You think a person could just put an audio file on their web site, but you’d be wrong.  There’s no one audio format that’s supported by all the browsers. Here’s the breakdown:

For further details, read more at the Scirra blog: http://www.scirra.com/blog/44/on-html5-audio-formats-aac-and-ogg

Ok, you’ve got Ubuntu running on your machine through Parallels.  You could run all the linux/unix foo directly on your OSX hardware, and that’s not really hard at all, but what if you need to match what’s really going on with your live web server?

So here, you want to setup multiple virtual web servers in Ubuntu under Parallels.  (note: these concepts apply to anyone running a virtual server on their actual hardware.  I’m doing it via Parallels on OSX, but you could be doing it with VMware on Windows or whatever works for you.)

So, some things need to happen:

1. Your actual computer needs to be able to talk to the virtual OS on your machine
2. The virtual machine needs to be able to host multiple virtual web servers correctly
3. You need to be able to develop your stuff on the virtual machine, test it and then migrate the working results to the client’s live web server
4. This should all happen without anyone resulting to joining a cult, getting addicted to stress-reliving drugs or giving up entirely on the modern world.

So – you’ve got Ubuntu installed in Parallels.  That was pretty easy, right?  Next, you’ll want to install the various bits of server software that may not have been included in the *nix you installed – Apache, MySQL, PHP, etc.  Google should be able to direct you to the right documentation to do that for your chosen flavor of unix.  At the end of this process, you should be able to start firefox in your virtual machine and get your local webserver to display when you go to “localhost”.  Go away and get that working.  All done?  Great!

Set up multiple virtual web servers.

Instructions for doing this changes depending on which unix and version you’re using.  For Ubuntu 11, here’s some good instructions I’ve found.  Now, since you’re just running this on your local machine you won’t have a DNS entry for your local virtual servers.  If you knew how to set that up, you probably wouldn’t be reading this blog post, so let’s edit your local hosts file to match a name to your virtual web server(s).

Somewhere in your apache configuration you have a line that tells apache what to call the virtual server.  Here’s an example of one I’m using:

<VirtualHost *:80>
 ServerAdmin sbp@tikimojo.com
 ServerName coopers
 ServerAlias coopers
 DocumentRoot /srv/www/coopers/public_html/
 ErrorLog /srv/www/coopers/logs/error.log
 CustomLog /srv/www/coopers/logs/access.log combined
 <Directory />
 Options FollowSyminks
 AllowOverride All
 </Directory>
 </VirtualHost>

I’m doing a site for Cooper’s Auto Service, so I want to call the web server “coopers”.  Now we need to edit your hosts file.  Do this:

sudo pico /etc/hosts

For each virtual server you want, create an entry like this:

127.0.0.1 coopers

Replace “coopers” with what you’d like to type into the browser to get to your local site.  Save and now inside your virtual machine, when you type that name in the URL window of your browser, your local site should come up.  Victory!  Next step:

Viewing and editing your local virtual web server

Everything’s working properly inside your linux virtual OS, now we set things up so you can use the software on your physical machine to view and edit the sites running within the virtual OS.  First you probably want to be able to read the virtual OS’s file system, so let’s go setup Samba.  Next you want to make sure the virtual OS is on the same subnet so you can get to it’s web servers.  (ok, there are other ways and better ways to do this, but in order to keep things simple here’s one way to do it.) In Parallels set the network to be bridged.  Here’s some instructions on how to do that.  If you care to read about it, here’s more infos on the Parallels networking options.

Check to see what IP address the virtual machine has.  In Ubuntu, go system settings -> network and it should tell  you that it’s IP address is something like 10.0.0.103.

Now, on your mac, crack open a terminal window and give this command:

ping 10.0.0.103

Remember to use the IP address you got from Ubuntu, not my example IP.  You should get a stream of lines like this:

64 bytes from 10.0.0.103: icmp_req=1 ttl=64 time=0.073 ms

If you don’t, then something is broken somewhere.  Hit control-c to stop the ping command.  Now if you type that IP address into a browser, the web site running on your virtual OS should appear!  Excellent work!  Just one last step.  Back in your terminal window enter this command:

sudo pico /etc/hosts

We’re now going to assign a hostname to your virtual web servers so you can use those names directly in your browsers instead of having to type the IP.  For each virtual web server you’ll have an entry like this:

10.0.0.103    site_name_one
10.0.0.103    site_name_two
10.0.0.103    site_name_three

When you type your site names in your web browsers, they will appear and work correctly!  The only catch is this hostname setup is manual.  If you change networks, or if your virtual OS gets assigned a different IP at some point, you’ll need to go and re-edit your computer’s hosts file.  That’s not too hard though.  You know how to do it now.

