Pinehead.tv

Introduction To PhoneGap + IOS

Anthony James — Fri, 18 May 2012 09:46:11 PDT

PhoneGap is a wrapper type application that allows you to package HTML5/CSS3 Web Apps inside of a native app. This is a great feature because it gives you the ability to distribute your app via the app stores and have a so called “native app” without having to learn Java and Objective-C to code in the operating system native languages.

In this screencast we are going to do a quick introduction to PhoneGap and how to install it for IOS app development. We will learn how to launch the basic native application that comes with Cordova/PhoneGap. In the following tutorials we will learn how to take a pre-existing jQuery Mobile app and package it inside of our PhoneGap app. We will learn how to communicate with servers and use native functions only available from the phone to native applications.

4 JavaScript Frameworks You Need To Start Using Today

Anthony James — Thu, 17 May 2012 07:28:45 PDT

The web has quickly moved from fancy websites running strictly on HTML and a server side programming language, to dynamic web applications whose front ends run on JavaScript. JavaScript is an old language (created in 10 days). It has its problems but it has major advantages including its flexibility and user interface. Browser JavaScript engines are showing massive improvement, and so is JavaScript. Here are 4 awesome JavaScript frameworks you need to be aware of if you want to be a great web developer these days.

BackBoneJS
Most new web apps have hundreds, if not thousands, of lines of JavaScript. Backbone helps organize those widgets and give them structure. It also makes navigation a breeze using JavaScript and creates an incredible feel of a real application running on the web. Backbone.js uses the Model View Controller setup (MVC) to give structure to JavaScript based web applications. Its core also helps your web applications run native. Backbone by default will keep history and make your back and forward programing ability simple as pie.

_ (UnderscoreJS)
Underscore is to plain ol’ JavaScript as jQuery is to the DOM. It comes with 60+ super handy utility functions that help make your life easier when working with things like collections, objects, arrays, etc.

Heatmap.js
Heatmap.js is a slick JavaScript framework that uses the HTML5 Canvas tag to generate heat based locations on a map. You can see this in production at Rezonline; it shows users’ location based on heat density and sits on top of Google maps. Heatmap.js can sit on top of Google maps or OpenLayers maps or come in a more stand alone package. Are you looking for a tutorial on this? Stay tuned and we’ll have one soon.

Find Heatmap.js here

jQuery Mobile
Seriously, if you don’t know about jQuery Mobile or if you’re not using it then you’re missing out. A simple mobile framework that lets you develop mobile web apps, native mobile apps, and mobile websites in no time flat. In fact, we here at Pinehead have an entire jQuery Mobile development guide that will get you started from complete newbie to expert jQuery Mobile developer.

Tip: Apple Airplay And HTML5 Video Tag

Anthony James — Mon, 14 May 2012 08:41:17 PDT

HTML5 has been evolving super fast. Not only that, Apple, the driving force (and owner) of webkit, has been making changes as well. In IOS 4.0 a tag called x-webkit-airplay was needed in order to give controls to the video to airplay stream to an Apple TV.

The exact command needed was x-webkit-airplay=”allow”. By default the x-webkit-airplay was actually set to “disallow.” If you wanted your video to have the ability to use AirPlay and stream to an Apple TV you needed to turn it on or “allow” it with the x-webkit-airplay parameter. However, this changed in IOS 5.0. Apple changed the default behavior of x-webkit-airplay to be x-webkit-airplay=”allow.”

So by default if you’re using the video HTML5 tag it will be able to use AirPlay and stream to an Apple TV. You only need to worry about the parameter x-webkit-ariplay if you want to set x-webkit-airplay=”disallow” and not allow streaming over AirPlay to an Apple TV.

Open Source News Roundup — Weekend Edition

RayneTech — Sun, 13 May 2012 11:05:26 PDT

Linux

Adobe fixed a vulnerability in its Flash software; this newly discovered exploit affected not only Windows but Mac and Linux as well. Make sure you’re checking for updates.

