My “Must Have” utilities on Ubuntu
My OS of choice is Ubuntu and there are a few "Must Have" utilities on Ubuntu I usually install straight away. Here’s a list of the ones I use the most.
From left to right these are:
Shutter
Shutter is a feature-rich screenshot program. You can take a screenshot of a specific area, window, your whole screen, or even of a website – apply different effects to it, draw on it to highlight points, and then upload to an image hosting site, all within one window. .
Autokey
AutoKey is a desktop automation utility for Linux and X11. It allows you to manage collection of scripts and phrases, and assign abbreviations and hotkeys to these. This allows you to execute a script or insert text on demand in whatever program you are using.
Pidgin
Pidgin is a chat program which lets you log in to accounts on multiple chat networks simultaneously. This means that you can be chatting with friends on MSN, talking to a friend on Google Talk, and sitting in a Yahoo chat room all at the same time.
Pidgin runs on Windows, Linux, and other UNIX operating system
Gnome Do
GNOME Do allows you to quickly search for many items present on your desktop or the web, and perform useful actions on those items.
GNOME Do is inspired by Quicksilver & GNOME Launch Box.
Parcellite
http://parcellite.sourceforge.net/
Parcellite is a lightweight GTK+ clipboard manager. This is a stripped down, basic-features-only clipboard manager with a small memory footprint for those who like simplicity.
Tomboy
http://projects.gnome.org/tomboy/?pagewanted=all
Tomboy is a desktop note-taking application for Linux, Unix, Windows, and Mac OS X. Simple and easy to use, but with potential to help you organize the ideas and information you deal with every day.
Dropbox
Dropbox is a free service that lets you bring your photos, docs, and videos anywhere and share them easily. Never email yourself a file again!
Test SMTP with a dummy Server in Python
Today I came across a need to test SMTP outgoing emails from the web application I was working on. I was working on a simple forgotten password form that sent a password reset url to the registered user’s email address. I didn’t need to test that the email [...] Continue Reading…
APC is a great tool for caching in PHP and once installed it is very easy to use. However, what do you do about viewing the PHP APC cache in Ubuntu? Well, there is a fantastic PHP page provided by APC that allows you to inspect the cache [...] Continue Reading…
What I want from an IM Client
I’ve been ‘struggling’ to find the ultimate IM Client on my Ubuntu setup. Some do most things but there is usually some functionality missing. Here’s the list of what I want from an IM Client:Multiple Accounts (Hotmail/Windows Live, Google, Jabber)Chat rooms (Jabber)Bring chat to front when new message [...] Continue Reading…
Debugging your vimrc
I made some changes to my ~/.vimrc file that didn’t seem to work and so I needed to see what was happening when vim loaded my ~/.vimrc file.
To do this you need to tell vim to log it’s output to a logfile:
andrew@andrew$ vim -V9vim.log myfile
This will then create a [...] Continue Reading…
I just came across something that made me wonder wether a PHP object uses the magic __get() and __set() methods inside the object itself. I wrote the following code to test:
Here are 10 things you shouldn’t do as a wordpress plugin developer:
ini_set(‘memory_limit’,’16M’);
ini_set(‘memory_limit’, ’32M’);
ini_set(‘memory_limit’, ’64M’);
ini_set(‘memory_limit’, ’128M’);
ini_set(‘memory_limit’, ’256M’);
ini_set(‘memory_limit’, ’512M’);
ini_set(‘memory_limit’, ’1024M’);
ini_set(‘memory_limit’, ’2048M);
php_value memory_limit 64M
php_value memory_limit 128M
Quite simply, don’t blindly allocate RAM to a process without checking if the system can have it. A server we deployed recently had 512mb of RAM and [...] Continue Reading…
If you host a WordPress site and have enabled writeable permissions on any of the folders it is recommended that you disable PHP execution on these folders. If you are running Apache you can do this in the VirtualHosts file as follows:
php_admin_flag engine off
[...] Continue Reading…
Here’s the ‘book’ I’m currently reading on my Kindle:
Amazon Link (£0.00 via Amazon)
It is the distant future and one man, Jonas Valent, is letting his life slip by. He is employed by Freeground station as a port traffic controller, a job he took after completing a tour in the military. [...] Continue Reading…
I have a need in a bash shell to get the public ipaddress of a domain name. Here’s how to achieve it:
andrew@andrew:~$ dig +short A www.euperia.com
193.228.155.183
Cool huh?
