Found this on StumbleUpon.
I’ve just spotted these three great voice packs available in British English format while browsing the UK Asterisk User Group:
We’ve recently been restructuring some of our servers here at Essential and shut down our Windows resseller acocunt at Fast2Hosts after 5yrs service. We’ve recently setup two new servers at our Studley datacentre providing fast, reliable hosting and expanding our CRM services.
So on to the subject of the post. Why Debian? Well for those not of the techy persuasion Debian is a server OS like Windows, Unix, etc. In fact its a ‘flavour’ or distribution of Linux. You may have heard the old saying about over 70% of the Internet’s servers run on Linux well Debian happens to be a major chunk of that and there’s a lot of good reasons why:
- Reliability - From our personal experience and the stats out there Debian is by far the most reliable server OS available.
- Simplicity - Due to the robust nature of the OS build Debian has made it incredibly easy to maintain. With Aptitude handling program installation and DPKG handing configuration, Debians ease of use makes working with it a pleasure.
- Aptitude - This is actually an app distributed as part of Debian. Its called a package manager and it makes the task of installing, updating and managing software an absolute breeze. Seriously - its easier than Windows and its ‘point-and-click’ method. Not only that it will install anything else you need to get things working. Want to install a MySQL database? Simply type:
aptitude install mysql
- Stability - Similar to reliability above but this is more about Debians overall solid build. Its one of the most integrated OS’s out there and you can tell form using it that they’ve put effort into every small detail of the system. With over 2000 developers worldwide and thousands more volunteers working on the codebase this OS has a testing and development team unmatched by any other in the world of open or closed source projects. If you include Debian derivatives such as Ubuntu we’re talking of hundreds of thousands. Thats one hell of a seal of quality.
- Users - So who else uses Debian? Well here’s just a small taster:
- Boeing - Commercial Flight Test Data Systems.
- City of Munich - Being used as the main system and configuration platform for the city.
- Digg - One of the biggest news sites on the net receiving millions of hits per day.
- The Register - Major UK IT news service.
- Technorati - Worlds biggest blog search engine.
- Council of Europe - Uses Debian for their servers (SMTP, POP, DNS, etc).
- Semiconductor Physics Group, Cavendish Lab, University of Cambridge - Providing NFS, NIS, CUPS to over 100 workstations.
- Bittorent - The original torrent service uses Debian.
- Ministry of Public Administration (Spain) - Have transferred over 8000 of their Windows workstations to Debian.
- Thawte - One of the biggest internet security and certification agencies in the world.
- United Drug Plc - Irish pharmaceutical company.
- OpenDNS - An open and free DNS service.
- Many, many, many more - too many to list but here’s some more you may have heard of.
Technorati Tags: debian, linux, os
[UPDATE: This position has been filled]
Essential Systems are looking to recruit a fresh new web designer/developer for our growing company. You have to be motivated, energetic, keen to develop your skills and be part of a team.
Deep knowledge of web development isn’t essential as training will be given but you will be expected to learn and grow in this position.
If you’re interested in working for us then get in contact with Abi Cooper via email or phone: 0845 867 9002
Google released a great new web security tool on Wednesday (2nd) which aims to help web developers tighten up the security of their web apps. It goes by the name RatProxy and as its name suggests it works by acting as a proxy between the browser and the site your viewing. In that position it can monitor all the communications between them and flag any potential concerns.
Its especially useful for discovering cross-site scripting vulnerabilities and its being used actively at Google for their own systems. We plan on using it here at Essential on all our existing and future web apps to add another tool to the security arsenal.
Other security tools we’d recommend are:
- Nikto - Web server security scanner.
- ProxMon & WebScarab - Python proxy analyser for pen-testing web servers and the proxy itself.
- Nessus - A hugely comprehensive network security analysis program.
If you thought the only flash charts out there were paid-for then fear not because there’s a great open source alternative: Open Charts.
The developer decided to build the charts api after having a bad experience with a paid service provider so went and built his own. Personally I think the charts look nicer than many of the paid offerings out there.
Hpricot is a funky Ruby library for parsing and manipulating website HTML. Because of its ease of use it makes quick prototyping and testing of websites a breeze.
