Author Archives → jole

Lessons learned from my first 30-day challenge

Hello again!

If you didn’t see my previous post, for the last 30 days I gave myself a challenge, that I will not go to Facebook, Twitter, and social media in general, that I will minimize mails activities and try to do something more useful.

Well, my challenge was successful. Honestly, I expected it will be.

What can I say now, after this challenge:

  • You will not miss anything really important if you’re not on Facebook or Twitter – important news were getting to me in other ways
  • You will feel better without so much not-necessary information
  • You will have more time for other activities
  • You can get Twitter followers without tweeting – for one month without Twitter, I got 19 followers.

 

I enjoyed time without Facebook/Twitter/Social Media, and in the moments I felt like opening Facebook or Twitter, I would take a book. I started with 100$ Startup. I have read it completely, I am not so satisfied with the book itself, but more about this in other post.

After this one, I started a new book – The Gambler from Fyodor Dostoyevsky. I read this book as well, it’s a great one.

 

Parallel with this, I decided to take course on Python. I started with Learn Python The Hard Way, and until now, I passed more than half.
Since I “speak” more than few programming languages, learning Python is not something  hard. It’s even pretty easy. So, after I finish the course I mentioned (btw, it’s free! ), I will start with reading a new book on learning Python.

I think that 30-day challenge is a great way to motivate yourself to do things you want to do, to try something you never tried before, etc.
I will for sure give myself next 30-day challenge really soon.

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30 Day challenge – Stay out of social media

Yesterday I was reading post from Matt Cutts about his last 30 day challenge, so I decided to take one as well.

For the next 30 days, I will not visit Facebook, Twitter and social media in general. Also, I will stop with reading online articles, and I’ll try to minimize my email activities. Instead, I will study and read more books.

Next blog post I will write in 30 days, and tell you about my results.

The challenge starts today at noon ( meaning, in about 40 minutes ).


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Test Download Speed From Console

If you sometimes need to check download speed on a remote computer, to which you are connected through console, here is a nice tip how to do this:

 wget http://cachefly.cachefly.net/100mb.test

Yes, simple as that. Download a 100 MB test file using wget, and you’ll see a download speed in console.


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3 Twitter Search Ideas You (Probably) Don’t Know About

Last few days I was working on developing simple Twitter console client in Perl, and I got some interesting results while playing with Twitter search.

Have you ever thought that you can find some ideas for startup on Twitter? Well, if you try searching for:

"should invent"

you can get some pretty interesting results, and if you search for a while, you can even get some cool ideas.

 

Another interesting point. Since lots of people are sharing their emails in tweets, Twitter search can be a nice source for spammers. Try searching for:

"email me at"
"email me on"
"email me to"

You’ll get lots of emails. I even wrote a simple Perl script to download all those tweets, and parse the emails into a text file. Quite an easy way to get some emails.

 

And the last one I will share today. If you are looking for a job, you can find a lot of job offers. Try searching for “jobs <country|city> <keyword>”. Here are few examples:

jobs uk
jobs usa linux
I'm hiring london

That’s it for now. Happy tweeting ;)

 


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How to install LAMP (Apache MySQL and PHP) on CentOS

This is first article from next few I will write about LAMP.

I will not write about what LAMP is, I guess that you already know since you are reading how to install it.

So, to install LAMP in Linux CentOS, follow next steps:

First, make sure that your system is up to date:

# yum update -y

Once update is finished, you need to install Apache:

# yum install httpd -y

After installation, you need to add apache service to system startup:

# chkconfig --levels 235 httpd on

and then start it up:

# service httpd start

Now, open your browser and go to localhost, or http://yourdomain.tld and you should see Apache default page.

Next step is to install PHP as an Apache module (mod_php). Do it like this:

# yum install php -y

After you install it, you have to check is everything’s fine. You need to create an PHP info page, and put it in Apache root ( /var/www/html ), so you can check that PHP support is enabled:

# echo -e "<?php\n\tphpinfo();\n?>" > /var/www/html/info.php

Once you created info.php file, you need to reload Apache, so installed PHP module can take effect:

# service httpd restart

Now you need to open this file with your browser. Go to http://yourdomain.tld/info.php and you should see a page with some PHP info.

Now you need to install MySQL support. This mean that you have to install PHP module for MySQL. Beside this, it’s good to install and module for PHP console and PHP common files:

# yum install php-cli php-common php-gd php-mysql -y

Again, restart Apache:

# service httpd restart

After all this, now you need to install the last main component of LAMP stack – MySQL server. Do it like this:

# yum install mysql mysql-server -y

and then add to system startup, and run the service:

# chkconfig --levels 235 mysqld on
# service mysqld start

Once it is started, it’s good that you set MySQL root password. Also, it’s recommended to disable remote root login if you don’t really need it. It’s good that you remove anonymous users and remote ‘test’ database right away as well. All this you can do with:

# mysql_secure_installation

After this, your installation of LAMP is finished. Of course, there is more stuff you should install, but this is the basic.

In next article, to this installation, we will add PhpMyAdmin, some cashe engine, and some more cool stuff.

 


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