This post tries to investigate whether creating forks of software, that has been released under the terms of the Apache license, on Bitbucket or Github using a name identical to the name of the original project or a name that contains the name of the original project violates the Apache license or not. Whenever I [...]

It was brought to my attention by a message in our forums that the download methods described in the “Use wget or curl to download from RapidShare Premium” article are no longer valid. Rapidshare has introduced a new API for account and file management. After a quick read of the Rapidshare API documentation, it was [...]

The PHP interpreter supports running it in interactive mode by using the –interactive (short equivalent: -a) command-line switch. Running an interactive PHP shell can be useful when you need to quickly try code snippets. But, for this mode to be fully functional, PHP has to be compiled with readline support. Unfortunately, on CentOS PHP has [...]

I’ve been using the Subversion version control system during the last 2-3 years. Although a VCS has never been a top priority for me, it seems there is always room for version control. I ended up using it for almost everything, from simple to more complex scripts and even system configuration files in some cases. [...]

I can still recall the excitement of the first time I tried to access and administer a remote system using SSH. Accessing my shell at a remote machine securely, being able to do local and remote port forwarding in order to access remote services through encrypted tunnels, X forwarding, secure file transfers using scp or [...]

I’ve been looking for a pure python implementation of the ping command. Now that I found one, I am not sure if I want to use it, as it has a restriction: only privileged users can ping other hosts. I’ve used the ping command successfully as a normal user on all operating systems I have [...]

If you check the file where gftp keeps its bookmarks, you will notice that passwords are not stored in clear text. Instead, gftp has used an algorithm to scramble them. I cannot recall if it was one or two years ago when I had decided to write a script to convert the bookmarks from the [...]

It’s been several months since the last time I had done any coding on Drupal. Although many people might find it trivial, here is a PHP snippet to enter in a custom block, so that the taxonomy terms of the currently displayed node are printed as an unordered list inside that block. Also, each list [...]

I’ve been using the mod_dav_svn module for Apache, part of the subversion distribution package, in order to make several SVN repositories available over the HTTP protocol for quite some time now. More specifically, I use a multi-repository setup under the same virtualhost by using the SVNParentPath directive of mod_dav_svn. Also, the authorization policy is enforced [...]

delayed-shutdown is an initscript that delays the shutdown (runlevel 0) or reboot (runlevel 6) procedure as long as a pre-defined lock file exists. The goal is to create a mechanism, which can be used by programs that perform critical operations that must not be interrupted, in order to delay system shutdown until these programs have [...]