FarhanFaisal

As google have introduced to their google apps to all users for free, I think a simple guide on how to utilize the free service to our optimum use.. This should be a reference for me myself, and other who would see this useful.

For me, I would just want to use google mail, as inside google apps package. Google mail really a good thing we have in the internet world nowadays, as the email interface, emailing experience is different, and really useful. Just a few cons like no folder management. But you can still use labelling to categorize your email.

There are 2 ways you can use google mail on your own domain. Either registering for google apps at http://www.google.com/a/ or using your current gmail email account.

Using google apps.

Go to http://www.google.com/a/, and register for google apps account with your domain name. With google apps, you can have google docs, google chat, google site, calendar and a few more. But this example, google site will be ignored, as I’m using my current hosting account for site, I’m just using Google Mail in my google apps.

After the registration process, you will have to verify domain ownership. You can choose either 1 of 2 method, either configuring your MX record, your html verification. I think HTML verification will be easier, as you can simply create the file, with specific filename and content provided by Google, on your hosting account, and Google with check the file later.

After your google apps have been created, you need to modify your DNS record of your domain, specifically your MX record to tell where emails of your domain to be sent to. Please check it here, http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=33352. You can just refer below, the list of MX record to be changed.

MX Server address Priority
ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM. 10
ALT1.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM. 20
ALT2.ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM. 20
ASPMX2.GOOGLEMAIL.COM. 30
ASPMX3.GOOGLEMAIL.COM. 30
ASPMX4.GOOGLEMAIL.COM. 30
ASPMX5.GOOGLEMAIL.COM. 30


Google also suggest you to add this additional SPF Read the rest of this entry »

Today I discovered a very slow loading of a few website of mine. For apache, I have reading through and made some tweaks and optimization to make it perform better. On database, not much that I’ve done. I use mytop, a mysql health monitor just like top in linux system. Its shows a few queries hanging and queued.

Apache and mysql need a higher priority to serve the web faster, as fast as it could. I found a tutorial on renice, where we can change the process priority of process, and also for any process that belong to any particular user. The value varies from -20 until 19. The negative value only can be assigned by a superuser. The lower the value, higher the priority. For example, process with value -19, have a higher priority than a process with nice value -18.

to change the nice value, it could be as simple as :

nice -5 httpd
* this will change process httpd priority to 5.

You can also change the priority by user.

renice -5 -u mysql
* This will change the priority of all process that belong to user mysql to -5

renice -5 -u mysql -p 8918
* This will change the priority of all process that belong to user mysql and with PID 8918 to -5.

http://www.newlinuxuser.com/howto-change-a-running-processes-priority-with-renice/
http://jeremy.zawodny.com/mysql/mytop/
Renice – Linux man page http://linux.die.net/man/8/renice

Yesterday I spent some time to play around with Monowall. Monowall is an embedded firewall package, thats built from bare-bone version of FreeBSD. The whole package is really small, smaller than 12MB, it can fit into your CF card for your embedded project. I start to have a look into Monowall when my boss bring this machine into our office, an embedded box, Axiomtek NA-0042B. I couldn’t find any technical spec in detail of the product, even from the official Axiomtek website.

So, in my case, I’m using a generic-pc image, from one of the monowall mirrors. I load the image into another vmware virtual machine, load the image into a secondary image of the machine.

The disk is available for download here Monowall Disk for VMware. I’ve also prepared a complete vmware machine with monowall. Please download it here, Monowall VMware Image.. This machine have been configured with IP 192.168.1.254. Username & password are the same as default, admin and mono respectively.

I’ll have a look into IpCop and pfSense later. Never get my hands tired with them yet. Maybe some other Monowall derivative as well

http://www.farhanfaisal.com/?download=Monowall Disk for VMware (5.4MB), 143 downloads.
http://www.farhanfaisal.com/?download=Monowall VMware Image. (5.4MB), 129 downloads.

While figuring out how to manage my pics, and easy insert into my blog post, I found this plugin. Picasa LigthBox 2. This plugin will retrieve our public pictures from picasa gallery, and have an easy interface to include them into our blog post. Besides, it provides a overlay preview to our users, using WordPress Lightbox Plugin.

Just put the WordPress Lightbox2 plugin into your wp-content/plugins/, activate it in WordPress Admin page. Do the same thing for Picasa Lightbox 2 plugin. Put into your plugin folder and activate it. After that, you can see a small button to add new picasa photo.

http://bogde.ro/computers/picasa-ligthbox-2-preview.htm
http://zeo.unic.net.my/notes/lightbox2-for-wordpress/

Last few month I have bought a electronic prototyping platform, which contains a mictrocontroller Atmega168. The board I bought was iDuino, a derivative from another electronic platform, that is Arduino. They are open source hardware and software platform, where you can customize the microcontroller to do almost anything. But right now, I just can blink the light

This is the iDuino board, a similar version of Arduino Diecimila. I just use the Arduino programming software, Arduino tutorial to start with the board. The only reason I bought iDuino instead of Arduino because its cheaper

iDuino is a breadboardable version. So, you can test your own circuit directly on a breadboard. There are a few version of Arduino you can choose from, according to your project need. This iDuino is a good start, and surely I will learn alot from it. It took me almost 4 month to get started, because of busy work. From beginning, i start buying tools, completing my toolbox, and now i have the time to play around with it.

