ab‘s help pages gives a few possible leads. We can POST data with the -p option, which would be great if we would like to benchmark the login process itself. But, we want to test the page after the login. So we’ll need the ab’s -C option, which allows for passing cookies in cookie-name=value pairs.

The login process itself is done with curl as it allows us to POST data to a server and store cookies received from the server in a cookie jar. curl writes the cookies in a Netscape cookie file format, whatever that is. Sample line is:

# Netscape HTTP Cookie File
# http://curl.haxx.se/rfc/cookie_spec.html
# This file was generated by libcurl! Edit at your own risk.

example.com	FALSE	/	FALSE	0	PHPSESSID	[RANDOM_SESSION_ID]

From this output we’re interested in the [RANDOM_SESSION_ID] cookie value, as the cookie name is simply PHPSESSID and we can just hard-code it. To get the value, we use some obscure *nix magic: grep and cut. grep to grep the line with the PHPSESSID cookie and cut to cut out the 7th column from that line. Easy!

Now that we have the value of the cookie, we just pass it along with ab and done! We’re benchmarking pages behind a login.

The entire script is:

#!/bin/bash

COOKIE_JAR="/tmp/ab-login-cookie-jar"

echo "Logging in..."

curl -c $COOKIE_JAR -d username=user -d password=h4x0r http://example.com/login

echo "Getting the session id..."
PHPSESSID=$(cat $COOKIE_JAR | grep PHPSESSID | cut -f 7)

echo "The session id is:"
echo $PHPSESSID
echo "=================="

ab -n 10 -c 10 -C PHPSESSID=$PHPSESSID http://example.com/loggedin

The script is also on Github here.

Tip: use ab’s -v option to test for HTTP codes and/or redirects to see if you are really on the page you want to be.

Happy hackin’!

Actually I really don’t know what one has to do to create a user group, but I’ll just improvise along the way. So far, the date, time and the place for the first meeting is set: April 5th, 6PM, in a local coffee shop by the Danube river. A website thingy is also up: pugns, which is currently just a simple HTML page, but things will improve on that front too. The page of pugns is intentionally under a “directory”, because I’d love to host information about other PHP user groups from around here on the phpug.phpplaneta.net (sub)domain. It’d be nice to keep all relevant information under one “roof”.

Sooo… This will be an interesting ride, hope it’ll turn out fine :)

Of course, if anyone has some advice, tips and tricks about organizing user groups please do share them, that would be highly appreciated :)

I graduated on June 26th, the topic was a Python desktop application that communicates with a web service; both sending and receiving data is possible. Started working on July 1st at Online Solutions as a PHP dev and started to “officially” give back to the Open Source community by joining the ZF Bug Hunt Days – so far few minor patches submitted and applied. Wrote a review on a ZF book and another one on jQuery and PHP is in the drafts.

I ain’t making plans for this year, cause I have failed miserably to realize my most important plan for 2009; I’ll just improvise throughout the year.

Dear 2009 – up yours. 2010 – bring it on.

Happy new year!

You can find my posterous account at http://robertbasic.posterous.com/.

That is all.

It all started with this. Just another bored tweet from yours truly after the Sunday lunch. Followed by tweets like this and this and this and this and this. I’ll just blame the fact that it’s Sunday afternoon for the low response and that we geeks do have a life! (well, most of us… some of us…)

What’s the point?

To meet. To really get to know those people behind the avatars and tweets and funny names like “Swizec”.

Who can come?

Despite the “Balkanic” part in the name, anyone can come, no matter from where you are. Be friendly and don’t hate the geeks (geeks run the world, so, beware). One rule only: you have to have a Twitter account. On the list below you’ll read later are my friends from Romania, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia. If you have a friend from these countries and I don’t know her or him, do not worry, she or he, can come too. As long as they have a Twitter account.

When?

In autumn. September, most likely, during a weekend, when no sane person should be working. Our dear Anca had a knee surgery recently and will have another one sometimes in July and we shall wait for her to fully heal and recover! (the hashtag is #wewaitforanca).

Update: I created a twtPoll on when to organize the #balkanictweetup Please give your vote!

Where?

Budapest, Hungary. Well, that’s one suggestion. But it can be somewhere else. As long as we are together :-* It would be great to last at least one night (2 days that is), but I’m fine with more, too. One day is not possible. I expect lots of you guys there and it would be impossible to drink beers with all of you in one day only (oh yeah baby, we’re gonna have lot’s of beers). So, it would be great to find a cheap hotel where there are those fancy conference halls.

What will we do?

Chat (IRL!!!) and eat and drink and goof around and laugh and cry and sleep (NOT!) and take pictures and go do stuff and most importantly, we’ll TWEET!!!1 There will be one special event that will be important for everyone to attend: we’ll sit around in a big freakin’ circle and introduce – stand up, say hi my name is Robert, aka @robertbasic and sit down (no need for the “and I’m a Twitter addict” part, we all know that).

We also can give talks on some silly topics. We can show off our works. We can sing odes to the Twitter Bird. We really can do what we want. The sky is the limit.

