Technology

AOS – Animate On Scroll JavaScript Library

AOS is a very easy to use, but fancy looking JavaScript library for animating page blocks on mouse scroll. It supports a wide range effects, like fading, flipping, zooming, and more.

Fedora 26 Update

Fedora 26 has been release about a month and a half ago. But I didn’t have the time to update my laptop until today. There was also nothing particularly exciting for me in this release, so there was no rush.

Here’s what I had to do today to update my laptop from Fedora 25 to Fedora 26:

# Let's get into root to save a few keystrokes
sudo su -
# Install all updates for Fedora 25
dnf update
# Install dnf system upgrade plugin
dnf install dnf-plugin-system-upgrade
# Download upgrade packages for Fedora 26
dnf system-upgrade download --refresh --releasever=26
# Reboot and install Fedora 26
dnf system-upgrade reboot

If you need more help, have a look at DNF system upgrade wiki page.

The whole process took less an hour, but your mileage may vary. For me, the download itself was the slowest part. I had to pull down about 2.5 GBytes worth of packages, and given my office connection, it took about 35-40 minutes.

The installation itself took about 10-15 minutes, for which, I think, the solid-state disk (SSD) helped a lot.

One more reboot later, everything was up and running. Of all the changes pushed into this version, I think, the upgrade to PHP 7.1 is the one that affects me the most.

Fire and Motion

Joel Spolsky wrote “Fire and Motion” blog post back in 2002, but it is as relevant today as it was 15 years ago. It’s a good read on the subject of both personal and organizational productivity.

What drives me crazy is that ever since my first job I’ve realized that as a developer, I usually average about two or three hours a day of productive coding. When I had a summer internship at Microsoft, a fellow intern told me he was actually only going into work from 12 to 5 every day. Five hours, minus lunch, and his team loved him because he still managed to get a lot more done than average. I’ve found the same thing to be true. I feel a little bit guilty when I see how hard everybody else seems to be working, and I get about two or three quality hours in a day, and still I’ve always been one of the most productive members of the team. That’s probably why when Peopleware and XP insist on eliminating overtime and working strictly 40 hour weeks, they do so secure in the knowledge that this won’t reduce a team’s output.

WPBloggerTricks – The Real Blogger & WordPress Tricks

It looks like blogging is coming back. At least in the world around me, there is quite a few new blogs spawning up, and the old ones being resurrected. I don’t know what’s causing that, but I see it as a good thing.

I’ve been answering a lot more basic blogging questions from all sorts of people recently, so I thought, let me link to one of those tips and tricks sites that have plenty to offer. You know, just to save myself a bit of time.

WPBloggerTricks seems like a good choice here. It has plenty to offer to the new and return bloggers.

Is VPN Legal in Your Country?

TheBestVPN.com published a study of whether or not VPNs are legal in 196 countries around the world. There is a summary for each, and some links to details of the research.

VPNs are legal, generally.

It depends largely on the country you’re physically sitting in while using a VPN. But even then, their laws and restrictions are often opaque. What’s legal vs. illegal is not always clear. Some activities, while frowned upon, are still shrouded in grey area. In this research we fact-checked 196 countries laws and their opinions on VPNs.

VPNs are illegal in: China, Turkey, Iraq, United Arab Emirates, Belarus, Oman.

VPNs are some-what illegal in: Iran, North-Korea, Turkmenistan.

P.S.: If you can’t access the links above, VPN is probably illegal (or at least blocked) in your country or region.