Is the LinkedIn Platform Dead?
My Clippings November 12th, 2009 by System
Automatically pulled from Google Starred
LinkedIn, the business social network, hopped on the platform bandwagon this time last year by opening up its network to developers. It was a move I was excited to see Reid Hoffman’s crew make. LinkedIn, unlike some of the other professional networks that came before it, is actually very useful. It’s a great way to reach people within large companies, and an even better tool for recruiting and finding like-minded business people. Any extension of such a platform, therefore, was great news in my book. So how has it fared thus far?
Let me put it this way: The LinkedIn platform is no different than the Florida real estate market — neither have any building going on. And that is why it gets a solid D from me. D is for disappointing, by the way.
LinkedIn opened up its platform using Open Social and called the effort InApps. (It remains in beta.) It had half a dozen partners, among them SlideShare, Box.net, Tripit and SimplyHired.
How many new partners have launched apps on LinkedIn since then? How about none! And how many apps are there? I just counted again — there are eight approved apps on the web. Eight. And no, that doesn’t include the ones made by LinkedIn itself, including the recently launched SAP Community Connection. A new Twitter-focused app tentatively called TweetIn is likely to make its debut soon. The only other two major developments that I have seen are partnerships with BusinessWeek and The New York Times.
From what I hear, third-party developers have had a tough time working with LinkedIn; an inability to link to the company’s data set is a big issue, according to my sources. The moribund nature of the LinkedIn platform should be a warning to every single developer out there: For companies, sometimes opening up a platform is little more than an easy way to get cheap press.
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LinkedIn is looking to make some changes. Last month, when it announced that it had 50 million professionals on its network, our friend Marshall Kirkpatrick quipped that it was still a roach motel. In response, Adam Nash, VP of search & platform products at LinkedIn, left a comment saying: “I think you’ll be quite happy with our plans for improvements to our APIs. Stay tuned.”
The Perfect Server – Ubuntu Karmic Koala (Ubuntu 9.10) [ISPConfig 2]
My Clippings November 6th, 2009 by System
Automatically pulled from Google Starred
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The Perfect Server – Ubuntu Karmic Koala (Ubuntu 9.10) [ISPConfig 2]
This tutorial shows how to set up an Ubuntu Karmic Koala (Ubuntu
9.10) server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters:
Apache web server (SSL-capable), Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and
TLS, BIND DNS server, Proftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Courier
POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc. In the end you should have a system
that works reliably, and if you like you can install the free
webhosting control panel ISPConfig 2 (i.e., ISPConfig runs on it out of the box).
SVN Server Admin Issue: Fix It!
My Clippings September 25th, 2009 by System
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A few months ago, Anton Isaykin in collaboration with the company 2comrades discovered a serious security problem that is quite typical of big projects (we do not name names here). To test it, they obtained the file structures and even the source code of about 3320 Russian websites and some major English-language websites. Serious problems like this aren’t supposed to exist nowadays. Every serious or visible exploit is found and fixed quickly. But here we will show you something simple and ordinary yet quite dangerous.
What Is It?
Almost every developer has used or is using a version control system such as SVN. SVN is an advanced tool for managing source code and is used by teams consisting of anywhere from two to hundreds of developers. In its architecture, SVN stores some meta data in a hidden sub-directory (called .svn) of every directory. One of the files in there, named entries, is a list of all of the files and directories contained in the folder where .svn is located.
It also has a link to the repository itself, developer log-ins, file sizes and dates. That’s a problem right there, isn’t it? So, if a project was developed using SVN, we could go to draftcopy.ru/.svn/entries and see the project’s root file structure, with all of this information.
And we could go even further. In the same .svn directory are some text-base directories containing the latest versions of all project files. Moreover, these files carry the non-standard extension .svn-base (for example, index.php.svn-base). So, the files are not run in PHP, Ruby, Python or Perl but are displayed outright!
http://draftcopy.ru/.svn/text-base/index.php.svn-base
We should note that not all websites use SVN this way. We were not able to get the source code in every case.
When we realized that this problem has persisted for almost nine years, we decided to create a crawler to check websites with Russian top-level domains and major .com websites to collect some statistics. But before we report this, let’s go over how to prevent such a thing from happening to your own project.
How To Defend Yourself
You can solve the problem in different ways. The simplest solution is to deny access to SVN meta data directories from port 80 using a Web server configuration.
