This January I decided to finally make the move to put Jira on my Rackspacecloud hosting. It took a bit of searching so I decided to make a step by step guide.

Sun Java 1.6

From a fresh install of 10.04 we need to install a few things to make Jira run nicely

nano /etc/apt/sources.list

update-alternatives --config java

nano /etc/profile

JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun export JAVA_HOME

MySQL

apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client

mysql -u root -p
Then enter the password you setup for the root account
Now we need to create the user and database on MySQL for the Jira installation 

CREATE USER 'jira_db'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY '__PASSWORD__'; GRANT USAGE ON * . * TO 'jira_db'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY '__PASSWORD__' WITH MAX_QUERIES_PER_HOUR 0 MAX_CONNECTIONS_PER_HOUR 0 MAX_UPDATES_PER_HOUR 0 MAX_USER_CONNECTIONS 0 ; CREATE DATABASE IF NOT EXISTS `jira_db` ; GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON `jira_db` . * TO 'jira_db'@'localhost';

Jira

wget atlassian-jira-X.Y.bin chmod a+x atlassian-jira-X.Y.bin ./atlassian-jira-X.Y.bin

Follow the on-screen install instructions. (I used the defaults for everything)

When you are done you should see a message like:

JIRA 4..4.4 can be accessed at http://localhost:8080 Finishing installation ...

When you open the website on port 8080 you should be able to figure out how to set up the MySQL

With Jira 5 you can add Gmail as your SMTP using apps (not available in the 4.4.4 version unfortuantely)

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As of my birthday (3rd of Aug) Google has added a "Call phones from Gmail" feature to google chat.

Can anyone say "goodbye skype!"?

What most would consider the final advantage of Skype now has been matched and the proliferation of google chat into google plus only means less reason to boot up the slow and cumbersome dinosaur that Skype now is.

Skype, thanks for the good times but it looks like goodbye.
Microsoft, good luck
Google, well played

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It is very encouraging to see that Google is not all politics and actually realises the potential that Facebook gives to the Google platform as well as the threat.

I am very encouraged that Google is working on something similar to what I have been exploring these last couple of weeks.
(more news about this I hope soon)

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Portugal has a big problem.... rotten bureaucracy

I am an Australian who is working as a freelancer in Portugal. I work primarily for an Australian company. In other words in terms of economic benefit for Portugal I remove money from Australia and spend it in Portugal. For me it is great because I am earning a decent wage (hard to do in Portugal). For Portugal it is great because more money if flowing through their economy.

The biggest problems I have faced over the 18 months, that I have been here, have come from the tax and social security systems.

Don't get me wrong, I want to pay tax and I want to put money into the Portuguese social security system.

The problem is how hard it is for a person to do that. I registered for "recibos verdes" (i.e. the freelancer system). All fine and dandy, the people in Finanças even tell me because I am a new tax payer I get a year free of paying tax. Because I am doing most of my work for a non-EU company my income would be exempt from VAT and my declarations would be pretty straight forward. So far, so good. I am doing a VAT declaration each 3 months, every time struggling with the legal "lingo" on top of an already difficult language.

So my 12 months of beginners tax-free living is over and now I am supposed to start paying income tax and supposedly some social security. In April I will fill out my income tax declaration for last year and I will not have to pay anything. For this year I will have to save my own tax payments as I earn money and pay it when it comes to tax time next year.
However the social security department is the hardest department to get any information out of, people start lining up an hour before the offices open. Reading their instructions in Portuguese are ridiculously difficult even for a native speaker. I am currently trying to find out if I have to start paying this monthly fee now or in October (I swear it says both). I have received requests for basic information from the department, most of which they already have copies of and some of which I don't even know. They have asked, for example, for my social security number, which they have not given me yet.

It is no wonder the Portuguese economy is in the toilet. Why are there proposals to reduce pensions when they don't even have a decent system to receive tax? With electronic citizen cards they can authenticate people, allow them to enter the information required and then give that data to a bureaucrat who can then contact that person with an answer, all without having to line up for hours and hours just to be told that the office is closing and you might have better luck tomorrow.

