mehesz.net :: n:ews

How to fix NTFS read write problem in Ubuntu

noreply@blogger.com (The Author) — Wed, 23 Aug 2017 11:33:00 +0000

I ran into an interesting problem with my media server (on Pi), no matter what I tried, it only mounted the external hard-drive (NTFS) as READ ONLY.
After I "bricked" my Pi several times, I gave Google another shot and found this:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/70281/why-does-my-ntfs-partition-mount-as-read-only

... so that's it:

sudo apt-get install ntfs-3g

ember new web-app (on Ubuntu) - Killed

noreply@blogger.com (The Author) — Sun, 30 Aug 2015 17:10:00 +0000

I am cheap, so I have a cheap VPS somewhere in Canada. The server is fast and reliable (for my usage) so the other day I decided to take EmberJS for a test-drive.

I tried to install it many different ways (meaning, ioJS 3.x just did NOT work well, I had to go back to 2.5.5) everything seemed fine after that, until I tried to create the ember app. Unfortunately I kept getting this message: "Killed" ... that's it. Then I ran the installation in verbose mode `ember new web-app -verbose` and with that I was able to follow all the packages it was trying to install, but again at one point it just threw up and said `Killed`. Unfortunately nobody on the forum was able to help, so I kept Google-ing for another hour or two and found this priceless gem:

https://github.com/ember-cli/ember-cli/issues/3939

If you look at Xobb's answer from April 22nd it clearly states that you'll need more memory... Dang, looks like my Chromebook days are over :P (or I have to pay-up more for a bigger slice of VPS)

Nvidia Shield Box Quick Review (after one day)

noreply@blogger.com (The Author) — Mon, 01 Jun 2015 21:18:00 +0000

I'm not a gamer. My last console is/was a Nintendo Wii (first gen, still works great!) I also had several Sony PS2s back in the day (the slim kind that broke every time we moved). So take this review with a grain of salt.

I kept my eye on the Nvidia Shield Box for a while, because:

a) it's cheap
b) gives a plugged in experience vs wifi (not like Chromecast or Amazon Fire TV Stick)
c) includes HD games and movies and PLEX
d) it's cheap

For the $200 version you don't get much storage, but for me it's good enough (for now).

Opening: the box is super nice. The beautifully embossed image of the console on the top of the box shows care. Early on, one of my kids pressed the power button on the controller (when the console itself was not assembled yet!) which seemed to freeze the console after I plugged it in, a simple reboot fixed this problem but that didn't occur to me for a while (reboot #1). After this the NVIDIA logo showed up, and shortly after the ANDROID logo ... for a long long long long time. That's when I noticed that I forgot to plugin the network cable (oops, my bad, but again the console seemed frozen - a simple reboot fixed the problem and I was good to go - (reboot #2)) The setup itself was pretty straight forward, adding my phone, entering some code etc. Then we finally downloaded our first game Asphalt8 - a fast paced car racing game, the kids and myself enjoyed it a lot! Beautiful graphics, the controller is very responsive (compared to my Moga PRO controller which I use for my Android phone)

Then I tried to load another game and it seemed to have some sort of an issue, because after the game was downloaded (100%), it just disappeared from the screen (and never showed up again!) Also, I could not launch anything else after this, but the main dashboard was functional. Again, I had to unplug-replug the console (reboot #3).

After this everything seemed to work, watched a couple of shows with FLEX, the experience was flawless. (Although the speech recognition was way off a couple of times, as a foreigner I got used to it over the years)

At last, I finally got a chance to try out the famous new Nvidia gaming-network, GRID. I'm really hoping this will take off. Again, I am not a gamer, I only finished one game from beginning till the end in my life (Eufloria). I usually just lose my interests/patience. The idea of cheaper monthly subscription to try/play games is brilliant.

Overall I think it's a great product, time will tell how others see it. I'm currently looking for Mortal Kombat or Dead or Alive style games :)

BabelJS in the browser

noreply@blogger.com (The Author) — Mon, 01 Jun 2015 16:05:00 +0000

First thing first. Pre-compilers are A-wesome! But not everybody thinks that, or they just don't want the hustle battling with everything on the server side (node, grunt, gulp ... etc). Somewhat understandable.