Related posts:Tags: apache, email, Google, Information, IO, Javascript, php, script, security, way, XP
Ubutu & SSL with Apache 2
Uncategorized September 8th, 2009 by Shai Perednik
Quick HTTP server for current directory with Python
My Clippings September 5th, 2009 by System
Automatically pulled from My Clippings on NewsGator Online
$ python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8080
Will create a HTTP server on the current directory and allow viewing of all files (via Apache esque Indexes)
by David Winterbottom (codeinthehole.com)
How To Develop Websites On Linux
My Clippings August 29th, 2009 by System
Automatically pulled from My Clippings on NewsGator Online
  
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In this article we will look at tools that can help those of you who want to develop websites on a Linux platform, from powerful text editors to desktop and system features. How do you edit files remotely without FTP plug-ins? What are package managers, and why they are cool? In which Web browsers can you test your applications?
I wish I could cover many more topics: using the command line, basics of Vim, Nautilus features in detail, Nautilus scripting, neat command line tools, basic server configuration and many others. But if I addressed all of the issues that arise from time to time on the Internet, this article would turn into a small book. This isn’t an article on “How to do X or Y on Linux” or “How to use [insert app name here].” And we cannot cover more comprehensive IDEs such as Eclipse and NetBeans, each of which requires separate articles.
You probably already have some idea of how to find and install applications for your favorite distros. However, we will point you to the right place anyway to download, for example, scripts and plug-ins.
So, let’s begin!
1. Our Tools
Below, for your quick reference, is a list of tools that we will mention or explain in this article.
Text Editors:
- Gedit
- Geany
Browsers:
- Opera
- Mozilla Firefox
- Epiphany (with the WebKit engine)
- Chromium (for some other WebKit examples)
General and command line tools:
- FUSE
- SSHFS
- Vim
- Parcellite
2. Gedit
Gedit is the default and simplest text editor for the GNOME environment. The default installation already comes with some good resources, although not all of them are activated by default. It is bundled with some plug-ins; however, you can add many more plug-ins to make it a nice simple IDE. If you go to Edit > Preferences > Plugins, you’ll see which plug-ins are installed by default. There, you can configure and activate them. On the same screen, you can configure other elements of the text editor, such as indentation, line numbering and current line highlighting.
Tags: apache, Apple, Build, Chromium, css, email, Google, Information, IO, Linux, Mac, Microsoft, module, php, script, security, ssl, Ubuntu, video, VirtualBox, way, wind, WordPress, XP
Enable mod_rewrite in APACHE
Code August 21st, 2009 by Shai Perednik
With all the hullabaloo lately relating to tr.im’s closure and reopening most people are opting to setup their own shortning service.
There’s Lessn and Yourls. Both are great but Yours takes the cake for the admin panel and more detailed info. I followed the LifeHacker Tutorial, but couldn’t get mod_rewrite working. With the help of this post I figured it out.
change the following line in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default
DocumentRoot /var/www/ <Directory /> Options FollowSymLinks AllowOverride all </Directory> <Directory /var/www/> Options FollowSymLinks AllowOverride all Order allow,deny allow from all </Directory>
then restart apache
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
Theres also a bookmarklet for Yourls from twitter.com/jarbro but I’m still working on getting past the “Unknown” error.
UPDATE: The unknown error is normal. You just need to drag the links to the bookmark bar.
I have to install php5-curl just to get the curl_init() function installed
sudo apt-get php5-curl
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
Hopefully this helps someone
Tags: apache, blockquote, Bookmarklet, CURL, IO, mod_rewrite, php, Sudo, tr.im, Ubuntu
View Processeses like a fu, fu
My Clippings August 20th, 2009 by System
Automatically pulled from My Clippings on NewsGator Online
$ command ps -Hacl -F S -A f
I don’t truly enjoy many commands more than this one, which I alias to be ps1.. Cool to be able to see the heirarchy and makes it clearer what need to be killed, and whats really going on.
by David Winterbottom (codeinthehole.com)
benchmark web server with apache benchmarking tool
My Clippings August 8th, 2009 by System
Automatically pulled from My Clippings on NewsGator Online
$ ab -n 9000 -c 900 localhost:8080/index.php
-n 9000 : Number of requests to perform for the benchmarking session
-c 900 : Number of multiple requests to perform at a time
by David Winterbottom (codeinthehole.com)
