Linux

Monday, September 15. 2008

CodeWeavers brings Chromium to Linux and Mac (sort of)

So on Thursday, September 4th, I called a company Fire Drill. I said I wanted to ship ported versions of Chromium for Mac and Linux, and I wanted to do it as fast as possible. By Friday, we had a first working build. But it had a major problem - you couldn't do https sites, so logging in to Gmail, for example, was right out. Unfortunately, supporting that required that we finish the implementation of a nearly brand new DLL in Wine - the winhttp dll. Luckily for us, Hans Leiddeker had recently joined CodeWeavers, and in a bit of a hazing ritual, we asked him to scramble madly to implement what we needed. A little more than a week later, and he had done it. Of course, there were many other people who pitched in and tuned Wine to make Chromium just that much nicer.

via Slashdot

Tuesday, September 2. 2008

Google to launch new open source browser: Chrome

At Google, we have a saying: “launch early and iterate.” While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well! As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit "send" a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome. As we believe in access to information for everyone, we've now made the comic publicly available -- you can find it here. We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries.

Thursday, July 10. 2008

Projects abound

I apologize for the lack of updates recently. Between work, meetings, and fun little side projects, I've practically been coding in my sleep. I'll be back to a full time posting schedule soon, I promise. In the mean time, here's a little bit of a description of the projects I've been working on.

Magus - An old school web based RPG / Collectible card game. Collect, buy, sell and trade cards to build powerful decks to duel your opponents. Nearly feature complete, in final testing before our first invite-only release.

Semantic IO - A flexible semantic input/output engine. Enter a file, text, or a URL and pull out an array of useful information. Quickly find phone numbers, addresses, names, or custom searches. Summarize long articles. Find keywords. Automatically tag bodies of text. Full i18n support.

And lastly, I'll be slowly updating and adding (literally) hundreds of research scripts, snippets, and documents to my resources. So - If there's anything specifically that you'd like to improve at or have an idea you want to share or explore - leave a comment. I'd love to hear from some of you lurkers.

Tuesday, June 17. 2008

Wine 1.0 Released

After 15 years of development, Wine version 1.0 has been released. Wine is an Open Source implementation of the Windows API on top of X, OpenGL, and Unix. While perfect windows compatibility has not yet been achieved, full support for Photoshop CS2, Excel Viewer 2003, Word Viewer 2003 and PowerPoint Viewer 2003 have been among the goals prior to the release. For further information about supported applications, head over to the appdb. Get it (source) while it's hot.

via Slashdot

Firefox 3 Download Day / Release

If you haven't already heard, Firefox 3 has been released, and they're having a Download Day today to go for the world record number of software downloads. Download it, see how many downloads they've had so far, or check out all of the features that are in Firefox 3.

Tuesday, May 20. 2008

How to install Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP) in Ubuntu 8.04

Just like our Ubuntu 7.10 LAMP how to, this guide will cover the installation of Apache, MySQL and PHP on Ubuntu 8.04. I assume you're already running Ubuntu 8.04 for this guide. If you're still running 7.10, you can use this guide.
Continue reading "How to install Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP) in Ubuntu 8.04"

Thursday, February 28. 2008

Practical (and impractical) PHP Optimizations

I've been seeing a lot of articles popping up lately about PHP Optimizations, particularly within the code (rather than the configuration, server, caching, etc) that I have some nitpicks with.

My position remains the same: Unless your code is running incredibly slow, you've found every single bug you can possibly find without having nightmares about unit tests, or an optimization that makes more than a 10% improvement in speed (factoring in your margin of error,) don't bother. That said, let's down to brass tacks.
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Tuesday, February 12. 2008

How to install PHP-GTK in Ubuntu 7.10

Just as described on their site,

"PHP-GTK is an extension for the PHP programming language that implements language bindings for GTK+. It provides an object-oriented interface to GTK+ classes and functions and greatly simplifies writing client-side cross-platform GUI applications."

Basically, it will allow you to use almost everything in the GTK+ API with PHP. If you don't already know what GTK+ is, GTK+ is an API for creating a graphical user interface, which also happens to be cross platform (Linux, Windows, and Mac.) Today we're going to cover installing PHP-GTK in Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy).
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Wednesday, January 9. 2008

How to install APC in Ubuntu 7.10

APC, or Alternative PHP Cache, is a framework for PHP to cache opcodes. Opcodes are the actual instructions that are used when PHP executes scripts. By caching these, you can usually vastly improve performance across the board for PHP based applications. This guide covers installing APC in Ubuntu 7.10 with PHP5 and Apache2.
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Tuesday, January 8. 2008

How to install Xdebug for PHP5 on Ubuntu 7.10

This guide will cover how to install Xdebug for PHP5 on Ubuntu 7.10. Xdebug is not only an excellent debugger for PHP, it also has one of my favorite tools for optimizing PHP - A profiler.

This profiler will break down your code and determine where your bottlenecks, or slow downs are to ease optimization. Combined with a program to handle cachegrind files, you can benchmark and optimize your scripts quickly and effectively.
Continue reading "How to install Xdebug for PHP5 on Ubuntu 7.10"