As a proof of concept I was able to use BabelJS in the browser and compile my ES6 code to browser-understandable Javascript on the fly. Definitely not something you wanna do in a production environment, but hey, I got to show some of the cool features of ES6 to my buddies without much effort.

https://babeljs.io/docs/usage/browser/

ES7 Observe with DOM binding

noreply@blogger.com (The Author) — Wed, 29 Apr 2015 03:00:00 +0000

Here is a very simple data-binding example with the proposed ES7 Observe() solution (only works in Chrome for now)

Full Fiddle Example.

My latest .vimrc

noreply@blogger.com (The Author) — Tue, 21 Apr 2015 00:56:00 +0000

This is just an updated .vimrc as of today. (check out my other post for plugins)

NERDTreeDirArrows - fixes the weird characters in some terminals

ES6 Classes, inheritance and fat arrows

noreply@blogger.com (The Author) — Tue, 24 Feb 2015 20:57:00 +0000

Here is a simple example on how to use ES6 classes:

Output:

Lajos dude is unemployed!
Jozsi dude is a car mechanic

You can use Babel's `Try It Out` feature if you don't wanna install anything to write ES6 code ... TODAY!

6to5 JS and Sass

noreply@blogger.com (The Author) — Mon, 16 Feb 2015 19:17:00 +0000

In the past couple of weeks/months, I started to update the rendering "engine" of BizzBuzzComics.com to CoffeeScript. I really really liked the approach of coffee, but also kept an eye on the initiatives for ECMAScript 6 (or ES6), the future of Javascript. I was almost done with the re-factoring when I decided to just go ahead an do the whole thing in ES6 instead of CoffeeScript. (it was a tough decision that had to be made, but in the long run, I think it is the right thing to do).

Unfortunately, there is not much browser support for ES6 at the moment, but there are pre-compilers (just like for CoffeeScript). There is Traceur by Google, but to run the compiled JS you need to also run traceur-runtime.js. It's not that big of a deal, but I ended up using 6to5 instead (now called BabelJS). Although the compilation process needs a little TLC, it does the job for now.

I also started using Sass (CSS with superpowers) to keep thing interesting. I use the following to compile the files (for development):

sass --watch sass:css
babel -w es6/app.es6.js -o js/bin/app.js
uglifyjs js/app.js -o js/app.min.js

Paraszt-heartbeat

noreply@blogger.com (The Author) — Tue, 13 Jan 2015 09:00:00 +0000

I needed something quick to monitor a site that is hosted on a VPS. I looked around but nothing seemed as light weight as this:

In computer science, a heartbeat is a periodic signal generated by hardware or software to indicate normal operation or to synchronize other parts of a system.

--wikipedia

Packt's $5 eBook bonanza is back!

noreply@blogger.com (The Author) — Fri, 19 Dec 2014 03:48:00 +0000

From Thursday 18th December, every eBook and video will be available on the publisher’s website for just $5. Customers are invited to purchase as many as they like before the offer ends on Tuesday
January 6th, making it the perfect opportunity to try something new or to take your skills to the next
level as 2015 begins.

You can find out more here http://bit.ly/1C4FAaQ

Vim and Coffeescript

noreply@blogger.com (The Author) — Thu, 13 Nov 2014 19:03:00 +0000

People who know me know that for coding I love to use Vim (lately I've been using the built in Chrome editor, but I still go back to Vim every now and them).

At the beginning (sometimes even now) I had a hard time "seeing" the Javascript generated by Coffeescript. These are the tools that help me a lot:

For syntax highlighting I use vim-coffee-script http://github.com/kchmck/vim-coffee-script

And to see the generated Javascript output from Coffeescript I ended up using a.vim http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=31

Now to get a.vim to work I had to add the following to my .vimrc (assuming your source coffee files are under /src and your JS files under /js)

let g:alternateExtensions_coffee = 'js'
let g:alternateExtensions_js = 'coffee'
let g:alternateSearchPath = 'wdr:src,wdr:js'

Factorial(s) in CoffeeScript

noreply@blogger.com (The Author) — Wed, 08 Oct 2014 02:59:00 +0000

In mathematics, the factorial of a non-negative integer n, denoted by n!, is the product of all positive integers less than or equal to n.

-- Wikipedia

Now let's see how we can solve this with a little CoffeeScript ...

BarCamp Oralndo 2014 recap

noreply@blogger.com (The Author) — Sun, 28 Sep 2014 20:12:00 +0000

BarCampOrlando is pretty much the only BarCamp event I usually attend, because this is the closest to me. (it's still a 2hr drive though). They changed the venue, which I originally I didn't like, but boy ... what a surprise. I LOVE old buildings (and living in Hungary in the first 25 years of my life, the US has not much to look at :P), so as soon as I entered I was like ... woooah.

