2007 (GSoC). Four students were chosen to work on different aspects (enhancements) of cpg. I was mentoring one of the students, Sander Weyens. Being a mentor was a wonderful first time experience. I really liked the work done by Sander and other students. Thu Tu did a wonderful job in coordinating the whole program for coppermine. She is in the dev team and was also a mentor.

Google is organizing a mentor summit in Mountain View, California on 6th Oct-07 and Coppermine has been invited. Any three mentors from coppermine can attend the summit and Google will be giving $1200 as travel expenses (for non U.S mentors). I am being told by other Dev Team members (specially Thu) to attend the summit but because of work load and visa problems i cannot. Though i would have loved to go there and represent coppermine. Better luck next time ;).

 

Tue 22 Aug 2006

Problems faced while installing FC4 on Acer TravelMate 4152NLCi (4150 Series)

Posted by Abbas under Linux
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Recently I tried to install Fedora Core 4 on my brother's Acer TravelMate 4152NLCi Laptop, Installation went on smoothly, however I faced few problems when I started the laptop for first time after installation-

# Issue 1 - Start-up got stuck on PCMCIA service

When the laptop rebooted after the installation, the start up got stucked while initializing PCMCIA service. To overcome this I choose interactive start up and selected 'N' when asked for PCMCIA service . The laptop start up went on smoothly and for the first time I saw the login screen. After login the first thing I did was turned OFF the PCMCIA service from System Services.

# Issue 2 - No Sound

It detected the sound card correctly during installation, however I was not able to hear any sound when playing the Test Sound. I followed the instructions given here, but it didnt helped, then after searching the internet I got a major breathrough from this site. The only tweak I did to adjust, is to open the ALSA mixer and turn on external amplifier option (under Switches Tab in KMix). This worked magically for me and I was able to hear the sound then onwards.

There were no other major issues and FC4 is now working fine on Acer TravelMate 4152.

 

Fri 4 Aug 2006

Deleting folders recursively

Posted by Abbas under Linux
[2] Comments

Many a times we need to delete a particular folder which is present in every subfolder of the parent directory. One such situation is the subversion's working copy. The working copy of project which is in subversion contains .svn hidden folders. When moving the working copy to the webroot, we generally want to delete all the .svn folders as they take a lot of space.

Directories can be deleted recursively very easily in linux. To do so first go to the parent directory and then issue rm -rf `find . -type d -name .svn` command. This will delete all .svn folders from the parent as well as sub-directories. Replace .svn from the command as per your needs.

 

Mon 24 Jul 2006

Where to download Coppermine?

Posted by Abbas under Open Source
No Comments

Coppermine's development is done on sourceforge.net. Latest stable version of coppermine can be downloaded from the download page.

However there is no zip package available for Coppermine NG. You will need to check it out from the SVN repository. Coppermine NG is in early alpha stage and not meant for production servers. Currently only testers are using it. If you want to check out cpgNG and its cool features then follow the steps given below.

  1. If you don't have a SVN client then install it first. In most of the linux distros you get a command line utility.
  2. Then issue svn co https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/coppermine/trunk/cpgNGDevel /path/to/folder command.
  3. Above command will checkout the cpgNG files in /path/to/folder directory. Change this path as per your needs.

Now follow the normal installation procedure of coppermine and you are done.

 

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