Mohsin Rasool - IAM & IGA Consultant

My Favorite Quotes

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What is good time to start, or when to start? The best time to start was last year. The second best time to start is right now.
~ Seth Godin – When to Start

Many years ago Rudyard Kipling gave an address at McGill University in Montreal. He said one striking thing which deserves to be remembered. Warning the students against an over-concern for money, or position, or glory, he said: “Some day you will meet a man who cares for none of these things. Then you will know how poor you are.”
~Halford E. Luccock

Human creativity has no limits – except those we ourselves place upon it
~ Carl Jung

If you know exactly what you are going to do, what is the point of doing it
~ Pablo Picasso

A broken clock has the correct time twice a day, but it’s possible for a working clock to never have the correct time.

“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”
~ Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

Fix NodeJs Permissions Problem

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I have been lazy to keep using sudo with all NPM global installs on Ubuntu 14.04 and today I finally browsed for the simple solution and applied it and it is fixed for all. Posting here for future reference for me and you 🙂

Here is Help Link:
https://docs.npmjs.com/getting-started/fixing-npm-permissions

Here is Video

I used first option i.e. Change permissions to /usr/local dir. Thanks to awesome community members of NodeJs for having this simple guide to fix issue of NPM Permissions error whenever installing any global module.

Take Full Page Screenshot in FireFox with No Addons like a Boss

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I just discovered this awesome technique of taking full page screenshot of any webpage of any Width and Height (regardless of your display screen size) using Firefox in Mobile View or Responsive Design Mode (official name).

Here is how to do it:

  1. Open the URL of the webpage you want take screenshot
  2. Turn on Mobile View or Responsive Design Mode (by pressing Ctrl + Shift + M)
  3. Edit the Width and Heights to your desired dimensions , just double click the area (highlighted and numbered-1 in screenshot below) where it lists current width and height and enter your own, and then click somewhere on the page to let it take effect.
  4. You are ready, hit the Screenshot/Camera Button (highlighted as #2 in screenshot below) and you will have your screenshot ready to be downloaded or automatically downloaded to your downloads.
Take full page screenshot with Firefox
Take full page screenshot with Firefox

My Calculator is Now NodeJs instead of Google or Excel

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Wow funny thing I noticed today that I have been using NodeJS, in terminal for doing my calculations and arithmetic operations. Then I realized how I have always been using different methods and tools on my laptop to perform quick arithmetic calculations.

NodeJs is My Handy Calculator

At start it was usual system calculator. Then I started to use Spreadsheet most of the time for performing calculations when I learned basic maths operations and functions available in spreadsheets. After sometime Google, became my favorite calculator for fast arithmetic operations.

Just recently on my Ubuntu system I caught NodeJs fever and have been playing with any NMP package I could find and play with on Javascript. And wow the new use case which I found today was that, I have been using Node in my terminal for performing quick calculations. I am posting it to share with the world so if you find doing your calculations using something other than conventional or system calculator, don’t panic, it is normal 😀

Associate Tags & Categories with Custom Post Type – CPT & Make them Work on Archive Pages

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If you associate your own custom post types with the built-in ‘category’ and ‘tags’ taxonomies in WordPress, to make them work in Tag, Category Archive pages, you need to add following code in the functions.php

add_filter('pre_get_posts', 'query_post_type');
function query_post_type($query) {
if(is_category() || is_tag()) {
$post_type = get_query_var('post_type');
if($post_type)
$post_type = $post_type;
else
//in following line replace 'cpt' with your own cpt.
// note 'nav_menu_item' is added in below code for custom menus to work on archive pages with it.
$post_type = array('nav_menu_item','post','cpt');
$query->set('post_type',$post_type);
return $query;
}
}

SASS & SCSS to Super Charge CSS Skills

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CSS is becoming complex day by day and as projects become bigger so gets the stylesheet and its CSS styles. To manage and keep track of your CSS stylesheets is not that easy as it used to be in the early days.

CSS preprocessors are here to rescue and SASS (with new syntax SCSS called Sassy CSS easy to follow for CSS users). I have tried many times to go with CSS preprocessors like LESS or SASS but have not been able to stick to it as my projects were not that complex or I did not need to add more tools into my workflow. But recent weeks I have been using SASS and I am finding it so useful and it is here to rescue me for bigger and long term projects to help me manage and keep track of CSS stuff.

Here is good tutorial to follow if you are new to SASS and want to give it a try:

http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/a-wordpress-development-process-using-sass-and-compass–cms-21861

On Ubuntu it was easy to get started by just adding RUBY with RVM. Following tutorial by Ryan Bigg at his blog at this blog post: http://ryanbigg.com/2010/12/ubuntu-ruby-rvm-rails-and-you/

Enjoy your adventure with Ruby installation challenges , and SASSing your CSS 🙂

Bluefish Editor – Text Editor for Programmers

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I am loving the Bluefish Editor, it is like just a Lightweight IDE. I am learning about it and will keep this post to keep track of interesting things I learn about it and add to my WorkFlow. Currently I am using Ubuntu 14.04 with Bluefish Editor and Firefox autoreload extenstion. It is really helpful work flow for faster development.

Most useful thing of Bluefish editor is shortcut:Ctrl+Shift+Enter after Entering some html element tag first letter like e.g. p (then hit above shortcut key, and you will have

 

with cursor at right position to get started to write in it.)

It can even extend p.myclass to <p class=”myclass”></p> and p#myid to related syntax. For quick great tutorial about this. Check out this URL:

http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/bluefish/

Short cuts to browse files in Bluefish Editor:

  1. Alt + 1 to first tab, and so on
  2. To move between multiple windows Unity shortcut for Ubuntu is : Alt + ` (just the key above your TAB key)
  3. more to come

Other Bluefish Editor Settings:

  • Changed Dir Base to www folder in sidebar panel.. by right clicking on any (www folder in my case) and then selecting “Set as Base Dir”