I can’t resist to talk about Viewport Resizer (a bookmarklet) by Malte Wassermann.
It is an awesome tool for designers and developers to verify/test responsive websites. It’s so cool I have to create a video to show what it can do.
Netflix is not accessible in India due to licensing and other reasons.
A lot of people (including expats) want to access Netflix, Hulu and other services in India (or other geo-blocked or geo-fenced territories).
Thanks to Unotelly for their DNS/VPN service which enables watching/consuming geo-blocked content including Netflix’s.
I have used Unotelly for couple of years. Trust me, it is convenient and better use of time to go for Unotelly when you really want to watch some shows and films.
Wondering, why couldn’t I build my own system to do that?
Just so you know, as a geek, I have successfully set up and run my own VPS (with SNI/non-SNI DNS Proxy and VPN), but not everyone can or prefers to do that. The goal was to watch some shows and films, but I got drifted away while building my own system, and ended up spending a lot of time (and money – vps fee) in setting things up than watching shows/films.
I think, Netflix would be officially launched in India in couple of years. For those who can’t wait, why not use Unotelly?
Phabricator (pronounced like the word fabricator) is a suite of web applications which make it easier to build software, particularly when working with teams. Phabricator is largely based on Facebook’s internal tools.
It has been more than three years since I have been using Phabricator (self-hosted) at work. It is one of the open-source projects which has inspired me a lot. I have seen it grow over these years; every day it gets better. Thanks to hundreds of open-source developers for their contribution.
Want to see how to develop elegant and sophisticated software, even with a poor programming languages like PHP? Look at Phabricator’s source-code and tools (built using PHP), you would be awestruck.
Want to play with Phabricator without installing? Have a look at PhorePlay (Phabricator hosting service), which offers free Phabricator hosting (with multiple instances) up to five users. I think, that’s good enough for most of us (small teams).
Phabricator’s core team is working to launch Phacility (Phabricator Hosting). I think, it has potential to become something like Github (useful and essential service) one day.
I posted about our proposed development setup, during these years a few things have changed a bit. More or less, this is what we have:
Testing:
Development Servers/Applications:
One of our servers, collocated in our office, crashed couple of weeks back. We took this opportunity to virtualize most of the stuff, earlier only some intances were virtualized.
Installing and setting up VMware vSphere Hypervisor is a straight forward process, even the process of creating virtual-machines.
Most of time, I spent was figuring out:
I am not going to cover details of installation and network configuration. I might write more posts in future to cover specifics. Meanwhile, I would love to answer the comments, if I know or share anything I know.
Anyway, this is what we have now:
We are very happy with the improved performance and stability, and the way hardware is properly used. Thanks to VM templates, clones and snapshots, we would be able to provision above infrastructure with minimal downtime.
I would soon replace Windows Server with Zentyal (eBox), which I believe, can handle most of things. However, we would need another Windows XP box to run some software (proprietary), which only runs on windows, to manage various other devices (EPBX, Access-Control-System, etc.).
We now have relatively more scalable infrastructure, more virtual machines can be created to take care of email-server, svn-server, etc.
We are yet to invest in a sophisticated storage device such as DAS or NAS or SAN, hence we are relying on some cheap tricks here:
Things I didn’t like:
Finally, I could execute some of things I planned more than two years back.
We use Trac as project collaboration space[1] within our company. We have been trying out agile-methodology (specially Scrum) for projects, but recently we went more formal with the approach using a software to manage the whole process.
I evaluated some software for agile project management and found good ones including ThoughtWorks‘ Mingle, but it’s not open-source and I believe, we can’t afford it (licensing, subscription).
We found ‘Agilo‘, a plugin for Trac, is easy to setup and was intuitive enough to get us started, considering our (no) experience with formal agile-methodology.
Do you want to get started with Scrum and don’t want to invest time learning a complicated software? You don’t need a software to do Scrum. However, if you like managing projects using a software and you are comfortable with Trac, try Agilo.
You might want to check Scrum in five minutes [PDF]
BTW! This is yet another post to spread the word about the software and tools, we find useful and have been using.
[1] project management, bug tracking, documentation, wiki and version-control browser
We have one Windows server, which is there for many reasons. Taking backup on windows can be pain, one has to rely on third-party software. We use DeltaCopy, which relies on rsync (an awesome piece of open-source software), statically linked Cygwin libraries/binaries.
It is easy to setup and doesn’t conflict with any existing Cygwin installation.
DeltaCopy has saved us from many disasters(disk failure, etc.), some of those happened during last one month. Had we not taken daily, weekly and monthly backup snapshots, we would have lost months of work.
Thanks to DeltaCopy and developers/company/community behind it. This post is my way of thanking them, by spreading some words.
Using DeltaCopy is very intuitive, however, feel free to leave comments, if you need any help setting it up.
Plogger is an open-source photo gallery system built using PHP. It successfully maintains the simplicity while providing so many features, it’s just beautiful piece of work.
