Use Visual Studio shortcuts in Eclipse

Eclipse, Visual Studio

I am using Eclipse for PHP development. At work we use Visual Studio, so I am familiar with it’s keyboard shortcuts. In Eclipse I was quite frustrated when I was for example trying to find something in the opened document. Ctrl+F summoned Find dialog as other editors usually does, but pressing F3 to find next match in document did not work. F3 key is used by Open declaration functionality by default.
So I was looking for some way to change the keyboard scheme to look more like other editors. I found a possibility to use Mircosoft Visual Studio scheme. This scheme is available if C++ Development Tools  is installed in Eclipse. If you don’t have C++ Development Tools installed in Eclipse you have to install them first. To do that go to Help > Install New Software…

After you finish installation and restart Eclipse IDE go to Windows > Preferences and change scheme on the Keys page to Microsoft Visual Studio.


Outlook integrated CRM free for single-person use

eWay-CRM, Outlook

Yesterday we have released new version of our CRM system eWay-CRM free for single-person use. You can obtain it on our download page.
eWay-CRM is CRM system fully integrated into Microsoft Outlook 2003, 2007 and 2010. It works even with 64bit Office systems. All in one installation package!
You can see some basics of work with eWay-CRM in introduction video on youtube. We are planning to publish more learning videos in a few months.

Free version has some small limitations, but you can use it even for commercial use. If you want eWay-CRM for a company to be able to synchronize data between employees you have to purchase the system. Check out full price list for detail information.

Connecting to Microsoft Exchange from Linux

DavMail, Exchange, Java

In our company we are all using Microsoft technologies. Working on Windows eight hours a day makes me a little sick, so when I work on PC at home I usually switch to Linux. But from time to time I need to access my work mail. We can use Outlook Web Access (OWA), but I don’t like the interface much.

I was looking for some alternative in Linux. The first I found is that Evolution has some package called evolution-mapi, but I was not able to make it work. It was probably caused by having old version of Evolution.

So I searched further and found a great tool called DavMail. It’s basically a gateway to OWA written in Java. It provides POP3, IMAP, SMTP and LDAP access to your Exchange. You can install it on your client computer and access it only from localhost, so there won’t be any security risks.

Object code signing with StartSSL

OpenSSL, SignTool, StartSSL

I have used code signing to sign our .NET assemblies, but you should be able to use the same steps to sign any dll, exe, cab or msi files.
Before you can start signing you need those prerequisites:

  1. The actual certificate downloaded from StartSSL.
  2. OpenSSL binaries for Windows.
  3. SignTool which is part of Windows SDK.

After you have your object code certificate request approved you can download it from Tool Box > Retrieve Certificate section in you StartSSL account page. Copy the contents in textbox and save it into some file for example cert.pem.
Now we have to convert the certificate into some format which is readable by SignTool. To do this you need file with private key (key.pem) which was used for certificate request.

openssl.exe pkcs12 -export -out cert.pfx -inkey key.pem -in cert.pem

You will have to provide pass phrase used when key.pem has been created and define password for pfx file, which will be used for signing. As soon as pfx file is created you can sign your first assembly.

signtool sign /d "PRODUCT_NAME" /du "PRODUCT_URL" /f cert.pfx /p "PFX_PASSWORD" /t "http://timestamp.verisign.com/scripts/timestamp.dll" /v "FILE_TO_SIGN"

Publishing content from Google+ Pages to Facebook, Twitter and other social networks

Facebook, Google+, RSS, Twitter

I have been searching this possibility for a while, but I have not found any easy free solution to allow me do this. The first thing I wanted to do was to publish to Google+ Page using Hootsuite, but I found out that this functionality is available for Enterprise accounts only, which I obviously does not have. I don’t even really want this highly priced account, because I would not found any use for that.
So the second thing I thought about was getting data from Google+ Page. Again I was not really successful. There were some tools which should transform Google+ Page to RSS feed, but they did not work, because of some changes made by Google or something.
Since Google+ API is already accessible for some time I wondered if I could write some little service which would make a RSS feed for my Google+ Page. After some hours of work I came out with the first version. I called the service Google+ RSS.
As I said I use Google+ API to access the data and because Google has some quotas to access it’s API you have to create your own API key to use Google+ RSS. So here is a How to guide to get desired RSS feed.
First of all you have to create new project using Google+ API. Go to Google APIs console and from the drop down on the left side of the page create new project. You can use whatever project name you want. I created this service because I wanted to access data for Necronomicon magazine, so I called the project Necronomicon Google+ RSS. After you click OK you should be redirected to API Access page and you should see you new API key there.

Also make sure that Google+ API is turned ON in the Services page.

Now you have the API key. That was the harder part. The second thing you have to know is Google+ profile id of your page or some other public profile. To get this go to your Google+ Page and look at the numeric part of the URL.

Thats it! Now you have all data you need to generate your Google+ RSS feed. Go too the Google+ RSS service and put API key and Google+ profile id there.

Click on the Generate RSS button. You should be redirected to the final RSS feed page. Save this URL somewhere. You can use it in any RSS client.
It’s good we can get data from Google+ page in some generic format, but we want to send them to Facebook and Twitter or others.
To accomplish this I use RSS Graffiti for Facebook and twitterfeed.com for Twitter. Those services will check your generated RSS feed in specified interval and post data to your Facebook wall or Twitter.
Note that there is access limit on Google+ RSS. You can access your generated RSS page 3 times in 30 minutes. So just have it on mind when testing. Otherwise you will have to wait 30 minutes when you reach this limit.

Getting the most from foobar2000

foobar2000, Windows

foobar2000 is my favorite music player. It is very lightweight program which even runs on Linux under Wine. It is components based so you can install additional features into it like users can install plugins to improve Winamp. I would like to list some of the best components you should install:

  1. Windows 7 Shell Integration – This component enhances the preview window in Windows 7 with play controls, progress bar and album art preview. Very similar to the feature in Windows Media Player on Window 7.
  1. Discogs Tagger – Automatic ID3 tagging using discogs.com.
  2. Audioscrobbler – Last.fm audioscrobbler. Sends information about currently played songs to last.fm.

Customize GNOME panel in Jolicloud

GNOME, Joli OS

When you install JoliOS you are not able to customize the top panel. This is quite uncomfortable. I would like to display Tomboy applet and hide Notification area, because icons on this applet are automatically resized to fit the panel size which makes some of them look really ugly (e.g. the Wuala icon).

To make the panel customizable like in other GNOME based distributions you have to go to the ~/.gconf/apps/panel folder and rename applets to for example applets_bak. After that logoff and login again. You should se a blank top panel ready to be customized 🙂

Increasing size of vmdk virtual machine disk

VirtualBox, VMware

I don’t have any of the VMware products installed on my PC, but I have some VMDK virtual machine disks which I run inside VirtualBox.I had trouble installing some update on one of my virtual machines because I did not have enough space. I needed to make it larger, but I was not able to find some easy solution without having to install VMware Server or similar robust not free software.
I used to copy virtual disks using CloneVDI tool and I realized that it is possible to resize the virtual machine disk during cloning. This tool is very simple to use and does not require to be installed.
You can download it from VirtualBox forums or you can download it from my site mirror.