Tech Exposures

URL’s opening to the same page on your iOs, iPhone, iPad development HTML.

The Problem – href links open to the same page, sometimes with a dot or grey plus sign appearing on the page.

If you’re developing an html page for iOS devices such as the iPhone, iPad, and iPod, and you’re wondering why the href links all open back to the same page, then I think I have a simple solution for you. There’s an explanation for why this is happening, but that’s beyond the scope of this post. I’ve seen others suggest to build your entire website into one index page, but that’s not feasable for more than a very simple static website.

The Solution
Add target=self to the “a” tag and that should bypass the navigation issues.

example:

< a target=”_self” href=”page2.html” class=”ui-btn ui-shadow ui-btn-corner-all ui-btn-up-c btn-showpg list-bttn” id=”showpg”>Link Description

Nikon D600 : The Photo Enthusiast’s Dream DSLR
As an owner of several Nikon bodies and lenses, I was very excited when Nikon released the D600 camera.
Finally, an “affordable” full frame DSLR (assuming you consider $2,000 for just the body as “affordable”).
It’s somewhat of a hybrid in performance, features, and cost between it’s older brother, the D800, and it’s cousin the D7100.

The early reviews were very positive on image quality and features. See Popular Photo December 2012 issue for a detailed review, and a November 2012 DPREVIEW does a nice in depth review here. I waited a month or so for the early bugs to be discovered and then jumped in.






Spots Noticed
The buzz from the early birds was that there was a pattern of spots growing on the upper-left to center of the frame as more shots were taken. Some bloggers suggested it was from oil spots that were spattering from the back of the mirror. They suggested that as the mirror flies up to expose the image sensor, apparently some of the lubrication on the mirror was making it’s way to the sensor.

Meanwhile, Nikon hadn’t officially responded to these claims. Other owners were syaing that Nikon had resolved the issue and in updated versions of the camera, the problem had been fixed. This is very unlikely in such a short timeframe to engineer a fix and ramp up production with the fix, and ship all these fixed cameras around the world. I figured, more likely, that the problem was overstated and/or limited to specific uses – perhaps heavy zoom lens users that pump air in to the camera.

I Had Spots Too
My first images with the new camera were simply stunning. Nothing like slapping a super wide lens on a full frame DSLR. The landscapes were rich with color and the images were startling clean and beautiful. Then, the spots came… And, they came, and they came. And before I knew it, the images were filthy with spots just as the others had written about.

Nikon Official Announcement
On Mar 25, 2013 Nikon finally acknowledged that there was a problem here. The announcement goes like this:

Some users have indicated the appearance of multiple granular dust spots in images captured with the Nikon D600 digital-SLR camera. These granular dust spots are reflections of internal dust generated with camera operation, or external dust particles that have found their way into the camera, either, or both of which, have adhered to the camera’s low-pass filter.

The good news is that they also offer a resolution to the problem:

“As a first step, please follow the guidance from the User’s Manual (pages 301-305) related to the “Clean Image Sensor” function and manual cleaning using a blower. If these measures do not remove all dust particles and you are still experiencing problems, then please consult your nearest Nikon service center.” …

Actually, you can set your D600 to automatically clean the image sensor when you turn on and off the camera – however, that’s not likely going to solve this problem. By the way, here’s a link to the Nikon D600 manual in case you don’t have your’s handy.

Do What Nikon Says to Do!
First thing I noticed about the announcement: they do not mention oil ever. They said there may be “external dust particles”. I do not believe in conspiracy theories. With litteraly thousands of blog posts from users complaining about spots, I’m sure Nikon wouldn’t try to cover it up with lies. You can only fool the public for so long. If there is/was an oil spots problem, Nikon would have to fess up. At least as of now, they are not calling it oil, but dust. That’s good news for camera owners! Dust can be blown away, oil, not so much…

Here’s the Fix – It’s as Simple as 1-2-3
Who wants to deal with the hassle of getting an authorization from the service center, sending it back, and waiting for its return? Instead, just as Nikon suggested, I disbelievingly took out my blower and blew on the inside of the camera, first on the back of the mirror, and then by pressing the live view, which opens the mirror and locks it up, I blew into the sensor area and lightly on the sensor itself. I was not able to see any spots physically accumulating on the sensor before blowing, and didn’t notice any change afterwards. However, to my great surprise, the photos taken after the blower cleaning were spotless. Have a look at the before and after and let me know what you think.

