I’ve entered the world of digital photography with a DSLR.  A good friend of mine said I have “entered the money pit”.  This has become true.  Suddenly, things like aperture, exposure, shutter speeds, etc – have entered my vocabulary.  I’ve spent way too much time on Ken Rockwell’s website.  Researching lenses, flashes, shot composition, and have […]

You’re likely aware that the TSA has been putting new scanning machines in airports around the country, as well as, policies for a more ‘invasive’ pat-down procedure should an ‘anomaly’ show up on the scan, or should the passenger choose to opt-out of the scan.  This post isn’t about the potential health concerns of the […]

I’ve had a problem with the local Tires Plus location (#244242) I recently visited. I took my 2005 Toyota 4Runner in for a full-set of new tires (all 4 replaced).  I was called a couple hours later, and was told by the technician that they replaced a TPMS sensor.  They did not state that it […]

Recently, a friend and co-worker of mine launched a side-project of his.  Gootimer is a service, which you can use to manage your time-tracking tasks.  James is an excellent developer, and very meticulous about tracking his time spent on various tasks.  It’s a quality I envy greatly, as it significantly adds to overall organization, and […]

RoweWare Solutions, LLC is proud to announce its first software offering! Name-O Bingo Cards is a simple application to make creating custom bingo cards an easier task for anyone that uses them.  Launch the application, edit your word lists, hit Print, and you have fresh, hot, Bingo cards! As this is the first product, as well […]

04
Jun

I use KDE as my main desktop environment. Recently I was rebuilding an installation, and saw my clock was set to the 24-hour style, instead of the American style of 12-hour with AMPM. Clicking through the settings on the clock widget itself, I found no settings for getting that changed back. I always find out […]

03
Jun
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Note to ArchLinux users: If you decide to rebuild an installation, and of course you’re going to use yaourt for community built packages, you need to remember to install ‘base-devel’. If you don’t install ‘base-devel’ you may receive vague messages like “Unable to read PKGBUILD for “. For me, the solution was a simple ‘pacman […]

If you ask someone for an export of data, and you know the data is coming from SQL Server, be sure to clarify what encoding you’d like the export in (if they can configure it) – I spent a bit of time trying to figure out why I couldn’t reliably read a file, and by […]

For a project, we have the need to create charts dynamically from data.  In another project, we’ve used ChartDirector for this.  It has worked great there, so we pulled it into this project as well.  Now, the type of charts I was working with in particular is a stacked percentage chart, which is kind of […]

01
Mar

FYI – If you’re using jQuery in your application, and you’re trying to submit a form programmatically (ie, $(‘#myform’).submit(); ), you’ll want to make sure you don’t have a button with an ID/Name of ‘submit’ – the code fails silently, with no indication of why. This is something that caught me today, and was somewhat […]

24
Feb

You can now sign-in to Facebook Chat using your favorite XMPP/Jabber client (Pidgin, Adium, Kopete, etc). If you’re on Linux (Arch, specifically) you’ll need to install the cyrus-sasl package.

10
Feb
stored in: General and tagged:

I love SSH tunnels. I use them as a cheap VPN solution when traveling, and if I need to get access to an internal web server on the inside of a network (assuming the network isn’t separated). As an example, I have 2 computers at home which I use daily for development, etc. When traveling, […]

07
Feb
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A quick shout-out to a great product. Concrete5 is an excellent CMS. With easy theming, and even easier setup, it’s a snap solution for some of the most particular of tastes. It’s open-source, which I really like, but the ease of getting it setup, and the polished look and feel just make me happy to […]

04
Feb
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At work, we’re developing an application that uses LDAP for authentication. Specifically, we’re using OpenLDAP. We use a VM for development, which allows each developer to have a copy of the ‘standard’ environment, to ensure we’re on the same version of libraries, compilers, databases, etc. As part of managing the VMs, we write maintenance scripts […]

In today’s Adventures in Database Design, we’ll take a look at a relevant topic, ICD9 data. ICD9 data is the diagnosis and procedure codes used by insurance companies to categorize, well, diagnoses and procedures to be determined / performed by medical professionals. The design is simple, but very versatile, given the type of data we’re storing.

16
Sep
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Stef and I recently switched phone providers, and thus, could take advantage of the latest deals. Well, Verizon had a buy one get one free offer on Blackberry phones. Step went with a Curve and I went with a Storm. Not having a physical keyboard takes some getting used to, but the Storm screen actually […]

27
Jul

This weekend, I watched (again) one of my childhood favorite movies, WarGames. This is a classic, and a must see for anyone involved in technology. Some of the concepts used, are accurate (war-dialing) while others, a little far-fetched (war-dialing into NORAD). Anyways, in one scene the WOPR  is running a simulation of a USA/Russia attack. […]

My boss used an analogy today, which struck me as quite accurate for the position we’re currently in.  We’re moving at a fairly rapid pace, quick releases, and plenty of improvements / changes.  Along with this, there is new business, new ideas, and new potential sources of revenue that we’re working on. Assuming that the […]

07
Jul
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In health news – I’m getting my gallbladder removed tomorrow.  It should be interesting, as it will be my first official surgery.  I had my wisdom teeth out (3 of which were impacted) and was put under for it, but I didn’t really consider it a sugery-surgery. I’m getting it done laparoscopically so the recovery […]

06
Jul
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I use VirtualBox fairly regularly for virtual machines of various types (XP under Debian, FreeBSD, etc) on my main desktop. Compared to VMWare I have no complaints. It works flawlessly, and with the latest release things are just polished. Also, it now supports OpenGL for guest VMs. This is huge for graphics work / gaming, […]