Web service proposal example – mobile website over native or hybrid app.
Recently got asked to do some freelance work and the company requested a service proposal. The main interest was in an app for the company which would serve the same purpose as the website, such as info about the company, contact details etc, but for mobile devices. There are many factors involved in whether an native app, hybrid app or mobile website is the best option and the proposal is in favour of the creation of a mobile site.
If you need to write a web service proposal, feel free to use this one as a template or to get a general idea as to how they are structured and their content as it seems there is little on them on the net and you seem to have to pay for examples. You can download it in doc format. Good luck with your proposal if you are writing one. Apparantly this one is exellent, however if you have any comments or suggestions I'd be interested to know them.
PLEASE NOTE
The original was lost and the pdf only remained so I converted it back to a doc file using a converter. The formatting is messed up but the content is all there. Please excuse some of the spacing. However the content is all there.
MGS2 needs to be on all phones as standard, just like the ability to call people.
Hp Microserver review
I had been toying with the idea of switching from my current home server which was a power hungry amd quad with 8 gb ram and far too many hard disks and it very rarely got strained unless during compilation or hashing torrents.
I'd thought about switching to the the hp microserver for a few months as there seems to be nothing but good things were said about it, particularly the low power consumption which appears to be under 30 watt, even with 4 hard disks. Another attractive factor was the cashback deal HP was offering which resulted in the server being only 129 pounds. I took the plunge and purchased one in september and am happy to say I'm very pleased with it. I use it chiefly to host my git repo's on, run a minecraft server (mainly for my insane friends; god they adore that game); running a LAMP virtual machine using KVM (oh yeah it supports virtualization); DNS; squid caching proxy; rtorrent and other random nick nacks and it takes it all in it's stride easily. It runs debian stable and is well.....nice and stable!
The only qualm I have with it is that it's not as quiet as I had expected, I don't know whether it's just due to perhaps having a dodgy fan or whether it's just supposed to be that way.
Thankfully that's not really a problem as it resides under the stairs where it can't be heard.
So overall I wholeheartedly reccomend them. You probably won't even notice a change in your electric bill either - hooray. HP also have an upgraded version now which has 2gb ram and an upgraded processor and the cashback deal is still on, so that's another plus.
GNU Wget patch which adds a –config option.
This patch allows wget to take in configuration files specified by the user, for example
wget --config /la/de/dah/mylovelywgetrc http://vivithemage.co.uk
The patch has already been submitted and should be appearing in the wget trunk sometime soon, however, the FSF are taking some time to process the copyright assignment papers (apparently they're on holiday 
). So I thought I'd put it up so people can use it.
Here is the patch:
http://vivithemage.co.uk/sourcecode/config_wget_0808.patch
Here is revision 2414 with the patch applied.
http://vivithemage.co.uk/sourcecode/wget_2420_withconfigoption.tar.gz
All you need to do is
tar -xzvf wget_2420_withconfigoption.tar.gz
cd trunk
sh bootstrap
./configure
make
./src/wget --config /la/de/dah/mylovelywgetrc http://vivithemage.co.uk
Hope this helps and don't hesitate to ask if you need help.
FreeBSD mascot also the mascot for a sex toy vending machine company; my word!
Seems the BSD daemon has a side job.....
I was in Durham yesterday and went to the lavatory in Yates and as soon as I opened the door, there was a big metal box with the freeBSD daemon on, now if we think about this; a restaurant lavatory is arguably the last place most people would think to find a large image of the FreeBSD daemon.
On closer inspection I found it to be a sex toy dispenser, and sad as it may be the first thing I thought of was the copyright issues. Others appear to have questioned it:
http://www.mail-archive.com/freebsd-questions@freebsd.org/msg83250.html
However it's probably likely that the author is not aware of this or doesn't care. It's probably under the gnu equivalent for images anyway, whatever that may be. I took a few few snaps and went away amused but unimpressed by the selection and questionable quality of the goods in the machine. I informed the gf when arriving at the table but she was -.- and directed the conversation elsewhere.