The 2012 Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS 2012) wrapped up on Friday, May 11th. Reports from the summit are slowly filtering on to the internet; apparently the Ubuntu folks are focused on doing rather than talking, since less than 100 unique reports have appeared in news streams.

While presenting at UDS 2012, Electronic Arts (EA) announced release of two web-based games for Ubuntu–Command & Conquer Tiberium Alliances and Lord of Ultima–at the developers’ summit. It’d be nice if EA told the rest of the world; so far the company hasn’t issued a press release.

Speaking at UDS 2012, Chris Kenyon, VP of Canonical Ltd., said 5% of all new PCs will ship pre-loaded with Ubuntu. No wonder Dell feels some pressure to create a Linux-based developer laptop.

Uh-oh. Keep an eye on this: Ubuntu may have forked the Gnome Control Center, according to a developer at UDS 2012. Others say it’s more of a patch than a fork. Will there be any conflicts in the future about Ubuntu’s direction on Control Center?

Android

And while Adobe is patching up an exploit in Flash, a fake Flash malware download for Android phones has been found. Watch your phone bill for high-priced text messages.

SaaS security provider Zscaler’s research group, Zscaler ThreatlabZ, notes iOS surpassed Android in enterprise mobile devices during first quarter of 2012. You might ask if this is represents a reduction in Android use, or a reduction in RIM’s BlackBerry devices resulting in an increase of iOS users? Looks like a combination, but the trend may not hold for long with Android continuing to outpace iOS on non-enterprise phones.

Other Open Source

Colleges and universities are using open source mobile development as a tool to attract and keep students, based on numbers adopting Modo Labs’ Kurogo platform.

Cloud services field is more crowded with HP offering Cloud Compute; HP will be going head-to-head with Amazon as a cloud provider, eyeing a portion of the USD$1.08 billion that Amazon earned last year from cloud services. HP’s existing customer base of former Compaq users and EDS clients gained through acquisition of those firms, assures HP a different segment of the cloud market inaccessible to Amazon. Watch Google’s cloud offering to change shape soon in response, in order to retain and gain Google Drive and Google Enterprise clients.

Open Source News Roundup

RayneTech — Wed, 09 May 2012 15:14:37 PDT

Linux

Dude, you’re getting a Dell! Well, maybe–if you’re an open source software developer. Looks like Dell took to heart feedback from the open source community, an began an experiment in which Ubuntu’s 12.04 operating system will be featured on a Dell’s XPS13 Ultrabook. Dell’s commitment to Ubuntu-loaded machines has been problematic—“spotty” is too generous a word since Dell doesn’t currently offer a pre-loaded system at its own Ubuntu page. (http://dell.com/ubuntu actually redirects to a generic Dell product page). A real commitment to Ubuntu as an operating system will take more than pre-loaded software, as Ars Technica notes; this exploratory project could be finally represent the beginning of something big in open source for commitment-phobic Dell.

Did you know that Google is a substantial supporter of open source software (OSS) with real skin in the game? By substantive we mean Google’s invested real money and resources invested in the propagation of OSS. Now in its eighth year, check out Google’s Summer of Code (SoC) program as an example of the company’s commitment. Google announced a record number of students have applied to work on OSS projects this summer, all of which are hosted on and partially sponsored through Google. There are 1212 students working with 180 mentoring companies, whose proposed projects include at least 24 Linux-projects. Students aren’t merely working for experience; they’ll receive a USD$5000 stipend if they have fulfilled the requirements of their project by the evaluation deadline in August.

Android

Former iPad-only personalized magazine app Flipboard is now available for Android smartphones. Check out the download info at ReadWriteWeb. Now that this app has been liberated from the walled Apple iGarden, will Flipboard for Android tablets be far behind? Or will some enterprising Android tablet devotee code something even better in the way of a magazine app (please hurry!)?