I hope you find this useful. Feedback? Email Steve at sbp@tikimojo.com.

Your Author

WordPress

Hey kids! From the official WordPress site:

The latest and greatest version of the WordPress software — 3.3, named “Sonny” in honor of the great jazz saxophonist Sonny Stitt — is immediately available for download or update inside your WordPress dashboard.

If you go here, you can see a nifty video summarizing what’s in the new version.

Let’s say you go into your WordPress admin and it tells you that it wants your web server hostname and password before it can do the update.  You enter that stuff in, WordPress download a zip file and then gives you a message like:

Could not create directory: /my/path/web/wp-content/upgrade/wordpress-3.tmp

Now what?  The WordPress Codex has some information on this right here, including how to do a manual upgrade.

Possibly there’s ownership issues – the apache user has to be able to write to your WordPress files.  If you have some command-line skills you can look at the output from ps to figure out which is the right user:

ps auxw | grep -E apache

And then you can go to the root of your WordPress site and change owner of the files with a command like this

sudo chown -R apache_username *

After that, the automatic upgrade should work.  However, you may need to chown the files back to your user name to get editing permission back.  Doing this is a hack – in a more perfect world you’d go and learn enough about UNIX permissions to set everything correctly in the first place.  But will get you going in the meantime.

WordPress

So, you are ready to run WordPress on your laptop so you can work on a web site without having to either be connected to the Internet, or if you are connected, having to wait for that site to load.

There’s lots of different ways to do this, for this article I’m addressing running WordPress on Ubuntu.  Ubuntu 11.10 in my case.  Installing WordPress is easy once you’ve got MySQL, PHP and phpMyAdmin installed in Ubuntu – I’m going to leave that has an exercise for the reader.  It’s outside the scope of this article.

So… it appears you’ve got WordPress installed and running, but when you try to load your WordPress site the only thing you get in your web browser is the home page of your site – none of the other pages show up.  Frustrating!

It turns out that Ubuntu (and Debian Linux) turn off htaccess by default.  In short htaccess is a way to fool a web brower to do things you want when it tries to look at a URL on your server.  In this case WordPress uses it to hand visitors pretty URL’s.  If htaccess is turned off, WordPress won’t work correctly.  You’ll get the home page of your WordPress site, but nothing else.

Setting up Apache2 on Ubuntu is it’s own long topic – here’s a place to start.  Now if you’ve done your googling correctly you’ve got Apache2 up and running, and you’ve got it serving up virtual web servers, now we turn on .htaccess.

In Ubuntu under /etc/apache2/sites-enabled is an entry for each virtual web server you have running.  Perhaps you’ve got a site called superkitty.com.  In your terminal window, while you’re in the /etc/apache2/sites-enabled directory we need to give a command like this:

sudo pico superkitty.com

(ok – go off and learn how to use Pico and sudo.  We’ll wait.)  Make sure you’ve got something like this in that file:

<Directory />
     Options FollowSymLinks
     AllowOverride all
</Directory>

Now kick your Apache2 configuration in the head.  In the terminal type:

sudo a2enmod rewrite

You’ve got Apache good and woozy.  It’s time to tell it to restart.  In the terminal type:

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

H’okay.  Now your Ubuntu-based WordPress sites should be working properly.  Yay!  Feel good about yourself and consider getting some icecream!

So, you’d like to use Samba (a.k.a. SMB – windows file sharing.  More than you wanted to know here.) to connect to your Ubuntu Linux machine and edit files.

Of course you do, it’s a great idea.

This is the place to start: https://help.ubuntu.com/11.04/serverguide/C/samba-fileserver.html

However, you must must configure a directory to share, there isn’t one setup in the Ubuntu example file.  I can’t teach you Samba configuration in a single blog post, but in your /etc/samba/smb.conf:

• Use this as a reference: http://samba.org/samba/docs/man/Samba-HOWTO-Collection/FastStart.html

[name of your file share]
comment = Text people see when they attempt to connect
path = /path/to/the/directory/you/wanna/share

There’s far too many options in smb.conf to cover here, but you’ll need those for sure.

• Now, you must also create a smb user with a password, your existing user accts don’t get access automatically.  Guh!  Did the Ubuntu docs forget to mention that?  D’OH!

sudo smbpasswd -a your_smb_user

Replace “your_smb_user” with the username you’d like people to log in with.  It will ask you for a password, type that in.  For greater security you’ll have an smb username for each person you want to connect to the server.

