Articles 51 to 60

Twitter Bootstrap is a great front-end framework. It makes it not only easy but also rather fast to deploy a new website / web application with a consistent and well-tested style.

Even though the creators of the framework have left Twitter recently, one thing is for sure: the framework will continue to live on. With new releases going live on a regular basis, it might sometimes be confusing to find the appropriate documentation.

One could obviously update his / her website / application as soon as a new release shows up, but unfortunately, some changes might need some refactoring and therefore be time consuming. It is therefore important to be able to access documentation from previous version of the framework.

Well, that’s where BootstrapDocs comes in. All documentation from past versions of Twitter Bootstrap are accessible from there, in one place.

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Developing web applications often requires emails to be sent out, whether it is during the registration process, for newsletters or for some events notifications.

When the application is live, there are plenty of options to send the email:

• simple sendmail application
• connection to a SMTP server
• connection to a SMTP application (web application allowing to track emails that have been sent)

However, when one uses any of this option in a development environment, the inbox might become quickly spammed with test emails. Even worse if using a QA environment that has production data, there is a risk that some emails are actually sent to the original user by mistake. Not the best move towards your customers…

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Before getting rid of a server, I needed a quick and efficient way to wipe some of the data that we had on the disk. Fortunately, this functionality is built in into Linux¹ so a quick search on Google provides the necessary command:

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While writing a report recently, I needed to be able to illustrate some concepts in order to make them more understandable for the reader. In order to do that, I decided to look for a flowchart software that could help me achieve this. At the time of writing, the main functionalities that I was looking for were the availability to use network cliparts, the price (free was better in this case since it was for a punctual use) and finally the design of the application. The following review is just the tip of the iceberg of what is available out there. It is by no mean an exhaustive review and probably only focuses on what my needs were at the time of writing.

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Since I have been using SSH extensively lately, I have discovered a few commands / options that have allowed me to be more efficient while using it. This is nothing really new for command lines gurus, but since I might eventually forget them, I write it down here so that I can get back to it later if needed.

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Consider this simple scenario:

• You have a computer / server / NAS / … at the office behind a firewall
• The firewall is configured so that you are allowed to access the machine using SSH
• The machine has services available on different other ports (but they are not accessible from the outside since only the SSH port is open)

Now, how can one access those different services that are accessible on ports blocked by the firewall?

A quite easy way (once you know the command), is to use SSH tunneling. To put it simply, it will allow to map the ports from the remote server that are not accessible to a local port of your computer.

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In order to have a work calendar that can be used in different devices (laptop, phone, …), I have set up an ICS calendar on a WebDAV host. This allows the calendar to be accessible from an online location (both readable and writable) and can therefore be used, in my case, both on my phone (Android) and on my laptop (Thunderbird).

The ICS calendar is hosted on a shared host (in this case Hostgator), and for the next step, I assume that your hosting is using CPanel.

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In the past two weeks, I have been sharing the same Skype tip a couple of time. I thought it might be interesting to have it in written somewhere so that maybe additional people get to learn it.

One of the great thing that Skype chat allows is editing messages that you have written. It is quite convenient when one makes an error while typing and wants to correct it. It can also be used to completely delete the message (if you wrote to the wrong person for instance).

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Backup Strategy

And here we are: another article about backups. After some setup to back up gmail on a Synology drive, here is another article to continue on our backup strategy.

In this article, we will backup the files and database(s) on a web server that is on a shared hosting plan (in this specific case, hosted on Hostgator). There are usually two different possible approaches to backup files:

1. Archive the file (zip, tar, gzip, …) and download the archive,
2. Mirror the folder containing the files

Considering that there are some files I am not interesting in backing up on my webserver, I will go for the first solution so that I can white list what I am interested in and create an archive containing only the files that I want to back up. It should be possible to do that with the mirror strategy as well, but I didn’t have much time to investigate the matter.

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Following an update of Ubuntu during which I simply formatted the system partition, I lost all the printers that were previously configured on my computer.

Based on what I read on different blog posts and forums, adding a printer from Unity is quite straightforward. Unfortunately for me, I am getting used to Gnome and have decided to have it as my main window manager and it seems that some of the tools working in Unity do not function properly under Gnome.

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