Boot from a USB drive even if your BIOS Won’t Let You

You’ve always got a trusty bootable USB flash drive with you to solve computer problems, but what if a PC’s BIOS won’t let you boot from USB? We’ll show you how to make a CD or floppy disk that will let you boot from your USB drive.

This boot menu, like many created before USB drives became cheap and commonplace, does not include an option to boot from a USB drive.
A piece of freeware called PLoP Boot Manager solves this problem, offering an image that can burned to a CD or put on a floppy disk, and enables you to boot to a variety of devices, including USB drives.
Put PLoP on a CD
PLoP comes as a zip file, which includes a variety of files. To put PLoP on a CD, you will need either plpbt.iso or plpbtnoemul.iso from that zip file. Either disc image should work on most computers, though if in doubt plpbtnoemul.iso should work “everywhere,” according to the readme included with PLoP Boot Manager.
Burn plpbtnoemul.iso or plpbt.iso to a CD and then skip to the “booting PLoP Boot Manager” section.
Put PLoP on a Floppy Disk
If your computer is old enough to still have a floppy drive, then you will need to put the contents of the plpbt.img image file found in PLoP’s zip file on a floppy disk.
To do this, we’ll use a freeware utility called RawWrite for Windows.

We aren’t fortunate enough to have a floppy drive installed, but if you do it should be listed in the Floppy drive drop-down box. Select your floppy drive, then click on the “…” button and browse to plpbt.img. Press the Write button to write PLoP boot manager to your floppy disk.

Booting PLoP Boot Manager
To boot PLoP, you will need to have your CD or floppy drive boot with higher precedence than your hard drive. In many cases, especially with floppy disks, this is done by default.
If the CD or floppy drive is not set to boot first, then you will need to access your BIOS’s boot menu, or the setup menu. The exact steps to do this vary depending on your BIOS – to get a detailed description of the process, search for your motherboard’s manual (or your laptop’s manual if you’re working with a laptop).
In general, however, as the computer boots up, some important keyboard strokes are noted somewhere prominent on the screen. In our case, they are at the bottom of the screen.

Press Escape to bring up the Boot Menu. Previously, we burned a CD with PLoP Boot Manager on it, so we will select the CD-ROM Drive option and hit Enter.

If your BIOS does not have a Boot Menu, then you will need to access the Setup menu and change the boot order to give the floppy disk or CD-ROM Drive higher precedence than the hard drive. Usually this setting is found in the “Boot” or “Advanced” section of the Setup menu.

If done correctly, PLoP Boot Manager will load up, giving a number of boot options.

Highlight USB and press Enter.

PLoP begins loading from the USB drive.

Despite our BIOS not having the option, we’re now booting using the USB drive, which in our case holds an Ubuntu Live CD!

This is a pretty geeky way to get your PC to boot from a USB…provided your computer still has a floppy drive. Of course if your BIOS won’t boot from a USB it probably has one…or you really need to update it.

Backup MySQL Database to a file

Backing up your database is a very important system administration task, and should generally be run from a cron job at scheduled intervals. We will use the mysqldump utility included with mysql to dump the contents of the database to a text file that can be easily re-imported.
Syntax:

mysqldump -h localhost -u root -pmypassword databasename > dumpfile.sql

Example:

mysqldump -h localhost -u root -p2Uad7as9 database01 > dumpfile.sql

This will give you a text file containing all the commands required to recreate the database.

Allow Remote Control To Your Desktop On Ubuntu

Enabling remote desktop mode is extremely easy on Ubuntu since Dapper. You can allow other users to access your desktop using the VNC Viewer utility that is bundled with Ubuntu, or offered as a free download for Windows.
Note that enabling remote control of your desktop is never a safe thing to do unless you have a firewall installed and configured correctly, and even then is still a potential security problem. Now that you’ve been warned of the risks, let’s move on.
Navigate to the System \ Preferences \ Remote Desktop on the Gnome top menu.
You’ll see this window:

The first two checkboxes need to be checked in order for remote desktop to be enabled.
The Security section is important: If you select the “Ask you for confirmation” code, then you will need to be at the computer in order to allow the other person to access your desktop. If you are trying to remotely access one of your own computers, you will want to uncheck this box.
The second checkbox should always be checked, and you should enter a secure password. You will be prompted for this password when you try to log on.