I bought a unsoldered board iDuino, it took me almost one hour to solder them, and test it the other day. The board is connected to PC using USB, utilizing FT232RL, the same as in Arduino. So, I need to install USB Serial Converted driver, provided in Arduino programming software package. Arduino software provided with some sample code, and sample wiring to get started. At first when I try to load up a “blink” code, it gives me an error,

[code]avrdude: stk500_getsync(): not in sync: resp=0x00
avrdude: stk500_disable(): protocol error, expect=0x14, resp=0x51[/code]

I search around, and found the solutions in Arduino forum. i just need to go to Device Manager –> Ports, there is a USB serial port. At first it was mapped to Port 15. Go to its properties, Port Setting, Advance, change the port number to something below 10. Then change the port in Arduino software to what you have change, through Tools –> Serial Port. Now I can start the coding and projects.

There is one guy who already proposing for a sumo challenge, in Ittutor forum. I dont know when I can get involve. I’m a newbie. huhuh.. Tunggu Bro Rizal, bagi saya blaja dulu

Hai everyone.

It seems a long time since I wrote in my own blog. So busy with life, no activity to post in yet. Btw, I’m thinking there might be something I could share with you guys.

These are a few website I’ve been alot lately. I’m into web development, PHP & Jquery.

http://www.noupe.com/ – Good blog related to web development and design
http://www.problogdesign.com/ – Have good articles on web design and wordpress.

http://nettuts.com/

http://www.devsnippets.com/ – Collection of good tutorials on web development, mostly Ajax, CSS and JS framework.
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/ – This site have a good design articles. Web designers, photographers, you should subscribe to this blog.

I’m planning to develop a new website, my own, from scratch. Previously I’ll just use CMS like Joomla and wordpress. Build it from scratch, I have the freedom to see it the way I want. But still, I’m not good in designing actually.

These are a few website I’ve done for past few month
http://www.iratec.com.my
http://www.amaidnetwork.com
http://www.pmo.gov.my

There are a few more to go:
http://www.wahtec.com
http://www.palmaritime.com.my

Will update more soon..

I just found a new Photoshop tutorial, Its a simple tutorial, to create a Web 2.0 button for your website. It will look like glossy crystal look, some kinda elegant. The article is available here.

The tutorial is simple, showing a few suggestion on blending options that needed to give the glossy look. You will find it very easy Eventhough I’m not really into graphic and multimedia stuff. Huhuhu..

http://www.xtutorial.info/2007/11/19/13/

This is really a companion for web developers, a website that could test your design compatibility for different browser, just from this single website. This will be a time-saver tricks to check your work, and make sure everything will displayed smoothly on your viewers screen.

You can test your design for different browser. For Linux browser, test it on Epiphany, Firefox, Galeon, Iceweasel, Konqueror and Opera. For Windows, you can test it for Microsoft Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Safari. BrowserShot can also check for Max OS browser, Firefox and Safari.

With a few click, you can know how ready your design to be delivered

You might develop a website for your client using WordPress, and want to customize the login page. There are a hacks to modify custom login screen at BinaryMoon, but they also develop a custom login plugin to make your life easier. Just place the plugin into your wp-content/plugins folder, activate, and you already have a custom login screen. You can use different background image for the screen, by uploading it to wp-content/plugins/bm-custom-login/images folder.

Custom login plugin – http://www.binarymoon.co.uk/projects/bm-custom-login/

Once in a while, you might caught at a computer, updating your blog maybe, and you need to edit your pictures. Some would suggest a portable image editor in your pendrive. Another alternative would be online/web-based image editor.

One that you could try is rsizr. It will immediately prompt you to open a image file to edit. You can easily resize and crop any image file you uploaded. Rsizr use a special technique to keep the quality of the image edited. You may experience image quality loss, blurred text after resize, but not with rsizr. I have tried rsizr with 800 x 600 image, it resizes the image from 191kb to 121kb. After editing, the image can be save directly to your computer, or to your ImageShack account.

Another one that you could try is flauntr. Flauntr have a lot of feature for image editing. Just enough to make you comfortable without Adobe Photoshop. You can change hue/saturation, brightness, resize, crop, and you can also applying effects to your image, for example blur, greyscale or sepia. Give it a try

Rsizr – http://rsizr.com/
Flauntr – http://www.flauntr.com/