Withing five minutes, I got Plogger running on my machine. In another hour, I created a new theme with different visualization (CoverFlow) to display thumbnails.
Having worked many different photo gallery management software/scripts, I find, Plogger is the most beautiful. I might be ignorant about other better systems, please share if you know.
I bet, web designers would find it very handy because they can easily customize and deliver solutions without dealing with complex programming required behind file upload/management.
I have been looking document management system (DMS) so that we can go paperless, as much as we can. We have to use paper, considering our goverment and various other complainces require us to maintain document in paper form. I am currently evaluating following DMS:
These are opensource and stable products. However, it takes little effort to install and customize both of these for following reasons:-
Once I implement one of these successfully, I would post details. Meanwhile, we have done following to reduce paper usage:
With these small changes, we are already seeing benefits. With DMS, I can imagine life would be lot easier when it comes to maintaing, reviewing and sharing the documents. Please share your experiences, perhaps there is a better system I can implement easily.
I am sharing my experience while finding a good media-server (software that can store, transcode and serves various media formats to devices – computers, mobile, apple-tv, etc).
We all (parents, brother, sister-in-law, sister and myself) stay together, which means we have got more than one TV, various devices (mobile, computers, laptops, etc). We realized, it’s useful to host the media at one central computer.
Most of the requirements (above) are sorted out except the last one “Media Server”. I looked at various options, some of these are listed below:
I found myself more comfortable with TVersity, though it’s not opensource and only runs on Windows, for following reasons
You can find the complete list of features on TVersity website.
So now life is simpler and easier, we all store our media at one place and can see it anytime and on most of our devices. Having web-based access to media makes life easier. I also feel, it’s lot easier to extend web-interface, which I plan to do in sometime.
I would love to post about detailed comparison between various options (media-servers and tools) mentioned above, perhaps in another post, sometime in future. Another post would be there to share how our home network looks like. Hope, I can spend sometime drawing diagrams which would be lot easier to understand.
Adobe Buzzword is available, no need for private invite to use it. It took me couple of minutes to register, then I checked out Buzzword; I must say Buzzword rocks!
It has a usable, fast, responsive and sleek user-interface (UI). Buzzword also allows to save documents in different formats (.doc, office-xml etc).
It allows to insert images, tables, comments, notes etc. I loved the ui-interaction for each of these features. I don’t know how to express in words without showing the screen-shots, so why don’t you check it out 🙂
Just wondering, who designed the user-interface of Buzzword?
Before I start writing about how useful & helpful Onfolio has been to me, let me put some words(from it’s help) about Onfolio.
Onfolio is a PC application that helps you collect, organize, and share information you find on the Internet, receive in a feed, or capture from your system or network. Web pages, web sites, multipage articles, images, a wide variety of file types, news feeds, search feeds, snippets of files or web pagesyou can put any of these into an Onfolio collection. Then you share your research through documents, presentations, emails, websites, and reports.
I have been using Onfolio for over a month or two. I find it really useful because I can keep all my bookmarks, documents, rss feed subscriptions or other web-documents in one place for offline reading and also for archiving purpose. Which really helps me a lot because I don’t have internet connectivity after work.
Onfolio has got a nice User Interface. It works seemlessly with Internet Explorer as well as Mozilla
If you want to give it a try, you can download Onfolio 2.0 Beta. I am sure, you gonna like it!
I just love it and I have been using Beta version of it but I am planning to buy it because its piece of software that’s worth buying.
BTW! Jeremy Alliare also has something to say about Onfolio.
Update: Onfolio guys have a blog also.
Google is the best(IMO) search engine. Now they have released Google Desktop software, which searches local file system and believe me its many times faster than window’s built-in search. Its indexing algorithm is just superb which makes searching very fast. Google Desktop runs as a local server and keep indexing file system in background.
I am finding it cool…get it here.
ASV – Action Script Viewer
A few days, I talked about ASV add-on tools. Lately I also tried ASV and I must say its a ‘must-have’ tool for designers or developers.
Imagine a situation, a client comes back and asks you to make some changes in his site or application you did in past. Now, if you have source files its simple but if you don’t remember where are latest files. Believe me, ASV can help you out here. It can create entire FLA for you through JSFL.
If you have lost some assets or source files from your machine and you only have swf files then ASV can extract following things for you.
– font outlines as TTF
– sound as WAV or MP3
– videos as FLV
– frames/graphics/movieclips/library symbols as SWFs
– bitmaps as JPG/PNG
– ofcourse all ActionScript code (scripts or class scripts)
ASV is very intuitive and user friendly to use, so anyone can easily start using without any problems. I love the timeline thingy and preview feature.
And ofcourse, if you want to study your compiled swf, ASV would help you there also. Peter Hall was able to come up with this idea while he was working in ASV.
Though some guys use ASV for wrong purpose, I would just request, please use the tool for ethically right reason. Its a nice tool made for nice purpose.