1. Before With Spots – Photo untouched, cropped to enlarge the upper left portion of the frame. Click on photo to see detail. Nikon D600 With Spots

2. The Fix: Use Blower on Camera’s Image Sensor

3. After Without Spots – Photo untouched, cropped to enlarge the same area. Click on photo to see detail.

Conclusion & Reccomendation
If you have spots accumulation problems, first check to see if Nikon has issued any new announcements on the D600. They may also release firmware updates, so it’s a good idea to check their website from time to time. Assuming there isn’t a recall, or some new information about these dreaded spots, simply pick up your blower (or buy one at your favorite camera store for about $8 — The Rocket Blower costs about $7.99 online). Clean the inside of the camera where the lens is mounted by pumping air in and around with the opening to the camera facing down so that the agitated dust particles can fall safely out of the camera. If that doesn’t do the trick, then call Nikon for a service authorization. From my experience though, the blower solution should work. Please let us know how it worked out for you.

You’ve just unwrapped your new Ubuntu server running on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and now it’s time to roll up your sleeves and get started. What should you do first? Here’s a checklist of the top things I do for each new Ubuntu server that I install.

Let’s approach it from two ways:
- You’re working with a managed network provider like Rackspace, etc… or
- You’re doing it yourself on AWS as a new EC2 instance (Similar to managed, with some caveats).

You have your server credentials and have logged on to your server with a SSH connection. You are staring at your command prompt and are ready to begin…
1. Check your server to make sure you got what you wanted

Are the drives partitioned right? Do you have any space on /var to work?

df -h

What release are you running? The current (as of 2/13) latest LTS version of Ubuntu is 12.04.x

lsb_release -a

2. Update your copy of distribution files.

sudo apt-get update

This will make sure that as we get started installing new software, we’ll have the latest and greatest of everything.

3. Install The LAMP stack ([Linux], Apache, MySQL, PHP) We’ll want to throw in phpmyadmin here as well. In case you aren’t familiar, phpmyadmin is great for setting up database permissions and general DB management from within a browser-based GUI.

sudo apt-get install lamp-server^ phpmyadmin

Answer Yes to the prompts as it installs each of the requested programs in the LAMP stack. You’ll need to pick out a password for MySQL and then confirm it. Later you’ll be asked for a password for phpmyadmin. Use the same password, it will make things easier for later. (You can always change your password later from within MySQL or PhpMyAdmin.

4. Install htop
htop is essentially “top” on steroids. It gives you a good visual picture of your server’s load and what processes are running. It’s sort of like the baby monitor of servers.

sudo apt-get install htop

5. Setup a test web page
You’ve installed apache, so you can test that everything is set correctly. Go to your default web root directory /var/www (this can be changed later, and we’ll show you how to do that in our next blog in this series)

cd /var/www

Now, edit the file index.html and put in some text that identifies it as your new server.

sudo vi /var/www/index.html

(or .php, or .htm depending on your configuration)

Now start or reload apache to make sure everything is running right.

sudo service apache2 reload

After you’ve saved the file, you can go to a browser window and type in your server ip address. You should see your temporary index page that you just created/edited.

Next…
Configuring Apache, setting up cron jobs, rsync to synchronize with multiple servers, setting up MySQL database connectivity, and more…
Check out our other blog posts on these topics.

If you’ve launched AWS EC2 server instances behind a load balancer, then you’ve probably noticed that your Apache logs are showing the internal ip address of the load balancer for all entries.

I’ve seen a few blogs that explain that the reason for this is that the ELB load balancer is configured as a reverse proxy and the actual ip address of the origin is masked.  Aside from the cosmetics of seeing thousands of log entries all with the same ip address, this is actually bad for SEO as your sitemaps will also be showing all your visitors coming from one ip address.  Also, if you are using geoip the country filter won’t work as it will be looking at all visitors as coming from Amazon’s region that your EC2 instances are located.

Here’s the fix:
Very simple actually.  It worked for me on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and I assume it will work on any Linux configuration.  Instead of logging the Host (which in our case is the internal ip), we want to log the X-Forwarded_for which is the origin ip for the entry.
Open your apache configuration file for edit.  On Ubuntu it’s at /etc/apache2/apache2.conf    You can also use locate to find it on your instance if it’s not on Ubuntu.  locate apache2.conf

sudo vi /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

Next within configuration file look for the section with LogFormat   There should be several lines beginning with LogFormat.  The top three should be for vhost_combined, combined, and common.   In all three lines where you see %h  (which is echoing to the apache log the host) change that to %{X-Forwarded-For}i

Before

LogFormat “%v:%p %h %l %u %t \”%r\” %>s %O \”%{Referer}i\” \”%{User-Agent}i\”" vhost_combined
LogFormat “%h %l %u %t \”%r\” %>s %O \”%{Referer}i\” \”%{User-Agent}i\”" combined
LogFormat “%h %l %u %t \”%r\” %>s %O” common

After

LogFormat “%v:%p %{X-Forwarded-For}i %l %u %t \”%r\” %>s %O \”%{Referer}i\” \”%{User-Agent}i\”" vhost_combined
LogFormat “%{X-Forwarded-For}i %l %u %t \”%r\” %>s %O \”%{Referer}i\” \”%{User-Agent}i\”" combined
LogFormat “%{X-Forwarded-For}i %l %u %t \”%r\” %>s %O” common

Then remember to reload apache

sudo service apache2 reload

Note of Caution: It’s relatively easy for someone to spoof the header and change the X-Forwarded-For to whatever address they want. That would mask from you their actual ip. Therefore, this solution is not intended for applications that have security implications.

