Category: CoolTools

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Location, Location, Location! Now I get it.

I’ll admit that for the longest time I didn’t get the mobile world’s fascination with location. It seemed like one of those things that mobile developers did to push ads on me while I was in a grocery store or alert people I vaguely knew to my presence in a museum. Most implementations left me feeling underwhelmed. OK, so my phone knows where I’m at. Then what?

I’m coming around on location-based tech now as I’ve been working with a bit of it for a side project I’ve got going. The light bulb came on while writing a little web app that can tell me where I am and give me some basic info about that place. Turns out that once you peel off the veneer of constant ad generation using location in web apps (and, by extension, mobile apps) is fascinating from the developers point of view. Knowing where someone is provides a hook for offering up a lot of useful data that isn’t about selling things or letting near strangers know where you are.

And it isn’t that hard to do.

A good place to start is with the Google Maps JavaScript API. The developer site provides everything you need to get going with adding interesting location-based features to your apps. I tend to use JQuery when I have to deal with JavaScript and there is an excellent demo page of JQuery Mobile integrations with the Google Maps API with many useful examples.

I’ve put together a little example page for you to try. You’ll need to give it access to your browser location data and then you’ll get some basic location information. I find it interesting that in testing the most accurate location comes from mobile devices. The location data returned by laptop and desktop browsers is a lot less accurate, seemingly giving more weight to your IP address than other factors.

 

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Running your own Git server with GitlabHQ on Ubuntu 14.04

This document describes how to install and configure Git and GitHub. These are great tools to manage and administer a whole host of Git repositories and the associated permissions. So, these remain true blessings for users writing open source software, however, when writing a closed source software may not be comfortable in trusting the code to a third party server. To gain the much-needed flexibility and control on stuff like Github/BitBucket without hosting the git repositories on servers that lie external to the control of users, GitLab remains a Godsend!
GitLab is a wonder tool that offers a simple and user-friendly yet potent web-based interface to the Git repositories on your server, viz., GitHub. Users are free to host it on their own cloud server, control access in a custom-built manner, and the only factor limiting the repo size is the inbuilt storage space of the server.

via How to run your own Git server with GitlabHQ on Ubuntu 14.04 | HowtoForge – Linux Howtos and Tutorials.

Just in case anyone has a hankering to run there own “GitHub” or build an open source software community for a particular space, like law or government.

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Running GitBook Editor on Linux (and Windows and Mac)

Did you ever wanted to write and publish book? With GitBook you can create ebook using markdown syntax and with few clicks publish it in multiple formats such as PDF, EPUB, HTML or MOBI. GitBook also allows to split the workload among multiple contributors by using git distributed revision control. In this article we show how to run GitBook on Fedora and Ubuntu Linux.

via How to run GitBook Editor on Linux.

This is interesting. The meat of GitBook is at www.gitbook.io and the source is on GitHub at https://github.com/GitbookIO. Versions of the editor for Windows and Mac are available.

 

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ownCloud 7 Release Adds Many Features, Improves API

The best new feature on ownCloud 7, as far as I’m concerned, is that its new “Server-to-Server Sharing enables users on one ownCloud instance to seamlessly share files with users on a different ownCloud installation without using share links.” So, for example, you can share files with a business partner without a lot of fuss or muss while maintaining your own independent private clouds.
Frank Karlitschek, founder and leader of the ownCloud project, proclaimed that “Server-to-server sharing is a game changer, allowing individuals — and organizations — to more easily share across private clouds, while still maintaining complete control of their data.” I can certainly see companies with close partner ties really liking this feature.

via ownCloud 7 pulls in users and open source developers | ZDNet.