Let’s say, just for the heck of it, that you’re connecting to an Ubuntu server running in Parallels on your Mac, or over the network.

1. Find the IP address of the Ubuntu server.  Go System Settings -> Network, it should tell you what the Ubuntu IP address is.
2. On the Mac in the Finder hit command-k.   In the “server address” field type: “smb://ip_address”
3. (replace ip_address with the IP address you found up in step 1)
4. Click Connect
5. It should ask you for the username and password you defined earlier in this blog post
6. If it can’t connect, open the Terminal and type “ping ip_address”  (see ip_address note above).

PING 192.168.5.71 (192.168.5.71): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 192.168.5.71: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=0.785 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.5.71: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.574 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.5.71: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.351 ms
64 bytes from 192.168.5.71: icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.581 ms

So, you’ve probably heard of Google Chrome.  Chrome is a fine web browser produced at Google.  What you probably haven’t heard about is the open source version known as Chromium.

You probably wouldn’t care, unless you’re like me and you want to run modern software on your old computers.  Let’s say you’re a web developer and you’d like to run the latest browsers on your old, unsupported OS.

In this case, I’ve got an old mac which won’t run anything newer than OSX 10.4.  Yet, using the tools of X11 we can make it do all kinds of modern things!

That previous Tiki:Mojo blog post addresses how to run an app on one mac and display it on a completely different computer over the local network.  What happens if when you need to use a linux/unix app that doesn’t run under OS X?

In this case, how can I run Google’s Chrome web browser, but display it on my old Powerbook?  Here’s how I’m doing it.  This trick requires a newer Intel-based mac (or anything that can run Linux) and almost any older mac.

1. On the newer mac you need a way to run a Linux installation.  This could be a dual-boot or through some kind of Virtual Machine software.  I’m using Parallels Desktop, but the clever monkey can adapt this info to any virtual machine system.
2. I’m running Ubuntu on Parallels virtual machine in this case.  Inside Ubuntu, install Google Chrome.  Consult your local linux nerd if you can’t figure out how to do that.
3. The next step is to make sure another computer on your local network can talk to the linux install you are running inside your virtual machine.  I’m not going to teach you networking 101 in this blog post, but if you’re using Parallels Desktop:
1. In Parallels you’ll need to have the virtual machine “shut down” to make these changes
2. open hardware settings
3. choose “network 1″
4. under “type” choose a bridged network, and the one your computer uses to connect to other computers on the local network
5. then click OK
4. Now, since you’re a smooth computer operator, you’ve done all that correctly and a machine on your local network can talk to the virtual machine on your physical machine on that network.  Genius!  Ok.  On that machine, open a Terminal window.
5. If you’re in OS X 10.4, start the X11 app.  If you’re in Windows, use Google to find yourself an X Server.  If you’re in some kind of Linux or Unix, you most likely already have X11 nearby.  In OS X 10.5 and newer, X11 is built in and your friendly computer is just ready t0 go.
6. The first thing we need to do is to allow another computer to send us a window.  Open a terminal window and type this:

• xhost +

7. Now connect from the old machine to the newer machine that’s going to run Chrome for you.  In your terminal window follow these examples:

• ssh username@ipaddress_of_the_newer_machine

• ssh steve@10.0.2.1

8. Ok, now we need to tell the computer where to send the Chromium window.  Follow these examples:

• export DISPLAY=your_ip_address:0

• export DISPLAY=10.0.2.3:0

9. But wait! There’s a shortcut to all these commands to set your display.  Skip back to step 6.  You just opened a terminal window.  Skip the xhost bit, this time our ssh command will connect us AND set the display correctly with just one line:

• ssh -Y username@ipaddress_of_the_newer_machine

10. You should be ready to launch Chrome.  Here’s the command:

• chromium-browser

11. Chrome should now appear on your old computer!  Hooray for Zoidberg!  You now have the latest in web browsing technology on whatever old cranky computer you’ve got laying around.
12. By now you’ve noticed that Chromium and Chrome are the same thing, but it’s all confusing.  Chromium is the open source project behind Chrome.  Go read about it here.
13. There is no step 12.  You’re done!  Go off and web it up!

Note:experienced computer nerds will note that “xhost +” allows anyone on your network to open windows on your machine.  If you’re concerned about this, you can restrict this to just the ip address of the machine that’s running Firefox for you.  Example:

xhost +10.0.2.1

Let’s say you’ve got an old laptop that still works, but can’t run a modern web browser.  Well, there’s this nifty old-school technology called X11 which allows the clever nerd to run a program on one machine and have it display on another.  So, how about I run the most recent Firefox on my new computer, but have it display on my old computer!

