Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Hebrew Flash Card Web App

While evaluating different web app frameworks, I put together a little web app to help me get back up to speed with my biblical Hebrew vocab. And if you know anything about trying to read the Hebrew Bible, knowing a good amount of vocab is (unfortunately) essential. The flash card app is built using Sencha Touch's framework and is at http://hebrewflash.me/ ... check it out on your smartphone or iPod touch. The chapter divisions are based on Basics of Biblical Hebrew by Pratico and Van Pelt (Zondervan) so it is a great free vocab tool for students using this textbook.

Thursday, November 17, 2011

Partition and Mount a Drive on CentOS

I have a few servers over at Softlayer. I recently procured a monthly computing instance with an additional 200 gigs of drive space. Thing is, the extra HD space doesn't come partitioned, formated or mounted. So, here is what you do:

First things first. Find the name of the physical drive: fdisk -l

This command will return a list of drives and information about each. You should find one that hasn't been partitioned with a name like /dev/sdb (or in my case /dev/xvdc for a computing instance) or similar. Check the size of the drive to make sure it is what you are looking for.

Next, partition the drive: fdisk /dev/xvdc (using the name of the drive, of course)

Once in the fdisk utility, press p to print the partitions to the screen. There should be none, because you haven't created any yet. If there are, are you sure you are using the right drive?

Next press n to create a new partition, press p for a primary partition, 1 for the first partition, and then use the default first and last cylinder (unless you know what you are doing, of course). Once this is set up, you can press p to make sure it worked and then finally, and most importantly, press w to write the changes to disk.

In the previous command, you'll get a slightly different name for the partition you created. It probably added a letter, something like /dev/sdb1 or /dev/xvdc1 would be right. You'll need it to format the drive: mkfs -t ext3 /dev/xvdc1 (I've used the ext3 file system, here, because it suited me just fine and is probably the most common.)

Now, where would like the disk mounted? You'll have to create a folder as the mount point. If you want the disk to be used for a new /data directory, then you'll have to create a folder with this name: mkdir /data

Next, add the drive and mount point to the /etc/fstab file so that it will be mounted at boot time. Use your favorite text editor, as they say. I used vi /etc/fstab and I added a new row, matching the spacing of the other rows: /dev/xvdc1   /data    ext3   defaults   1 2

Lastly, you mount the drive using mount /dev/xvdc1 and you are all done.

Head on over to cd /data and check it out. Or run mount without parameters to check out the details.

PS. Here are a couple websites I used when I was working through this problem myself.

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Synchronize Facebook Status & Twitter

There is so much unhelpful junk out there on the web when you do a Google search on synchronizing your Facebook status' with Twitter. So, a quick post.

If you want your Facebook status to auto-tweet, go to http://www.facebook.com/twitter/

If you want your Tweets to auto-Facebook-status-update (why is there no verb for this?), go to http://apps.facebook.com/twitter/

It's just a slight change in the sub-domain. You don't need any 3rd part software or other service. Facebook and Twitter worked this out among themselves already.