Steven S. Ross - Home

Open an ssh Tunnel to Administer MySQL (or anything else)

2008-11-03T16:17:00Z

Pretty simple stuff, say you are using mysql administrator and you want to point it at a server that you have ssh access to but the firewall prevents you from making a direct connection over the internet (which it should).

Here is what you do (if mysql is running on its default port):


ssh -N -L3306:localhost:3306 username@server.com

You can also pass in a port variable if you are running ssh on a non-starndard port (which you should also do) all you do is add ” -p 1234” (1234 would be the port number where ssh is wanting you to connect)

Now just point mysql administrator at 127.0.0.1 and supply your credentials. Bang. You’re in.

Sync Google Contacts with your Mac/iPhone

2008-10-23T14:06:00Z

Just passing this along. Found this article at google and yay! Sync’ing is cool! read

TED: Seadragon - streaming high res image content

2008-09-19T13:33:00Z

So, maybe you have seen this Microsoft tool called Photosynth its pretty cool but, I think that Microsoft is trying to compete with Flickr or something instead of putting this technology to good use. If you watch this video (7mins) you’ll see the potential of this software. I think M$ missed the mark here, I certainly hope that photosynth is not the only project they are working on that will use Seadragon. Also sorry for us mac users, it only runs on windows.

Vmware Fusion 2.0 final, get it while its hot

2008-09-18T18:21:00Z

Just in! Go grab some final code VmWare Fusion 2.0 After using the beta for awhile I can assure you that it is a vast improvement over 1.0 I have yet to try out this version. Downloading it as we speak and I’ll post an update soon.

Hurricane Ike: the aftermath (photos)

2008-09-18T13:30:00Z

Received this link http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/09/the_short_but_eventful_life_of.html Great photos. Worth a gander. When Hanna was fast approaching our home here in Savannah I was wondering what it would take to make me evacuate and at the time it would have been a Category 3+ storm. We aren’t really near the water so we wouldn’t have the surge to worry about as far inland as we are but, now it makes me wonder if staying at all would be wise. Especially with the power situation. Makes you realize how much you take for granted.

Kiteboarding: Don't ever try it...

2008-09-17T19:25:00Z

...Unless you want to spend a bunch of money on an addiction that will have you watching weather bouys and wind forecasts every time you mind starts wandering from whatever it is you should be doing.

Yep, I have been out on the water probably 6-8 times since my last post. I now have 2 kites and one board. Actually I should keep track of the number of times I have ridden but, who cares, the only thing you’ll ever remember when you aren’t kiteboarding is that you need to find wind so that you can feed that need once again. I feel like I am addicted to crack or something. Seriously, its that bad.

My progression is going well, I can “upwind” well now (that means when you leave your launch spot on the beach you aren’t blown so far downwind that you have to stop riding and walk back up the beach to where you launched in the first place). I have also mastered catching some air off some waves and throwing in a few grabs while I’m at it. This is probably more due to the fact that I have done a bunch of board sports before (skimboarding, wakeboarding, surfing etc.) Now around my second or third time I decided I would try to boost a nice big floaty air by using the kite to send me up into the stratosphere.

This amounts to turning the kite upward very quickly and all that power is then translated from a horizontal plane to a vertical one and it sends you flying (literally) into the air anywhere from 10-40ft (depending on the wind speed and your skill). So I see an approaching wave and decide I’m going to send it and boom up I go into the air probably 15-18ft off the water. Now I had no idea what I was doing and knew I was going to crash when I came down (I didn’t crash hard so that was good). I came up grinning and looking for my board. As if I needed anything more in this sport that was the icing on the cake and the addiction was fed with even more adrenaline.

It turns out in order to land one of these big airs you have to keep flying the kite and after you send it vertical you have to pull it back down so that you don’t catch up with the velocity of the kite and send it flying backward through the air only to leave you and the kite down in the water. So that needs some practice on my part and from the looks of it this week would have been the perfect wind to give it another shot in. However I am on a job site this week while looking at the weather report back home.

Oh well hopefully we’ll still have the wind when I get back in town this Saturday.

CS4 around the corner? Flash animation re-vamped?

2008-09-17T19:16:00Z

Cool stuff being mentioned on this thread looks like Adobe has completely overhauled the way you will animate stuff in Flash. That is very exciting for those that have used After Effects before. If you haven’t, after effects is truly a mind blowing app. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. Also sounds interesting that there have been some major improvements in Fireworks. I just wish they would slap be type rendering engine into Fireworks. It really needs some work (especially when compared to Photoshop).

