Abdullah Yahya

I can’t stand using Putty for SSH on Windows. It’s ugly and very non user-friendly. I even got a Mac laptop which I often use for just SSH using Mac Terminal. But, yesterday I discovered mRemoteNG from a coworker, which is a wrapper to Putty, supports tabs, and offers a much better overall SSH experience from Windows. If you need a terminal on Windows, I’d recommend Putty + mRemoteNG. Learn more and download at

http://www.mremoteng.org/

In addition, to fix the ugly color scheme that comes with Putty, use one of these custom themes.

http://www.igvita.com/2008/04/14/custom-putty-color-themes/

Instead of specifically writing string manipulation code that is multibyte-safe, e.g. mb_substr() instead of substr(), you can configure PHP to do this automatically.  Just update the following lines in your php.ini.

mbstring.internal_encoding = UTF-8
mbstring.func_overload = 7
mbstring.strict_detection = On
zend.multibyte = On
zend.script_encoding = UTF-8

mbstring.func_overload will automatically cause any non-multibyte-safe functions to use their multibyte-safe counterparts.

When determining the URL for a web page, you often want to use keywords that accurately describe the page’s content. Sometimes, these keywords aren’t in English and contain accented characters. One thing you can do is choose one URL to be the canonical URL and create a redirect to that URL from another that contains the ascii-equivalent version of the words, e.g.

Canonical: http://www.somedomain.com/nǐhǎo

Redirects:

• http://www.somedomain.com/nihao
• http://www.somedomain.com/你好

1. Generated a server certificate and server private key

http://www.selfsignedcertificate.com/

2. Download the files, e.g.

9264078_local.dev.mydomain.com.cert
9264078_local.dev.mydomain.com.key

and put them in your Apache conf folder, e.g. C:Apache24conf

Continue reading Adding Self-Signed SSL For Local Web Development with https Auto-Redirect

If you’ve installed Apache on Windows and are used to (re)starting the Apache service from a GUI interface, you’ll have a hard time debugging errors in your httpd configuration files, if there are any, since the GUI response will simply say

“The requested operation has failed!”

Continue reading Fixing Apache Errors on Windows

Here’s a good word to use to test if your files are UTF-8 -encoded and support international characters.

Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn

For more information about UTF-8 character encoding, visit

• http://htmlpurifier.org/docs/enduser-utf8.html
• http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html

If you’re on a Mac and want to connect to another computer over SSH via your Terminal, you can create a shortcut so that instead of typing

> ssh server1.ops.somedomain.com

you can just enter

> ssh server1

Continue reading Mac: Creating Shortcut Host Names When Connecting Over SSH in Terminal