Here's the FreeBSD mascot
And here's the place to download the OS: http://www.freebsd.org/
Server monitoring with conky (or any other tool you may fancy)
I've always liked conky because of the abundance of themes and the extent to which you can customize them. In addition, it is embedded into the desktop in the sense that it doesn't take any room away from windows; like gkrellm does for example. It also seemed great to keep a constant eye on a server with.
Tunneling conky over ssh and running a script at the startup of the desktop seemed the best way. First, follow this great tutorial which basically goes over how to "Run Commands Remotely via SSH with No Password".
Then to set conky to run at startup, save the following c code as conky_startup.c, change the username and ip and compile it with "gcc conky_startup.c -o conky_startup" in the cli.
#include
int main(void)
{
sleep(5);
system("ssh username@ip -X conky");
return 0;
}
I set it to sleep for a while as there have been times when I used the startup options with gnome and conky started underneath the desktop, which is not really what you want. Anyway, set this program to run at startup, check the documentation of whatever desktop you're using for instructions. In kde4's case you can add it to autostart which should be under computer >> system settings >> advanced tab >> autostart
Then click add program and locate the program you just compiled (conky_startup). Log out and log back in and if all is well conky should pop up after 5 seconds telling you all about the remote machine 
.
Here's the result
Teenage girls and Linux/BSD
I have found a certain consistency regarding the reasons for dissatisfaction among teenage girls with Linux or BSD operating systems. I'm sure there are many teenage girls who know there way round Linux/BSD. I've listed three of the main requirements that I think most girls would want if they are to use a Linux/BSD machine.
1. Use KDE
KDE is nice and bubbly, plenty of icons and you can get quite far without using the command line. Don't use something like blackbox, it will piss them off severely.
2. make sure flash is installed, sound is working, it plays dvd's and recognizes whatever music player they have.
3. When you install open office, make sure to provide instructions on how to save the files as docs. If you fail to do this, be sure to tell them about the online conversion sites which can convert odt's to docs.
If all these requirements are met (summed up as GUI, Media and Work), there should be an increased likelihood they'll be satisfied with their new OS. I may add some additional points later, but these seem to be the main three. (*Hides and braces himself for flames by female FOSS developers*) ;p
Tutorial: Using the K800i phone on the 02 network as a modem on debian GNU/Linux
O2 currently offers 'unlimited' Internet and texts on one of their plans for a month if you top up £15 a month. It's pretty simple to set up and only consists of a few steps.
On the phone:
1. go to the menu
2. Go to the bottom right and click settings
3. move along the tabs until you reach 'connectivity'
4. go down and click on 'usb', then 'usb internet'.
5. Then just click 'turn on'.
5. connect the phone to the computer with usb.
Ok so the phones set up, now on the computer
1. You need to install wvdial so: 'apt-get install wvdial'. This is the software which dials into the phone and connects to the internet.
2. You need to edit the /etc/wvdial.conf to looks something like this. The only thing you should need to change is the 'Phone' option to *99***1# . The rest you can leave as they are.
[Dialer Defaults]
Init1 = ATZ
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Modem Type = USB Modem
Baud = 460800
New PPPD = yes
Modem = /dev/ttyACM0
ISDN = 0
Phone = *99***1#
Password = password
Username = username
3. Now all you need to do is type wvdial as root and you should see something like this:
4. Type 'ping -I ppp0 vivithemage.co.uk' and you should should get a reply. All done. This is a pretty lean howto so any questions feel free to ask them in the comments.
The only con is that the speeds suck very badly, but it's not too much of a problem if; like me, you're using your laptop to access something else though a terminal.
Take a look at the times compared to wifi (pipex) times:
O2......>.<
libmagic/magic.h library tutorial with example. (It’s magic!)
