Archive for the ‘Tech’ Category

Snapz really annoys me because I paid money for what is supposed to be the best product out there, but it’s actually incredibly hard to use because every time I want to take a screen shot I have to google for the shortcut key. By default, it’s this.

Cmd + Shift + 3

I always knew that one day I would be able to prove it! While trawling through my old websites, I came across a website that is essentially FaceMash. Now, where do I write off to, to get my money?

Quick command for listing locally modified CVS files.

cvs -Q status | grep -i locally

If you are using Flex Builder on Windows, you may run into an error where Flex Builder says it is unable to find the executable for Flash Player. The error will look something like the one below.

Flash Builder cannot locate the required version of Adobe Flash Player. You might need to install the FLash Player or reinstall Flash Builder.

Do you want to try and run your application with the current version?

This will give you an attempt to continue dialog with a yes or no option. If you click yes then you would get another error similar to the following.

Cannot run program "C:\Users\chris\Desktop\flashplayer_11_sa_debug_32bit.exe": CreateProcess error=2, The System cannot find the file specified

You can fix this by following the steps below.

1. Go to the Adobe website and download the standalone Flash Player Debugger edition.

2. Open up Notepad and insert some text (literally, anything).

3. Save the file as dummy.swf on your Desktop.

4. Open your Desktop and right click on the file. Select “open with…”

5. Browse to the location of the Flash Debugger you downloaded and select it, making sure to tick the “always open these types of file” option.

From now on, you should be able to run the application from Flash Builder.

Over the years, the Worfolk Online network has run a lot of technical websites. Dozens and dozens of them. Each one had a selection of interesting and useful content, which for one reason or anther has since been closed down.

So, we decided to rescue them.

The result is that we’re currently working on importing articles from a number of old websites from our network.

It’s stretching our remit a little further than we already do – most of the articles are about web development and programming, but we thought it would be better to put them on here then for them to be lost forever – though that’s probably a big claim given how old the content is in some of them – it’s things we haven’t been doing for a decade!

Never the less, you may notice that our archives now date back to before the site was even founded in 2005. This is as a result of the new content we have brought on board and with articles dating back to 2002, we are now pulling together resources from the past decade!

Need to uncompress a .tar.gz file from the terminal? No problem.

tar xvzf filename.tar.gz

Hello everyone! I just wanted to post a quick update on what the status of the site was now.

We first acquired Hardware Tutorials back in 2005, but since then there hasn’t been much content added to it – and indeed the content that was posted back then wasn’t exactly amazing quality. But for prosperity sake, we have kept it.

Never the less, it has always been an ambition to develop the site further and one thing I constantly find myself doing at work is googling for solutions to problems, usually when I’m trying to install something, usually on CentOS. Though that isn’t to say I don’t have my fair share of problems dealing with OS X, Windows 7 and Fedora too.

Rather than just leaving the solutions I eventually find for these problems, Hardware Tutorials seems a reasonably appropriate place to post such solutions – a lot of it isn’t strictly hardware, but as I said in my opening post six years ago, we would almost certainly be straying from that criteria anyway.

So please enjoy the new and updated Hardware Tutorials. Hopefully, you will be seeing a lot more regularly updated content from now on.

Following on from my previous post about installing Git on CentOS 4, CentOS 5 is a whole different story. This is because you actually can get the RPM for Git on Cent OS – but cPanel doesn’t make it quite easy enough to do it.

You see, cPanel likes to take control of a lot of it’s own stuff, so it has a long list of packages which it won’t update automatically, because it will end up breaking itself if it does. As Git has two dependencies from the Perl libraries, this causes a problem.

But we can easily fix that.

cd /etc/
vim yum.conf

Remove perl* from the exclude line, then save the file. Now you should be able to run the command.

yum install git

It will gather all the dependencies and install Git. Final step, go back into the YUM configuration and put the exclude pack in to protect cPanel from its malevolent self.

vim yum.conf

If you’re trying to install Git on CentOS with cPanel, you’ll probably be running into the problems where you can’t get hold the RPM because cPanel excludes all Perl modules. But that is a whole different problem to if you are running CentOS 4.

CentOS 4 doesn’t actually have the RPMs for Git at all. But luckily, it’s actually really easy to install on a cPanel server because cPanel should come will all the dependencies you need.

So, all you need to do is head over to the Git website, download the latest source (I tried it with v1.7.8.1) and compile it – no problems, no worries.

wget http://git-core.googlecode.com/files/git-1.7.8.1.tar.gz
tar xvzf git-1.7.8.1.tar.gz
cd git-1.7.8.1
./configure
make
make install

Eight years ago, I was outgrowing my current hosting package, and needed to find pastures new. So I headed over to a web hosting forum and found a post about a company named Real Value Hosting. They seemed to have everything I needed, and a reasonable price, so I decided to give them a go and sign up.

Little did I know at the time, but I was actually their second customer to sign up!

Eight years later and I’m still a happy customer. There have been a few glitches over the years as you would expect with any host, but overall I am more than satisfied and their support response times have always been reasonably quick and consistent, which is probably the biggest concern when selecting a hosting company.

As I’ve now migrated my entire online portfolio onto the LAMP stack, I’ve recently retired my reseller account with them, but I would highly recommend it to those looking for a Windows hosting provider.