Installing PHP5 and Apache on Ubuntu

If you are doing any kind of PHP development, you’ll almost always be using Apache along with it. Here’s the quick and easy way to get PHP up and running on your Ubuntu box.
First, you’ll want to add the extra repositories to Ubuntu’s sources.list file.
From a command shell, you will run the following commands:

sudo apt-get install apache2
sudo apt-get install php5
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Note that if apache is already installed you can omit the first line. Your web files will now be found in /var/www/

How to install Apache on Linux

The installation, care, and feeding of an Apache Web server is not terribly difficult, but can seem so if you haven't ventured into those particular waters before. This quick-start guide will help you get your feet wet with Apache on a Linux server. You'll find it's relatively simple to get the Web server set up and running on your Linux of choice. We'll also install PHP and MySQL, though we won't be digging into MySQL configurations, as that deserves a quick start all its own.
The method of installing the Apache packages on a Linux server varies from distribution to distribution. We'll cover how to do this on Fedora and CentOS, as well as on Ubuntu. This is a server-centric walkthrough, so we'll use the command line exclusively. Naturally, you'll need root-level privileges. Open the terminal window and type:

su -

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Then enter the root password. Now we can get started.
First we'll install the packages themselves. For Fedora and CentOS, this is a simple step involving Yum, the package installer and updater. To install the basic Apache and PHP packages, run the following command:

yum install httpd php mysql mysql-server

Follow the prompts, as this tool will locate and install a base set of Apache and PHP packages.
For Ubuntu 10.04 servers and newer, you can install the whole LAMP (Apache, MySQL, and PHP) stack with two commands:

sudo apt-get install tasksel
sudo tasksel install lamp-server

While this guide does not cover MySQL, the above commands are a quick way to get all the necessary packages required for LAMP applications. Once the installation is complete, we can begin configuring the server.
For all file editing, on Fedora, CentOS, or Ubuntu, you may want to use nano:

nano /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

This command will open the Apache configuration file in a basic editor. You can save the file with Ctrl-O and exit the editor with Ctrl-X.
Apache on Linux: Initial configuration
While the Apache and PHP packages are essentially the same across the different distributions, there are differences in how they are actually installed on the file system. We'll start with Fedora and CentOS.
Fedora and CentOS. After installation, you'll find a new directory: /etc/httpd. Within this directory are all the Apache configuration files. The important subdirectories for our purposes are /etc/httpd/conf and /etc/httpd/conf.d. Within /etc/httpd you'll find the main Apache configuration file, httpd.conf. In /etc/httpd/conf.d you will find includes, or supplemental files that are included in the main configuration file.
Includes are a way to break out complex configurations into separate files for easy organization and management. For instance, if you have an Apache server that has 20 virtual hosts, then each virtual host should have a separate file in /etc/httpd/conf.d/ that contains its specific configuration parameters. In this way, you can easily add or remove virtual hosts without editing the main Apache configuration file.
In order for files to be included in the Apache configuration, they must have a filename that ends with .conf. If we have a virtual host named www.test.com, all the configuration elements for that virtual host would reside in a file named test.conf or test.com.conf.
You can see how these files are included in the main configuration file by looking at /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf. Press Ctrl-W to search for "Include conf.d" and you'll find this line:

Include conf.d/*.conf

Create tab on Facebook page (updated)

CUSTOM FACEBOOK TAB
As usual Facebook keep changing, improving and driving nuts many developers and users.
How to have however a new tab into your page on Facebook and in personal profile
1. Go to your https://developers.facebook.com/apps (if you have not account there just create one, it is fast and free – follow the instructions)
2. Create an app , take care , name of the app is very relevant, for example is your new tab will be a contact form the name it Contact. It is not just about name of tab, it can be changed but it is about page title when user will click on the icon of your app. The icon can be setup later. Let’s have the tab working.
See image below as sample and fill in with your details
You can setup and use the application (tab) but you must have SSL installed on your website!

• If your page (tab) will be browsed by a user who is not log into facebook then the facebook url is http://facebook.com/YOUR_FACEBOOK_PAGE. All good and your tab will be displayed okay.
• If your page (tab) will be browsed by a user who is log into facebook  then the facebook url is https://facebook.com/YOUR_FACEBOOK_PAGE. Your page (TAB) will try to load your content on https:// and if you have not SSL installed then an error will be displayed.

