PPI Engineering Catalog July 2013 UMBC
publ.com ]]>
Today, W3C published W3C Highlights - August 2013, a survey of select recent work and upcoming priorities. The report includes: progress and work ahead in making the Open Web Platform a success on mobile devices, news in Web for All areas like accessibility and internationalization, how W3C is collaborating more closely with various industries that are being transformed by the Web, liaison updates, and new opportunities for more people to get involved in W3C.
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For years premium design and development software has been the exclusive preserve of Adobe. Since they outmaneuvered Quark and purchased Macromedia, few tools have been able to compete with their products.
However, for all the market dominance of tools like Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, Adobe’s recent shift to a subscription model has infuriated many loyal customers. Worryingly for the executives at Adobe, this anger has manifested itself in a search for alternate applications — despite the fact that it’s the subscription model used by many of these alternatives, that largely drove Adobe’s own business model change.
Today, Adobe have announced a new Creative Cloud subscription option that will allow teams to purchase membership of a single CC application for a single user. So, if you have a team of artworkers using Photoshop CC, you won’t need license Dreamweaver CC as well.
The new single app plan is being introduced alongside the existing team plan that provides access to the full suite. A single app plan is available for $29.99 per user, per month. That compares to $69.99 per user, per month for the existing all-inclusive license. Pre-orders are available now, with full availability beginning in the middle of August.
Based on Adobe’s previous 18-month release schedule, the new plan is approximately the same price as an upgrade license for any of the Creative Suite applications. Better news is that existing customers with licenses for CS3 or later are eligible for a reduced price of $19.99 per user, per month.
Included in the price are 20Gb of cloud storage allowing staff to easily collaborate on files. Also included is membership of Behance ProSite, although it’s debatable how useful teams will find that service.
The market for this new subscription is very definitely companies with large teams, especially with staff who spend all day in a single application, but are too small to qualify for enterprise pricing. For those companies the potential savings are clearly substantial.
The good news for smaller agencies and freelancers is that Adobe are listening to community feedback, and are actively looking for ways to make their new subscription model more palatable for everyone in the industry.
Are you a Creative Cloud subscriber? What changes do Adobe need to make in order to retain your business? Let us know in the comments.
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One of the most widely used tools in the web development process is surely the terminal. While you are working on a project, often you find yourself in the position of using the terminal with several tabs open at once, one for launching a local web server, a second tab for managing the database, another for copying files and so on. This can soon become messy and hard to handle. One solution for this problem which works well for me, is the terminal multiplexer, tmux.
tmuxis a terminal multiplexer: it enables a number of terminals, each running a separate program to be created, accessed and controlled from a single screen.
The definition above, taken from the tmux website, is clear: from one terminal window we can start and control a number of other terminals and in each of them run a different application or a different instance of an application.
tmux is developed on a client-server model. This brings into the game the concept of sessions. A session is stored on the server which holds the representation of a window. Each window can be linked to multiple sessions and moved between them.
On the other hand, multiple clients can be attached to each session. So, one or more users can connect to a tmux session from different computers and they share the same information on the window. This is extremely useful in teaching or collaborating since the users sharing a tmux session see the same information on their terminal windows.
Connecting to a tmux session is done by starting the application with the following command:
tmux attach <session_name>
When one user wants to end the terminal sharing feature, the following command is used:
tmux detach
tmux runs on Linux and Mac. At the moment of writing this article, I am not aware of a Windows version of the application.
For the majority of Linux distributions, there is a package in their repositories:
On Arch (which I use), installation is simply a matter of running the following command:
sudo pacman -S tmux
After installation, you can start tmux by issuing the command tmux in a terminal window. If you want to have it running automatically for each terminal session, a small bit of configuration is needed:
tmux as in the screenshot below:
If you are on Mac, iTerm2 comes with tmux installed, and to start it, you should issue the command: tmux.
After installation, if you start a terminal window, the only new thing you’ll notice is the presence of a status line at the bottom of the screen:
Let’s take a look at the most common features. For a list of complete features, see the links at the end of this article.
Or, in other words, splitting the main window. First of all, I must say that each tmux command is prefixed using the following key combination: <Ctrl-b>. This can be changed, but we will learn how to configure and customize tmux later on.
