We helped organize the Hackathon for Social Good at WebVisions NYC – http://www.webvisionsevent.com/new-york/session/hackathon-for-social-good/

How did it go?  It went great!  Big Thanks to the Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 team who provided the funding support to make this event possible.

Kin Lane, one of our volunteers provides a good review here: http://www.hackweekends.com/2012/01/27/hackathon-for-social-good-in-new-york-city/

Here’s what people had to say:

I now know all hackathons are not created equal. I appreciate the commitment and expertise of the developers who participated in the first hackathon I attended. But you need more than coders and subject matter experts at the table.

The Hackathon for Social Good brought together a dynamic group of programmers, subject matter experts and designers. The mix of people matters. The progress was incredible. Frankly, I was blown away by how much was accomplished. It’s so refreshing to have access to solution-oriented people who can tackle a problem and tear it apart.

I left New York City with more than a prototype for the Cost of Freedom App. I left with a website, something to which I can point volunteers and potential funders as we solicit resources to develop the app. I also left with a core team of concerned citizens who love democracy. You can’t fake passion. So I want to give a special shout-out to Kin, Jack, Lori and Alexa.

Thanks Microsoft and WebVisions for making it happen. You rock!

– Faye Anderson, Cost of Freedom project

I feel honored to have volunteered for Hackathon for Social Good. How lucky I was to help serve a group supporting military families, a cause close to my heart, and to do this with such a lovely group of strangers-turned-colleagues. The event was very well organized, without being restrictive. I made friends, learned tons, and, I hope, helped a group I will continue to help in the future. Thanks to WebVisions for organizing this!

– Martha Garvey, volunteer

Just think – most of us will live to see the day when Gangsta Rap is played on the oldies station.  Or whatever the equivalent will be in 2020.

Perhaps we’ll also see nostalgic movies of the era as well.

Stay tuned!

NYC port authority bus terminal. 3pm bus. What should I do with my time?

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

Step 1: Post about it on my blog

Step 2: “Borrow” time machine

Step 3: Travel back to 1940 and father Chuck Norris

Step 4: Profit!

The next social networking alternative to Facebook – Clambake(.com)!

Ben Balzer has already come up with the marketing pitch:Duuuuude. Like, have you heard of this righteously crescent fresh site, Clambake? Whoa, its like the dopest shit around, maaan. You gotta check it out, right? You, like, sit around and talk about important things with your, like, bros and shit. You know, important world-changing and reality creating with, like, collective willpower man. Manifesting it, and shit.

Brilliant!

The WebVisions Mascot

Here’s the official tweet text:

Calling all devs and designers: Put your skills to good use & help #military families @ the #Hackathon for Social Good http://t.co/z8Cm81Hj

At WebVisions NYC on Jan 19th our friends on the Internet Explorer 9 team at Microsoft are helping us hold a Hackathon for Social Good.

Help us help the National Military Family Association, New York Cares and other worthwhile causes.

We’ll also be playing a quick game of MapAttack!

Tell your friends and sign up today!

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.

Punchy!

Web Nerds Unite!

The WebVisions conference brings together the best of the nerdy worlds we live in – web stuff, mobile stuff, neato design, crunchy tech and entertaining media.

…and if you’re lucky I’ll buy you a beer!

http://webvisionsevent.com
January 18, 19 and 20
Hudson Hotel, Manhattan, NYC

I am organizing a hackathon for non-profits that jan 19th and I need you (yes, you) to spread the word and get us volunteers to do good work for good people.

What are you waiting for?  Don’t you need to be smarter?