Libmagic is generally used to determine a file type, for example if it's a jpg, avi, or whatever, you can point it to a file and it will determine what sort of file it is using magic numbers.
I found only a few links on the library and the majority were all clones of the man file with this one being the best I found.
http://swoolley.org/man.cgi/3/libmagic
My googling skills/patience failed me it seems as I couldn't find anything more detailed. However, I looked at some other projects that used it and experimented and got it working. Here is some example code, which takes "/file/you/want.yay" and returns a mime to it (e.g. text/x-c; charset=us-ascii). You can get it to return different stuff, check the previous link for more details.
#include <stdio.h>
#include <magic.h>
int main(void)
{
char *actual_file = "/file/you/want.yay";
const char *magic_full;
magic_t magic_cookie;
/*MAGIC_MIME tells magic to return a mime of the file, but you can specify different things*/
magic_cookie = magic_open(MAGIC_MIME);
if (magic_cookie == NULL) {
printf("unable to initialize magic library\n");
return 1;
}
printf("Loading default magic database\n");
if (magic_load(magic_cookie, NULL) != 0) {
printf("cannot load magic database - %s\n", magic_error(magic_cookie));
magic_close(magic_cookie);
return 1;
}
magic_full = magic_file(magic_cookie, actual_file);
printf("%s\n", magic_full);
magic_close(magic_cookie);
return 0;
}
To compile it do: "gcc magic_test.c -o magics -lmagic". Furthermore make sure the libmagic library is installed. "apt-get install libmagic-dev" should do it if you're using a machine with debian/ubuntu.
Apologies for the bad formatting, it seems eclipse and wordpress don't agree with each other.
Debian Linux 64 installing flash firefox howto – much easier than it seems.
Jesus christ, people make it seem much harder than it actually is. A lot of the tutorials are old and from the dark ages when Adobe didn't have flash for 64 bit Linux machines and instruct 64 bit users to use nspluginwrapper etc. Well Adobe have one now, so hooray. The release is pretty new at the time of writing but works well.
Check out this page:
http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10_64bit.html
Then execute these commands, remember to change line 3 to reflect your username.
wget http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer10/libflashplayer-10.0.42.34.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz
tar xzvf libflashplayer-10.0.42.34.linux-x86_64.so.tar.gz
mv libflashplayer.so /home/<<<yourusername>>>i/.mozilla/plugins/
Then restart firefox and go to edit > preferences > manage add-ons > plugins then right click "shockwave flash" and enable it. Remember to disable any other flash plugins that may be enabled such as gnash.
Voila, firefox should be enabled with flash. Simple isn't it.
HAF 932 review with pictures! (bought from ebuyer.co.uk)
Looks
I'm pretty sure it's the industrial and 'solid' look that attracted me to the HAF 932. I was pleased when I first saw it, it was probably one of the biggest desktop cases I had seen, it completely dwarfed anything else I had. For an idea of the size- that's the case next to a 17 inch lcd monitor.
Pretty lights
I initially thought that the red led's at the front fan would be really bright and something that would be distracting, but they're fine. The led's that are completely blinding are the hdd and power led's at the top of the case, they're extremely powerful, so don't stand in front of the case and look directly at them (if you buy the case). Maybe they'll dim with time.
Ignorance is strength
The case feels nice and solid, most of it is steel apart from the front of the case which is plastic. It would have been nicer if the front panel was steel as well. I'm not sure about everyone else but, for me, the front of a pc is usually the part that gets bashed about the most, it has to deal with people brushing past and general scrapes and bashes. So if any part of the case was steel, the front would probably be the best place for it to be!
Internal exposure
No qualms about it at all, nice and spacious, installing everything was easy, there was plenty of room to move and the hard drive caddy's keep the drives nice and firmly in place. There's also a lot of space between the back of the motherboard plate and the case and a great place to route all the cabling.
The small plastic square thing is a hard drive caddy.
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