Chris Jean :: Page 13

Flush DNS Cache in Ubuntu

As a web developer, I’m always having to work with DNS. Anyone who has dealt with DNS will tell you that caching is simultaneously a great thing and a horrible thing.

Today, I made a mistake with the IP address of a new host, and I needed to flush my DNS cache so that my machine would go and grab the new IP address. I hadn’t done this in Ubuntu before, so I had to figure it out. Fortunately, it’s really easy.

Load Terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal)
Type in the following:
sudo service networking restart
Press the Enter key
Put in your password

Done. Enjoy your newly flushed DNS cache.

Categories Linux, Tips 'n Tricks
Comments (4)

Pods for WordPress – Content Beyond Posts and Pages

Have you ever wanted to turn WordPress into a more powerful, CMS-style platform? The Pods plugin looks to be the first step toward achieving this goal.

In case you haven’t heard about Pods, here is a snippet from Pods’ site:

WordPress evolved.

Create more than just blog posts and pages. Add new content types with only the fields you need. Customize exactly how each content type’s list and detail pages appear. Automatic pagination, filtering, public forms and more are possible with the Pods CMS plugin.

Categories WordPress
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Week Two Running Ubuntu at the Office

As of today, it has been exactly two weeks since I started using Ubuntu as my OS at the office. Not only that, it’s been two weeks since my office computer (Dell Studio 17) has booted into Windows.

I left Windows on the system “just in case,” but much to my surprise, I haven’t needed it once. Running Ubuntu is different than running Windows, but it’s not any more difficult. In fact, Ubuntu is much more powerful and forgiving than Windows has been. I can work so much faster now that I’m running Ubuntu than I ever have been able to with Windows, and that’s without being able to use my favorite editor, Crimson Editor.

Categories Linux
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Firefox Titlebar Missing in Ubuntu

I just experienced a very odd behavior with Firefox on my system. Somehow, my titlebar had disappeared. I chose to ignore this as an odd glitch, figured it would go away when Firefox was restarted, and went about my work.

Eventually, it started to drive me nuts. Not only was the titlebar missing, but I could not resize Firefox, could not move Firefox, and it kept stealing focus from other applications and obscuring new windows.

Even at this point, I did not want to restart Firefox yet, so I kept just ignoring it. Then, Firefox froze entirely. It seems like I could still interact with Firefox via the keyboard (since the titles in the Window List panel kept changing), but the rendered image of Firefox never changed.

Restarting Firefox didn’t work. Restarting the system didn’t work. Changing from Emerald to Metacity (run “metacity –replace”) didn’t work. Uninstalling some new packages didn’t work. I was at a loss.

I settled back into just dealing with the problem, when I happened to accidentally switch Firefox to fullscreen (F11). Amazingly, when I switched back to normal, the problem went away.

So, the quick way to fix the problem of a missing titlebar in Firefox with Ubuntu (this problem may be present in other distros as well) is to switch to fullscreen and then back. Basically, you can press F11 twice to fix it.

Categories Linux, Tips 'n Tricks
Comments (14)

Adding SSL Support to Apache on CentOS

This is going to turn into another one of my “I love package management” posts. When I first starting managing Linux servers with Apache, adding a new module to Apache required going back to the source code, remembering the configure parameters you compiled Apache with last time, configuring Apache again with the same parameters plus whatever changes need to be made, compiling, testing, and then installing. It took hours. Now, it takes a few minutes to add something like mod_ssl support to Apache without having to compile anything.

Categories Linux, Tips 'n Tricks
Comments (2)

Auttomatic Releases WordPress Video Solution Framework Code

I didn’t see a lot of fanfare, but the release of the WordPress Video Solution Framework plugin, also called the WordPress.com Video Server, has the potential to be huge.

Some of you may wonder why I was interested in getting FFmpeg installed again. This is the reason why: Auttomatic has released code that makes it possible (with some work and knowhow) to turn a WordPress Mu platform into a video solution.