There were 3 projectored-sessions going on simultaneously in the Cheyenne, Orchid and Poker rooms and one conversation track in the Cellar. (the Cellar turned out to be very claustrophobic but I'm glad I stayed because the conversations were very cool)

Here are the tracks I was able to attend:

9:45am Welcome by Gregg Pollack
A short and funny introduction to the 8th annual BarCampOrlando event. (8 years man, EIGHT YEARS!)

10:00am Artificial Intelligence & Javascript by Matt Mazur
I'm somewhat interested in JS robotics, so I figured I'd check this out. Matt showed us about 10 really cool interactive demos. My favorites were Boids and Animorphs.

10:30am Big Ass Buttons: Improving UX Through large click/touch targets by Brandan Mitchell
Good intro on bad vs good UI/UX design based on examples from big companies (like Apple, Netflix etc)

11:00am Video Games Taught Me To Learn: a discussion about the future of education games by Thomas Lavelle
This was a more of an educational gathering on how technology might change the way kids (and us) can learn.

11:30am eval everything - Running student code at Code School by Adam Fortuna
Adam showed us how to successfully use iFrames to overcome some of the limitations with cross-browser issues. He also talked about web workers and AngularJS.

12:00pm 10 lessons I learned when switching to Ruby & Rails by Daniel Smith
I've been following the Rails community since about 2005-2006, but never really worked with it. It certainly revolutionized some things on the internet but never had the time to learn it, but since I know Daniel, I wanted to see his presentation.

I ate LUNCH at Hamburger Mary's :)

1:00pm Everything I Wish I Knew About WordPress Before I Started by Adam Sorcie
I originally wrote BizzBuzzComics in NodeJS (the backend part), but the project grew fast I needed something else that had built-in authentication, roles etc.... so I decided to rewrite the whole thing and I chose WordPress. So far it did not dissapoint, and I was able to do everything I needed on the site.

1:30pm Internet Of Things by Ryan Lopez
The list of things that are connected to the internet will be drastically growing in the next couple of years. (including but not limited to: cars, refrigerators, watches, clothes etc.)

2:00pm Let's Hack Some JavaScript by David Rogers
This was another talk in the cellar and they anticipated a much Much MUCH smaller crowd, so we really only talked about the history of JavaScript and David introduced us to what a coding dojo is.

2:30pm Responsive Single Page Designs w/o Math by Ray Villalobos
This was a really cool talk, as I am one of those people who raised an eyebrow when first saw the mathematics involved in Responsive Design, Ray was going through an example and if I can find his presentation I put it up here. Until then, use Susy.

For the full list of talks check out the mobile site: http://s.barcamporlando.org

Simple Inheritance in CoffeeScript

noreply@blogger.com (The Author) — Tue, 16 Sep 2014 17:01:00 +0000

"JavaScript uses a different approach than C# or C++ to create an object oriented language. It is a prototype-based language. The concept of prototyping implies that behavior can be reused by cloning existing objects that serve as prototypes."

For more info visit the msdn source.

Javascript Singleton in CoffeeScript

noreply@blogger.com (The Author) — Wed, 27 Aug 2014 02:46:00 +0000

I did not jump on the CoffeeScript bandwagon right away (in fact, I'm still not on it). For a while I just didn't have the time to study it, at work it is definitely a no go, so I had no reason except for my own good. (hack, even the community is divided on it)

BUT, I love beautiful things and when I look at CoffeeScript code I always think: "Dang, that's pretty!"

So here is a reference post with a somewhat useful example (a Singleton "class"), to see it working check out this plunker.

The `instance = init() if instance is null` line just brings tears to my eyes (happy tears).

Laravel on Cloud9 (the new C9!)

noreply@blogger.com (The Author) — Tue, 12 Aug 2014 08:00:00 +0000

Laravel is the new (new to me at least) framework-hotness in the PHP world. It's heavily based upon Symfony, an old PHP framework (old to me at least).

With the latest edition of C9, you have to jump through some hoops to get Laravel working in the butt based environment, but it is still doable fairly easily.

First off install Composer
curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php

Laravel has a lot of dependencies, but right out of the box, if you don't have `mycrypt`, it will break your app, so install that also
sudo php5enmod mcrypt

Create the Laravel project
php composer.phar create-project laravel/laravel laravel-test-project --prefer-dist

Now we won't use the built-in C9 server because:
1) you can have multiple projects this way
2) I couldn't get it to work.

