If you are a Google Apps for Businesses customer you might see a red error messaging stating “Unable to sign in :(” in the Hangouts sidebar, detailing: “Hangouts has not been enabled for your account. Please contact your administrator to enable this service.” To get rid of it, in the classical admin panel to to Settings(…)
Launch iTerm 2 on startup without opening a terminal window
iTerm 2 is the best Terminal replacement for Mac OS X. As somebody, spending most of his time on the console, I set up the Hotkey window so it opens fullscreen on my MacBook Air and fills half of the screen in my iMac. Obviously, I added iTerm 2 to the Login Items in Users(…)
How to stop posting public Google+ Communities posts to your profile
I cannot believe I did not know this.
Ever since Google+ Communities became available, people complained about their Community posts automatically popping up on their profiles, too. This has been the default for public Communities. In fact, many Community owners on finding this out killed their public Communities and started over doing private ones.
Stay hungry, don’t stop learning
If I could only offer one piece of advice to a new web development student, it would be: “don’t worry; we all feel overwhelmed.” I’d then remind him or her that I, too, am still a student, and so are all of my peers. This industry is an incredibly tough one that requires constant continued education throughout your career. You better be okay with this truth.
You’ll never graduate. You’ll never know it all. But, if you love it enough, none of that will matter. In fact, you’ll crave education.
Setting up Scalr with Ubuntu 12.04 Server and Predis
Part of my work at acceleract is to build highly scalable web applications – mostly driving RESTful APIs for mobile clients these days. The infrastructure powering these scalable PHP applications can get quite complex. For example, for a current client I’m running two load balancers which dispatch traffic to four app servers each using a(…)
Setting Gmail as default mailto link handler in Chrome 24+
I’m a Gmail addict. We run our company email on it. All my personal mail has been based on it for years. Lately, I got annoyed that whenever clicking a mailto: link anywhere on the Web, Apple Mail launched. Now, Apple Mail likely is the worst email client ever written and – frankly – using(…)
Setting up Slim PHP Framework with Twig templating
Recently, I migrated one of my Facebook Canvas apps to the Slim Framework and Twig templating. Unfortunately, the Slim documentation is… very slim… so I ran into some trouble with the paths and how to include everything to make it work. Most of the suggested solutions I found via Google where either outdated or not(…)
Using instant Gmail aliases to track sources of inbox spam
It is a surprisingly little known fact that Gmail and Google Apps for Businesses customers can use instant aliases to better track potential spam mail originating from singing up for (free) services. You “create” an instant alias by adding a +alias to your username. For example, if your email address is bill.gates@gmail.com, you could use bill.gates+freeby@gmail.com when(…)