Another tip. Within your web application if you are using the ip for any purpose, like Maxmind’s geoip, you’ll need to echo the X-Forwarded-For instead of the Remote host as well. e.g. $ip=$_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR'];

Let us know if you have any suggestions on how to improve this method.

Another installment in our How to Set up an Ubuntu Server Series:

Synchronizing multiple servers - You have more than one web server in your host configuration. What’s the easiest way to synch files among the multiple web servers?
Solution - rsync does the trick efficiently and easily.

This tutorial assumes you are comfortable on the linux command line.

Steps to Set up rsync for multiple servers synchronization:

Step One

First make sure rsync is installed on each server that you’ll be working with.  By typing rsync from a command prompt, you should get the rsync response asking you for parameters.  If rsync isn’t found, then install it.

sudo apt-get install rsync

Step Two

Test synchronizing files.  From a command prompt on your 2nd server, type in an rsync command to retrieve files from the 1st server.  Let’s assume you have a directory /var/www/ set up on both servers and you wish to synchronize the files from the first server to the 2nd. The first server acts as the master.  Any new files or changes to existing files on the master will overwrite existing files on the 2nd server.  Type in from the command prompt on server 2

sudo rsync -ra user@FirstServerIP:/var/www/ /var/www/

The first server in this example sends all the files in /var/www/ along with the (-r) recursive subdirectories. You can also sync only specific files, etc…
If this works, you are ready to move on to step 3. If not, check your connectivity with the FirstServer. Generally, if you can ssh to another server, you should be able to rsync with it as well. AWS EC2 Users If you are using AWS Amazon’s ec2 servers, which require a passkey, the rsync command will look like this:

rsync -rave “ssh -i /home/ubuntu/.ssh/passkey.pem” ubuntu@EC2ServerIP:/var/www/ /var/www/

Note that for AWS EC2, you will first need to copy your passkey over to your .ssh directory

Step Three

Next, let’s set this up to synchronize all the time automatically. We accomplish this with a cron job. Here again, we’re assuming you are familiar with how to set up and edit crons. From your root user (sudo su) edit your crontab

crontab -e

Then, add a line to the crontab that tells it to run the rsync command every minute (or any frequency that suits you).

* * * * * rsync -ar FirstServerIP:/var/www/* /var/www/

Test your configuration!  Go to your first server and make a change or add a file to the synchronized directory. Then go back to the 2nd server and see if the file is there. You can replicate this process to as many servers as you need, but keep in mind that frequency of sync and amount of data passing on your internal network can get costly and cause a hit on performance.

I hope this little tutorial was helpful.  Please drop me a note if you have any questions or comments.

Summary: Fix WordPress to auto update plugins without requiring an FTP password.

If you manage your own blog with WordPress you will often need to update plugins to their newer versions. Depending on how your blog was initially set up, when you click on update you may get a screen that asks for a FTP username and password. There is a fix that will enable you to automatically update all your plugins and themes.

This fix should work for versions of WordPress 2.8 and above.

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Problem:  Low contrast VIM on SSH and Telnet

If you work over SSH or telnet on VIM (VI) text editor, then you are probably experiencing a low contrast page that’s very hard on the eyes.  I searched all over the net and VIM’s wiki but didn’t find a fix.

Solution: Change setting in VIM’s config file

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AdEngage Ad Network is Shutting down

AdEngage (one of the better known ad networks and a Google Adsense alternative)  sent a stunning letter yesterday to all its affiliates and advertisers that as of Feb 8,2011 it will be closing the site.  Visitors to their website receive the same message that was sent by email to all existing account holders.

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Want to play Windows Media files (wmv, mms, wma, asx) on your Macintosh Safari and Chrome browser?

You’ll need to install a free plugin that will give your Mac Quicktime player the extensions it needs to play Microsoft Windows content.

Here are the steps to install the required plugin:

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The Affiliate Summit West was held last week in Las Vegas at the Wynn Resort and had nearly 5,000 attendees. This is _the_ place where affiliate internet marketers meet to learn about the latest industry trends and to meet with new and existing marketing partners. The conference included an expo and “meet market” where dozens of network and affiliate vendors exhibited and shared information about their services. Many of those attending shmoozed in the halls with impromptu networking opportunities.

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