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 > Talk and activate the feature called “Enable the new Hangouts for messaging and video calls”.

The Google+ help might wrongly point you to the Services > Google+ section. I hope this helps others stopping the frustration. If you want to stay in touch, I’m on Google+.

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 & Groups to automatically launch it on startup.

One little thing always bothered me, though: On launch, iTerm 2 automatically opens a terminal window.
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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. 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.

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I have shamelessly stolen this entire post from Jeffrey Way, who is a fantastic teacher over at tuts+ premium. Of course, I asked for his permission and got it. I’ve been working with developers for most of my life and found this so to the point, that I just had to make it available to the rottmann.net audience. Thanks, Jeffrey, for nailing it.

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.

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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 powerful master-slave MySQL cluster and four master-slave Redis Key/Value stores for fast delivery of in-memory hashes. For all of this, I currently mostly use Ubuntu 12.04 server.

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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 Gmail with anything else than the Web based interface is just plain stupid from a productivity standpoint, so I really had to force my Mac to open mailto: links in Google Chrome.

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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 working.

To save you the hassle, here is how I made it work.

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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.

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