We use a number of tools for managing our customers SEO in partnership with Essential Marketer.
Here I’m going to show you how you can make use of Hpricot to check your site for a range of common SEO-related points.
First Off: Get the Document
Before you can check the HTML you need to get the document. Here’s how in Hpricot:
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require 'rubygems'
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require 'hpricot'
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require 'open-uri' #Make opening your webpages nice and easy
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doc = Hpricot(open('http://www.example.com'))
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# We're going to define a function here that will come in useful throughout this example
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# It simply splits a string into its component words and returns the count
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def word_count(str)
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return str.split(/ /).length
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end
Checking Meta Tags
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# First you need to check there are keywords
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if doc.at('meta[@name="keywords"]')
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keywords = doc.at('meta[@name="keywords"]')['content']
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keyword_count = word_count(keywords)
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if keyword_count < 4 || keyword_count > 10
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puts '[PROBLEM] Keyword Count'
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end
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else
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puts '[PROBLEM] No Keywords'
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end
To check your meta description you’d simply change the above code to:
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# First you need to check there are keywords
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if doc.at('meta[@name="description"]')
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description = doc.at('meta[@name="description"]')['content']
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description_count = word_count(description)
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if keyword_count < 4 || keyword_count > 10
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puts '[PROBLEM] Description Count'
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end
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else
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puts '[PROBLEM] No Description'
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end
Checking Image Alt Tags
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if doc.search('img')
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images = doc.search('img') #Get all the page images
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image_alts = doc.search('img[@alt]') # Get only those images that have alt tags
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image_count = images.length
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image_alt_count = image_alts.length
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# After getting the counts you get the difference.
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# Then you'll know whether you're missing alt tags
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if image_count - image_alt_count > 0
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puts '[PROBLEM] Mising Some Image Alt Attributes'
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end
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end
Checking Title
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title = doc.at('title').inner_html
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title_count = word_count(title)
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if title_count < 3 || title_count > 6
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puts '[PROBLEM] Title Length'
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end
In Conclusion
As you can see all the tests follow a similar pattern:
- Get the doc
- Get the tag and its contents.
- Get the count.
- Check.
There’s much more that can be done than whats shown here and we plan on releasing a tool for our partner site soon so you can get a thorough grading of your own site. Possible areas you could check in acse you’re wanting to experiement are:
- Keyword checking of attributes and text.
- Inbound links - Scraping Google, Yahoo, etc.
- Server responses - Checking for nice 404, 500 responses and ensuring you have correct 302 redirects on your subdomains.
After someone pointed this strange wiki service out the Essential Team have now gone and published a ‘lens’ on Squidoo. Each lens you publish is a single page about any subject you choose. You can even make money off the page itself or donate the proceeds to charity.
You can see the Essential Systems lens here.
I’m hopeless at picking something to buy for someone. Even when I know what they want there’s always those little doubts - maybe they actually wanted this, or that.
Well I think I’ve found the perfect place. We recently took over development of a site called Laserpics.co.uk. They are one of the biggest providers of laser etched crystals in the country. Laser etched crystals make one of those original and personal gifts you wish you’d thought of sooner.
There’s a huge range of products available and you can upload your own pics and select your own text to put in your crystal.
On the techy side this sites built using CakePHP - which as you can see form our advocate page is one of the technologies we’re big supporters of. Because of this it’ll make the future expansion and development of Laserpics.co.uk much simpler.
So - if you’re after a gift for anniversary, wedding, christening or birthday then give laserpics.co.uk a go.
P.S. Oops - almost forgot: Laserpics.co.uk also have a Facebook group too!
We’ve released a CakePHP component that enables developers to send SMS messages from their online apps using the Clickatell SMS service.
For the tech savvy this class currently uses the HTTP method of sending messaging commands to the Clickatell servers. Clickatell are a major provider of SMS services across the globe and we here at Essential make use of them for a huge range of our products and services.
You can sign up for a free account at Clickatell and test the class out before comitting to using it in your project. If anyone had any suggestions or ideas don’t hesistate to get in touch.
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