SCI Blog

Woo! The responsive design is nearly complete

This is quick post and test of the redesigned Skrinak Creative web site. We switched the site over to the Drupal Omega theme, and I'm quite pleased with how Omega helps with making a site responsive. More to follow.

Making ubuntu server 12.10 drupal-ready

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get install tasksel
sudo tasksel install lamp-server (reference)
1. Enter your root password
mysql -u root -p (Log in and ensure name/password combo work)
sudo apt-get install build-essential php5-dev php5-gd php-pear
1. (FYI: This loaded 82.5 MB on my server)
2. I ran apt-get autoremove afterwards; YMMV
sudo a2enmod rewrite

Installing a RapidSSL commercial SSL certificate on Zimbra 7.2

There's no clear, single source detailing how to do this; amazingly enough. I was frustrated by the unclear documentation at the zimbra and RapidSSL sites. Some of it was outdated, and some as flat-out wrong. The biggest pieces of the puzzle missing are steps 1 and 5, as I've detailed below. I presume you're comfortable with the command line and using the clipboard to transfer text between it and your email client. This focuses on after you've received the OK for a SSL certificate:

Create your Certificate Signing Request (CSR) for submission to RapidSSL.

Wordpress migration, the right way

There's much noise on this topic and I was merely adding to the fog. The problem: Wordpress puts too much importance on the fully qualified URLs. So, moving a site around means updating the URLs in the database. Searching and replacing the database won't work, as Wordpress stores serialized data.

xampp/windows versus virtualbox/ubuntu server/amp

I would think that a native compilation of an AMP stack on Windows should outperform an emulated LAMP stack. But it seems I'm wrong. Very informally, using bench.php here are my very informal results: Windows/XAMPP: total time: 29.869 sec VBox/Ubuntu Server/AMP Package: 20.075 sec

So close, VirtualBox, so close…

Well, I popped the champagne too soon. When I bought this Dell laptop, I configured a dual-boot Win7/Ubuntu hoping to use VirtualBox (4.2.0) rawdisk access to access the other partition when running. As time progresses, I'm using Windows more frequently, so I'd be content to occasionally access the Ubuntu partition. After several attempts over several months, I have been unable to get the setup to work. Last week, however, I successfully created a vmdk rawdisk access file, and booted ubuntu from VirtualBox. It was awesome.

Armwrestling CentOS and Redmine

Ever on the hunt for a better project management tool, Redmine pops up quite a bit in my research, so I thought installing it would be worthwhile. These instructions are clear, but it helps if you've managed a CentOS server before. I had conflicting packages (e.g., mysql, ImageMagick) I had to resolve before I could install required dev packages for the full required gems for Redmine. Running the dev "webrick" server confirmed a successful install.

Dell Studio 1747, Windows 7, and a beguiling crash with… Adobe Flash?

A quick note. I've been struggling with frequent crashes on my laptop. There's a lot of articles on Firefox and Flash stability issues, but that wasn't ailing me. The fear of a full OS reload from scratch loomed darkly over my schedule. I also noticed that my sound wasn't working. Uninstalling and reinstalling the sound drivers fixed everything. (Which makes sense after the fact, that Flash would hang when the audio system became unresponsive.) Hope that helps someone facing this annoyance.

APC versus WordPress's Super Cache: the loser is you

I've been struggling with an intermittant but nevertheless constant problem with a linode 512 server I manage, two apache virtual hosted sites on said server and one or the other of the virtual sites doing frequent 500 errors. Apache error logs showed nothing (first mistake) and free memory was slight but never going OOM. I wrongly guessed that this was symptomatic of a low memory instance and watched the server and rebooted as needed. A recent outaged pushed my curiosity further. WordPress has a debug mode. It writes errors to the live page and lo, there's the problem.

An umbraco adventure: migrating the media folder in 4.8.1

I've spent the past month knee-deep in umbraco, and, yes, it's been quite rewarding. My criticisms remain, though I must also emphasize the performance of an umbraco site is a pure joy to behold. Today I found myself in a problem that I was able to fix through a number of disparate posts through the interwebs and wish to make it a single thread here.

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