Other Open Source

Java: Open-source advocates should watch carefully the Oracle-Google fisticuffs over Java. Reporting has been muddy in covering this legal duke-out over Oracle’s claims that Google’s use of Java APIs in Android mobile applications violated licensing and copyrights. You’ll recall that Oracle acquired Java’s progenitor, Sun Microsystems, in 2009, including Java–but Java had already been released by Sun in 2007 under the GNU General Public License. This case could have widespread repercussions for any open source applications using Java APIs or released under GNU GPL. For in-depth, blow-by-blow coverage of Oracle v. Google, we check Groklaw. This case has a rather big reach in terms of numbers as roughly half of all new smartphones are shipped with Android; what’s really puzzling is Oracle’s aggressively adversarial position on APIs created with a GPL app since these same Android devices could represent growth opportunities for Oracle application sales. It’s ultimately all about the Benjamins, isn’t it?

Resizing Root Partition on Linux in Amazon EC2

Anthony James — Mon, 07 May 2012 08:55:13 PDT

Changing the partition size for a root partition or any other partition is just a little bit different when you’re working in the cloud. Today I’m going to show you how to change the root partition of an EC2 instance running Linux.
Resizing the root partition on an Amazon EC2 instance starts by stopping your instance.

First, go to volumes on the left-hand EC2 navigation control panel. Once you’re there, look under attachment information and identify the volume that is attached to the instance on which you want to change the root partition.

Right-click on the volume you want to resize and select Create Snapshot.

Fill out the details of the snapshot you’re creating. This will help you identify it in your snapshot inventory.

Select Snapshots on the left hand side of the EC2 control panel. From here you can see your snapshot being created. Make sure you remember what availability zone your running instance/server is in; what you do next will require that information

Right hand click on the snapshot you just created and select Create Volume from Snapshot.

Enter the new size you would like the partition to be, select the same availability zone of your running instance then click on yes, create.

Head back over to volumes in the EC2 control panel. Once there, select the root volume we just created an image of, right click on it, and select detach volume. We are doing this because now that we created a new 10gig volume, we are going to attach that new volume in place of the old volume.

Now right click on the new volume we created.

Attach the volume

It’s important to make sure the volume is attached as /dev/sda1, so change the volume name. If you do not do this, your instance will NOT be able to turn back on.

As soon as the volume is attached, go back to your instances and turn your instance back on.

Login to your instance and run df -m as sudo or root. You’ll notice that your partition size is still the same even though we created a larger volume. Now we need to resize the partition inside of Linux.

Make note of the partition name; in our case it’s /dev/xvda1. Now type resize2fs /dev/xvda1 at the command line.

Now it starts to resize the root partition…

Once complete, type df -m to view the new root partition size and verify that it worked.

We see that /dev/xvda1 is now 10gig vs 1gig.

All Done!

Learning linux: Root User, Sudo Users And Managing Users & User Groups

Anthony James — Thu, 03 May 2012 22:19:50 PDT

This lesson will walk you through user management. This lesson includes topics such as how to create users, manage users and user groups, what sudo is, when users need sudo and when to run as root or not. Ready to take the whole course? Get started by going to LinuxAcademy.tv to take the whole course.

Linux Academy Lesson: Basic User Management For Fresh Images/Server Installs

Anthony James — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 08:40:01 PDT

This lesson and the entire course “Introduction To The Linux Server” is available free at pineheadacademy.com.
In this lesson we are going to go over the basics of user management on our instance. First we want to change the “user” password, change the “root” password and add yourself a personal user. You will learn why you should do all of these things and how to do them. If you have never used Linux then this lesson is for you. We are going to start with the basic concepts and explain why or why not to do these tasks.

It’s important to remember not all distributions have ssh root enabled by default. Read When You Should Disable Root Login…Or Not to understand when and when not to disable root login.