So we need to find your IP address, open a terminal (Alt+t) and type
ifconfig | grep "inet addr"

(ie: 123.456.789.123, but yours will be different)

Go to your project (cd project-name) and run the PHP server
php artisan serve --host=123.456.789.123 --port=8080

Viola, check your app at:
http://your-app-name-c9-username.c9.io

MEAN ME

noreply@blogger.com (The Author) — Wed, 02 Jul 2014 00:42:00 +0000

This is going to be an ongoing adventure of a side project I've been working on. I finally decided to suck it up and finally attempt to learn NodeJS and hopefully see what's all the fuss is about.

First thing first:

MeanIO != MeanJS != MeanStack

Once you learn that, you've already won half the battle, and you won't get confused when somebody's answer on one of the forums don't make no sense ... :)

DATABASE

I've been a "hard-code" SQL (and particularly MySQL) guy in my whole life, but luckily my recent years of front-end heavy jobs trained my weary eyes to the following query JS "craziness" (MongoDB and Mongoose):

Book.find({published:true,deleted:false}).sort("-createdAt").exec(function(err,books){...});

(if it's not clear, it's a query that lets your filter by `published` and `deleted` fields, and sorts the results by `createdAt` ... oh, and `-` means DESC!)

AUTH
...

btw, I found this crazy awesome lib, but it's not production ready yet :/ synthjs.com

Dressing up a basic Yii2 app with custom templates

noreply@blogger.com (The Author) — Tue, 10 Jun 2014 16:06:00 +0000

Now, that we have a running Yii2-basic application on C9, we might wanna dress it up with our own (or a downloaded) template. Luckily there are a bunch of freely available designs on the fantabulous ThemeFactory.net site (khm, khm, wink, wink).

For this example, we will use Greenery as our template. Please go to the template's page and copy the link from the gigantic orange `Download` button.

Head over to C9, and because there is no quick way to download a file with the IDE, just open up a `terminal-tab`, go into your app's `web` folder (you can create a `themes` folder if you'd like!) and run the following to download the theme:

curl http://yii2.themefactory.net/theme/download/?id=38 > greenery.zip

This will create the greenery.zip file, which you can unzip by using the unzip tool. Easy-peasy. With this, you should have a greenery/ folder in place.

There is one more thing left, we have to tell Yii to use the new theme. Open the web.php configuration file from your-app/config/ folder, and add the following to the `components` section:

And that's it, if you now reload your app you should see the new theme in action.

How to install basic Yii2 app with C9

noreply@blogger.com (The Author) — Tue, 27 May 2014 12:56:00 +0000

Now, that we have successfully installed and tested PHP 5.4 on our cloud based C9 editor, we have the minimum requirements to develop Yii 2 applications.

They suggest to use Composer, the Dependency Manager for PHP. I don't have much experience with it, but it seemed to work like this:

With composer installed, now you should be able to run the following command as stated on the Yii2 installation page (make sure you are in the same folder as your composer.phar executable!)

php composer.phar create-project --prefer-dist --stability=dev yiisoft/yii2-app-basic your-app-name

When it's done, you will see something like this (our app is called `basic`):

And that's pretty much it. To see the app running, go to the `web` folder (cd basic/web in our case) and start a PHP 5.4 server with php -S $IP:$PORT, go to your app url, something like https://[your-webapp-name]-c9-[your-user-name].c9.io/index.php and see the fruits of your labor :)

Congratulations! You have successfully created your Yii-powered application.

PHP 5.4 server on Cloud9 (C9)

noreply@blogger.com (The Author) — Mon, 12 May 2014 15:30:00 +0000

Lately I'm turning towards cloud development, and after checking out a lot of IDEs, I decided (for now) to go with Cloud9 aka C9. It has everything I need (and much more).

There was one thing I didn't like, by default it uses PHP 5.3, so I couldn't take advantage of the awesome new features of 5.4. After some googling and messing around, I came up with the following steps to install and run the built-in server with it. (note: to open a "terminal-tab", press Alt+t)

Hungarian Runic Angular directive

noreply@blogger.com (The Author) — Wed, 16 Apr 2014 01:05:00 +0000

Before the Hungarians switched to the Latin letters we used a different style of writing called Hungarian Runic. (unfortunately very few people can understand it these days, but it's pretty cool looking nonetheless)

I wanted to learn what's the difference between Angular 1.0.8-1.2.12 and decided to create a one-way translator directive. As it turned out a lot was changed in the system, click here if you wanna see the list of changes, because I'm only going to mention a few here.

