We're looking for a Computer Science Graduate or similar with strong Object Oriented programming skills and the ability to grasp cutting edge technologies quickly.

If you are looking to work with the latest technogies and are a motivated self starter with a positive "can do" attitude this is the job for you. The ability to take problems and deliver solutions is a must.

There will be significant on the job learning as we are always pushing the boundaries and using the latest and greatest technologies. We are currently working on projects using Actionscript/Flex, ColdFusion, PHP, and Javascript, and are leveraging technologies such as VOIP, SMS, Instant Messenger (Jabber XMPP) to deliver cutting edge solutions.

Suitable applicants will have a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science or Engineering, or similar tertiary qualification. Remuneration commensurate with experience.

Responsibilities would include:

• Developing new functionality for Asterisk and VOIP applications
• Creating Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex
• Creation of Desktop applications with Adobe AIR
• Design and development of new Web applications

Must haves:

• A robust foundation in Object Oriented programming
• Demonstrated experience in at least one OO language
• Motivation to learn and push the boundaries
• Understanding of XHTML and CSS

Preferable:

• Experience with PHP, ColdFusion, Farcry CMS, XML, Web Standards etc
• Competency using linux-based tools (SSH, bash, etc)
• Familiar with using source control tools (Subversion, etc)
• Familiarity with Actionscript or Flash

This role may be full time, part-time or on a contract basis depending on the candidates skills and experience. You will be working in a casual workplace with flexible hours in the centre of Sydney.

If this sounds like the job for you email your resume to mark@lynchconsulting.com.au if interested - no agencies please.

I was very excited to see that Skype recently released a beta version of Skype for Linux which has video support.

I duly went and downloaded the version for Ubuntu (the Fiesty Fawn one works great on Gutsy).

Initial attempts to get it working met with frustration - it quickly flashed up on screen and gave the following output:

After thinking on it a while and hearing reports of other people using it happily I had some further attempts. First plan of attack - make sure there are no settings from an old version that would conflict by (re)moving the settings directory.

Try again and everything came up sweet - even the webcam! Thanks Skype. I'm very happy that this has removed the last reason I had to reboot to windows.

Check out the wiki page for the list of supported webcams in Skype on Ubuntu.

Cheers, Mark

To create simple DVD's (i.e. with no title menu's) you need the following software:

• mplayer
• videotrans
• libxvidcore4
• dvdauthor
• mkisofs

To install all this use:

Here are the simple steps to format a video for DVD:

First, make sure you can view the video using mplayer:

Then we convert if to DVD mpeg format:

This will create two files: MyMovie.m2v and MyMovie.ac3 which we need to merge back together:

Format the video for DVD:

Create a title page for it:

Create an ISO image to burn to dvd:

Then right click on the ISO in the file browser (Nautilus) and select "Write to Disc" and you have a DVD that will play in you normal DVD player.

References:

• http://videotrans.sourceforge.net/movie-to-dvd.1.html
• http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Create_a_DVD:Filesystem
• http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=117709

I normally stay away from the look and feel of websites (as it's not my forte), however, for a current project I need to it and came across these resources:

FreeCSSTemplates.org - Lots of nice CSS templates which are W3C compliant and released under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license. You can use them as you wish or modify them as long as you continue to attribute them to the original author.

Public Domain Photos - A great collection of stock photography that you can use completely free.

Morgue File - Not as morbid as it sounds - some really great photo's here.

Cheers, Mark

Updated: Fixed urls. Updated: Added Morguefile

Handy reference for backing up and restoring db's via the mysql command line tools as it is by far the quickest way to do it.

We do this regularly as we take copies of our staging db's from a central DB server and put them on our local machines for development work.

Backup a database & zip it up

This will back the mydbname database from the server db.example.com and will prompt for a password (much better than writing it in the command line) and will then gzip it into the file mydbname.sql.gz

Create a database (if it doesn't exist)

This is only necessary the first you are creating a copy of the db on your machine.

