Category: General

Semantic Versioning – A recommendation for numbering releases of a software

Semantic Versioning is a recommendation for numbering different releases of a software package. It is widely being used by the open source software projects. From the day one about 4 years ago when I first started getting interest in the open source software development and communities surrounding such projects till today, I was developing an intuition about how these projects number their different versions. But I never searched for it seriously, thinking that I am far away from a stage where I will have to apply this scheme to one of my own projects because I am still a noob 🙂

But, a few days ago, I started working on a plugin for the MyBB forum creation software and hosted its source code on GitHub. Today, I was reading GitHub’s help page about releases. It linked to this official spec of Semantic Versioning. I read it and was amazed by the clarity with which it was written and explained. Plus, I was happy to find that much of the intuition that I developed during this time about the versioning scheme of most open source software projects was indeed correct 🙂

I highly recommend that you also go through this short specification before releasing any of your own piece of software, how little it may be, to the public. The rationale that it provides to back its recommendations really makes sense.

mongo shell – JavaScript execution failed: Error: couldn’t connect to server – Quick Fix

I have just installed MongoDB v2.4.5 on my Ubuntu 13.04 64 bit system and when I tried to connect to the server from command line using the mongo shell provided with the installed mongodb-10gen package, I got the following error:

I tried to start, stop and restart the mongodb service using these commands but the error remained there:

Finally, I looked at the log file ( /var/log/mongodb ) and found the following error message listed there: Continue reading mongo shell – JavaScript execution failed: Error: couldn’t connect to server – Quick Fix

How to Manually Update Avira Free Antivirus

If you are not able to automatically update your installation of Avira Free Antivirus to the latest virus definitions for any reason, then don’t worry. It is still very easy to update it manually. Using this method, you can also update Avira Antivirus on such a computer which is not directly connected to the internet. To update, just follow the simple steps given below:

  1. Go to Avira’s official website and there click on the “More about VDF” link in the “Latest VDF Status” block present in almost center of the page as shown in the following screen shot. Manually Update Avira Free AntiVirus Continue reading How to Manually Update Avira Free Antivirus

How to get permalink of a post on Facebook?

So, you want to point your friends on facebook to a specific post but you can’t find a way to share that post with them via a button or link in the vicinity of that post. Or, suppose you are taking part in a contest on a company’s facebook page or group and you want to deliver maximum likes or comments on a certain post of you there. Then you would certainly want yourself to be able to give your friends the exact URL of that post. Unfortunately, I don’t find any clearly available option to get such a permalink for any post on facebook. Whenever you get a notification about a new comment or like on a post you are subscribed to and you click on that notification then that is the permalink that I always wished I could get without going through the notifications. Luckily, I found the following hidden trick to get it. The permalink of any post on facebook is hidden under its time stamp. So to get the permalink of any post, click on its time stamp reading “x hours ago”, “x seconds ago”, “a few minutes ago” etc. depending on the time passed since that post has been posted as shown in the following screen shot. Continue reading How to get permalink of a post on Facebook?

How to enable Welcome Screen in Adobe Illustrator CS5

Default setting in Adobe Illustrator CS5 is to hide the Welcome Screen (Well, I don’t know why 🙂 ?). However, some people find it really helpful in their day to day work flow to have it open when no other document is open for editing. So, if you are one of those people then don’t worry. It is extremely easy to enable it so that it will show every time you start illustrator until you don’t open a document or create a new one. Also it will reappear if at sometime you close all of the open documents in your workspace. To enable it, follow the two simple steps given below:

  1. In the menu bar click on Help > Welcome Screen, with no document open. The welcome screen will appear in the middle of the window.
    Adobe Illustrator Welcome Screen
  2. Click once on the check box besides “Don’t show again” to un check it in the lower left hand corner of the welcome screen to enable it for future. Continue reading How to enable Welcome Screen in Adobe Illustrator CS5