Features

Video-Uploader: A program that will load raw video files into the transcoder without making the user wait
Video-Transcoder
- Takes in raw video from the Uploader
- Transcodes the video into h.264
- Stores the video into an mp4 container
- Creates thumbnails
- Sends the files and meta data to the file server
Video-FinalTouch
- Receives files and data from the Transcoder
- Copies the files into the source video’s folder
- Updates the database tables with new video information
- Can be customized to replicate or load files into a CDN (Content Delivery Network)
Video-XML
- Reads in information from the video such as: caption, duration, and format
- Returns this information in XML format
- Caches information to ensure quick performance
Video-AJAX: Displays the video when the transcoder has not completed processing the raw video data
Includes a player written in ActionScript 3 that will handle proper display of the video based upon your configuration

Final Thoughts

The notes indicate that at least some work must be done in order to make everything function. Since I have yet to try everything out yet, I don’t know exactly how much work that would be. I’ll be sure to post about my experiences and hopefully have some examples soon.

The notes also indicate that you’ll need to have a working install of FFmpeg and qt-faststart (the readme.txt file says qu-faststart, but it’s actually qt-faststart). To install FFmpeg, see Install FFmpeg and ffmpeg-php on CentOS Easily.

Categories Development, WordPress
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Install FFmpeg and ffmpeg-php on CentOS Easily

FFmpeg is an amazing collection of open-source tools that can record and stream video and audio. However, it can also transcode video and audio (convert the files to different formats), and that is what has me so excited. There’s also a great PHP package called ffmpeg-php that allows for easy use of FFmpeg from inside PHP scripts. Today, I’m going to see if I can’t help you get both of these set up on your system.

Admittedly, it’s been a while since I’ve tried to install FFmpeg, about two years. I recently thought up some ideas on how I’d like to use FFmpeg, so I thought it was time to give it a try yet again. Today, I’m proud to say that installing FFmpeg is so much easier to install compared to the past, that I dare say it’s simple.

Here is my experience with installing FFmpeg on my server and how to fix the pitfalls that I encountered.

Categories Development, Linux, Tips 'n Tricks
Comments (55)

Convert XML to Associative Array in PHP

I’m working on a project where I needed to convert an XML doc into an associative array in PHP easily. I hadn’t done any work with XML in PHP yet, so I started digging around the usual places.

Soon, it looked like my best option would be to create a completely-custom XML parsing engine out of PHP’s built-in XML Parser. I started working on a set of code based off of the External Entity Example since that is the only example that actually incorporates the ability to retrieve data and not just attributes. My results were slow and very error prone. Why is this so tough? XML isn’t exactly new, and it is very widespread. Similarly, PHP is an extremely popular language. So, why is it so hard to combine the two and work with them easily? I shouldn’t have to create a custom syntax parser just to be able to read a standard format document into a PHP data structure.

Categories Development
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Eversion is a Great Platformer

I stumbled on a great game the other day called Eversion. At first this game seems to be a simple, cutesy platformer, but it holds a great twist that starts simple and gets weirder and weirder.

I really don’t want to give anything away, so I just recommend that you give it a try. A bit of advice should be helpful though, the spacebar does something, but only in certain locations.

I wish you the best of luck as Eversion is not an easy platformer.

Categories Random Ramblings
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Cleaning a Computer: A Story of Smoke, Viruses, and Love

image from New Life Service Co.

I got an emergency call from a friend yesterday. His computer was totally eaten up by viruses and couldn’t function anymore. He’s a writer and doesn’t do backups, so he was naturally very afraid that he would lose the book drafts that he’s been working on.

I brought him and his ailing computer over to my place to give it some TLC and get it back in fighting condition. This system, Raine, is special to me as it was the second computer I built. That was way back in 2002, and when I cracked the case, horror itself greeted me. I could see that I had a long night ahead of me.

Categories Random Ramblings, Tips 'n Tricks
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