Rails & Server Side Push for Flash

2008-08-29T14:03:00Z

Check it out for yourself, pretty slick stuff, push for a SWF or AJAX. Taken from the Juggernaut website: “The Juggernaut plugin for Ruby on Rails aims to revolutionize your Rails app by letting the server initiate a connection and push data to the client. In other words your app can have a real time connection to the server with the advantage of instant updates. Although the obvious use of this is for chat, the most exciting prospect is collaborative cms and wikis.” I can think of a few more uses as well! Check it out

Slick javascript animation effects: Gruppler's Effect Demos

2008-08-19T14:54:00Z

Via Destruct-o-bot-5000, if you haven’t seen these effects you need to check them out. Very slick stuff, although running them at the same time can be a bit taxing on the Ol’ CPU. Read

Macports: Tools for developers

2008-08-08T12:56:00Z

So, I wrote an article on what Macports is but, what tools are out there for web developers? Well one I have used in the past is Siege to steal the quote from what Siege is I’ll just blatantly plagiarize the author’s website: Siege is an http regression testing and benchmarking utility. It was designed to let web developers measure the performance of their code under duress, to see how it will stand up to load on the internet. Siege supports basic authentication, cookies, HTTP and HTTPS protocols. It allows the user hit a web server with a configurable number of concurrent simulated users. Those users place the webserver “under siege.”

So to install Siege it couldn’t be easier: “sudo port install siege”. Now, you might think that your machine could generate tons of requests and flood a site with traffic but, unless you are on some ridiculous MacPro quad CPU Goliath then you probably can’t generate a ton of simultaneous requests.

Another tool I have used to do command line conversion of mp3 files is SoX (sound exchange) and Lame. Both can be installed using Macports. So get out there and start using the terminal!

Read: More info about Siege

Installing Command Line Tools on the Mac Using Macports

2008-08-06T14:38:00Z

Chances are if you have used any other nix OS then you have used a package manager to install software. Some package managers on nix: yum, aptitude, rpm, and there is fink for the mac which mainly targets open source software. Now I have never used fink, just because I first found Macports and although people complain about the speed of Macports I have never found it to be an issue. So yesterday I needed to add wget to my mac so I could easily download some files via the command line. With macports its easy, you just have to run one command: “sudo port install wget”, first you might want to make sure you have the application name right by running “port search wget”. That returns a list of programs that match your phrase and they you can run the install.

The nice thing about Macports is that it installs everything to /opt/local so that if you upgrade your OS or Apple comes out with a patch that might change things in one of your common /bin directories then everything is safe and sound and still unscathed in /opt/local.

Now apparently there is a bug in the installer that took me awhile to get past, it is supposed to be fixed in the next release but, to get around it if you get the error about running the post-flight script then go here Macports Support Issue 4 and run that script, then run “sudo port selfupdate” and you should be up and running fine.

So for the most part, you won’t have to download and compile things manually on your Mac unless of course you want to run the bleeding edge release. Happy package management. Tomorrow, some useful tools on Macports for web developers.

Love or Hate Mac's, one thing they got right - Bonjour.

2008-08-05T13:27:00Z

So I spent about an hour setting up a new printer on my parents two windows boxes last night, It was a fancy schmancy network printer that even had WiFi built into it. So After the drivers were installed (its an HP by the way) I try to just go to the network settings on the computer and point the “add printer network printer” at it. No dice, I fiddle with it for about 10-15 mins and nothing, it won’t see the printer or if it does it asks me for a password to access it (apparently it was trying to access the card readers on the printer, bizarre).

So of course I end up looking through the manual and finally give in and load up the CD that came with the printer and there is a network setup program that you have to run from the CD. That really didn’t make much since to me but, it did work at least.

So enter my mac this morning, fire up the pinter prefrerence pane and of course when I click add printer there is the printer. Why is it so easy? Bonjour. Bonjour is a service discovery protocol that goes way back in the Apple OS. It makes it stupid simple to setup any network device and I wish that every OS on the planet had Bonjour integrated into it. Imagine how much less time we (us computer guru’s who support our family’s PC’s) would spend trying to troubleshoot add a silly printer connection.