Restore DB backup

Note: this will overwrite all local changes to the DB

This will take your previously gzipped backup copy and restore it into the local mysql instance to the db called mydbname

Hope it helps. Cheers, Mark

Today my digital camera decided that it had been too well behaved of late and the SD card decided to completely corrupt itself for no good reason, losing all the photos on it.

I've spent a significant portion of my youth messing around with file system editing and partition table editing an was not going to give up on the series of photos I'd taken over the last couple of days - luckily it didn't need anything more than a couple of simple commands to recover all the photos. Go Open Source software.

This tutorial is written for Ubuntu, but should be similar for most Linux machines

Step 1 was to make an image of the card (to have a backup of it) using the venerable dd command.

• sudo - used to perform command as root user (i.e. have correct privileges)
• dd - command to copy data a byte level
• if=/dev/sdb - read data from /dev/sdb - you may need to change this depending on where your memory card it located.
• of=sdcard.img - save this to the sdcard.img file in the current directory
• bs=1M - Copy it in 1M chunks

Once this has completed you will need to run the marvellous program recoverjpeg on it.

First lets install it:

Then run it:

and you should get something like the following:

The images will be saved in the same folder.

Check the images out and hopefully it works as well for you as it did for me.

Cheers, Mark

I'm going to be speaking at LearnX tomorrow about some of the eLearning and eAssessment projects we've been working on over the last few months and years at Learnosity.

I'm speaking at a Frontliner session about Mobile and Web based assessment in High Stakes arenas. This will cover a number of applications based around ColdFusion, Flex and VoiceXML, but will be a high level session for Executives and Educators.

• Time: 13:30 - 14:15
• Location: Room 101 - L1, Bayside Terrace

If you're at LearnX pop on by and ask some questions.

Lynch Consulting has been working with Websonic Learning to deliver mobile phone and IM based learning solutions.

A pilot project in Ireland that we recently completed has just been written up in one of the national newspapers: Pupils lap up hi-tech learning of Irish

Behind the scenes it's using CFMX 7 with VoiceXML for the mobile phone integration and Jabber for instant messenging.

I've just added a Google CSE search to a government/education site and ran into problems due to the forced width of the google search results box.

After a bit of googling (how many times can I use google in one post?) I found this at google groups: Modify width of search results

The solution in there was correct to set the FORID to 11 - which allows a minimum width of 500px.

I searched for documentation on what the different options for FORID are and what it even meant and eventually found this: Configure Google Search Module.

In summary it controls the position of the advertisement space.

However, the site I was working on was a government site and so had ads turned off - however the code still reserves the space on the RHS for the ads. When switching to FORID:11 there is no space resevered on the side and the top and bottom spaces collapse which leaves a much narrower window - minimum width 500px as opposed to ~740px

Cheers, Mark

I've just seen a google Malware warning (Screenshot)for the first time - not really sure when they started this.

This strikes me as potentially a very dangerous thing for Google to be doing, here are my initial thoughts:

Very strong warning

• It's a strongly worded warning - most people will heed it.
• You must manually cut and paste the link. This will dramatically reduce access to the pages

This is good if they are correct and very very bad if they get it wrong.

How wide is the net?

The site I was trying to visit was a forum on hostprogressive.com which was formerly f2o.org which hosted free sites - there was nothing particalularly nasty on the page I visited, or on the main site. Was it a particular sub domain or page that was the issue?

I tried to investigate via Report Search on StopBadware.org but couldn't find any mention of hostprogressive and why they might be blacklisted.

Give with one hand and take with the other

Another point was that while Google gave a very strong warning not to go to the page - they were happy to have a Google Adwords on the page.

What if they get it wrong

If Google get it wrong then they are essentially slandering the site by saying that it is hosting bad software. There was no clear remediation path for site owners.

This could have implications for ISP's who give free hosting and it gets abused and their entire domain gets blacklisted.

Conclusion

I think this may help some people and prevent some people getting spyware on their computers, however, it will also cause a lot of pain for many sites if the checking process by stop badware and google is not stringent enough.

Let me know your thoughts or comments.