For this reason I wanted to change their creation dates to something between 2011-11-21 00:00:00 and 2011-11-23 23:59:59.

First we need the Unix Timestamp for both dates:

SELECT UNIX_TIMESTAMP('2011-11-21 00:00:00') AS start, UNIX_TIMESTAMP('2011-11-23 23:59:59') AS end;

And, to get a random date, the recipe is:
RAND() * (end – start) + start

In SQL:

SELECT FROM_UNIXTIME(RAND() * (1322099999 - 1321840800) + 1321840800) AS `the_date`

For more information about all those “strange” numbers, visit Stoyan’s phpied.com.

Despite its pretty looks, It took only few minutes to be developed using Finn Rudolph’s ImageFlow library. It uses few images, Javascript, CSS and two PHP files that manipulate your photos.

It is easy, fast, lightweight, cross-browser and beautifull. Works smoothly with mouse scroll and touch screen interfaces!

Just download the zip package at http://finnrudolph.de/ImageFlow/Download and change the defaults photos. On his website he teaches some customizations too.

100% recommended.

sudo apt-get install msn-pecan

After installing it you will have a new protocol on Accounts preferences window at your instant messenger program: msn-pecan.
So, instead of creating your account with the traditional Windows Live (MSN) protocol, choose msn-pecan protocol.

Voila!

I have no time to change my Linux distribution now, so I started a research and solved my problem with two steps:

1st step: Use Ubuntu 2D (Unity 2D) at login screen.

It is not so beautiful as the default Ubuntu interface, but is fast. Faster even than Ubuntu 11.04 Unity.

2nd step: Change the system font sizes

Install and run the gnome-tweak-tool package.

sudo apt-get install gnome-tweak-tool
gnome-tweak-tool

On the Fonts’ screen at the Advanced Settings’ window that opens, switch the Text scaling factor to 0.9.

Thats it. I bet that you will work better and faster now, don’t you?

In my specific case, I access the database to make an data interaction that results on an array that is used on Zend_Navigation‘s construct function. This array only changes when some data is changed on the application’s control panel.

To avoid the database access and the loop interaction on every read access at a correlated application I have decided to exchange this array through array dump.
I could export this array as an XML or JSON, to import and convert back to an array. However, as this information would be used only with Zend_Navigation’s PHP class, it had a fast development and a better performance doing with array dump.

function load_array_dump($filename) {
    $fp = fopen($filename,"r");
    $content = fread($fp,filesize($filename));
    fclose($fp);

    eval('$array='.gzuncompress(stripslashes($content)).';');
    return($array);
}

function save_array_dump($filename, $array) {
    $dump = addslashes(gzcompress(var_export($array,true),9));
    $fp = fopen($filename, "wb+");
    fwrite($fp, $dump);
    fclose($fp);
}

Thanks to Jonas John.

You only need to access your server with ssh, create a directory, change to this directory and execute:

git init --bare

Now your directory is a Git server.

On your client machine, change to your working directory and execute:

git remote add origin user@serverIp:/pathToDir

Switch user to your server username, serverIp to your server IP and pathToDir to your absolute git path on server.

That’s enough.
But, if on a git remote show origin or on other commands you see an error like “does not appear to be a git repository” even when you are accessing your server with no problems, you probably have a mistake on git path on server.

Use the ~ symbol to references your home directory on server. It has solved my problem.

git remote add origin user@serverIp:/~/pathToDir

Switch user to your server username, serverIp to your server IP and pathToDir to your absolute git path inside your home directory on server.

Thanks to broofa on The Joyent Community.

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

It brings to you all the codecs and plugins that you need to a great user experience. The Java Virtual Machine that comes for default is the open source OpenJDK. There is nothing wrong with it.

But, as a developer, if you want to use NetBeans like I do, it’s better to install the Sun Java package. This Java Virtual Machine is developed by Sun, that develops NetBeans also. So, NetBeans become faster on it and free of a problem with font sizes too.

To install sun-java6-jre and make it the default Java Virtual Machine of you system do as follows:

sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://archive.canonical.com/ natty partner"
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin
sudo update-alternatives --config java

Thanks to Alexandre Gaigalas for the tip and Sanjeev Mishra for the how to.

Another Unit’s advantage is the variety of keyboard shortcuts. Working on Linux Desktop become faster than ever! Mostly of the shortcuts use the Super Key. For those that don’t know, it is the Windows’ logo key, between Ctrl and Alt. I solved this on the last FISL (International Free Software Forum) ;)

On http://askubuntu.com/questions/28086/unity-keyboard-mouse-shortcuts you have a list of those shortcuts and some wallpapers with them too.

You can try Ubuntu from a CD or USB stick. No install is needed. Try it if you didn’t!

# yum remove php php-*

And then install the new packages:

# yum install php53u-pear php53u php53u-cli php53u-common php53u-devel php53u-gd php53u-mbstring php53u-mcrypt php53u-mysql php53u-pdo php53u-soap php53u-xml php53u-xmlrpc php53u-bcmath php53u-pecl-apc php53u-pecl-memcache php53u-snmp

Thanks to How2CentOS.

But, if after doing that, you start receiving an PHP error like “warning: strtotime(): It is not safe to rely on the system’s timezone settings” (that happened to me) you only need to uncomment and change the value of the date.timezone at /etc/php.ini file:

; http://php.net/date.timezone
date.timezone = America/New_York

Thanks to Guillermo Garron.

Bruno Bertolini sent me a post called Block Tough Proxies and it helps me discovering who came from a proxy like hidemyass.com, in a very simple way:

<?php if(@fsockopen($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'], 80, $errstr, $errno, 1))
die("Proxy access not allowed"); ?>

In the code above, the visitor can not see the site. You can change this behavior with a different logic after the if statement.

The post shows how to block with .htaccess too, but PHP is more effective in this case.