planetmobile.us is a blog aggregator focused on mobile software development.The purpose of the aggregator is to give all good blogs in one packet, without the need to hunt them individually.
planetmobile.us was managed by Christopher Schmidt until I resurrected it few weeks ago.
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MySQL has an ugly design fault preventing it to listen more than one interface in its bind_address my.conf directive. Thus, you usually cannot connect to the same MySQL instance using localhost and external IP sources.
Here is a workaround based on xinetd daemon. These are sample commands for Ubuntu/Debian.
Go to root
sudo -i
Install xinetd
apt-get install xinetd
Add a new xinetd mapping
pico /etc/xinetd.d/mysql
service mysql
{
only_from = localhost mansikki.redinnovation.com 80.75.108.108 server213-171-218-5.livedns.org.uk 213.171.218.5
flags = REUSE
socket_type = stream
wait = no
user = root
redirect = 127.0.0.1 3306
log_on_failure += USERID
interface = 84.34.147.68
}
Restart xinetd
/etc/init.d/xinetd restart
To debug xinetd:
/etc/init.d/xinetd stop
xinetd -d
xinetd only_from directive also gives an access control by allowed source IP addresses. This protects your MySQL against bots and brute force attacks.
Note that iptables DNAT translation doesn’t work (easily). Localhost packets don’t travel PREROUTING and POSTROUTING chains.
Bored with Spiderman 3 which came with your Nokia N95 8 GB? This guide shortly tells how to get movies into your N95 on Ubuntu Linux using ffmpeg video encoder. The aim is to encode video suitable for playback from Nokia N-series (N95, N78, others) mobile phone memory card. We use h264 + AAC codecs which provides the best quality/compression rate for Nokia phones currently.
Ubuntu does not distribute proprietary codes. First thing you need to do is to rebuild ffmpeg. Since Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron ships with ffmpeg from 2007, which is aeons old in video codec years, you need to build libx264 and ffmpeg from SVN sources. Here are detailed, valid, instructions. Note that FFMPEG trunk is not currently stable (September 2008), so you need to use revision 15261 which needs this little patch. Indeed, this is a very difficult month to start your career in the dark world of video encoders.
To make it legal and support open source codec development, please pay for your codecs.
Then we use this guide by Robert Swain. We have a tiny sub 2,4″ screen, we do not care about the quality and do one pass encoding. By empirical research, I have found that the following MPEG-4 profile parameters are compatible with N95 8 GB and provide the optimal result. You can vary video and audio bitrate depending on your taste.
Here is a script which recursivelu encodes all detected video files suitable for mobile format:
#!/bin/sh
#
# Optimal movie encoding for Nokia N-series mobile phones
#
# Copyright 2008 Red Innovation Ltd.
#
# Say hi if you find this useful.
# We do some professional mobile video publishing, so if you
# need a helping hand please call us.
#
# Usage: Run encode.sh in any folder and all video files are recursively converted to mobile phone suitable format
#
# Note: We expect all the source material be in 16:9 aspect ration
#
# Also see http://www.nseries.com/index.html#l=support,search,faq,general,video%20encoding,53848
#
VIDEO_BITRATE=300k
AUDIO_BITRATE=72k
# Assume locally build ffmpeg + x264 in /usr/local/bin
# http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=786095
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib
# Search all source AVI, MPG and WMV video files
# Place all encoded files to the same folder with the source, with added .mp4 extension
find . -iname "*.avi" -or -iname "*.wmv" -or -iname "*.mpg" | while read src ; do
srcfile=`basename "$src"`
srcfolder=`dirname "$src"`
dstfile="$srcfolder"/"$srcfile".mp4
# The magical string!
# Size and cropping is for 16:9 source material, so that 320:240 display will have black bars.
# Fex pixels off... note that h264 sizes must be multiplies of 16, use 256x144 for streaming
# N95 RealMedia player does not seem to respect MPEG-4 embedded aspect ration info.
/usr/local/bin/ffmpeg -y -i "$srcfile" -acodec libfaac -ab $AUDIO_BITRATE -s 320x176 -aspect 16:9 -vcodec libx264 -b $VIDEO_BITRATE -qcomp 0.6 -qmin 16 -qmax 51 -qdiff 4 -flags +loop -cmp +chroma -subq 7 -refs 6 -g 250 -keyint_min 25 -rc_eq 'blurCplx^(1-qComp)' -sc_threshold 40 -me_range 12 -i_qfactor 0.71 -directpred 3 "$dstfile"
done
This is my brain dump of instructions for artists how to design good Plone themes. I hope I can receive some comments, some feedback from the artists itself and then publish this as a plone.org tutorial.
Often external artist is used to design a site theme. Artists might or might not have seen Plone, artists might or might not have any basic usability know how. This article should explain the elements which “must be there” to make a match between the theme and Plone easily.
This document describes the elements of multilingual high usability Plone theme. It is based on fluid div layout, meaning that the content stays very readable on small screens or when CSS is not loaded (screen readers). See the example layout.
The layout must not break down when user is using non-default font size. E.g. all element accept two rows text, even if the default case is usually one row.
Here we are designing a “normal” site theme where Plone is used to publish textual content for external readers. This might not always be the case – for example if Plone is used as a professional tool one might want to use all available screen space to display as much as possible action shortcuts to make the tool to quick to use. The latter is actual case I have seen in medical applications.
Plone layout is formed by seven main parts.
| Left body padding (auto width) |
|
Right body padding (auto width) |
The layout must be designed so that
The layout must be formed from such a blocks that left or right portlets can be easily dropped without breaking the layout.
Right portlets missing:
|
Both portlets missing (front page view):
|
The header should have the following elements
The header must scale between 780 – 1280 px. Section navigation tabs may trigger drop down menus, see http://www.jyu.fi/
The content area contains
The whole portlet section can be dropped, making space for the content.
Portlets are boxes on the left and right side of the content containing section specific actions.
Example portlets:
Navigation
Search (not the header search)
News
Recently changed
The portlet consists of
See http://www.siggraph.org/ for creative use of portlets.
The footer has
The footer must scale between 780 – 1280 px.
Left body padding
|
|
Right body padding |
These are often required and might shoot you into a foot
Plone uses mechanism to have color variables in CSS. See base_properties.prop to get an idea what colors there are and try to guess how they are used.
Plone uses generic icon mechanism to apply icons to any action available on site. Icons are 16×16, transparent with one pixel transparent border leaving 14×14 pixels for the content.
The icons should preferably be suitable for dark and light backgrounds. This might be hard to achieve, though, so it is suitable to use ligh background icons, since this is the Plone default.
Plone default flags can be used
These reflect different Plone content types
Plone uses Javascript to apply special icons for external links
