So, I wrote a guide on how to do some basic tasks in emacs.

Let me know of any mistakes/improvements that you can think of in the comments!

P.S. I’m pretty fond of the mock terminal that I made with CSS.

# mount -t ntfs-3g -o force /dev/sda1 /mnt/win
Unexpected clusters per mft record (-127).
Failed to mount '/dev/sda1': Invalid argument
The device '/dev/sda1' doesn't have a valid NTFS.

I tried to recover it using a Windows XP disk, but that didn’t work because it wouldn’t recognize my C:\WINDOWS folder! At this point, I was getting pretty worried.

So, back in Ubuntu, I do a bit more reading and find out about the testdisk command (apt-get install testdisk) and a nice post about how to use it on the Ubuntu forums. To summarize, this is what I took out of that post to get mount to actually work after:

After starting testdisk, choose “No log”, choose the correct HDD and “Proceed”, choose “Intel”, choose “Advanced”, select the Windows partition, choose “Boot”, then choose “Rebuild BS”.

If testdisk gives you a warning that the “Extrapolated boot sector and current boot sector are different”, then choose “Write”.

Sure enough, something was messed and it was able to fix it after I selected “Write”.

After all this, mount worked, and when I rebooted, the Windows XP disk detected the installation and I was able to fix my MBR like I wanted.

Apache CouchDB is a distributed, fault-tolerant and schema-free document-oriented database accessible via a RESTful HTTP/JSON API. Among other features, it provides robust, incremental replication with bi-directional conflict detection and resolution, and is queryable and indexable using a table-oriented view engine with JavaScript acting as the default view definition language.

I’m gonna show you some really basic ways to use CouchDB using a PHP class found on their website and assume that you have PHP 5.1 or greater and CouchDB 0.8 installed successfully.

The first thing that we need to do is create a sample database for us to play eventually play with using PHP. To manage your databases and documents, you can use Futon, CouchDB’s administrative frontend. It can be accessed at http://localhost:5984/_utils. Create a database called “people” with two documents in it with random IDs that each have two fields in them: “name” and “age”. Also, be sure to enter in some values for those.

Let’s look at this PHP file:

<?php
include_once "CouchDB.php";

$couchdb = new CouchDB("people", "localhost");
$view = '{ "map": "function(doc) { emit(null, doc); }" }';

try {
  $all = $couchdb->send("/_temp_view", "post", $view)->getBody(true);
}
catch (CouchDBException $e) {
  die("[ERROR]".$e->getMessage()."\n");
}

foreach ($all->rows as $k => $row) {
  echo "Name: ".$row->value->name." / Age: ".$row->value->age."<br/>";
}
?>

This code is using a temporary view to query the database and then simply looping through the returned JSON and printing data from it.  If you set up your database as I mentioned above, $all should be structured like this:

stdClass Object
(
  [total_rows] => 2
  [offset] => 0
  [rows] => Array
  (
    [0] => stdClass Object
    (
      [id] => 4144833052c61ab553875737b88ef91a
      [key] =>
      [value] => stdClass Object
      (
        [_id] => 4144833052c61ab553875737b88ef91a
        [_rev] => 3595404992
        [name] => Ryan
        [age] => 20
      )
    )
    [1] => stdClass Object
    (
      [id] => ff3f20d54772b92aad43c36d6ed4abd1
      [key] =>
      [value] => stdClass Object
      (
        [_id] => ff3f20d54772b92aad43c36d6ed4abd1
        [_rev] => 994830077
        [name] => Bob
        [age] => 40
      )
    )
  )
)

When I visit the page running the script, it will therefore output this:

Name: Ryan / Age: 20
Name: Bob / Age: 40

If anyone wants to see how to do something, just post a comment and I’ll try to whip something up. Also, the CouchDB Wiki has a lot more information if you’re interested.

jQuery is a fast, concise, JavaScript Library that simplifies how you traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add Ajax interactions to your web pages.

While learning it, I found that there wasn’t a simple tutorial on how to make an ajax form, so here is one:

First, download jQuery from their website and rename the file to “jquery.js” (minus quotes).

Let’s create a file called form.html in the same folder as jquery.js:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Contact Form</title>
    <script src="jquery.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
    <script type="text/javascript">
      $(document).ready(function() {
        $("#contact").submit(function(event) {
          event.preventDefault();
          $.ajax({
            type: "POST",
            url: "process_form.php",
            data: $(this).serialize(),
            success: function(html) {
              $("#info").html(html);
            },
            error: function() {
              alert("[ERROR] submit");
            }
          });
        });
      });
    </script>
  </head>
  <body>
    <form id="contact" action="process_form.php" method="POST">
      Name <input type="text" name="name" /><br /><br />
      Email <input type="text" name="email" /><br />
      Message <textarea name="msg"></textarea><br /><br />

      <input type="submit" name="submit" value="submit" />
    </form>
    <p id="info"></p>
  </body>
</html>

Next, lets have a file called process_form.php, again in the same folder:

<?php
echo "Name: ".$_POST['name']."<br />";
echo "Email: ".$_POST['email']."<br />";
echo "Message: ".$_POST['msg'];
?>

If you load up your pages via a working installation of a webserver with PHP installed, it should return what you entered into the form upon clicking submit. Now that it works, how about an explanation?

This is selecting the element with the id contact and binding to it’s submit event the proceeding function which is being passed event.data by jQuery

$("#contact").submit(function(event) {

Because event was passed to the function, we are now preventing the normal submit actions from being performed. So now when you click the submit button, the page wont refresh and the browser wont call the action script specified in the form tag.

  event.preventDefault();

This is how jQuery loads a page using HTTP request. We specify that we want it use POST and the url to request.

  $.ajax({
    type: "POST",
    url: "process_form.php",

This is how we can send the data collected from the form to file being requested. $(this) is referring to the element with an id of contact and serialize is going to do just that: serialize the collected data into a string that can be sent in the request.

    data: $(this).serialize(),

This is the function to be called if the request succeeds. In our case, we are going to have it print all returned html into the element with id of info.

    success: function(html) {
      $("#info").html(html);
    },

This is called if the request fails for some reason. In our case, an alert will pop up.

    error: function() {
      alert("[ERROR] submit");
    }
  });
});

That concludes this tutorial, if you want to read more about jQuery, there are tons of docs on their official website.