Getting Started With Google Analytics For Your Site

nDeHertogh — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 09:15:07 PDT

Everyone has heard about Google Analytics at some point. But what does it exactly do? It’s a web analytics tool that shows you how people find your site (for instance through a search engine, ads, etc), how they navigate through your website and how they become costumers. You’re also able to track your mobile websites, mobile apps and web enabled mobile devices, bot high end and non-JavaScript enabled phones. You can find out which browser and which operating system your visitors use, which search queries they use and what the landing pages are. You can also see how many new and returning visitors you have. And what’s also important to know is how long they stay on your website.

For static pages (html) it is actually very easy to install. You just go to google.com and search “google analytics” and click on the first link they provide. There you can sign up for an account. You just have to create a new Google account, or sign in with your Google account if you already have one. If you already have an AdWords account, just login to that account and click on the Analytics tab to sign up. They will provide you a custom JavaScript that you just have to add to each page of the website, right before you close your head tag (). Now just upload all your files again with your ftp client and you’re done! You now have Google Analytics for your website.

When you have dynamic pages (php) you have to do it slightly different. You now have to put the JavaScript in a separate file and save it (for instance analytics.php). Now you have to include it to all your pages. You can do this by writing right after you open the body tag (). All that you have to do now is uploading all the files again (including the new analytics.php file) and you’re good to go.

When You Should Disable Root Login…Or Not

Anthony James — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 08:44:42 PDT

When should you disable root login? Disabling root login is a super easy trick to increase security on your machine. Let’s take a look at why and when you should disable the root login and also when it’s OK to keep root login enabled. Root or administrator users are the default users on almost all systems. By their name, we know that they have all privileges on the machine and control everything. In previous articles I’ve suggested several times that disabling root login and created root privilege users is a good security practice but in realty you don’t always have to do this. Let’s first look at when it is best practice to disable root login.

Can your server be accessed by anyone on the internet?
What does this mean? Well, for example, if you can be on any computer at any location on the internet and SSH to your machine, then your server can be accessed by anyone on the internet. Since the root user has all the powers AND we know that almost every Linux machine comes with the root user enabled, then guessing or trying to crack the root users password is the basic place to start if you’re trying to penetrate a system.

Bots can automatically scan for the open SSH port and start trying to access your system using the root user and random passwords trying to break in. By creating a user with root privileges and disabling the root login, you remove this from the equation. Bots (or people) generally aren’t out there trying to guess usernames AND passwords, so this increases the security of your system.

When is it OK to leave root login enabled?
As several Pinehead members in the Pinehead community have pointed out, it is OK at times to leave the root user enabled. Again, I will say it is BEST practice to change the root username and/or disable the root password. However, if your server is offline and is only located on a local network you don’t have to worry about hackers or bots trying to penetrate your system. By the very nature of a local network they don’t even have access to the system to even try accessing it as root.

If you can only access your servers from a VPN
Again, this is the same as your servers being only accessible on the local network. VPNs create another layer of protection. In order to access the VPN you’ll need permissions, from there you can login to your server.

All login is disabled except from console
Let’s say your server is behind a firewall that only allows access to port 80. Then port 22 (SSH) isn’t even available to the whole internet for someone or something trying to penetrate your system. You could also just remove the services that allow remote login. If you only allow access to the server via console login (being physically in front of the server) then there is no reason to disable root login.

Last but not least…

You don’t mind taking the chances of a break-in
If you just don’t care that someone or something “could” ever break in or you think the odds are against it, then leave it open. The odds are rather low that this will happen to you, but that doesn’t mean it won’t or that you shouldn’t take some steps to protect your system. This includes disabling root login, only allowing login at the console, putting your server behind a VPN, or making your server available only on the local network.

At the end of the day it’s easier to just disable root login via ssh as suggested in a previous tut: Disable Root Login via SSH or to allow access via ssh keys.
Have a suggestion to this? Or other suggestions on protecting your system? Post them in the comments.