You can read more about Bonjour and even add it to your Windows box (something I probably should have done) here: Read via Apple

Kiteboarding Lesson 2

2008-08-04T13:49:00Z

Lesson 2 == tired, sore, and in love. We’ll I can’t say I didn’t see this one coming, I mean what is not to love about combining practically all the things I love and do on the water into one sport. Surfing: check, Wakeboarding: check, Skimboarding: check, Harnessing the power of nature: check. The first thing to note about this lesson was that it was a bit intimidating. You have a 14 meter kite attached to your body and after a few minutes taxiing out to the surf you hang on to your instructor who does “body drags” (no board just let the kite pull you through the water) with you hanging onto their harness. Lots of waves in the face and ongoing instruction while He flies the kite and you try to pay attention in the surf.

Next its my turn, few minutes flying the kite on land (making sure I am comfortable with a kite that is twice the surface area of the previous lesson). You feel it pull, and man does it, the impression it leaves is that this kite will take you wherever it wants to go. That is while on land, in the water its a whole different feeling. So I wade into the water, lie down and begin my own body drags, getting used to steering the kite with one hand while holding your opposite hand in the water to create some resistance. Kite stays up, I learn how to “upwind” or move myself and the kite back toward the beach while hopefully gaining some ground toward the opposite direction that the wind is blowing. This skill is essential for picking up your board when it comes off your foot or not getting a mile down the beach and having to huff it back with all your gear.

So 30-45 mins later after a bunch of body drags and feeling comfortable flying the kite one handed its time to take the board on a body drag. Now this doesn’t sound too difficult but, to my surprise you add one more thing into the mix (trying to keep the board on a plane while flying the kite) and suddenly your brain practically has a conniption fit trying to handle the two tasks at the same time and both become very difficult. I got the hang of this and it was an important lesson. At first I thought “body dragging is easy, this will be too”. I think my instructor knew that and this is where your first test of truly managing all the gear comes into play and first pass (heading downwind was easy) coming back upwind I just couldn’t get my left arm to hold the board right.

So back on land again, took a small break, trying to catch my breath (arms and chest getting a major workout). Instructor took the kite out and showed off (doing airs, ripping it, etc). Comes back in and asks me if I am ready to give it a go with trying to get up and actually riding the board. We go over the launch position how to power up the kite for the launch etc. He asks me if I’m ready, I’m not, but I lie and say why not! So I get out there and strap in, try to power up the kite and didn’t give it enough juice, try two more times and I get the feeling of getting out of the water but, didn’t pay attention to where the kite was and fly the kite “out of the wind window”.

Fourth time: surreal bliss. I’m up, tracking along keeping the kite in the air and heading out to sea, I’m clipping along for about 100 yards and I start thinking about trying to turn the kite and head back to the beach. I go over one small swell and then a larger one, boom, lose my balance and eat it head first into the waves. Board is behind me about 30 feet and I’m trying to get back to it, proving very difficult and I didn’t body drag far enough to upwind back to the board. Instructor makes the swim out and rescues the board while I body drag back to the beach. Tide was ripping in hard and we head back past the sand bar (which is now covered up) and onto the beach for another break. Success, feels good, time to order some gear!

Last night won an auction on eBay for some last year model gear (one kite) need to win a board and a buy a harness, and I am set. Its going to be a fun rest of the summer and fall.

Vmware Fusion 2 Beta 2

2008-08-01T15:15:00Z

Incase you missed it VMWare Fusion 2 Beta 2 is out (out yesterday). Seems like there are some nice tweaks and that resuming / suspending is even faster than beta 1. Also, sound is working again for me. I tested out playing a movie through netflix’s online viewer and the playback was very nice. I’ll give another update after some use.

Life Outside the Box - Kiteboarding

2008-08-01T14:21:00Z

So I just created a new section of my blog: “Life Outside the Box” where I am going to start putting some stuff that really has nothing to do with anything with the other sections of the site. Well duh, you might say. Anyway, so I have taken up a new hobby, well to be more specific its not really a hobby. Hobby’s to me don’t involve moving at a high rate of speed, flying through the air, and massive consequences for a screwup. I am about to take lesson 2 of 3 with a kiteboarding instructor this afternoon. Now to explain what kiteboarding is… well I’ll let youtube speak for myself in this one:

So its also interesting to note that there are all these big name internet guru’s kiting out in silicon valley (founders of google etc), not that just seeing the video alone isn’t enough to get you started. So anyone else out there kiteboarding? I first caught the bug down in south florida watching these kiters blow by windsurfers and launch to great heights. I mean isn’t this a surfers dream? When the waves suck and are all washed out and choppy you can still ride!

Next week I’ll give an update on my first water lesson no board this time but, I should get dragged around in the water for awhile just to improve my proficiency in relaunching the kite and what to do in case the thing won’t relaunch after a crash in the water. Totally looking forward to it!