Tech Chorus

Changes In Bizsense

sudheer — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 14:55:23 +0000

Bizsense is an open source CRM project which uses Zend Framework. The open source project was started by Binary Vibes about three years ago and was released under the GPL V3 license. Some of you might have noticed that I am no longer active in Binary Vibes.

I wanted Bizsense project development to continue to nourish, flourish and cherish. Therefore, there we did a few changes. Bizsense is now released under the new BSD license. Bizsense uses Google open source project hosting which offers issue tracker, Wiki and source control. Bizsense now uses Mercurial for source control. The documentation is published at docs.jubero.com. In order to contribute to Bizsense, signing a CLA is no longer required.

Here are the project links:

Bizsense project home page
Bizsense end user documentation
Bizsense developer documentation
We hang out at #bizsense channel on Freenode IRC network.
We also have a mailing list. Send an email to bizsensebms@googlegroups.com

Installing Redmine With MySQL And Nginx On CentOS 6

sudheer — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 10:18:22 +0000

Redmine is a software project management tool which has Wiki, issue tracer, source code browser and other cool features built in. If you want to install Redmine with MySQL and Nginx on CentOS 6, follow these steps.

I always use EPEL repository with CentOS. EPEL provides additional RPM packages. We can use Nginx and some Ruby gem packages from EPEL.

Enable EPEL:

rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-5.noarch.rpm

Install required packages:

yum install nginx mysql-server ruby rubygem-rack rubygem-rake ruby-mysql

Redmine requires a Ruby gem called i18n. I couldn't find the RPM for i18n gem. I had to install i18n gem using the gem installer.

gem install -v=0.4.2 i18n

Start MySQL server:

/etc/init.d/mysqld start

Use the MySQL secure installation program:

mysql_secure_installation

Connect to the MySQL server as root:

mysql -u root -p

Create a MySQL database and user for Redmine:
mysql> CREATE DATABASE redmine character set utf8;
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON redmine.* TO 'redmine'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'secret_password' WITH GRANT OPTION;

Writing A Python Script To Send Files To Amazon S3

sudheer — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 10:55:11 +0000

Amazon Simple Storage Service or Amazon S3 is a storage service with a web API. I use Amazon S3 to store backups of my blog and other sites. I made a simple python script to handle file uploads to S3.

In order to use Amazon S3, first create a bucket using your Amazon AWS account. As the name suggests, bucket is a container. You can create buckets using the AWS management console.

The script we're going to write will take two input parameters

Path to file, local
Target S3 path

Personal Wiki

sudheer — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 07:59:23 +0000

When someone asks how to become a programmer or a good programmer, the usual answer is "hack something". To clarify the jargon, hacking is not breaking into computer systems. When you start learning programming, it is good to write programs. You could hack on existing open source software projects or your own cool new project.

I have been blogging ever since I have started programming. I have urged a lot of developers to start blogging. In addition to working on a personal project, blogging about hacking is an awesome experience. Unfortunately, blogging doesn't tick for a lot of people. The usual reasons are lack of time and not having writing skills.

I have been a wiki user from a long time and I enjoy browsing wikis. I use Wikipedia everyday. Wikipedia search is the second search engine in my Firefox's list of search engines. At work, I use the wiki in Redmine. A wiki is a good tool for collaborative content creation and editing. It also works great for single users. Apart from using wikis at work and other places, I have been using a personal wiki. I use it to store

notes
blog post ideas and drafts
technical documentation
business ideas
miscellaneous items

Website Content

sudheer — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 15:49:39 +0000

Jane: Golix, we have to put up some impressive content on our website. Any ideas?
Golix: Sure. On the front page, mention that we're innovating in the field of cloud computing.
Jane: Good point.
Golix: Also, mention that we're creating social media products. Put up some badges.
Golix: On the technology page, be sure to mention noSQL and node.js.
Jane: That would be cool. Thanks.
Golix: Remember, we have to update our website in one year.

Jobless

sudheer — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 18:07:22 +0000

Year 2002

John: Hey Golix. What's up buddy? You seem to be unhappy.
Golix: I got the pink slip today. I'm looking for a job.
John: Sorry to hear that. I'll see if I can get you a lead.
Golix: Thanks.

Year 2011

John: Hey Golix. What's up buddy? I don't see you online these days.
Golix: Yup.
John: I heard you're not working for Crux Consulting anymore.
Golix: Yeah. I've founded a stealth startup.
John: Congrats. A friend of mine was looking to hire a Java programmer. I suggested you. Anyway, I will tell him you're not available for hire. All the best.
Golix: Hey. You know what. Just tell your friend, I'm open.

Email Ain't Dead. RSS Ain't Dead

sudheer — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 15:10:55 +0000

There's some talk going on in the interweb about the future of technologies like RSS and email. Some people seem to believe that these fundamental technologies are dead already or will be dead soon. I feel, these zealous folks(tweeps?) have to be brought back to the real world.

Let's analyze RSS first. RSS has become a meme for feeds. Generally, when people are talking about RSS, they mean web feeds. Remember Xerox? RSS is one of the popular feed formats. Atom is the other major format. Personally, I prefer Atom for various reasons. Feeds are ubiquitous in the blog, news and podcast worlds. They are also useful and well received in other areas.

Zend Date Class Constants Cheat Sheet

sudheer — Sat, 25 Dec 2010 18:31:05 +0000

Date and time handling in general is a problem in programming. For PHP programmers, there's a good library out there that performs all the difficult tasks and provides convenient APIs. Zend_Date has several constants defined. It is good to know what each one of them represents. For this purpose, I have made a cheat sheet. Download the PDF and enjoy.

The table has the constant name and sample value columns.

Learning Nagios 3.0 - Book Review

sudheer — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 19:19:39 +0000

Title: Learning Nagios 3.0
Publisher: Packt Publishing
Author: Wojciech Kocjan
ISBN-10: 1847195180
ISBN-13: 978-1847195180

Nagios is a powerful and popular network monitoring software. I contacted PackT and asked for a review copy of the book.

Read the full table of contents on the publisher's site.

The topic being system administration, I could read the book from cover to cover in three days.

Like many other technical books, introductory pages of Learning Nagios 3.0 sells you Nagios. The first chapter convinces you why you should use Nagios to make your life easier by setting up automated monitoring of your servers.

How To Install And Configure Nagios On CentOS

sudheer — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 12:58:22 +0000

Nagios is a popular networking monitoring software. Nagios lets you monitor your IT infrastructure, be it servers, routers, switches or other devices. In this post, I will walk you through the steps of installing and configuring a basic setup of Nagios on CentOS.

At the end of the tutorial you will be have a working Nagios setup to monitor

local disk space usage
local system load
an external website

Whenever there is a problem or recovery with any of the above, Nagios will alert you via email.

Unless you have a strong reason to compile Nagios yourself, you should use the binary packages available for your Linux distribution.

RPMForge provides packages that are not included in CentOS repositories. We will use the Nagios packages from RPMForge.

Enabling RPMForge repository

For 32 bit machines use these commands:

wget http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.1-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm
rpm -ivh rpmforge-release-0.5.1-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm

For 64 bit machines use these commands:

wget http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.5.1-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm
rpm -ivh rpmforge-release-0.5.1-1.el5.rf.x86_64.rpm