Turn Your Box into a Dev Web Server

To turn your box into a dev web server is pretty simple, yet I’ve seen people struggling with this over and over again, so here’s a simple TODO list.

I won’t go over the likes of Apache installation, VirtualHost setup, .htaccess settings, etc. as you can find these online very easily, and might be specific to the needs of your project.

Most of the time I see people using localhost:8080 and a myriad of other ports to work on several sites locally; but you might as well work on http://www.myproject.com locally in just 2 simple steps:

• Create a VirtualHost in Apache which goes by “the name” http://www.myproject.com, by including the following within the definition:

  <VirtualHost *:80>
      ServerName www.myproject.com
      DocumentRoot /var/www/myproject/
      # all the other options and definitions ...
  </VirtualHost>

• “Register” the domain name locally – simply add the following line to your /etc/hosts file (on Windows, this file is typically located under [Windows]/System32/Drivers/etc):

  127.0.0.1    www.myproject.com

Now enable the VHost in Apache, restart Apache, and open http://www.myproject.com in the browser, and you’re ready to code off!

Note: The VHost name need not be a valid domain name – feel free to use myproject as ServerName and in /etc/hosts; just beware that some browsers will try to search for “myproject” instead of opening the local site. In such case, type in the whole http://myproject.

PHP+MySQL and Unicode/UTF-8

Most of the wide-spread languages support Unicode and/or UTF-8 at least in some form; post-2K languages support Unicode quite commonly, but there are always few things to look after.

How to Setup SVN Server on Shared Hosting

You’ve got a hosting, neat… a shared one. Now it’d be cool if you could move your subversion repositories there also. But, you can’t just daemonize svnserve or enable webdav in Apache.

SSH is the solution for you. SVN+SSH to be precise. The setup and configuration is pretty straight-forward, but there are quite a few glitches along the way.

All you’ll need for this is SSH access to the server and basic experience with the shell.

Hope this guide will help you: Setup a SVN Server on a Shared Hosting – it took me some time to get over all problems, I hope it’ll save some time to you!

Migrating from VMWare to VirtualBox

After years of using VMWare, I suddenly had to migrate to VirtualBox; I’ve been using VirtualBox for quite some time now, but not in the way I use VMWare.
First I thought it will be a short-lived trip, but now I’m happily stuck. I still had the image of VBox the way it was in the version 1.x in the head. What a blow it was to fully explore 4.x, in my case 4.0.6!

Few 2D Graphics Optimization Tips

Here are few optimization techniques that were handy to me recently; they mostly concern 2D graphics programming, where these patterns often emerge, but are helpful anywhere where you have to iterate and update data.

In short:

• iterate
• don’t do if‘s
• map all you can
• don’t float
• cache your reads

Setup NFS on Ubuntu Linux

The setup is pretty trivial, but configuration has few glitches.

Why is Lisp so great?, part 1

There are many books and texts about Lisp on the net, so I’ll leave out the “common” stuff, and I’ll try to show in this article one aspect of what makes Lisp the “most hackable” language out there.

If you think that tuples in .Net4 are awesome, or that F# is innovative, then you can stop here. This article is not for you… Seriously, don’t waste your time…

If, on the other hand, you ever wondered why your favourite language does not have this and this feature, ever wanted to hack the compiler (and/or really did), or found yourself writing bunch of a very similar code and spent days thinking of a way to refactor the code despite the limitations of the language at hand, then Lisp is The language for you.

HowTo: Quick Subversion Server Setup on Linux

This article is heavily based on Setup a Subversion Server in 4 Minutes by Tony Spencer.

To setup subversion (svn) server, all you need is the subversion package installed; on most systems, this already includes all the necessities – the client (svn), the repository tools (svnadmin), and the server (svnserve).

PDF Manipulation in GhostScript

GhostScript is incredibly powerful tool for manipulating many different document formats, among others also PDF.

Yet, its cryptic command format makes it sometimes hard to get something done; but most of the operations can be simply done by template.

Creating a Virtual Network with VirtualBox

VirtualBox sure is a great virtualization tool; not yet at the level of VMWare, but it’s getting very close, and esp. for basic day-to-day programming, when all you need is an “alien” test/development system, it’s a very adequate tool to use, and rivals VMWare’s performance quite nicely, and it’s free as in beer.