Ubuntu Gradle Update

Came across this issue when updating gradle on my Ubuntu VM. I'd run `apt-get upgrade gradle` which indicated it would upgrade to 2.1. However, a quick `gradle -v` indicated it was still on the 1.x version.

The fix for me was to remove the old file: /usr/bin/gradle and then link up the latest one:

sudo rm /usr/bin/gradle
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/gradle/2.1/bin/gradle  /usr/bin/gradle 

As always, hope this saves someone some time.

SSL Certifcate Fun...

Found it rather annoying to try to convert certificate files for the HealthVault platform. They expected .cer format which seemed to be of some funky variety. After digging a bit further, this is simply a self signed certificate which normally takes on a .crt file extension. Knowing this, you can simply google the best way to self sign a certificate for Microsoft, or you can use the commands below:

openssl req -new -key  server.key -out  server.csr

openssl x509 -req -days 365 -in server.csr -signkey server.key -out server.crt

cp server.crt server.cer

Hope this saves someone some time!

Local Testing from the Web

Useful tool that does port forwarding. It's a bit slow, but it get the job done if you need to test a local site on a device that isn't on the same network.

https://ngrok.com

D3 Charting

D3, a very powerful, low level charting package, can be difficult to start with. To create just a simple line graph can take a few hours to get off the ground. I found this site which has all a few templates to gets started: http://nvd3.org/ghpages/examples.html.

And, if you're interested in the more advanced D3 visualizations, there's always the Github gallery with some impressive examples:

https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Gallery.

Developer Application Management

Microsoft, Facebook and Google all have different URLs to manage applications.

Facebook is the easiest to remember: https://developers.facebook.com/ (Makes sense). Plus, if you're like me, I usually miss the "s" on developers, yet Facebook is smart enough to redirect me.

Microsoft and Google are both difficult to find. It's a good few minutes each time. 

Microsoft: https://account.live.com/developers/applications/

Google: https://code.google.com/apis/console/

Google also supports the "developers" subdomain, but it presents with too much information. You'd need to know you're looking for the API console.

This will certainly save me a few minutes next time I need to open up a dev server that has a different URL yet still needs the same API access.

jQuery Isotopes

Coworker pointed this out today, jQuery Isotopes. Looks interesting - a bit of eye candy. I'm not sure if I would put this on a website (using their homepage example), but it has a bit of promise for some other purposes. Something I'll keep in mind for future layouts.

Ubuntu Linux Items

Turns out installing items on Ubuntu is extremely easy. The following items turned out to be useful tips (if not also the "proper" way to install additional items).

For PHP, to install additional modules, it's also a "sudo apt-get install php" command. Press the tab key "tab out, as it were, and it will show you the additional items that can be installed.

For Apache, to enable additional modules, instead of modifying the httpd.conf file, the files are separated out into separate directories. Use the "a2enmod" (presumably it's the 'Apache2 enable module' command.

I'm working on getting Ubuntu running Symfony and connecting to the Azure SQL Server database - this is turning out to be quite the challenge. After that nut is cracked, or when I crack and install MySQL instead (using apt-get), I'll post the results here to save the next person some work.