The tool of choice is Webmin. This is a set of web-based tools which allow you to control virtually every piece of server-side software on you Ubuntu server. The GUI is intuitive and straight-forward, the documentation is excellent, and the project is under active development.

Because Webmin isn’t in the standard repositories you will have to do a couple of quick command-line changes to configure your system to be able to find and download the apt package.

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Once the file is open, add these lines to the bottom of the file

#########################

deb http://download.webmin.com/download/repository sarge contrib deb http://webmin.mirror.somersettechsolutions.co.uk/repository sarge contrib

Those lines will add the necessary sources to apt for it to find the Webmin package. The Webmin package has also been digitally signed by its author. By default you will need to download the author’s key so that apt can use it to verify the Webmin package at install time. Fortunately, this is really easy to do.

wget http://webmin.com/jcameron-key.asc sudo apt-key add jcameron-key.asc

Now that all the prep work is done, it’s time to install Webmin.

sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install webmin

All done! Now you can access administrative functions of your server’s services from the Webmin console: https://yourservername:10000/. This URL is also shown in the last few lines of the apt install details that are ouput to the command-line.

UPDATE 12-Apr-2011: After some fantastic discussion elsewhere I’ve modified the code to handle a number of additional scenarios. A point was also raised that a combination of Int64.TryParse() and Decimal.TryParse() would accomplish the same thing. They would, almost, but those methods test for valid 64-bit integers and valid 64-bit decimals — they don’t test whether a string is numeric. Feed them a long enough string of numbers and they’ll return false. It’s a pretty fine distinction, I grant that, but I figured since I was writing the code I might as well make it as robust as possible.

        public static bool IsNumeric(string s)
        {
            return IsNumeric(s, false);
        }

        public static bool IsNumeric(string s, bool allowDecimal)
        {
            bool result = true;
            if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(s))
            {
                return false;
            }

            if (s.StartsWith("-"))
            {
                s = s.Substring(1);
            }

            char[] chars = s.ToCharArray();

            if (allowDecimal)
            {
                bool decimalFound = false;
                foreach (char c in chars)
                {
                    if (c == '.' && !decimalFound)
                    {
                        decimalFound = true;
                    }
                    else
                    {
                        result = result & (char.IsNumber(c));
                    }
                }
            }
            else
            {
                foreach (char c in chars)
                {
                    result = result & char.IsNumber(c);
                }
            }

            return result;
        }

I built 14 39 unit tests for this on the project I built it for throwing all sorts of weird and null data at it, and it seems to run fairly well and reasonably quickly. Any comments/suggestions are welcome.

1Password

1Password is a password manager for MacOS X which late last year released a version of their application which works with the iPhone and iPod touch.  Both the desktop and handheld versions of the application are brilliant and provide a great credential management service for those running the appropriate devices.  If you’re a slider like many of us are starting to become, it may not be the solution for you since there’s no version of 1Password available for Windows or any flavour of Linux.

Website | App store | Twitter

Crayon Physics

Again coming from desktop-based roots Crayon Physics is a simplistic looking game for the iPod Touch.  The goal is simple, draw the tools you need to get the ball to the goal.  The trick is you need to be able to anticipate how those tools will react to gravity, friction and impacts with other objects.  Give Crayon Physics a try if you want a game that’s challenging enough to make you think, but easy enough to actually complete.

Note: the desktop version was licensed by Kloonigames to Hudson Soft, so they’re technically not related.

Website | App store

iShoot

iShoot is a great replication of games that were super-popular in the early 1990s like Worms and my favourite Scorched Earth.  Battle it out with the computer or up to three other human players in a tank-on-tank-on-tank-on-tank battle with weird and wonderful weapons of all kinds.  A recent release of the game also includes the ability to define your own rules, terrains and weapons making it a truly personalized experience.

Website | App store | Twitter

SpaceTrader

Modelled after games with the same name on other platforms, and of course loosely based on Wing Commander: Privateer, SpaceTrader allows you to fly from planet to planet as a trader in an effort to make as much money as possible.  This game is the only 3D entry on the list with a fairly rich 3D environment that you can walk around and explore.  I had some memory issues with this game early on, but working with the developer and sending in some crash logs a newer release seems to have licked that problem.  Give this a try as a neat alternative to the 2D side scrollers.

Website | App store

Which applications have you purchased?  Or are you more of a JailBreak type?  Party in the comments…

I’ve been hard on the poor WordPress guys in the past, so I feel a special obligation to acknowledge the improvement. The search now does a great job of indexing titles, descriptions and keywords to help plugins show up quickly and easily.

Best of all for me, a search for “random image” puts the Random Image selector plugin at the top of the list (at the time of this writing at least).

Thanks WordPress guys!!

In setting up this new environment, I needed to decide how to cope with my Windows XP disc being an original, pre SP1 disc.  The solution: Slipstream.

Slipstreaming allows you to create a Windows XP CD that has updates like the most current Service Packs.  In this case, I’ll be adding Service Pack 3.

There are lots of guides on how to do the Slipstream process, including these two on HowToHeaven and Invisibill.  These are great step-by-step tutorials that show you everything involved in the process.  But they’re also very manual.

The tool I’ve chosen to go with is nLite.  This slick little application provides the ability to not only Service Pack your XP installation, but apply lots of other custom features as well.  Here are the steps I went through for my Slipstreaming adventure.  (There is also a step-by-step guide on the nLite Website)

Step 1: When running nLite is to show it where the Windows installation is located.  After that, you’ll need to specify a location for nLite to perform it’s magic.  I chose C:slipstream.

Step 2: The next phase is to select the options for your installation.  I’m a whole-hog kinda guy, so I elected to go with every option if for no other reason than to browse the options and screens.

Step 3: Pick your Service Pack.  Once you’ve selected a service pack and applied it, nLite will perform the Slipstream operation and integrate the service pack.

Step 4: Updates & Hotfixes.  The more that you can download and apply here, the fewer there will be to apply once the windows installation is completed.

Step 5: Select components to remove.  nLite gives you the opportunity to eliminate components from the final installation.  This can lighten not only the ISO, but also the final installation.  Beware removing too many options.  By eliminating support for hardware or drivers the usage of the installation will become more limited.  However, if you have a specific application in mind it can help to streamline the process.

Step 6: Unattended Install. The next screen provides the ability to streamline the installation for a smooth unattended install.  If you want to use this option, you’ll need your Windows XP CD key at this stage.

Step 7: Installer Options. This screen allows you to customize some of the behaviours of the installation process including boot-time messages and BIOS backup retention.  If you don’t understand an option, take the default.

Step 8: Tweaks. Wow.  This section has dozens upon dozens of options to tweak and adjust virtually every major setting in Windows.  And a whole bunch that aren’t so major.  Take your time with this and make sure to read the little captions for each option.  There are so many possibilities.

Step 9: Integrate all the changes.  nLite will begin to create the installation image, merging together all the changes you’ve selected.  This process will take quite a while.  On my machine it took about 10 minutes.

Step 10: Burn the ISO.  Set any last settings you want for the ISO, and click the Create ISO button to start writing the image.  Once the image is written, it can be installed to a VM (VMWare/VirtualServer) or burned to a disk for installation at a later time.

In a short post titled “Thanks for waiting ” released yesterday, the iPhone Dev Team released Pwnage 2.0 for jailbreaking iPhones running the iPhone firmware version 2.0.

It should be noted that this doesn’t unlock your iPhone, it only opens up all the things that the old Jailbreak used to do.  With the advent of the app store, this is now more of a “hardcore” change than ever before… but nonetheless, Kudos to the iPhone Dev team!

Update #1: I also meant to note that un the first day since this was released, the blog entry received over 2800 comments.  Thats one way to get traffic. 

Avast did a great job of finding most things and cleaning them up.  What it had trouble with was a few DLLs that were in use by the executing trojan.  I was pointed toward Unlocker to free the DLL’s of their executing process and remove the lock that windows places on these files.  Once the file was unlocked, it was able to be deleted by Avast and all was well.