I already knew at the beginning that I wanted a reusable directive (well, that's the only way it makes sense really), that had the ability to display the runic characters either horizontally or vertically on the page. Also, the old Hungarians wrote from right to left.

The foundation of the directive did not change (at least not for this example) so I did something like this:

I usually try to keep my html somewhat clean and legit, so I use class names for directives. The declaration of a directive did not change either:

Now one thing that got changed big time was rendering dynamic/dirty HTML in a directive (or through a regular model even). Now you have to use SCE or Strict Contextual Escaping, you can't just use ng-bind-html-unsafe like in 1.0!
As you can see, to actually render the HTML part, you have to use the trustAsHtml() function, and you should be good to go.

I had some challenging stuff, especially with the unique "new" Hungarian letters, as we used one specific sign for `gy`, `ty`, `ly` etc. So that was fun, I ended creating a big array and parsed through the string by group of letter combinations. For the full example, check out my plunkr example.

Packt's celebrating their 2000 titles with Buy One Get One FREE

noreply@blogger.com (The Author) — Mon, 24 Mar 2014 12:49:00 +0000

First impressions about VR with Durovis Dive

noreply@blogger.com (The Author) — Wed, 12 Mar 2014 01:18:00 +0000

I've been an active follower of the VR (Virtual Reality) cult, ever since I heard about Oculus Rift. I kinda came late to the party, so I decided to wait for the second developer kit (DK2). It's been a year and a half, and getting closer, but still no firm date on the release :/

To calm my never ending thirst for VR, I ended up ordering a much simpler and more importantly cheaper product called Durovis Dive.

As you can see it does not have a screen, actually it uses your smartphone for everything. To see the full list of supported devices, check out this link: http://www.durovis.com/dive.html

I ordered it to the US (from Germany), so all and all it cost me about ~$80 and it arrived in less than 2 weeks. Luckily nothing was damaged upon arrival, so after I spent about 3-5 minutes assembling the kit, I was ready to go. (I previously downloaded most of the available games a couple days before!)

So here are the first impressions

1) no wonder it is $80 :) - everything is plastic, but I knew that beforehand

2) unfortunately there are only like a handful of games that support it, there was really only one game called Height that when I played, and took the goggles off, I had know idea where I was (that was really cool, although it made me sick within 5 minutes, in the good way)

3) The Tuscany 3D demo is beautiful, but there is some sort of bug that made the whole screen shake so I had to close my eyes a couple of times (and it still didn't go away) - ps, I figured out what the issue was, I had to turn off some extra features by tapping the screen

4) Their own Dive Launcher is slowly rotating to the right, which is weird, I'm not sure if it's a bug or a feature at this point :) - it only happens every now and then, I think if you kill all of your other apps running on the phone, it's ok

5) One really annoying thing, at least for my Galaxy S4. is that the volume button rests on one of the plastic hinges, which pushes the volume down, so you have to manually adjust it. - also, you can't really scratch/pick your nose while in the goggles :/

6) I also watched an hour of Oblivion, it is not as cool as I thought it was gonna be, but I enjoyed watching it. - the only real problem is when you try to look around only with your eyes, the picture becomes blurry on the edges

7) Bunch of games said that they support bluetooth controllers (I have the big MOGA) but nothing worked - it must be a Germany vs. USA thing ... hehe

Overall

I'm glad I got it. it IS really cool, and I hope that the Oculus will be that much better. (especially if they support the droid)

Fast way to find large files on Linux

noreply@blogger.com (The Author) — Mon, 03 Mar 2014 16:49:00 +0000

Simple, fast AND very useful

find . -type f -size +100000k -exec ls -lh {} \; | awk '{ print $9 ": " $5 }'

Simple GUI testing for web developers

noreply@blogger.com (The Author) — Tue, 18 Feb 2014 15:05:00 +0000

If you need some sort of quick UI testing in place (especially with drag and drop), you can use the XMacro package.

For Ubuntu just run:

sudo apt-get install xmacro

To record your mouse movements:

xmacrorec2 > record-this.test

To play the recorded test:

xmacroplay "$DISPLAY" < record-this.test

It definitely has its limitations, but can be used for quick testing without painful environment setups.

I also came up with the following little script to play all the *.test files from a given directory.