Archive for the ‘I|T’ Category

Google Apps Premier federated login with PHP

Monday, February 1st, 2010

Google supports OpenID authentication or behaves as openid identity provider, using Google Apps accounts. Basically it means, user can use GA credentials to sign in into different services. This is especially useful for companies to unite other internal services with Google Apps single sign-in point. This is related to Standard edition as well.

I have got it working for PHP. Here is the story.

(more…)

SOCKS proxy server with SSH

Thursday, November 26th, 2009

SSH protocol and openssh are full of features. It is not just remote terminal program.

You probably know about static port forwarding, local and remote. It allows to map local port to any host via SSH gateway or map incoming port on SSH gateway to local one. It is very useful in some situations. But what is dynamic port forwarding ?

(more…)

SPDY – new revolution from Google ?

Monday, November 16th, 2009

Recently, everybody heard the latest news from Google about new protocol which can speedup and make more comfortable internet surfing.

If not, better to read official white paper.  It is called “SPDY”, another endless attempt to fix this world.

But will Google make something that won’t have big chances to succeed ? I did not think so.

This protocol affect server side(web server) and client side(browser). To deploy it well both parts need to be changed. That is almost impossible in Internet reality. Many improvements to Internet were developed recently, including ones to improve email, fighting spam, etc… Where are they ? Penetration is not more than 5-10%.

Think again about Google.

They have their own browser, which is not so poplar as other leaders, but it is well designed, stable, fast and gained his part or market. For sure Google will add support of this protocol for their Google Chrome browser. It is matter of several months.

Do not forget, Google is biggest content/service provider on the net, that means – all web servers are under their control. Sure they will add support of SPDY to web server part.

Very soon, users who use Google Chrome and Google Mail|Docs|Wave services will experience much better performance of these apps. Even now I prefer Chrome for Gmail and Docs. This will lead to increased popularity of Chrome.

Will Mozilla stay aside ? I don’t think so. Will Apache stay aside ? I don’t think so.

Google+Mozilla+Apache and revolution is almost over.

Links

Greasemonkey for developers

Sunday, November 8th, 2009

If you are Mozilla Firefox user you probably know what are addons and use some of them to make surf  life more comfortable.

This article is about GreaseMonkey addon. I’d like to introduce  it mostly for developers and want to share my knowledge cause I was surprised by its power, simplicity and functionality.

I tried to gather all useful technics, code snippets and documentation in one place to make it a good start page.

(more…)

Does OpenOffice sucks ?

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

OpenOffice project celebrates 100 million downloads since version 3.0

Just over one year after the release of OpenOffice 3.0, OpenOffice.org (OOo) project developer Joost Andrae has announced that the free office suite has been downloaded more than one hundred million times since the launch of version 3.0. Read full story here

Yes, it still sucks, unlucky OO. It is still slow, not user friendly, not compatible with MS Office. But this is not what I am about.

It has nice batch processing features which no competitors have. About them I want to tell today.

(more…)

Mozilla Firefox user profile

Monday, October 26th, 2009

Once I heard weird story. A man was playing some web MMRPG game. Most of these games prohibit multiplayer and you know why :) Game site checks this by setting cookie to browser and when you logout and login with another char it tracks this.

What was the solution ? Most simple one, he installed all versions of browser he found on the Internet(IE,FF,Chrome,Safari, etc). That was weird, but it worked.

I want to tell about much simplier way of doing thia based on Mozilla Firefox profiles.

(more…)

Download google map, save as image

Friday, October 16th, 2009

Once I faced with task to download some area of Google maps…  At first I tried to glue some downloaded google maps images together manually, but gave up very soon. After googling on the Internet, I found this video:

http://www.wipeout44.com/video/misc/google_maps_large.asp

how to downloan google map. I got the point.

Inspired by this, I decided to dive in GMap API… By using some sample I wrote simple script, that handles most part of this process automatically.. You just need to select intrested region, zoom, map type and wait :)

Method used is the same as in video, it loads selected region in one big viewport and after it is loaded, converts it into Canvas, which can be saved as .PNG image.

Feel free to try it:

Grab Google Map Region

Samba – file audit trail with full_audit

Friday, October 16th, 2009
File server auditing is a must have process for all companies that
rely on file servers to store their critical data and applications.
Malicious and accidental modifications to files, permissions, file
sharing settings can severely impact your organization.

(C) Somewhere on the Internet.

I can not disagree with it :) I have no such goals, file audit is just another line of protection from users, who like to yell “WHERE IS MY LITTLE AND VERY IMPORTANT FILE ???”. In this article I will tell how I setup file audit on linux file server.

(more…)

OpenOffice BASIC Programmes guide in CHM

Saturday, October 10th, 2009

Once I had to write some code in OpenOffice BASIC, and found out how difficult is to get information on this. I wanted a book, like a handbook on all these language and API  stuff, and I did not find it. So I decided to make my own CHM file, which is based on OpenOffice wiki. Now I can take it while offline and it is still useful :)

(more…)