If you have not SSL installed on the website where you bring content into Facebook tab is not 100% relevant. The filed “Secure page tab url” is compulsory. Just replace http with https.
As far as I see if you are developer of the app and you try to see your result (tab content) you will get error generated by the missing SSL. If you open a new browser and access the same tab (login in facebook or not) there will be no error.

Save and wait a few minutes/hours or no need to wait. Why? Because it depends of Facebook “mood”. Try next steps once you finish this one. If it works means you are luck, does not work yet: check all above and it means “bad luck”. Keep trying, never give up.
3. make sure you have your in your website setup the path specified above, I mean: http://www.sydneywebs.com.au/facebook/about/ folder and that a file named index.php or index.html does exist into that folder
What will be in that page (index.php) will be displayed into your new tab on facebook
4. When you consider, login in Facebook, into that account that is admin for the page in which you wish to add the tab and write in browser :

• To display tab in your page (personal): call in a browser:  https://www.facebook.com/dialog/oauth?client_id=YOUR_APP_ID&redirect_uri=YOUR_CANVAS_PAGE
• To display tab in business page: call in a browser: https://www.facebook.com/dialog/pagetab?app_id=YOUR_APP_ID&next=YOUR_CANVAS_PAGE

replace YOUR_APP_ID and YOUR_CANVAS_PAGE with what you write above
For page, you will be asked to chose the page where you wish to be displayed this tab. To that page into applications area will be added your app.
More tabs you need then more apps you need to setup. One tab you wish to have = one apps like this you will add.

Create rounded corners with CSS

Rounded corners for Safari/Chrome, Opera and IE9:
#example {
border-radius: 15px;
}
Rounded corners to be supported by Firefox as well:
#example {
-moz-border-radius: 15px;
border-radius: 15px;
}

The border-radius shorthand property can be used to define all four corners simultaneously. The property accepts either one or two sets of values, each consisting of one to four lengths or percentages.
Example:
border-radius: 5px 10px 5px 10px / 10px 5px 10px 5px;
border-radius: 5px;
border-radius: 5px 10px / 10px;
The first set of (1-4) values define the horizontal radii for all four corners. An optional second set of values, preceded by a ‘/’, define the vertical radii for all four corners. If only one set of values are supplied, these are used to determine both the vertical and horizontal equally.
If all four values are supplied, these represent the top-left, top-right, bottom-right and bottom-left radii respectively. If bottom-left is omitted it is the same as top-right, if bottom-right is omitted it is the same as top-left, and if only one value is supplied it is used to set all four radii equally.

Basic examples that should work in current versions of Firefox, Safari/Chrome, Opera and even IE9:
#Example_A {
height: 65px;
width:160px;
-moz-border-radius-bottomright: 50px;
border-bottom-right-radius: 50px;
}
#Example_B {
height: 65px;
width:160px;
-moz-border-radius-bottomright: 50px 25px;
border-bottom-right-radius: 50px 25px;
}
#Example_C {
height: 65px;
width:160px;
-moz-border-radius-bottomright: 25px 50px;
border-bottom-right-radius: 25px 50px;
}
#Example_D {
height: 5em;
width: 12em;
-moz-border-radius: 1em 4em 1em 4em;
border-radius: 1em 4em 1em 4em;
}
#Example_E {
height: 65px;
width:160px;
-moz-border-radius: 25px 10px / 10px 25px;
border-radius: 25px 10px / 10px 25px;
}
#Example_F {
height: 70px;
width: 70px;
-moz-border-radius: 35px;
border-radius: 35px;
}
Another opinion in considering most of the browsers when create rounded conners through CSS:
Since each of the browsers still has its own unique idiosyncrasies, they apply prefixes such as -moz and -webkit.
-moz-border-radius is for Firefox, -webkit-border-radius is for Chrome/Safari and -khtml-border-radius is for older Konquerer browsers.
rounded-corners {
-moz-border-radius: 20px;
-webkit-border-radius: 20px;
-khtml-border-radius: 20px;
border-radius: 20px; }