Instructional

Ever been on a trip and, upon return, needed a quick and easy way for all your friends to send you their pictures and videos without burning CDs, sending massive emails, or using third-party services? Or, maybe a better question, ever wondered how to construct a basic Django application with Amazon’s web services, for instance S3? Look no further. Below is the basic code for a drag-and-drop Django web application that allows users to upload files directly to an Amazon S3 bucket. ...

NAT loopback is what your router performs when you try to access your external IP address from within your LAN. For instance, say your router forwards port 80 to a web server on your LAN. From an outside network, you could simply visit your external IP address from a browser to access the web server. Internally, if NAT loopback is disabled or blocked, you would not be able to access this the same way. ...

If you’ve done any amount of work with routers, you know that it doesn’t take long to start craving consistency. And more advanced functionality that the cheap home interfaces simply don’t grant you. This is the point where you usually break down and start research things like Tomato, OpenWrt, and DD-WRT, just to name a few of the more popular alternatives. These alternate firmwares don’t just provide a consistent administrative experience across all compatible models and brands, they also turn a cheap home router into a flexible and competitive enterprise router. ...

Oracle’s VM VirtualBox is a virtualization program that allows you to run another operating system from within your native operating system. Though it is most commonly used to run fully functional operating systems such as Linux or OS X from within Windows 7 (or vice versa), it can also be used to host a Virtual Private Server (VPS). This post does nothing to compare benchmarks between more efficient (and recommended) VPS environments such as VMware or Linux-VServer, and I would not recommend using VirtualBox as a VPS in a production environment. However, it is useful in many situations, and I’ll let you be the judge of when this should or should not be done. It is certainly acceptable for personal and developmental purposes. And hosting a VPS through something like VirtualBox that is extremely simply to setup and use allows you to easily experiment with configurations and operating systems, or even jump between multiple VPSs on the same computer. ...

When perusing the internet for discussions on PHP sessions and cookies in regards to credential validation and user logins, I’ve never been satisfied with the approaches I find. Many of the tutorials are just plain lousy or incomplete. And the others seem to imply that you should only use sessions or cookies and never mix-and-match, a confusion that would probably trip up many PHP novices. So I’ve decided to post a tutorial explaining the complete PHP login format I use for my sites and web applications. Before we start, I should let you know that you can grab all the source in this tutorial from GitHub. ...

For as long as I’ve been developing in Java, its lack of native support for OS X has always bothered me. This is more than likely an issue with Apple’s proprietary interface rather than Java, but, for the sake of being loyal to my Master, we’ll pretend the fault is on Java. I don’t want the default Java icon–I want my applications icon to appear in the dock! And why does setTitle not actually change the name of my program in the menu bar? It still remains the name of the Java package that the main () method is contained within. I don’t want people to know the package layout of my software. ...

After hours of frustration and failure, I finally set up a USB bootable Linux distribution that worked on both a BIOS-based PC or EFI-based Apple system. Ten minutes later, I repeated the process with a second distribution. I’ve been perusing this fine internet of hours all day, reviewing and attempting to complete step-by-step tutorials that were supposed to allow me to do this. Unfortunately, none of them would actually work on my MacBook Pro, as they promised they would. After finally acquiring a resolution, I decided to post my own step-by-step set of instructions that also claimed to work for a BIOS system or an EFI system. Hopefully it actually works for you as it did for me :). ...

I was never really good at Chemistry. Better at it than at Biology, but still not exceptional. Granted, I earned an A when I took Chemistry in college, but this was from Kirkwood, which doesn’t have the highest academic prestige, so the A was easily achieved without completely understanding the material. The same goes for Biology. That being said, I may not have the fullest understanding of acids and bases and things breaking down. (In fact, if the previous sentence really makes no sense, that’s probably why. I was just trying to throw the words out to sound intelligent.) ...