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Written by: Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos
I am the happy owner of an Intel NUC dual booting Windows 8.1 and Ubuntu, hooked up to a great-looking Apple LED Cinema Display. The only problem is that the Apple display comes with no physical controls for brightness and Ubuntu doesn't seem to be able to adjust it either. Being a geek I was anything but content with this situation. I finally found a solution to control the brightness using keyboard shortcuts.
Updated December 2020: Using a maintained fork of the acdcontrol tool, removing the need to run acdcontrol with root privileges and a much simpler Bash script for the integration with the desktop environment, documented how to modify acdcontrol to support other monitors.
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Written by: Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos
As much as I love Joomla!, there is a shortcoming compared to the other two major Open Source PHP CMS, WordPress and Drupal: it doesn't come with a command-line interface like wp-cli or drush. This is a bit of a problem when you're in need of mass-provisioning sites with extensions or updates in an unattended manner. Using a CLI tool is the only way to provide a scriptable, efficient and unattended method of doing so. In this post we'll see a practical way to overcome this limitation.
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Written by: Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos
Hello, I'm Nicholas. Most of you know me as the author of popular components like Akeeba Backup and Admin Tools. Some of you know me as a frequent code contributor to Joomla!. I'm very outspoken to the point that people think I'm an asshole. Most likely I am. I was working as a business consultant long before I turned to full time software development and, as you know, business consultants are always seen as assholes, usually ranking lower in being well-liked than accounting and legal departments. But you know what else business consultants do besides being assholes? They know how to make an organisation do more with the same people (or even less, which is why people think we are assholes). So there you have it, I was refactoring businesses before I got to refactoring code. This is my take on refactoring Joomla!'s organisation structure. It's a long read, ideal for a Sunday morning.
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Written by: Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos
You're wrong. Some rudimentary A/B testing led me to a counter-intuitive result about e-commerce.
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Written by: Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos
My last week's blog post on running Apache, MySQL, PHP server on Windows with multiple, simultaneous PHP versions seems to have been a smash hit. This week we'll be doing the same thing on Mac OS X. For those of you who didn't click the link, I decided it would be a cool, geeky project to implement an Apache-MySQL-PHP web server without using a pre-packaged server like MAMP or Zend Server. My goal was to have the same sites run under different versions of PHP by just visiting a different URL on my browser. This makes cross-PHP testing of sites a piece of cake.
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Written by: Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos
I just bought an Intel NUC (Next Unit of Computing) mini-PC to serve as my secondary, Windows-powered development machine (the primary is an Apple Mac Mini). I decided it would be a fun* weekend project to implement an Apache-MySQL-PHP web server without using a pre-packaged server like XAMPP, WAMPServer etc. My goal was to have the same sites run under different versions of PHP by just visiting a different URL on my browser.
* for extremely geek values of "fun"
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Written by: Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos
Two weeks ago we transferred our business site, AkeebaBackup.com, to a new host with a downtime of less than 15 minutes. The transfer of course took longer than that. Many people asked how we pulled this off. Keep reading on to find out!
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Written by: Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos
I'm quite sure that most of you wouldn't bat an eyelid on losing a pro bono job. You proposed to do some work for free, the other party didn't agree for some odd reason, less work for you, end of story. But once in a while there's a lesson to be had from such an experience, leading to interesting ripple effects. For example, a Joomla! guy ended up with a WordPress blog. Intrigued?
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Written by: Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos
Tablets, laptops and the like are great and convenient, but they don’t make much sense for certain needs. Think about media servers / players, home and small office servers (from a simple NAS to special purpose servers), or even educational / kid computers to hook up on the living room’s TV set to save some space and help parents monitor their kid’s activity. These use cases call for small, power-efficient yet powerful and easy to use computers. Over the last few years it has become increasingly easier to get such a machine. In this short article I am going to present the three small form factor computers which have won my heart and a permanent place in my home office.
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Written by: Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos
Joomla! 3.2 includes an abundance of new features appealing to end users and developers alike. One of these new features is two factor authentication. In this tutorial you will learn what two factor authentication is and how you can use it in your components to enhance the security of potentially dangerous or important operations, just like most banks do.