In this case, I’ve got an old Apple Powerbook from 2000 which nobody is making new software for and I’ve also got a 2010 Macbook Pro which can run anything that runs on an Intel CPU.  X11 is built into OSX from 10.4 on, but these same concepts will work for Windows once you locate an X Server package (see Google).  X is generally built into any Unix/Linux.

So here’s how we go about running Firefox on one mac and having it appear on another.  Starting with how to install this stuff.

1. Start up the Terminal on your faster, newer mac.  If you’re not comfortable doing some things in text in the terminal, this whole biznach isn’t for you.
2. Install macports – http://www.macports.org/install.php  Macports is a nifty tool that makes many unix applications available for your mac, which is actually unix under the surface.
3. Install Firefox for X11.  This will take a little while, depending on your network speed.  In the terminal type:

• sudo port install firefox-x11

4. So!  Now you’ve got Firefox!  Take it for a test-ride!  In your terminal, type:

• firefox-x11



5. Now, on your older mac.  In OSX 10.4 you have to start X11 manually.  It’s in applications -> utilities -> X11.  In OSX 10.5 and later, X11 is built-in.  So, double-click X11 if you’re in 10.4, otherwise just go back to your terminal.  First we tell your older mac that it’s OK for someone else to send you a window over the network.  Do this:

• xhost +

6. Now we connect from your older computer to your newer.  This can be done with SSH.  If you’ve made it this far, you’ve probably already heard of it.  In the terminal window on the older machine follow these examples:

• ssh username@ipaddress_of_the_newer_machine

• ssh steve@10.0.2.1

7. Now we tell the computers where to send the Firefox window.   Follow these examples:

• export DISPLAY=your_ip_address:0

• export DISPLAY=10.0.2.3:0

8. Boy, that’s a lot of work!  Isn’t there a shortcut? Actually, yes there is.  Back in your terminal window at Step 5, instead of the xhost command, use this:

• ssh -Y username@ipaddress_of_the_newer_machine

9. Now, at last, you can start Firefox.  In your terminal on your older computer:

• firefox-x11

10. and there you go… Now you have the tools to run any X application on a *nix machine somewhere on another machine.  You can do more reading on xhost and setting the display here: http://macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2003/03/14/install_x11.html?page=2.  Let’s say you want your terminal window back for more commands after starting Firefox?  Here’s whatcha do:

• firefox-x11 &

Enjoy the cool feeling of making something nifty happen!

Note:experienced computer nerds will note that “xhost +” allows anyone on your network to open windows on your machine.  If you’re concerned about this, you can restrict this to just the ip address of the machine that’s running Firefox for you.  Example:

xhost +10.0.2.1

The smartphone war is over and Android won?  Well, maybe it’s not that simple.  Apple provides much more than a device.  There’s quite a bit of service they provide along with that device which hasn’t been happening for the Android market.

Surrender!

In any case, there’s no one “winner” in the 90′s sense that Microsoft found a way to force everyone to use their products.  In many ways, everyone’s a winner because there will continue to be a lot of options in the smart phone world.

From Fast Company magazine:

http://www.fastcompany.com/1792286/the-smartphone-wars-are-over?partner=homepage_newsletter

If you care about mobile devices, which you do if you work in the industry you probably should… this is interesting information.

There’s been a lot of buzz around Google’s Android, and for good reason – it’s a good product and it’s making it’s way into the hands of a lot of people.  But there’s a catch.  Maybe Android doesn’t love you as much as you love it.  Based on this research there appears to be a pump-and-dump approach to Android phones.  This data suggests the game is to get the phone in a customer’s hands and then move on to finding the next customer.

This isn’t good news for many Android phone owners.  This chart suggests that if you want the new features Google has been working on, or at least security patches and fixes to what you have now, quite likely you’re out of luck.

No data on Windows Phone 7, possibly because it’s too new.

Read more here:

Android Orphans: Visualizing a Sad History of Support

I went back and found every Android phone shipped in the United States¹ up through the middle of last year. I then tracked down every update that was released for each device – be it a major OS upgrade or a minor support patch – as well as prices and release & discontinuation dates. I compared these dates & versions to the currently shipping version of Android at the time. The resulting picture isn’t pretty – well, not for Android users.

Lifehacker recently released the results of their Web browser speed tests.

The results, fastest to slowest:

1. Opera 11.51
2. Firefox 7
3. Internet Explorer 9
4. Chrome 14

Read the full results here.