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CAST(1.0 AS UNSIGNED) makes the value an unsigned integer, i.e. 1

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One thing I that really annoys me is how complicated charsets are on the internet. You need to study a ton to get everything working with "strange" characters. Which if you have anyone using a language that is not English comes up quite often.

Just playing around with a portuguese website I have been working on JPM and getting the charsets all changed from the default to UTF-8

First thing you have to do is change the following settings in your php.ini file (mbstring is a needed extension to create a transparent string handling system for UTF-8 strings, meaning you do not need to go encoding and decoding text)

mbstring.func_overload = 7 default_charset = "UTF-8"

You will also have to make sure MySQL (or other database) is using UTF-8 so when you input data to the DB it stays as UTF-8 (do this after the mysql_connect and mysql_select_db)

mysql_query("SET NAMES utf8"); mysql_query("SET CHARACTER SET utf8");  

Each html page will also need to know that it is encoded with UTF-8. Sending the PHP header command means the recipient gets the information in the header right at the start.

<?php header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8'); ?> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

If all of this stuff is done correctly there should not be any need to use utf8_encode or decode unless you are dealing with data that is coming from an external source.

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I like the way these Independents (the crossbenchers in general) and their indications on what they will do to reshape Australian politics. I really have disliked the bickering between Labor and Liberal especially in the last few years. I would love to see more minority governments in Australia.
I hope minority governments will help achieve Don Chipp's aim to "keep the bastards honest"

If it takes a hung parliament to make these sorts of changes or a declaration of independence, I don't really care, as long as it reduces the ridiculousness of the schoolyard arguments between big party leaders.

I would also like to see a hell of a lot more conscience votes rather than voting with party policy.

I really like the fact that the crossbenchers are not all in agreement on lots of issues and clearly disagree with each other on certain topics, but they seem to be working well together for the good of the country.

I hope at the end of all this I can be a proud Australian... always the optimist

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Teresa and I just spent our weekend at Super Bock Super Rock 2010

There were plenty of great bands to see. The only trouble we had was with the terrible organisation of the campers. We thought that people who paid for 3 days would be treated better than the people who just turned up for the day. Apparently we thought wrong.

We turned up a day early and were quite excited about the prospect of camping when we saw the situation around the main stage area. Although a bit sandy and dusty it was flat and pretty well shaded with lots of trees, and best of all it was a huge space.

Unfortunately as we continued around the side of the stage area we discovered that the landscape changed to steep and even more sandy. Unluckily (!?) this is where the organisers decided to put the campers who had paid for 3 days of festival. Not only was it on a slope and very sandy but it was also a tiny area. The organisers didn't bother designating any pathways through the camping area, so each time someone from the centre of this mess decided they wanted to go to the stage they had to discover new ways through the maze of tents.

See the full gallery on Posterous

After the first night Teresa and I decide that there was no advantage of being in the designated camping area. We moved our tent out into what we could only assume was meant for cars? We moved within 50 metres or so of the secondary stage.

Anyway. Over the next two nights Teresa and I slept much better and didn't have to worry about someone tripping over a tent string and landing on us during the night. We also had the advantage of easy access to both entries into the main area (the one with all the campers always had a notoriously long line for the men to get in)

Somehow I think a women who really had a chip on her shoulder about lines at women's toilets organised the gate entry too. There was always a huge line for guys and the girlsalways walked straight though and then had to stand around waiting for guys to go through security... lol

Anyway saw plenty of cool acts including all 4 Australian acts who were there (Cut Copy, John Butler Trio, Temper Trap, Empire of the Sun). Prince was surprisingly good, although the crowd was a bit tired at times (not surprising after 3 late nights). As as a closing act Empire of the Sun rocked, even though it was 2am when they started the (big) crowd really got into it.

IMGP0274.MOV Watch on Posterous

See the full gallery on Posterous

To see more pictures just check out http://picasaweb.google.com/niko.e.roberts/SBSR10

Or if you want to see more professional pictures have a look at http://www.festivaispt.org/1702-reportagem-super-bock-super-rock-18-de-julho-ultimo-dia/ 

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For the past day I have been looking for a solution to transfer encrypted information between a PHP web application and a C# desktop application.

