Programming, Online Community, Web 2.0 and Sri Lanka
My primary editor is Eclipse, EasyEclipse for PHP flavor to be exact. I usually open another few Windows Explorer windows to move files around.
Today out of shear laziness I dragged a file from Eclipse Navigator to my open WinSCP tab in the task bar and into the remote site. It worked! That's my tip.
Just found FireShot a cool Firefox extension. You can take screen shots of web pages, annotate it and do much more. Should be very useful for sending feedback to a web designer etc.
From the developers:
FireShot is a Firefox extension that creates screenshots of web pages. Unlike other extensions, this plugin provides a set of editing and annotation tools, which let users quickly modify captures and insert text and graphical annotations. Such functionality will be especially useful for web designers, testers and content reviewers. It's possible to choose whether entire web page or only visible part of this page should be captured. Screenshots can be uploaded to server, saved to disk (PNG, JPEG, BMP), copied to clipboard, e-mailed and sent to external editor for further processing.
Adds the ability to take a screenshot of web page (entire of visible part), edit it, add annotations and upload to server, save (PNG, JPEG, BMP), copy to clipboard, send to external editor or e-mail it.
I'm trying out Git. Its a distributed version control system originally written by Linus Torvalds. I also looked at SVK and Mercurial but settled with Git since it's commands made more sense to me.
I was happy with Subversion since 2004. Working alone with my notebook and client servers it has been very useful. Now the problem is I have too many workstations, servers, repositories and checkouts lying around I have to check where my latest code is before I start on any project.
I tried moving them to 2 online servers and checking out from there. But its slow and when I loose power or without an Internet connection I'm stuck.
Git might help me. When I'm done working on a project I should be able to commit locally and also sync a remote repository when I'm online. That way when I'm on another pc I can pull from a remote repository and start working.
All this is speculation at this point I will report back if it works as planned. If not I'm sticking with Subversion. 
Being on Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon I tried a aptitude search to see if I can install it.
aptitude search git
I thought I found it and installed the git package. I was wrong. You have to install the git-core package to get git.
sudo aptitude install git-core
And if your like and have some Subversion repositories to import you need to also install git-svn.
sudo aptitude install git-svn
Now to import a Subversion repository create a new directory for your git workspace and run something like this.
git-svnimport -v http://path.to.your/repo/
Check out this tutorial introduction to git.
Summery
In brief if you have new ssh client and server applications on 2 clean systems, you should be able to authenticate yourself using these 2 commands.
ssh-keygen
ssh-copy-id user@server
Once you are authenticated you can hop around computers more easily and run unattended tasks like backups without passing passwords around.
Background
We just got a few more servers at work bringing the total up to 8. About 6 have similar login accounts so life is a bit easier, then again for the number of times you have to login to 8 servers a day typing passwords can be a pain.
When passwords are too short they are not secure enough, too long and you can't remember them. So key exchange to the rescue. Basically you generate a pair of keys on your computer and add your public key to each of the servers you want to login without passwords.
I read a few guides about this and it worked for a while. Somewhere down the line the new servers refused to authenticate my keys. So I cleaned up and started from scratch.
Continue reading 'Easy Passwordless Shell Logins'
Sri Lankans are not known to keeping to the right time, but at least you can try to keep your computers so.
On Windows XP if you double click on the clock in the task bar you will get a dialog that has a "Internet Time" tab. Both time servers in this screen was not working for me.
I changed it to time-a.nist.gov from this list of the Simple Network Time Protocol (SNTP) time servers that are available on the Internet. It seems my work computer was a few minutes off.
On Ubuntu you can find these settings under the menus System -> Administration -> Time and Date. You can change the Configuration to Keep synchronized with internet servers, and add servers from the Time servers.
Update: Looks like Redmond has noticed Sri Lanka's current time zone.
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