Geekology

cPanel in combination with WHM is a Unix-based (usually integrated with CentOS Linux) web hosting control panel that provides a graphical interface and automation tools designed to simplify the process of hosting websites.

In combination with WebHost Manager (WHM), the software offers GUI, command line, and API-based access that allows third-party software vendors, web hosting organizations, and developers to automate standard system administration processes to manage hosting accounts on a web server.

If you have a WHM-based server running behind a firewall, you’ll need to open certain ports on your firewall to enable all services. The following are lists of Inbound and Outbound Ports used by the cPanel and WHM software:

Read more…

Apple’s new Magic Mouse features multi-touch technology that allows you to scroll, swipe or click from anywhere on its surface and improves upon many of the flaws the Mighty Mouse suffered from.

By default the Magic Mouse offers only basic multi-touch functionality, but the free BetterTouchTool menubar plugin adds a menubar item to your Mac that will let you define additional custom commands such as:

• zooming in and out by pinching
• tip-tapping (tapping on the left, then the right side of the mouse)
• two-finger swiping up, down, left, and right
• three-finger swiping up, down, left, and right
• single-finger tapping (anywhere, left, or right)
• two-finger tapping
• two-finger clicking
• three-finger tapping
• three-finger clicking

If your MacBook or MacBook Pro features a multi-touch trackpad, BetterTouchTool will let you define custom gestures for that too.

BetterTouchTool can be downloaded here.

Exactly one year ago today Geekology published it’s first post, “Anime Contact Lenses“. Before starting Geekology I tried my hand at blogging a few times using services like blogger.com and wordpress.com, but never stuck with it for long enough. With Geekology I aimed to finally build a blog I could be proud of and that I’d still be writing for many years down the line.

I started blogging because friends, colleagues, and others tend to ask me for a lot of advice regarding Unix, Apple products, and software development. I love doing research on these (and other) topics, and I’ve always kept notes whenever I find techniques or solutions that are especially interesting, so in early 2009 I decided to start converting these notes into articles in the hope that others who come across similar problems might benefit from them too.

One year later it seems like I’m on my way to reaching my blogging goals; Geekology was nominated (and achieved a runner-up position) for the “Best New Blog” category of the 2009 South African Blog Awards, and I hope to take part in the competition again this year.

Since the 22nd of January 2009 Geekology’s published 200 posts and had 390,000 unique visits from 210 countries (averaging around 2000 unique visitors per day for the past few months), visitors have posted 700 comments, I’ve gained 1200 Twitter followers, and after incorporating ads in May 2009 I’ve received my first Google AdSense Cheque with the second one on its way!

Traffic During 2009

Web Browsers

Read more…

Following on Geekology’s previous posts on Regular expressions (Regex Overview and Regex in PHP), the following is a list of regular expression examples for general use.

Credit Cards:

All major credit cards:

^(?:4[0-9]{12}(?:[0-9]{3})?|5[1-5][0-9]{14}|6011[0-9]{12}|3(?:0[0-5]|[68][0-9])[0-9]{11}|3[47][0-9]{13})$

American Express:

^3[47][0-9]{13}$

Diners Club International:

^3(?:0[0-5]|[68][0-9])[0-9]{11}$

Discover:

^6011[0-9]{12}$

MasterCard:

^5[1-5][0-9]{14}$

Visa:

^4[0-9]{12}(?:[0-9]{3})?$

Dates:

Read more…

3D TVs were one of the big hits at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES). These high-definition television sets feature extremely high resolutions and refresh rates, and will ship with 3D glasses that let viewers experience compatible movies and games in 3D similar to cinema releases like Avatar and Alice in Wonderland.

The videos below highlight some of the key technologies and devices that were introduced.

GeekBrief.TV – Brief 687 – 3D Technology from CES:

Attack of the Show – CES 2010 – 3D Televisions Review:

Kernel and Architecture

The uname command-line utility can be used to check the kernel and architecture of a machine running Linux:

uname -a

… resulting in output like:

Linux ubuntu 2.6.20-16-generic #2 SMP
Tue Feb 12 05:41:34 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux

This output specifies the operating system (“Linux”), nodename on the network (“ubuntu”), kernel version (“2.6.20-16-generic”), and architecture (“i686″), but it doesn’t specify the operating system’s release information.

Red Hat, Fedora, and CentOS Release Info

To check the release information in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, or CentOS, run the following command:

Read more…

Without a doubt I’m adding Zooom/2 by CodeRage Software to my list of must-have Mac utilities (which includes applications such as Default Folder X, Dropbox, GeekTool, Growl, NTFS-3G, Perian and Quicksilver).

Zooom/2 is a Mac desktop utility that uses Apple’s public-approved APIs to redefine how you can resize, move and align your application windows – making you faster and more productive. The utility’s tagline sums up its functionality pretty well: “Window stuff, done right“.

Zooom/2 features

By default Zooom/2’s functions are available to all applications, but they can be disabled on an application-by-application basis.The following is a short video overview of the utility’s main features: