Author Archives: Nuno Morgadinho

I'm a GNU

Posted on by

Yesterday I spend the evening playing with Emacs instead of doing my homework (preparing today classes) and that was total irresponsable of me. I’ve been accumulating hours of no-sleep during the week and at night I was kind of like a zombie and unable to understand (or read btw) anything. Today I had to woke earlier (6h) to review the material. Thank god it turned out ok in time but remember:

Rule of thumb here, do real work before slacking!

My girlfriend helped me a lot figuring out what was happening with the NOR’s and XOR’s. It’s so good when you can bounce ideas with someone. Thanks!

How to mount a remote ssh filesystem using sshfs

Posted on by

Have you read about sshfs yet?

SSH is protocol to transfer files securely. Like FTP, but more secure. Many hosting services offer their client the ability to remotely login to their hosting account using ssh. Transferring files to an from an ssh account can be done using the scp command. However, it would be neat if you could mount a remote folder that you can access using ssh on your local computer, so that you can access files on an ssh account just like they were local files on your pc, right? Well now you can! Mount a folder in an ssh account, edit the files locally and save the files, and the file on the ssh server changes too! Isn’t it awesome!!!

It is!

References:

How do I get accents to display correctly?

Posted on by

Let’s get one thing straight. If you’re still using ISO-* shit to have compatibility with people that aren’t using UTF-8 yet, they will never upgrade.. Just use UTF-8 and so we all can use the most modern character encoding… and get on with our lives.

Like the XChat guys say:

Use Unicode ( UTF-8 ) and tell all your friends to use Unicode. Problem solved!

Using UTF 8 on your web page is as simply as including this tag on the head section: 

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

And on a general Debian/Debian-based Linux system for using UTF-8 within applications issue: 

# dpkg-reconfigure locales

and select UTF 8 if it’s not yet enabled.

Ubuntu users see here.

“Just do it”.

Most things actually work!

Posted on by

Seriously, how hard can it be to configure a proper “404 Not Found” in a web application? I’m not talking for a blog or some homepage, for that I couldn’t care less. But for a real web-application like on-line banking it breaks my heart to see the default IIS 404 page with the ‘Microsoft Support’ contact. Are these guys monitoring what’s happening with their application? I guess not..

Setting up a 404 Not Found page with an e-mail form is not that hard and in these cases it makes all sense. You’d probably wanna say something like:

&gt; If you have a question or some feedback, please tell us!

Or if you’re into something more emotionally appealing, and I’ll quote Joel Spolsky on this:

&gt; Most things actually work!

Like Winamp said back in 2003 when Nullsoft shipped a new version.

On a side note, did you read “A closer look to gedit 2.14” already? It’s an interesting piece I think.

Extracting WordPress: The Right Way

Posted on by

Yesterday I worked ten hours. That’s not bad, at least for me. From 15:30h-20h and then from 21:30h-2h. Today I’m taking the morning to relax and get my news “fix”.

I must confess, this blog thing never quite worked for me. I always think too much before I write something and so spend a lot of time before writing anything and I can’t not always afford that. I got myself a blog in the first place because I wanted to be able to update my site on-the-fly and though this was the best way.

People change. And that’s good. For example, until recently, I never seriously consider the chance of buying a Mac. And now I do, so you never know what will happen.

Upgraded to Wordpress 2.0.2. I’m curious on how others are dealing with the plugin deactivation on the upgrade process. For example, for me, since I’m using Dokupress, while I’m upgrading, the posts fall back to normal syntax instead of Doku syntax.

Also, when upgrading Wordpress, when you need to extract the WordPress package, if you issue tar within the blog directory you will end with a wordpress directory inside your blog, which sucks. Of course I could extract it and then ‘mv wordpress morgadinho.org’ but that isn’t sexy enough as I have other directories inside my blog directory. I tryed creating a symlink in ../blogdirectory called wordpress but then tar would destroy the link instead of following it.

Then I found the -h option to tar that makes it follow symlinks and so this worked: 

$ ln -s morgadinho.org wordpress
$ tar
-zxvf ~/latest.tar.gz -h -C .

Of course I could also talk about what I’m working on, but I’ll leave that for another day.