Updating PHP5 to PHP 5.3.9 on Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric

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Thanks to Ondřej Surý,  maintainer for some Debian packages, you can have the latest PHP5 maintained by Debian PKG PHP Team in Ubuntu Oneiric, Natty, Maverick and Lucid.

Currently it is the previous version 5.3.9, but that’s already a lot better than 5.3.6 (Official in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric). I did contact Ondřej to ask him for updating the Personal Package Archive to 5.3.10.

Personal Package Archives (PPA) allow you to upload Ubuntu source packages to be built and published as an apt repository by Launchpad.

Ondřej Surý’s Personal Package Archives (PPA) is located at https://launchpad.net/~ondrej/+archive/php5

Just run as root the following to use PHP 5.3.9

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ondrej/php5 
sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get upgrade

I did create an account at https://launchpad.net/~cedric-walter just in case I would like to build some packages for Ubuntu.

Install Munin Monitoring in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric with nginx

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Munin is a networked resource monitoring tool that can help analyze resource trends and "what just happened to kill our performance?" problems. It is designed to be very plug and play. A default installation provides a lot of graphs with almost no work.

In Norse mythology Hugin and Munin are the ravens of the god king Odin. They flew all over Midgard for him, seeing and remembering, and later telling him. "Munin" means "memory".

Read more: Install Munin Monitoring in Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric with nginx

A Swarm of Nano Quad rotors

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The General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Lab, located at the University of Pennsylvania, is already well known for its work with quad rotors. And now they can fly autonomously.

Experiments performed with a team of nano quad rotors at the GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania. Vehicles developed by KMel Robotics.

Search And Replace Within Zip Files with Regular Expressions

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There is a lot of shareware and freeware (jEdit, Notepad++) to do complex search and replacement in files but none is supporting these kind of operations in zip files spread across many subdirectories. Luckily Oxygen Editor can

• Do case sensitive or insensitive searches,
• Search and replace across multiple files in multiple subdirectories,
• Search and replace also in ZIP files,
• Advanced regular expression search/replace,
• Is free to evaluate for 30 days!

Use the Menu "Find" and select "Replace in Files" or use the shortcut CTRL+SHIFT+H

Oxygen can also create backup of every changed zip files,  as xxxxxxx.zip.bak as shown in the picture above.

Speed up your web pages by embedding images in CSS.

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Data URI scheme is a URI scheme that provides a way to include data in line in web pages as if they were external resources. [WikiPedia]

Why you may want to start embedding images in CSS ?

• It reduce the number of http requests: instead of 1+N HTTP requests (1 for aggregated CSS file and N for images) you'll get 1+1 requests (1 for aggregated CSS file and one for CSS file with all images), which gives you faster page loading and lower server load.
• CSS is cached by browsers and these images can be reused with a CSS selector/class (<li> are obvious candidate if they use images)
• Attention Internet Explorer 5 to Internet Explorer 7 do not support inline images!

NOTA: Drupal has a module “CSS Embedded Images” to automatize the inclusion of external images in CSS, while Joomla has nothing something that could be done in Joomla platform, in an extension like JFinalizer….or in the Gantry framework!

I did start looking at the code of “CSS Embedded Images” and I am trying to make it a class for Joomla 2.5

Read more: Speed up your web pages by embedding images in CSS.

Restrictive Iptables Based Firewall for Webserver script

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This script is working on all Linux standard distribution, but use at your own risk! The script has been made to automated the creation of iptables rules. There is an easy to use menu as well

root:~# ./firewall.sh
 Firewall script by www.waltercedric.com
  Credits to all various authors - GNU/GPL 3.0 Script
  Choose one of the following options:

[N]ew firewall rules
[C]lear all firewall rules
[T]est firewall rules
[S]ave firewall rules to /etc/network/iptables
[E]xit

Features

To use it, just edit the file firewall.sh and change the variables.

Read more: Restrictive Iptables Based Firewall for Webserver script