Other stuff of interest

The official hashtag is #balkanictweetup.

The Tweetup tagline is “Bring netbooks and beers.”

The official #balkanictweetup Twitter account is @BalkanicTweetup.

Send all your ideas, comments, appeals to zebalkanictweetup at gmail dot com

I spent all my money on beers and women so if a good Samaritan wants to support us with buying a domain and hosting for this event that would be, like, very nice of you. You would have your own page on the official #balkanictweetup page where we praise you and your good deeds. The domain is bought by Vlad Georgescu. Thanks Vlad!

I am too lazy to make the list of my friends I promised earlier, so there will be no list for now. Sorry.

He, who likes this silly idea, drop me a love letter to zebalkanictweetup at gmail dot com with your real name (yes, Jozef, I mean, Swizec, you too!) and your Twitter username. I’ll make a list based on that.

I gotta run now. Please, share your thoughts in the comments below.

Love,
Robert :-*

P.S.: Due to insane amounts of spam, I’m moderating the comments, so please wait while I approve yours. Thanks :)

Moblin is an open source project focused on building a Linux-based platform optimized for the next generation of mobile devices including Netbooks, Mobile Internet Devices, and In-vehicle infotainment systems.

Cause I don’t own (yet!) a netbook, I installed it under VirtualBox (VB from now on). The image is 666 MB big and it comes not in an .iso, but in a .img format. But, VB, a really awesome software, had no troubles booting from it. As with the majority of Linux distros nowadays, Moblin image is also a Live CD, which means you can run it, without installing it.

Installing Moblin

The preinstall process is made up from 6-7 steps: choosing the language, the keyboard layout, the timezone and, of course, the partitioning. Basically, it’s just another boring “Next-Next” process. The installation itself took around 6 minutes to finish. When it’s done, it asks for a username and a password.

The first boot went pretty quickly, considering that booting under VB takes longer than booting under regular installations. The thing about VB is that it needs, the so called “Guest Additions” installed on the guest machine, so that the guest machine can be used normally. In this case, I failed to install it: Moblin comes with one version of the Linux kernel and the additions are for another version of the kernel. This prevented me in my quest to test Moblin fully. Anyway, I’ve managed to take a few screenshots of it, all are uploaded to my Picasa profile.

The m_zone

There was one thing that was strange. It has a “Status panel”, from which you can update your profiles on social networks. A really useful stuff. I just opened it up and updated my Twitter profile. Almost. I wasn’t logged in to Twitter from it and Moblin didn’t say a word about it. It just happily said that my status is updated. Once I found the “Web services” panel I logged in and this time I was really updating my Twitter stream.

I really was hoping to test it normally and write a detailed review of it, but this guest additions thingy thought otherwise. Moblin is a great distro, even in this beta stage I believe it’s useful. What do you think? Did you test it already, saw it in action?

One thing’s for sure: when I’ll get myself a netbook, it’ll run on Moblin.

Cheers!

P.S.: Check out the Moblin intro, too!

I was having a couple of beers with a friend of mine, with whom I go to college. After the 3rd beer or so, we came to an idea of submitting a paper to this year’s SISY conference. All I will say for now, that it will include Python, Assembly, microcontrollers, electric motors and lots of other geeky stuff. This project, even while the idea is still only in my head, got my mind running again and might be the way out of this state of indifference. Why? Well, to be able to start this project, I first need to finish my current project, my graduate work. To finish my grad work, I needed to start working on it again (which I did, honest!). I’ll even spend my whole Saturday this week in the college to write/test/debug my app there. If all goes well, the app will be finished this week and I can go onto writing the documentation for the grad work. Everything will go fine, right?

I installed Ubuntu 9.04 on my laptop a few days ago. Loving it! Had only 2 minor issues with the hardware upon the installation. First, the graphic card was messing around, it didn’t want to enable all those funky visual effects. That got sorted out, thanks to @firusvg who suggested to install compiz and @ivan86 who pointed me to this article. Second, when plugged in the headphones, the sound was still coming out on the speakers. @Asgrim sent me this link which helped me to sort this out. Apart from this, everything else works out-of-box. Even the wifi!

OK, enough for now. Here’s to hoping that the bad times are over and the good times are coming. Cheers!

The main purpose of this blog is to educate users about open source software and to show alternatives to proprietary software.

The original idea was a blog only in Serbian, but we got this awesome domain, so it ended up as a multi-language blog. The English version is on tryopensource.info and the Serbian is on sr.tryopensource.info.

Be sure to grab the feed and read our first article, an interview with Robert Castley, the man behind JotBug :)

Cheers!

Full Circle is a free, independent, magazine dedicated to the Ubuntu family of Linux operating systems. Each month, it contains helpful how-to articles and reader submitted stories.

The current issue is #21. All issues are available on the download page.

The current issue is a 45 page PDF; it contains news, tips on using the console, different how-tos, game reviews, interviews, etc.

Enjoy the reading, cheers!