Warning. This article is meant for Ubuntu Feisty only and is therefore deprecated! Compiz-fusion comes standard in more recent Ubuntu versions, so don't use this article anymore! I would have taken this article offline if it wasn't for the fact that there are still some Feisty users out there who find this useful. If you're in the midst of upgrading from Feisty to Gutsy, read howto upgrade to Ubuntu Gutsy without breaking compiz-fusion!

Since 2005 there has been an immense increase in brute force SSH attacks and though Linux is pretty secure by default, it does not stop evil programs from indefinitely trying to login with different passwords. Without proper protection your server is a sitting duck waiting for a bot to guess the right combination and hit the jackpot. But with just 2 commands we can stop that.

I often hear about people who want to upgrade their version of Ubuntu with tools like apt-get, but if you run a desktop version of Ubuntu, there is a much better tool called update-manager. There are a lot of ways to upgrade Ubuntu. But this one is the best.

Not everyone knows about PHP's capabilities of making SSH connections and executing remote commands, but it can be very useful. I've been using it a lot in PHP CLI applications that I run from cronjobs, but initially it was a pain to get it to work. The PHP manual on Secure Shell2 Functions is not very practice or thorough for that matter, so I would like to share my knowledge in this how to, to make it a little less time consuming setting this up.

If you've got a website that's heavy on your web server, you might want to run some processes like generating thumbnails or enriching data in the background. This way it can not interfere with the user interface. Linux has a great program for this called cron. It allows tasks to be automatically run in the background at regular intervals. You could also use it to automatically create backups, synchronize files, schedule updates, and much more. Welcome to the wonderful world of crontab.

The stable version of the newest Ubuntu version Gutsy Gibbon will be released in October 2007. I could not wait that long however. And since the third alpha of Ubuntu 7.10 was recently released, I figured let's give it a shot. Testing alpha releases (especially from Ubuntu ) is like looking into the crystal ball of technology. This is how I upgraded and got compiz working again.

This is a Javascript version of the PHP function: md5.

A good way for sites or articles to get known is submitting to social bookmarking sites, so submitting should be as easy as possible for your visitors. But gathering information on the best social bookmarking sites, their icons, submission URLs, and ranking is quite a pain. And so I did it for you. I'll also give you a PHP example of how to integrate social bookmarking sites in your website.

Recently two of my articles reached the Digg frontpage at the same day. My web server isn't state of the art and it had to handle gigantic amounts of traffic. But still it served pages to visitors swiftly thanks to a lot of optimizations. This is how you can prevent heavy traffic from killing your server.

I recently faced a programming challenge that almost broke my brain. I needed to create a function that could explode any single-dimensional array into a full blown tree structure, based on the delimiters found in it's keys. Tricky part was size of the tree could be infinite. I called the function: explodeTree. And maybe it's best to first look at an example.

Every time a request hits your server, PHP has to do a lot of processing, all of your code has to be compiled & executed for every single visit. Even though the outcome of all this processing is often identical for both visitor 21600 and 21601. So why not save the flat HTML generated for visitor 21600, and serve that to 21601 as well? This will relieve resources of your web server and database server because less PHP often means less queries.

Recently I've seen a lot of screencasts in the Planet Ubuntu RSS feed. A screencast is an embeded flash video of your desktop, often used in tutorials instead of screenshots. I wondered if I could make these online flash videos myself; turns out, it's pretty easy! So in this article I will cover how to install the video capturing tool, how to use it, how to convert the video to a flash video (flv) file, and finally how to embed a flash player in your site just like YouTube. Create your own screencasts in 5 easy steps!

Licensing Since the project is really kicking off and we're almost at 100 ported functions, I thought it was probably time to think about licensing. So I did a little bit of research, and I think the MIT license might be what we're looking for.

This is a Javascript version of the PHP function: abs.

It's no secret I like Ubuntu the best. But what strikes me as odd, is that it does not come standard with a good tool to change the display settings. Sure, you can change the Screen Resolution, but what about cloning to another device, extending the desktop to a second screen, changing the driver, or adjusting the refresh rates to enable more resolutions? There currently is no graphical way to do this in GNOME, so for this you had to manually change the X config file, or run a third party tool like nvidia-settings. But now I found a great GTK tool that can do it for you.

Synchronizing files from one server to another is quite awesome. You can use it for backups, for keeping web servers in sync, and much more. It's fast and it doesn't take up as much bandwidth as normal copying would. And the best thing is, it can be done with only 1 command. Welcome to the wonderful world of rsync.

CDs and DVDs don't have the eternal life, so you might want to back them up as ISO images. All the files and properties of the original disc, stored in a single file. You can also create ISO images and store them on your network for easy distribution of software installations. Here's how to create and mount ISO images on Linux.

Everyone knows that RAM is so much faster than a hard disk. To illustrate, while a modern SATA disk has peak transfer rates of 375 MB/s, modern RAM can do a mind blowing 12.500 MB/s! Normally only the system itself makes use of this ultra fast storage, but we can also access this space directly. And that opens a great window of opportunity.

This is a Javascript version of the PHP function: strpos.

This is a Javascript version of the PHP function: strrpos.

Readable URLs are nice. A well made website will have a logical layout, with intelligent folder and file names, and as few technical details as possible. In the most well designed sites, readers can guess at filenames with a high level of success. Clean URLs are great because they.

This is a Javascript version of the PHP function: base64_decode.

This is a Javascript version of the PHP function: mktime.

Making sure your system is up to date is a key attribute to it's security. Furthermore Ubuntu releases updates pretty often and you probably don't want to miss out on added stability and features. You could run updated manually, but why not schedule the updates in the background to make sure you are always running the latest stable versions, without ever having to worry about it.

This is a Javascript version of the PHP function: htmlentities.

This is a Javascript version of the PHP function: explode.

This is a Javascript version of the PHP function: addslashes.

It's always a good idea to backup important data. Your files and settings can easily be archived. But how can you backup & restore all applications that you've installed over the last couple of years? Here's an easy trick that works for both desktops & servers, and that can also be used to synchronize installed packages in a web cluster, making all the servers run the same software.

This is a Javascript version of the PHP function: isset.

Or: How to convert multipage TIFF to PDF in PHP. Let's say you have a fax with multiple pages that has been stored as a TIFF and you want to convert it to PDF using PHP for digital document flow. In this article I will show you a tiff2pdf function for PHP, because it cannot be done directly with ImageMagick.

This is a Javascript version of the PHP function: include.

This is a Javascript version of the PHP function: str_replace.

This is a Javascript version of the PHP function: count.

This is a Javascript version of the PHP function: is_array.