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Google Inactive Account Manager – The solution to your online data when you’re no more

Written by Nitin Venkatesh on April 16, 2013, 8:36 a.m.

Google released the Inactive Account Manager a few days back, and if you still haven’t checked it out, here’s a look at it. Google Inactive Account Manager is a tool that helps you decide what should happen to your Google Account and your Google data incase your account is not accessed over a period of time (subtext: you’re dead or lost in a coma). First, you’ll need to head over to Google Inactive Account Manager, where you can tinker quite a few things like Timeout period – how long your account should have been inactive before the set tasks are kicked into action. Add trusted contacts – who can receive all of your Google data or certain parts of your ...

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Google Reader gets the chopping block :(

Written by Nitin Venkatesh on March 14, 2013, 4:57 a.m.

Google announced recently that it was doing some spring cleaning, and what should finally end up on the chopping block than Google Reader. The beloved service used by many had been dodging and avoiding the axe for quite some time now and the cat has finally fallen on the wrong side of the wall. Google will shut down Google Reader on the 1st of July, 2013 and in the meantime devoted users can migrate/liberate their Google Reader data from here Note: This link is only a Google Reader takeout, to liberate more of your Google data visit - Google Takeout Full list of Google's Spring Cleaning*

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Twitter Widget, Firefox & Abine’s DoNotTrackMe plugin

Written by Nitin Venkatesh on March 13, 2013, 11:25 a.m.

FYI: This post is just to vent my frustration! Note to self: Turn off DNT plugin during dev. Was trying to embed the Twitter Timeline Widget today when something annoying happened, the widget loaded and worked flawlessly on Chromium but didn’t load on Firefox! Imagine the frustration! That obviously led me to tinkering and searching various posts and discussions online, then while googling about one result caught my eye – it said something along the lines of Twitter, Firefox and Comodo – EUREKA!!!! Firewall issues!!! But it was working properly on Chromium so what could be blocking Twitter on FF? Yup, you guessed it, a plugin that tries to block sites from tracking you (in this case it worked extremely ...

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Finding the best Public DNS service for you with Namebench

Written by Nitin Venkatesh on March 11, 2013, 7:18 a.m.

We have a ton of choices to choose from when it comes to using a Public DNS service – Google Public DNS, Open DNS, etc., but which one is the best for you? The main reason you use Public DNS is to bypass the slow or prohibitive DNS lookup by your ISP. And most of the time it’s for the speed. And namebench will help you find the fastest Public DNS for your location. Running Namebench on Linux (in the screenshots, Ubuntu) is as easy as pie – Download, extract and run! It’s the same if you’re running another Operating System too (Mac OS & Windows), visit the project site and do the needful :) Anyways, Linux folks, these are ...

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Congratulations to the new moderators of Askubuntu!

Written by Nitin Venkatesh on Feb. 20, 2013, 4:45 a.m.

We offer our hearty congrats to the three new moderators of Askubuntu! A special shout-out to the two of them, who are our very own members - Roland Taylor and Barneedhar Vigneshwar :D Congratulations once again guys! And may the force be with you!

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Installing uTorrent Server on Ubuntu

Written by Nitin Venkatesh on Feb. 18, 2013, 2:46 a.m.

Recently one of my friends shifted to Ubuntu and couldn’t install uTorrent Server. One note, folks, please always paste the full error message that you receive, there’s a reason why that error popped on your screen; so that you can fix it! Okay, so here goes: Download uTorrent Server . I am going to assume that the path where the file is stored is in ~/Downloads. Now open up a terminal, and navigate to the Downloads folder. nits@excalibur:~$ cd ~/Downloads/ nits@excalibur:~/Downloads$ ls -l utorrent-server-3.0-ubuntu-10.10-27079.tar.gz -rw-rw-r-- 1 nits nits 1561244 Feb 18 12:36 utorrent-server-3.0-ubuntu-10.10-27079.tar.gz Extract the package, and switch to the extracted directory nits@excalibur:~/Downloads$ tar -zvxf utorrent-server-3.0-ubuntu-10.10-27079.tar.gz utorrent-server-v3_0/ utorrent-server-v3_0/webui.zip utorrent-server-v3_0/utserver utorrent-server-v3_0/docs/ utorrent-server-v3_0/docs/style.css utorrent-server-v3_0/docs/Changes.txt utorrent-server-v3_0/docs/ut-logo.gif utorrent-server-v3_0/docs/Server_Changes.html utorrent-server-v3_0/docs/Server_Changes.pdf utorrent-server-v3_0/docs/license.txt utorrent-server-v3_0/docs/Server_Changes.txt utorrent-server-v3_0/docs/uTorrent_Server.pdf utorrent-server-v3_0/docs/footer_ut_address.gif utorrent-server-v3_0/docs/uTorrent_Server.txt ...

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Finding the exact selectors to change CSS behavior

Written by Nitin Venkatesh on Feb. 5, 2013, 6:53 a.m.

If you’ve had to work with Bootstrap, or have had to tweak some CSS in some other person’s code (or maybe yours) and have a tough time finding out the exact selector to apply the new CSS to, welcome :) Although you can use your web browser’s in-built development tools, I prefer using Firebug and will be using that in this post. Okay, so for example’s sake I am going to change the color of the navigation bar that Bootstrap offers from black (I am using navbar-inverse) to a purplish gradient and the active element of the navbar to use orange – Ubuntu colours! YAY! Now, open up the page in your web browser and hover your mouse over the ...

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PHP script to dynamically generate links to the files present in current directory

Written by Nitin Venkatesh on Feb. 5, 2013, 6:46 a.m.

If you’re like me, you have a bunch of symbolic links in your webroot (/var/www) and it’s getting tough to keep a track of all the things hosted on your local machine – locations, link names, etc. I am merely documenting(and explaining) how I found a solution to this problem. Code – /var/www/index.php: <?php $dir_open = opendir('.'); while(false !== ($filename = readdir($dir_open))){ if($filename != "." && $filename != ".."){ $link = "<a href='./$filename'> $filename </a><br />"; echo $link; } } closedir($dir_open); ?> Code Explanation: $dir_open = opendir('.'); The opendir() is very much similar to the cd command in Linux/Unix based environments. It puts the mentioned directory into perspective. So in our example, the variable $dir_open is assigned to the perspective ...

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What is the ternary operator?

Written by Nitin Venkatesh on Feb. 5, 2013, 6:41 a.m.

The ternary operator is used to write a very short version of an if-else block (in one line) and is used in a number of programming languages. The format of using a ternary operator is (condtion) ? truth statement : false statement Let’s see a simple example in PHP to check if the number stored in the variable is 1 or not, echo ($var == 1) ? 'Number stored is 1' : 'Number stored is not one' ; The same thing in a full if-else block would be as follows: if ($var == 1){ echo "Number stored is 1"; } else{ echo "Number stored is not one"; } We can also use nested ternary operators just as we would use ...

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Writing cleaner PHP code with heredoc

Written by Nitin Venkatesh on Jan. 30, 2013, 2:06 a.m.

Sometimes we need to write up long strings in PHP and things might get confusing the next time we read through it or someone else takes a look at the code. That’s when heredoc comes to the rescue. The way to use heredoc is as follows $var_name = <<<HEREDOC_NAME /* String assignment values go here */ HEREDOC_NAME; <<<HEREDOC_NAME marks the beginning and the HEREDOC_NAME; marks the end. A heredoc name can be anything you please, but the same heredoc name should be used at both the beginning and the end of the string. A very important note – No characters, whitespace, indentation should be present either before or after the end heredoc statement,meaning that there should be nothing before or ...

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