centre{source}

“I’m trying to think, but nothing happens.” – Curly

Crib notes, quick guides, Cliff Notes, cheat sheets – whatever you choose to call them, they come in handy when the web developer brain goes ___________ .

The guys at Smashing Magazine (we smash you with the information that will make your life easier. really.) have provided probably over 100 cheat sheets from Ajax to CCS, MySQL to XML. One could print them all out and fill several notebooks full of cheat sheets, but that’s not being environmentally green (unless you’re really green.)

A friend recently recommended: http://www.cerberusweb.com

It is a very popular (and affordable) email management solution for help desks & sales teams. It is a bit complex, so you’ll want to take a moment to review the features and consider ways to synthesize it for your business. It appears that everything is managed through email and you have certain email addresses that customers and prospects use (or that it recognizes).

There is workflow, tagging, team resolution, and an integrated knowledge base. Instead of typing an article into the knowledge base, simply answering a client’s problem would give you the ability to ‘Tag’ and file that email into the Knowledge base.

CentreSource has jumped on the Blackberry bandwagon! After complaining for months that I spend too much time with email, I gave up trying to avoid the problem and simply decided to further my addiction :) We purchased three new Blackberry 8703e’s and have now started the painful process of getting them to work in our Open Source environment. That’s right, Blackberries in a world without Outlook and Exchange. The verdict? It works, but not great.

Recently, a potential client asked us if we could recommend a viable open source document management system (DMS) for their needs. Despite our deep experience with Open Source business solutions, I didn’t have one to recommend. I think that is primarily because so few businesses have need for a true DMS – even if they could benefit from it. As I thought about it, we could benefit from one because we save so many files and even have an elaborate naming scheme for versioning.

So, I went on a quest to see what I could find. The systems I chose have the following features: Easy to use, Flexible to store any file, Versioning, Ability to handle large Volumes of Data, Customizable Meta Data, Document Text Search (including PDF), and Provide a Web Interface for Universal Access. Here are the ONLY two candidates I found:

This is pretty cool. Check out this new feature in OpenSSH 4.3:

* Add support for tunneling arbitrary network packets over a
connection between an OpenSSH client and server via tun(4) virtual
network interfaces. This allows the use of OpenSSH (4.3+) to create
a true VPN between the client and server providing real network
connectivity at layer 2 or 3. This feature is experimental and is
currently supported on OpenBSD, Linux, NetBSD (IPv4 only) and
FreeBSD.

I am a big fan of the cygwin suite of UNIX tools for windows, but one of my biggest annoyances was that the shell you run in cygwin is always displayed in the most horrid terminal environment (basically a glorified DOS window).

Enter puttycyg — it allows you to use putty as a raw terminal emulator (i.e. without telnet or ssh) in running your cygwin shell. From puttycyg’s README:

RATIONALE

The Windows Console is an inadequate terminal emulator. It is impossible
to resize horizontally without pulling up a dialog box. It is impossible
to send an ASCII NUL. Basic keyboard options do not exist such as
configuring the ASCII character sent by the Backspace key.

My previous post on PHP Live! reminded me of a rant I’ve been meaning to write about the state of some (note: some, not all) LAMP packages and the difficulties in installing and maintaining them. PHP Live! is an example of how easy and painless it can (and should) be. Others, however, suffer from a lot of the same problems:

Linux 2.6.14 came out recently, with a pretty impressive list of changes. Notable (to me) among them are:

• PPTP support in the kernel
• FUSE (userspace filesystem) support has been merged
• ipw2100 and ipw2200 (the wireless card my laptop uses) have been merged in as well

Check out the human-readable Changelog.

OpenBSD 3.8 is right around the corner, and onlamp has a good tour of the features coming with it, which include some pretty impressive ones:

I had a client call me last week with a problem. They have 3 servers running Debian GNU/Linux. They had had a power failure the evening before, and everything had come back up fine except their Linux servers. All of them!

They all had the exact same problem, he said, “When I boot them up, they get as far as LI….” To even the most casual Linux user, this is a sadly common problem. I realized that none of these servers had been rebooted since we performed a Woody to Sarge upgrade, and something clearly hosed LILO.