So, in order to split a window vertically (or in right and left panes) the following command should be used:
<Ctrl-b>%
and to split the window in horizontal panes you can use:
<Ctrl-b>"
And the result should look like following:
In order to move the cursor from one pane to the other (activating panes), the arrow keys are used. The command looks like this:
<Ctrl-b>[Up, Down, Right, Left]
If you want to go to the previously active pane, you can use the following command:
<Ctrl-b>;
Also, if you are not satisfied with the position of a pane, you can rotate the panes using the command:
<Ctrl-b><Ctrl-o>
Once created, you can change each panes size, in one cell step, using:
<Ctrl-b><Ctrl-Up[Down][Left][Right]>
or in five cells step using:
<Ctrl-b><Meta-Up[Down][Left][Right]>
When you want to close the current pane you can use:
<Ctrl-b>x
Sometimes you may want to create another window, for example, to work on another project. This window might contain a completely different set of panes with different programs in each of them. To do so, issue the following command:
<Ctrl-b>c
Then if you want to switch to the next window you can use:
<Ctrl-b>n
And you can switch to the previous window by using:
<Ctrl-b>p
Or you might select the window interactively with:
<Ctrl-b>w
In order to close the currently opened window, you use:
<Ctrl-b>&
Suppose you have issued a command on the terminal and the output of the command does not fit in one screen, so you’ll need to scroll up in order to see the entire output. If you try pressing the Up key, this won’t scroll you up, as it will only show you your command history. To scroll up the screen, use the following command:
<Ctrl-b>[
And then hit one of the following keys: Up, Down, PgUp or PgDn to scroll up or down.
Also, when in this mode you can copy text from the history and then paste it with:
<Ctrl-b>]
In order to exit this insert mode, just hit esc.
Now there are a lot of other commands bound to various keys. You can list all of the key bindings by issuing:
<Ctrl-b>?
tmux is highly configurable. The configuration file is either /etc/tmux.conf for system wide settings or (recommended) ~/.tmux.conf for user specific settings.
One of the first things that most users change is the mapping of the prefix key (since <Ctrl-b> doesn’t seem to be so handy). Most users change it to <Ctrl-a>. This can be done like so:
set -g prefix C-a
unbind C-b
bind C-a send-prefix
The -g option in the first command tells tmux that this is a global option, meaning this is set for all windows and sessions.
Some users may prefer Vi or Emacs like bindings for the key actions. This is done using:
set -g status-keys vi
setw -g mode-keys vi
The setw command, sets the option for the window (affects all the panes in a window).
You can perform various configurations of the status line: you can turn it on or off, you can change its background and foreground color, you can change what information is displayed inside it, etc.
To turn the status bar off, issue the following command:
set -g status off
Or you may try something like this:
set -g status-bg blue
set -g status-fg white
setw -g status-left #H:#S at #W:#T
… which changes the status line background to blue, the text color to white and displays to the left of the status bar the hostname of localhost, followed by a colon and the session name followed by the ‘at’ string and the window name, a colon, and lastly the pane title.
You can also display the status line at the bottom or at the top of the window:
set -g status-position [bottom | top]
For further information on configuration and other configuration options you can check the options section of the manual.
I hope you have found this introduction to tmux helpful in improving your terminal workflow. I’ve presented here just a few commands that I use most frequently. If you want to learn more, there are several resources that are available. I highly recommend:
tmux on Arch wiki
New research from Black Hat shows it’s possible to trick water and energy infrastructure to cause physical damage—and securing these systems remains painfully slow.
Three presentations scheduled to take place at the Black Hat computer security conference in Las Vegas today will reveal vulnerabilities in control systems used to manage energy infrastructure such as gas pipelines. These are just the latest sign that such systems remain dangerously susceptible to computer attacks that could have devastating consequences; and although the researchers proposed fixes for each flaw they’ve identified, they caution that, on the whole, industrial infrastructure remains woefully vulnerable.
]]>New research from Black Hat shows it’s possible to trick water and energy infrastructure to cause physical damage—and securing these systems remains painfully slow.
Three presentations scheduled to take place at the Black Hat computer security conference in Las Vegas today will reveal vulnerabilities in control systems used to manage energy infrastructure such as gas pipelines. These are just the latest sign that such systems remain dangerously susceptible to computer attacks that could have devastating consequences; and although the researchers proposed fixes for each flaw they’ve identified, they caution that, on the whole, industrial infrastructure remains woefully vulnerable.
]]>New research shows it’s possible to trick water and energy infrastructure to cause physical damage—and securing these systems remains painfully slow.
Three presentations scheduled to take place at the Black Hat computer security conference in Las Vegas today will reveal vulnerabilities in control systems used to manage energy infrastructure such as gas pipelines. These are just the latest sign that such systems remain dangerously susceptible to computer attacks that could have devastating consequences; and although the researchers proposed fixes for each flaw they’ve identified, they caution that, on the whole, industrial infrastructure remains woefully vulnerable.
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