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Very often when developing for web inside your LAMP environment you need to send emails using PHP. Configuring fully fledged email server on your Linux box is an option, although one I don't recommend. Life's too short to spend it configuring many mail transport agent of your choice configuration files just to check is your PHP application sending emails or not. In this article I'll show you how make your development environment capable of testing email sending features of your PHP applications in almost no time.

Some of you are probably wondering why would you want to spend your time fiddling with default desktop environment settings customization, when you can easily customize everything to your liking inside you own user account? Most probably you'd want to do this when you're re-mastering your favorite Linux distribution using tools like OS4 system imager (fork of the now discontinued Remastersys) or Relinux. In this article I'll show you how to handle this task elegantly using GSettings vendor overrides.

In my first article for Inchoo.net last week I've described how to easily manage LAMP name based virtual hosts using bash script that simplifies virtual hosts management on a Debian based Linux operating systems. While I was coding the script in question, I have assumed that most people develop from default document root /var/www and using Apache's mod_php5. In this article I'll show you how to setup your LAMP environment to develop in your home directory using another Apache module suPHP.

In this article I'm presenting my solution for a very common PHP developer job interview task where it is required to create a random sentence spinning function. Input of this function is a PHP string that employs syntax telling our code where's the randomness and what are the possible substrings for each section of randomness. Basically it is required to create PHP code that's able to process strings like the following:

<?php
$string = '{Please|Just} make this {cool|awesome|random} test sentence {rotate {quickly|fast} and random|spin and be random}';
?>

As you can probably guess the input sentence uses braces to declare sections of randomness and the pipe character to delimit substrings that should be used randomly inside their sections. Code also must be able to process nested sections of randomness.

Event though I follow MVC pattern in many of my web related projects, like every PHP web developer I came to the point when I have to dive into some well established MVC PHP framework. This is something backend developer must do if he wants to stop being a lone wolf and start working inside a team of developers. Web frameworks of my choice are fast Codeigniter and powerful Zend Framework. Getting to know about Codeigniter wasn't hard, but mastering Zend is still work in progress especially since Zend Framework 2 has been recently released. Talking about Zend, recently I got interested in getting to know about open source eCommerce solutions and I choose to get acquainted with Zend based Magento. In this article I'll show you how to install Magento on a Debian based distributions like Ubuntu and provide workaround for the PHP Extensions "0" must be loaded error thrown by Magento installer running on PHP 5.4.

For my video chat sessions I use my Logitech E3500 USB web cam. On my Linux box this hardware device sort of works fine, but it does have it's own set of quirks I've developed workarounds for over the years. One of the things that bug me is that even though you can change it's configuration options trough GUI or CLI, this hardware device has it's defaults, and these defaults are back every time you plug it in. In this article I'll show you how to create script that changes web cam settings using CLI tools I've explained in one of my earlier articles, and how to make this script being executed every time web cam is plugged in.

Are you interested in certifying your knowledge of the newest technologies? If so, the HP ASE - Cloud Architect V2 certification might be right for you. Earning this certification tells potential employers that you are able to specify and architect multiple cloud services based on converged infrastructure. It also tells future employers that you are comfortable with using HP Converged Cloud, Cloud Service Automation (CSA) 3.0, HP Matrix Operating Environment 7.1, HP Insight Management software 7.1, and HP Cloud Reference Architecture.

If you're anything like me your blog is probably full of code snippets and you're using WordPress Quicktags editor to enter your posts content. You're also using GeSHi compatible syntax highliter like WP-Syntax to make your code snippets more readable.

In this article I'll give you Javascript and PHP code I've created to add GeSHi compatible pre button to my blog's Quicktags editor toolbar on both frontend and backend.

Often your WordPress plugin or theme adds admin submenu inside WordPress admin interface using add_menu_page() functions on admin_menu hook or using WordPress Settings API. When your code adds multiple submenu items wouldn't it be nice to create section on admin menu to reduce clutter? Unfortunately WordPress currently doesn't support adding admin menu separators so you must do it manually by filtering $menu global variable. Here's function for doing that together with an example that should demonstrate it's use.

In one of my previous articles I've dealt with creating Oracle (Sun) Java 6 packages for your favorite Debian based distro. Since Oracle Java 7 has been out for a while now and it's code has matured to the point of OpenJDK 7 being default in recent Linux distributions, it seems reasonable to upgrade. In this article I'll show you how to create Oracle (Sun) Java JRE and JDK 7 packages using Janusz Dziemidowicz packaging work from Java 7 binary files you have downloaded your self.