This requires that both systems use the same algorithm, key and init vector (IV)

This isn't as easy as it sounds. The slightest difference in the setup of either system means that the encrypted information cannot be decoded on the other end and makes it basically useless.

(The following PHP code has been modified after some useful debugging and comments from Serge N.)

//Encryption function function mc_encrypt($encrypt, $key, $iv) {     $td = mcrypt_module_open(MCRYPT_RIJNDAEL_128, '', MCRYPT_MODE_ECB, '');     mcrypt_generic_init($td, $key, $iv);     $encrypted = mcrypt_generic($td, $encrypt);     $encode = base64_encode($encrypted);     mcrypt_generic_deinit($td);     mcrypt_module_close($td);     return $encode; } //Decryption function function mc_decrypt($decrypt, $key, $iv) {     $decoded = base64_decode($decrypt);     $td = mcrypt_module_open(MCRYPT_RIJNDAEL_128, '', MCRYPT_MODE_ECB, '');     mcrypt_generic_init($td, $key, $iv);     $decrypted = mdecrypt_generic($td, $decoded);     mcrypt_generic_deinit($td);     mcrypt_module_close($td);     return trim($decrypted); }   //Usage in PHP $original = "original message"; $key = "abcdefg_abcdefg_abcdefg_abcdefg_"; $iv = "abcdefg_abcdefg_"; $keysize = 128; $enced = mc_encrypt(stripslashes($original), $key, $iv); echo "Encrypted:<br>".$enced."<br>"; $unced = mc_decrypt($enced, $key, $iv); echo "Decrypted:<br>".$unced."<br>"; 

That is the PHP code done. We can generate a key and then at any point use the decrypt function to unencode it.

Now the trick is getting the exact same functionality in .NET (with C#) 

I found that the class below does it pretty well (this uses the default Rijndael algorithm which is 128 in C#)

public static class Encrypter {          public static String EncryptIt(String s, byte[] key, byte[] IV)          {              String result;              RijndaelManaged rijn = new RijndaelManaged();              rijn.Mode = CipherMode.ECB;              rijn.Padding = PaddingMode.Zeros;              using (MemoryStream msEncrypt = new MemoryStream())              {                  using (ICryptoTransform encryptor = rijn.CreateEncryptor(key, IV))                  {                      using (CryptoStream csEncrypt = new CryptoStream(msEncrypt, encryptor, CryptoStreamMode.Write))                      {                          using (StreamWriter swEncrypt = new StreamWriter(csEncrypt))                          {                              swEncrypt.Write(s);                          }                      }                  }                  result = Convert.ToBase64String(msEncrypt.ToArray());              }              rijn.Clear();              return result;          }          public static String DecryptIt(String s, byte[] key, byte[] IV)          {              String result;              RijndaelManaged rijn = new RijndaelManaged();              rijn.Mode = CipherMode.ECB;              rijn.Padding = PaddingMode.Zeros;              using (MemoryStream msDecrypt = new MemoryStream(Convert.FromBase64String(s)))              {                  using (ICryptoTransform decryptor = rijn.CreateDecryptor(key, IV))                  {                      using (CryptoStream csDecrypt = new CryptoStream(msDecrypt, decryptor, CryptoStreamMode.Read))                      {                          using (StreamReader swDecrypt = new StreamReader(csDecrypt))                          {                              result = swDecrypt.ReadToEnd();                          }                      }                  }              }              rijn.Clear();              return result;          } } //Usage Encoding byteEncoder = Encoding.UTF8; byte[] rijnKey = byteEncoder.GetBytes("abcdefg_abcdefg_abcdefg_abcdefg_"); byte[] rijnIV = byteEncoder.GetBytes("abcdefg_abcdefg_"); String message = "original message"; String encrypted = Encrypter.EncryptIt(message, rijnKey, rijnIV); String decrypted = Encrypter.DecryptIt(encryption, rijnKey, rijnIV); Console.WriteLine("Original: "+message); Console.WriteLine("Encrypted: "+encrypted); Console.WriteLine("Decrypted: "+decrypted);

I hope this shortens someone's search process when trying to do this.

