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Facebook is unblocked as per latest verdict from Lahore High Court but I find many people not using the popular social networking website. I have even seen many foreign friends leaving facebook and publishing email addresses to stay in touch via email.

Updated at: 1027 PST, Monday, May 31, 2010
LAHORE: A Pakistani court on Monday ordered authorities to restore access to Facebook, nearly two weeks after the popular social networking website was blocked nationwide in a row over blasphemy.

Justice Ejaz Chaudhry of the Lahore High Court issued the directive, reversing a May 19 order on the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) to block Facebook over “blasphemous” drawings of Prophet Mohammed on the website.

“Restore Facebook. We don’t want to block access to information,” Chaudhry told the court.

A contest organised by a Facebook user calling on people to draw the Prophet Mohammed to promote “freedom of expression” sparked a major backlash in the conservative Muslim country of 170 million.

Islam strictly prohibits the depiction of any prophet as blasphemous and even moderate Muslims were deeply offended by the drawings that appeared on a Facebook page in an answer to the call for an “Everyone Draw Mohammed Day”.

A group of Islamic lawyers petitioned the Lahore court, which had ordered Facebook blocked until May 31 and the PTA then banned YouTube and restricted access to other websites, including Wikipedia.

Chaudhry on Monday asked the government to develop a system to block access to “blasphemous” content on the Internet, which he said was already in place in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

“It is the government’s job to take care of such things, which spark resentment among the people and bring them onto the streets. They should take steps to block any blasphemous content on the Internet,” Chaudhry said.

The court Monday adjourned until June 15 the petitions from the Islamic lawyers.

Mudassir Hussain, an official from the information technology ministry, told the court that all links to “blasphemous” content on the Internet would remain blocked in Pakistan.

via Geo.tv

ADOdb library is a very good data abstraction layer for PHP. Installing a PHP extension enables the library to auto-detect this and give even better performance. To install this library on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS do this

apt-get install php5-adodb

I recently found out about T1LIB. But I had no clue how to install this. Lucky for me I am on Ubuntu and I have the ability to search for a package.

T1LIB is actually in the latest Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. You can install it by punching in the following command

apt-get install t1lib-bin

If you are like me, you may be doing this to install essential build libraries to compile something from source

# wrong method
yum install build-essential

Build essential is a Ubuntu / Debian package. On CentOS, you need to do this

yum groupinstall "Development Tools"

Warning: This will install all development tools approx 49 packages closing to 65MB

I asked my client to buy a Linode for some testing purposes and I tried it for the first time. I must say, Linode is blazzing fast. Downloads are touching 8M/sec and speed, performance is as if its running on a VM on my local system.

Update: Now its been almost a month running Linode and I strongly recommend this VPS company.
Update 2: If you plan to signup for LINODE, use my referral link, it will give you the same price but it will help me a lil http://www.linode.com/?r=587d6a71720a4606811a5710431462642c56bc21

On Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, Do this (there’s no need to do any compiling anymore)

apt-get install libssh2-1-dev libssh2-php

You can now test if PHP recognizes it’s new ssh2 extension by running:

php -m |grep ssh2

Don’t forget to restart Apache

service apache2 restart

Its been about almost more then two years since I have been playing with CentOS on many different platforms etc. Its very stable but on the other hand, PHP/MySQL updates are very hard to get and still PHP is 5.1.6. I tried EPEL repo and it updated PHP to 5.3.1 but still there were conflicts with stuff and many core packages.

So, I thought why not move to Ubuntu since it has just announced 10.04LTS (Long Term Support) in April 2010. Folks at iWeb were really nice to do a reinstall without any charges and also process a memory upgrade request at an amazing 50% discount.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

• Apache 2 version is 2.2.14
• PHP version is 5.3.2
• MySQL version is 5.1.41-3ubuntu12
• SVN (Subversion) version is 1.6.6

As a comparison CentOS 5.4 has the following versions

• Apache 2 version is 2.2.3
• PHP version is 5.1.6
• MySQL version is 5.0.77
• SVN (Subversion) version is 1.4.2

So if you are a PHP developer looking to deploy a Linux flavour on your new box, choose Ubuntu

I just secured a nice deal on QuickWeb.co.nz‘s Texas data center. Thanks to lowendbox for the info on this special coupon. Plan to use it to test new stuff before putting it on my two other production servers (with iWeb.com).

Connect to server via SSH and then issue the following command

sudo passwd

output will be something similar to this

root@vps:~# sudo passwd
Enter new UNIX password:
Retype new UNIX password:
passwd: password updated successfully