Cloud storage for Linux PCs

Having your resume, project files, assignments and other documents stored on the internet cloud is now a much more acceptable norm. Previously there were fears on privacy of the files from the providers and governments, possibility of the account being hacked or just plain poor software and hardware to protect integrity of the documents.

As cloud storage gain acceptance, there are more options available. Among the popular storage are Dropbox, gDrive and ownCloud as listed here.

Compare	Dropbox	gDrive	OwnCloud
Storage (FREE)	2GB. Offers available up to 16GB	15GB. Include Google accounts like Gmail.	Unlimited, provide your own
Availability	Integration with MS O365, OneLogin, 1Password, MS Azure, Xero. available Offline	Pretty much everything works with Google and Google Realtime API. Available offline	Unlimited. Not available offline
Features (General)	Accessible by main stream devices Automatic updates File sharing Offline access 256-bit AES encryption keys. 128-bit AES SSL/TLS encryption for files in transfer	Accessible by main stream devices Automatic updates File sharing Offline access File versioning 128-bit AES encryption keys. 256-bit SSL/TLS encryption for files in transfer	Web based. 3rd party apps are available for wide variety of devices. Open source licensed AGPLv3 File sharing Comments and tagging Versioning and undelete Flexible external storage handling Integration of anti-virus scanning

Its a matter of balancing your resources, needs and funding when deciding which services to take up.


Dropbox provide one of the most fancy looking and good security.

Google gDrive comes with a host of applications like Google Sheets, Docs, Presentation to open your documents on a PC and mobile devices. Truly any time, any where documents are available.

OwnCloud allows any individual and corporation to customise, design a security of their choosing and include branding with use of their own storage. With more controls, security exploits such as man-in-the-cloud attack can be avoided. Did I mention, you install the whole thing for FREE on your own (your ownCloud....get it)?

Howto start Programming with Laravel

With the announcement Laravel 5.4 is released on 24.1.2017, a better PHP programming framework is now available. Here is how you can start programming with Laravel 5.

What is Laravel 5?

Its a PHP programming framework. Yes, you still need to know PHP programming. This framework allow quick creation of a CRUD application and connection to a database to store data. Lots of work have been done for you to complete standard task BUT it requires you to adhere certain styles and syntax. These you MUST learn in order to appreciate the power of Laravel framework and the learning curve is NOT steep.

From laravel.com get more information on what is Laravel, browse examples and then install Laravel framework. Once installed, open a command line terminal to create a new project framework.

Laravel have a tool called artisan to do all the wonderful stuff of the framework. Here is an example to display Laravel version.

Getting help

The installed framework comes with its own description of its command tools. To access this, open a command line interface and type;

 $ php artisan --help  

or to display for a specific command

 $ php artisan help serve  
 $ php artisan help migrate  

List to find further help can be found at Laravel and Getting Help.