PS. Yes this is my first try at using the [ code ]  containers in Posterous (not the easiest thing in the world but after some tweaking eventually got the code to appear here nicely)

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After an afternoon of reading and searching:

1em is equal to the body font-size in the CSS, if there is no body font-size selected then it is whatever the browser default is.

Browser defaults vary depending on Operating System 16px on Windows or 14px on Mac OS X

So on Windows 1em is 16px and 2em is 32px

The reason 1em is the preferred unit for font-size is because it by design can be measured in values smaller than 1. 0.1em is 10% of the body font-size.
And most browsers display 1em in the same way.
Unlike font-size: 16.5px which gets rounded down to 16px by Internet Explorer 6 + 7

To test these differences try www.browsershots.org
This will take screenshots of your website run on lots of browsers and operating systems

Cheers,
Niko

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HTML5

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On Saturday (1st of May) Helder and I spent the day at Estoril Open

We saw 2 Australians play; Olivia Rogowska and Jarmila Groth.
Unfortunately Olivia got knocked out by the Canadian Fichman.
We were a bit more into it by the time we saw Jarmila beating the portuguese Margarida Moura

See the full gallery on Posterous

video-2010-05-01-16-06-36.avi Watch on Posterous

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I have just been working on getting JW Player working with seeking (so you can click somewhere in the video and go directly to it)

I managed to get it using psstream (PHP module) and H624 Streaming Module for Apache

Pretty simple process once you figure out what all the components are... (which is why I am listing them here - these are a instructions for non-commercial use)

I am running Ubuntu 8.04 with Apache/2.2.8 and PHP 5.2.4

PSStream

(as I am writing this I realise that the developer of psstream has discontinued development on psstream and has a new module called Loomiere Stream written in C that increases the performance of the module by approx. 6 times, this however is not publically available yet)

wget http://codeblog.palos.ro/downloads/psstream-1.0.tar.gztar -xvzf psstream-1.0.tar.gzcd psstreamphpize./configure --enable-psstreammakesudo make installsudo cp psstream.ini /etc/php5/conf.dsudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restartcp psstream.php /var/www/mywebsitedirectory/

H264

sudo apt-get install apache2-threaded-devcd ~wget http://h264.code-shop.com/download/apache_mod_h264_streaming-2.2.7.tar.gztar -zxvf apache_mod_h264_streaming-2.2.7.tar.gzcd ~/mod_h264_streaming-2.2.7./configure --with-apxs=`which apxs2makesudo make installsudo nano /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

Then add the following lines to the configuration (for all websites served off apache)

LoadModule h264_streaming_module /usr/lib/apache2/modules/mod_h264_streaming.soAddHandler h264-streaming.extensions .mp4

Then restart apache

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart 

JWPlayer

JW Player is just installed on each page you want a video playing on, using Javascript

When you download the JW Player you should get a set of js and swf files if you include these in your HTML code

In the HEAD section

<script type="text/javascript" src="jwplayer/swfobject.js"></script>

In the BODY section

<div id='mediaspace'> </div><script type='text/javascript'>        var so = new SWFObject('/jwplayer/player.swf','mpl','470','320','9');        so.addParam("flashvars","image=videos/MyVideoFirstFrame.png&file=http://www.mydomain.com/psstream.php&type=video&id=videos/MyVideo.mp4&streamer=lighttpd");        so.addParam('allowfullscreen','true');        so.addParam('allowscriptaccess','always');        so.addParam('wmode','opaque');        so.addVariable('file','/videos/MyVideo.mp4');        so.write('mediaspace');</script> 

Well I think that is all for now. Pretty simple and straight forward, I will try and fix any mistakes if I find them.

Enjoy,

Niko

A working version is on the MiStats Mitel Call Accounting website

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