Kuala Lumpur Makes Internet Access a Requirement for Food and Drink Outlets

Posted on: Saturday, 21st January 2012

A lot of things get my attention in the news now-a-days but a piece from Kuala Lumpur impressed me. A new law has been passed in Kuala Lumpur that stipulates food and drink outlets must now provide free wireless internet in order to be granted or to renew a license to operate. I think this is a fantastic step from the local government as Internet access has been a must have for most people in recent years.

Here in the UK, we're often lucky that most popular coffee houses such as Starbucks or Costa Coffee and food outlets such as McDonalds have long provided free WiFi. Starbucks do it in a very interesting way and effectively allow members of their reward scheme to have free Internet access whereas non-members have to use BT OpenZone. Registration is free, so there is no reason for you not to sign up and its a valuable marketing tool for Starbucks.

 

Get Week Start and End Timestamps in PHP

Posted on: Sunday, 15th January 2012

For a recent piece of PHP I was writing I needed to find the start and end timestamps for a given week. I came up with the following piece of code to achieve getting the timestamps.

<?php
// This creates a date string in the format YYYY-WNN, which is
// a four digit year followed by a hyphen and letter W then the
// two digit week number
$strtotime = date("o-\WW");

// The $start timestamp contains the timestamp at 0:00 on the
// Monday at the beginning of the week
$start = strtotime($strtotime);

// and the end timestamp is six days later just before midnight
$end = strtotime("+6 days 23:59:59", $start);

// Display each of the timestamps and the corresponding date
echo "$start: ".date("r", $start)."<br />";
echo "$end: ".date("r", $end)."<br />";
?>

 

Facebook Feature Request: Event Search to Honour 'center' and 'distance' Parameters

Posted on: Saturday, 7th January 2012

For quite a while now one feature I've felt was missing from the Facebook Graph API was searching for events by latitude and longitude along with a distance. You can currently issue a search for place objects, but the place object is the only one which honours the center and distance parameters.

I've filed a bug report for the feature request for Facebook to implement this and we'll see how that progresses. If you would like to add your notes to the feature request or show your support you can do so at https://developers.facebook.com/bugs/288653361182652.

 

Create a New Google Account Without Gmail

Posted on: Thursday, 5th January 2012

A couple of times recently I've needed to create new Google accounts. If you've recently needed to do this you probably noticed that Google's default form now wants you to effectively create a 'screen name' which will come with GMail.

I'd imagine this is a ploy to push more users to Google+ and its a smart way to do it, however if you want to use your existing email address then you will need to use the old formatted signup page which you can find at https://accounts.google.com/newaccount?hl=en.

 

What is a Wharf?

Posted on: Sunday, 1st January 2012

When I went to visit Last.fm in London last year I took some time to wander around the City as I do most times I'm in London. This particular time I decided to take one of the riverboats down to Greenwich - for a long time now, Greenwich has been one of my favourite places in and around London. While I was on the riverboat the tour guide was discussing local points of interest which they have done many times before. However, this time he pointed out a sign which said Wharf above a new apartment block. After then asking all of the people on the riverboat if they knew the meaning of the word wharf non did. Up to that point in my life even I hadn't questioned what the meaning of it was.

As it was explained to us, a wharf is a Ware House At River Front. During the late 1800s this were prevalent all along the Thames and most other waterside locations.

 

Creating and Requesting SSL Certificates

Posted on: Friday, 30th December 2011

One of the less common server tasks during the year is the setup and maintenance of SSL certificates for web services. There has always been the air of dread when this comes around but I'm not too sure where the reason for that comes from. The process is simple enough to go through and you have two choices in how you use SSL.

You can either generate your own certificate which will cause the users browser to prompt (this is by design, you're not a certificate authority) or you can purchase a certificate from an authority such as Verisign. Most of the larger certificate authorities are accepted by 99% of browsers. There are various levels of certificate validation which include domain validation (providing you own the domain), extended validation (proving you are a business/individual) and enterprise level validation.

The first thing you will need to do is generate your own key if you haven't done so already. Using the openssl program you can generate your own key using the following command:

openssl genrsa -des3 -out my.key 2048

This will generate a private key for you using 2,048 bits of encryption. Some certificate authorities require this level of encryption.

Now that you have your own identity key you can create a Certificate Signing Request (CSR). This is a request to an authority to create a certificate on your behalf. The program will ask you a series of questions that you need to answer. The most important of these is the FQDN field which must match the site you're securing. Again, using OpenSSL you can use this command to generate your CSR:

openssl req -new -key my.key -out my.csr

If you want to generate your own self signed certificate then you can use the following OpenSSL command to do so. This generates a certificate that is valid for 365 days from today:

openssl x509 -req -days 365 -in my.csr -signkey my.key -out my.crt

If for any reason you would like to remove the passphrase/password from your private key, you can do so using the command:

openssl rsa -in www.key -out new.key

 

Activate Facebook Timeline for Your Profile

Posted on: Thursday, 29th December 2011

If you would like to active Facebook's new timeline feature for your own profile page, then you can activate it by visiting http://www.facebook.com/about/timeline/.

 

Enable Keyboard Repeat in OSX Lion

Posted on: Saturday, 24th December 2011

An odd bug in OSX Lion means that the keyboard repeat rate options in the Keyboard preference pane doesn't get honoured. To enable this, you can run the following command at a Terminal prompt:

defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false

Then either logout or restart your machine to force a re-read of the defaults configuration.

 

Set Your Facebook Username

Posted on: Sunday, 18th December 2011

One of the most often asked questions for me when it comes to Facebook is how administrators of pages and profiles can set usernames. In the past, Facebook haven't really pushed this feature but in the age where social marketing and name based branding is becoming more important - setting your username is a bonus point when it comes to promoting your brand.

You can set your Facebook username at the following URL:

http://www.facebook.com/username/

 

Enable Airdrop for All Macs

Posted on: Sunday, 13th November 2011

Fire up a terminal and enter the following to enable Airdrop on all macs:

defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser BrowseAllInterfaces 1