Galaxy S3 USB connect to Mac OS X

Posted by & filed under Android, Misc.

This is just a quick note to Galaxy S3 users who have the North American version i747 and have issues connecting it to a mac. If you want to transfer all kinds of files and not only your pictures you should download the Samsung Kies software.

After installing it on your mac, connect the device and open Kies, it will show a working status and after that you will have access to both your SD card and internal storage via the Kies application. Unfortunately the application is quite buggy, very slow and has the tendency to suck laptop battery life on a mac if you leave it in the background, so as soon as you finish a transfer I would suggest to quit it.

If you still have trouble connecting the phone to a Mac with Kies installed, try:

  1. Updating the Kies application
  2. Enable/Disable USB debugging in the phone settings
  3. Get a more solid USB cable ( the factory one is very unreliable and even if the phone is charging it may not connect as a storage devide )

If everything you want is to just transfer a few photos from the phone to the Mac, you actually don’t need Kies, after you connect the phone to the computer, go to the Connection settings on the phone and instead of connected as a media device (MTP), select connected as a Camera device (PTP), at which point iPhoto will detect it automatically and allow you to manage it via the iPhoto application.

If you are using a custom ROM such as Cyanogenmod or another non-samsung device, chances are that Kies won’t work. In that case you need the Android file transfer application.

Keep in mind Android File transfer and Kies are not compatible as of the time of this post. When you install both they won’t work, which of course is a big problem if you have one mac and two Android users with devices from different vendors.

Setting up a new CentOS 6 web server with nginx and php-fpm

Posted by & filed under Linux, Misc.

Sometimes as developers we have to perform some simple sysadmin tasks, such as installing a basic LAMP or LEMP stack, basic securing of the server and so on. So what I decided to do is to just gather links to various helpful resources on how to setup Nginx + PHP 5.4 + MySQL + memcached on CentOS 6. I chose this installation since its the one I happen to use the most and I personally believe the optimal one. An alternative might be Apache + mod_php + Varnish + memcached.

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Why you should never use opencart

Posted by & filed under Ecommerce, PHP.

Recently I had the opportunity to work on a decent sized e-commerce project based on OpenCart. I haven’t used it before but I had heard its a very simple and easy to use. So the following is just a quick overview of all the fundamental flaws and issues with OpenCart and why you should NEVER use it as a platform of choice for your projects, unless you want constant headaches, ugly code and incredible amount of code repetition.

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Easy PHP deployment with Capistrano

Posted by & filed under PHP.

I am actually stunned how many PHP developers still remote into their production environment via SSH and manually run the necessary git commands to update their production branch. While that is definitely the most advanced and flexible option available I dont think it makes sense for smaller projects where the deployment routine is pretty straightforward. There are some services that automate that process and are pretty good at it. Read more »

Calculating PHP time difference (time ago)

Posted by & filed under PHP.

It is a common problem in any CMS to show the last time a modification has been made. Our function will elaborate a bit on the PHP time difference and allow the user option of “accuracy” or show how many time intervals to be included in the “time ago” statement. For example if an article was posted 2 years 4 months 5 hours 33 minutes and 10 seconds ago we can limit the function to show only 1 level of accuracy – years or more.

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