(Photo Credit: bigux on Flickr)

One of the most popular photo editing programs for Windows has to be Google’s Picasa.  Though it’s not the most full-featured image editing on the market it’s free and great for managing photos and albums, something that isn’t a strength of more full-featured applications like Photoshop and Paint.NET.

On the Mac, the most obvious photo organizer is Apple’s own iPhoto.  iPhoto does a decent job of organizing photos, though it does have its drawbacks and it’s not free.

A free Picasa would not only challenge iPhoto, but would also channel users into using Google’s online service Picasa Web Albums.  One question raised is how this will affect competing photo management services like Photobucket and industry leader Flickr.  Reality is it will probably do little to the market since OS X users make up a relatively small percentage of the software market, but what it will do is make Picasa a true cross-platform tool.

This plugin does a great number of things and has an options screen as long as my arm.  Aside from having the ability to ignore administrators, it also has the ability to add in tracking to all of your outgoing links and downloads.

If you use WordPress and you use Google Analytics you need this plugin.

I was able to meet up with the geeks to join them for the recording of the 74th edition of the GGP. We covered a ton of stuff in this week’s show, and as promised here’s the details for this week’s Mac Lab Update.

Net News Wire This was huge news this week. With NewsGator releasing all of it’s personal products as free downloads (FeedDemon, NetNewsWire and a few others) they have taken a huge step towards monopolizing the RSS agregation client market. As regular listeners of the GGP already know, Dave is a bit of an RSS afficianado and he highly recommended I check out this app as soon as it became available.

So on Thursday I downloaded and installed it, and gave it a run through it’s paces. Though it caused me a few headaches as it imported the sixty or so feeds that I had in my Google Reader OPML file, over the next few hours it became less finicky and seems to be working as advertised now.

Using a client instead of a web interface is often a more visually rewarding experience, and NNW doesn’t disappoint in this department. The UI is clean and easy to use, and there are enough options available to make organizing and browsing the articles in your feed a breeze.

Net News Wire is (now) a free application.

MAMP This item came to us from GGP listener Eric Searle. MAMP (Macintosh, Apache, MySQL & PHP) is the OS X implementation of the classic open-source development stack LAMP (Linux).

MAMP is a one-stop shop that brings the Mac usability experience to open-source development. Though it’s possible to install and configure all of these components from source code as is done on other systems, the MAMP package provides a quick and easy way to get a PHP development environment running on your Mac.

The open-source MAMP stack, are free applications.

gDisk gDisk is an OS X utility that gives you the ability to mount a drive to your system that will save files to your GMail account. This is a great way to move relatively small files between different computers or locations, with a backup copy stored in your GMail account.

It’s a simple utility that does exactly what it claims.

gDisk is a free application.

The real big seller for me was the ability to embed the presentation in your blog or website. Now, admittedly I’m not super-impressed because it’s using an I-Frame instead of a regular Embed tag like a YouTube video… but it’s definitely a start!

Based on the tutorial posted on the site I put together a short slide-deck tutorial of my own both for practice and as a demo!

For the tutorial, I’ll turn you over to my short slide deck.

The software included in the bundle is:

• ForkLift
• RapidWeaver
• Swift Publisher
• Marine Aquarium
• Xslimmer
• Memory Miner
• Yep
• XMind 2008 Pro
• iStabilize
• PulpMotion (still locked)

Full retail cost for the bundle is nearly $600.00, and the bundle will be going for about $50.00 USD until Tuesday.

I’ve tried using various incarnations of Red Hat including the Fedora Core (5 & 6) series, but eventually I hit some kind of a wall and give up. After all the technology is supposed to be there to serve me, not the other way around.

Photo Credit: IO_Burn on Flickr

Last week I listened to the second episode of the Knightcast. This was the continuation of the series “the Grid”. The main focus of the episode was getting started using Ubuntu as a “power-station” in a home or (very small) business network.

I listen to most of my podcasts in the car, so the first time I listened to this episode, I was driving around the city on my daily commute and it gave me lots of time to think about just how useful this type of “home server” might be. When I got home, I pulled the podcast up and went through the first part of it again, the bit that explains some of how the server could be put to good use. Most of it is pretty common sense stuff. The “power-station” server machine allows for a central place in your home where documents, media and other files can be stored and it provides a mechanism for making that data remotely accessible.

Knightwise also discussed a couple of options for remote administration, which is always a good thing. I’d much rather be able to addess and deal with my server by way of my MacBook from the deck (or the bedroom) instead of tromping all the way downstairs where the (very noisy) desktop machines have been relegated.

Almost immediately a few new possibilities began rolling to mind…

For some of the software development that I do, it would be very handy to have access to a SubVersion repository that I could use to manage the code from anywhere on the Internet. Oh sure, there are other services like SourceForge and GoogleCode which offer similar services, but it never hurts to be able to have full control over your machine, and your information.

With a built-in server, adding FTP (or better yet SFTP) capability makes it that much easier to share specific files or data with friends and colleagues. Again you could sign up for a service like X-Drive or Box.net for this, but why not take advantage of owning all your own data. If done correctly, the self-hosted model can be much more secure.

Add to this the fact that my router, by way of it’s spanky new DD-WRT firmware, supports several free DDNS services, and I have a new server set up to serve my content on the web or anywhere else. And I don’t even have to remember my IP address (which admittedly hasn’t changed in the over 2 years I’ve had my service… thank you Mr. ISP!)

It sounds like there are going to be some more great tips coming up in future Knightcast episodes featuring “the Grid”. I wonder what else my 6-year old P4 desktop will be able to do for me!

PortableApps is a series of applications which have been built and configured for the sole purpose of running from an external device such as a flash drive, memory card or external hard drive.  This allows you to port not only your data from PC to PC, but your applications as well.  You can keep your email client (Thunderbird), web browser (Firefox) and many other tools and applications on the USB key and run them on any computer with Windows and a USB port.

How is this useful you may ask?  A recent example:

I have been doing some presentations at work last week we had a laptop whose Powerpoint application refused to open (read: Runtime error every time it started).  Admittedly a reboot probably would have fixed the probem, but I couldn’t take that chance.  I had to get another laptop, (wait for Windows to boot), and get it all set up.  This wasted about 15 minutes of everyone’s time.

A perfect solution to this would have been to use the OpenOffice slideshow application Impress and run the entire thing from my USB drive where the presentation was stored.  So over the past couple of days, I’ve been trying out my new setup (Firefox, KeePass and OpenOffice) in the office to see how it runs on various other computers.  So far, so good.

Have a look at the PortableApps suite.  There are tons of great applications for this technology, and I’ll probably cover some more examples in the coming weeks.

This week’s first tool is a Dashboard Widget called Delivery Status that will allow you to track packages from over a dozen different companies. This quick and dirty widget allows you to quickly hunt down that pesky new Wii, iPhone or eBay package that you’ve been waiting for without having to remember which website you need to find to look it up.

Some of the packages it can track are: - US Postal Service & CanadaPost - Posten in Sweeden & Norway - FEDEX - Apple - Nintendo and several others…

Not all services are are available in all countries, but it’s a really good start. There’s even compatibility with Growl to notify you when a package’s status changes.

Download Delivery Status from Mike Piontek‘s website.

Second on the block this week is a set of scripts for Apple’s Mail and Address Book apps. The scripts were written by Andreas Amann and are a collection of AppleScripts that are used in conjuntion with the standard OS X mail application to add many new features, and enhance some existing ones.

The API available to AppleScript and Cocoa developers for most of the built-in apple applications provides a myriad opportunities for elements of the applications to be scripted, or to combine them together.

Some of the scripts provided by “Mail Scripts” are:

• Add addresses: Not just the sender, but any email address contained in the header of the message (to, from, cc etc…) (Integrates with Address Book to store contact information)

• Create new Mail rules based on the selected message. this saves lots of tedious data-entry

• Schedule Mail Delivery for a later time/date. This allows you to write and pre-send a message, and then let the Mail application deliver it to its target at the appointed time. (integrates with iCal for scheduling)

There are several other scripts as well. If you’re a regular Apple Mail user, and find it lacking any of these capabilities, download Mail Scripts.

Third up this week is SketchBox, developed by Germany’s OMZ:Software. Sketchbox is a desktop-sticky application for the Mac which allows you to either draw or type notes to yourself. The sticky notes have two separate layers, a drawing canvas and a text input box.

The stickies can be deployed on your desktop, and will each occupy a space like a separate window, and can be managed while the main window is closed. The application will also allow the stickies to have alarms set on them, but they’re set in a timer format. You set the number of days, hours & minutes until the alarm goes off, instead of setting a specific time. At the appointed time, a cell-phone like ring will remind you of the task at hand.

Finally, Sketchbox provides support for tablet devices, allowing you to sketch to your heart’s content without even reaching for a keyboard. It’s in this context that the pull-slider interface for the alarms makes the most sense.

I’ve never really been a fan of Stickies type applications, and in some ways there’s quite a bit of polish missing from SketchBox. I’d love to see this type of functionality implemented as a dashboard widget instead. Still, the freehand drawing ability is pretty cool and I recommend at least taking a look at Sketchbox.

Last up this week is some tips for making use of a great built-in OS X feature called Aliases. This is a blog post from MyFirstMac.com which outlines some “killer-app” possibilities for what most consider at first blush to be a pretty innocuous feature of an OS.

The tips range from simple productivity gains for automatically reconnecting Network Drives, to workarounds for FrontRow’s limitation of not finding content outside of your Movies folder.

There’s a discussion started after this post with a few bonus tips as well, definitely worth a look for any Mac-Switcher’s out there, or those who just want to learn all they can about their mac.

Go and check this post out!

It is (for the moment at least) lightning fast and has been able to find all of the words and phrases I’ve thrown at it so far, including:

• web 2.0
• Enterprise
• enterprise
• ninja
• grammarian

The tool will also correct spelling (I forgot the second “m” in grammarian), as well as distinguish between common and proper nouns (note the two spellings of Enterprise).

This tool also comes with the ability to have a Windows Tray application, though the link to the OS X widget is broken. Hoorah!

A couple of days ago I was asked to create a tutorial at work for a new project we’re working on instead of having to continually do training sessions for my team.  I’ve given Jing a shot, and the early results are extremely encouraging!

I’ve been able to capture video segments (with audio!) of the training material, and will be able to produce it into a full length e-learning “howto” so that the team has something to work with when I go on holidays.

The tool produces .SWF files by default, but there are several video conversion apps out there which will manipulate your SWF’s into a more universally recognized format.

Check out the Jing project, and give it a try for yourself.

MacPorts (formerly DarwinPorts) is a package manager for Mac OS X which can handle the installation, removal and updating of many tools. The vast majority of these are command-line programs. They run the spectrum from development tool like Subversion or Ruby on Rails, to network tools like bind or arpwatch.

Typical syntax for installing a MacPort is:

sudo port install some-application

A quick note about the Subversion install: you may need to ensure that your MacPorts install is up-to-date. I needed to run a “self update” of MacPorts before my subversion install would complete. See the transcript below to see what I mean…

titanium:~/Projects/WP-Plugins kdmurray$ su root

titanium:/Users/kdmurray/Projects/WP-Plugins root# port install subversion +tools

If you’re working with command-line tools on your Mac, and trying to compile linux tools from scratch, give MacPorts a shot. It will quite literally save you hours of time and frustration.

The script will prompt you to choose one of the built-in system voices, then produce your file.  If you need an MP3, just open it up with iTunes and convert the track.

Sheer Brilliance!

PS: Those of you who watch Command N should try out the Zarvox voice.