June 24th, 2009
Through the years, I’ve had to develop, maintain and support software on a variety of systems. Unfortunately, it’s often impossible to maintain specific software versions or configurations installed on physical machines. In the realm of web development, this becomes increasingly complex because of the rapid release of multiple browser versions.
To aid in testing, I’ve found that it’s often best to run these configurations in Virtual Machines, I’ve used VirtualPC and VMWare in the past, but have recently become a fan of Sun’s OpenSource release of VirtualBox as it runs on a wide variety of host systems and supports most x86 based operating systems as clients.
Cheers
Tags: browser, emulation, emulator, free, hardware, open-source, operating system, testing, virtual, virtualization, virtualpc, vm, vmware
Posted in WebStandards, Work | No Comments »
April 29th, 2009
While it was not technically a personal computer, the Atari 2600 was one of the first pieces of technology that I had experience with in my youth. I’ll likely outline the progression of machines/operating systems in a future post.
I’ve heard about Stella for quite a while, but never had any time to fiddle with it. Recently I found that Ubuntu includes an installer for it and took a chance look. Other versions are available for MacOS and Windows.
I also found a few websites that contain ROM images for the emulator and was playing some of my old games in a matter of minutes.
For those legal types out there… I actually do own the games that I played, in fact, they are currently boxed up in my basement.
References:
Happy Retro Gaming!!!
Tags: 2600, arcade, atari, emulation, emulator, free, gaming, open-source, stella, ubuntu
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March 6th, 2009
This topic has come up a few times, especially for some peers that originally built to IBM’s proprietary portlet specification, but desire to move to the “standard” portlet specification.
I found a decent write-up on this topic at IBM:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/library/techarticles/0412_paeffgen/0412_paeffgen.html
Cheers!
Tags: 168, jetspeed, JSR, portal, portlet
Posted in WebStandards, Work | No Comments »
February 23rd, 2009
I’ve used a variety of computer based VOIP over the years. My current preference in this space is Skype as it’s free for computer-to-computer calls and even allows calls to and from regular phones (at a fee).
Video and text chat are also provided, as is ‘white-boarding’ with additional plugins.
Skype is available for most platforms, even mobile phones… I’ve found that while the Windows beta versions has some additional features, the Linux release is rock-solid.
http://www.skype.com/
There are also several hardware based solutions, like Vonage, available to replace your traditional phone service… perhaps we’ll cover that later.
Skype me!
Tags: audio, chat, client, linux, skype, ubuntu, video, voice, voip, whiteboard, windows
Posted in Life, WebStandards, Work | No Comments »
February 22nd, 2009
I first crossed on way from the Persian Gulf to Darwin, Australia on USS Helena (SSN-725) on 22 February 1994 (15 years ago, wow!), Longitude CLASSIFIED!
As is Navy tradition, there were some initiation rituals and a ‘Steel Beach Picnic’ and swim call on the equator.
Now get below decks and swap – Pollywog!
Tags: crossing, equator, hazing, helena, initiation, navy, pollywog, shellback, ssn, submarine
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February 17th, 2009
Today is February 17th 2009… up until a few week ago when President Barack Obama signed into law the “DTV Delay Act” officially making the new date June 12th because the government ran out of money for coupons to offset the cost of converter boxes.
Regardless, in many communities some television stations will end their analog transmissions and begin digital-only.
I’m all for digital content as the quality is obviously better, but from my background in communications it’ll likely be impaired more by foul weather and not have the range of the analog stations in the past… oh, well!
REFERENCES:
Cheers!
Tags: digital, transition, tv
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February 17th, 2009
At one time, FTP was the only means available to move large files, times have changed but the need still exists, especially for developers like myself.
For years I’ve happily used FileZilla for my FTP needs, the client is available on most platforms. There is also a server available for Windows as most Linux variants already provide FTP.
Happy file transfers!
Tags: client, filezilla, free, ftp, linux, open-source, server, ubuntu, windows
Posted in WebStandards, Work | No Comments »
February 11th, 2009
I spend a LOT of time trying to optimize web applications to run and appear as fast as possible, one of the most valuable tools I have in my “bag of tricks” is the YSlow! plugin for Firefox.
It integrates in the browser and gives a near real-time scoring of the pages you visit and suggestions on how to improve them. While some of the suggestions are not practical (for example: use of a CDN) the bulk of them can be applied to your application code or server with a little bit of work.
The rules and scoring mechanisms are well documented at the following website:
http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/
The YSlow! plugin is available here:
http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/
Happy… Faster Surfing!
Tags: browser, cache, firefox, html, http, javascript, network, performance, plugin, speed, standards, yslow
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December 8th, 2008
I’ve installed and managed dozens of MySQL installations for several years, occasionally it seems that an install just doesn’t run like it has in the past.
Recently I had a problem where the service would not start (Error 1067) on Windows Server 2003 (R2)… which is running under VMWare. After checking the obvious places and turning up nothing I started down the list of potential solutions exposed by Google search.
The ultimate solution it seems is that the ‘my.ini’ file needed to include the specific path information required by the service…. without it the service would not start.
Here’s my current file (c:\windows\my.ini) for reference:
[WinMySQLAdmin]
Server=C:/mysql40/bin/mysqld-nt.exe
[mysqld]
basedir=c:/mysql40
datadir=c:/mysql40/data
For the really observant readers of this entry… you will notice that this is for MySQL 4.0 (which is no longer officially supported). It’s mostly used as it is widely compatible across various host systems that are sometimes problematic with newer releases.
Cheers.
Tags: database, error, mysql, server, service, windows
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November 19th, 2008
I’ve found that a large percentage of Internet users don’t realize just how they are being tracked on a website. Most people are aware of HTTP Cookies, but very few realize that browser plugin technologies like Adobe Flash also maintain data about a user’s activities. Worse yet, while HTTP Cookies are limited to 4k, Flash can store up to 100k per website.
Clearing of standard HTTP cookies is relatively easy to do in mainstream browsers. However, while Flash is almost ubiquitous, it’s settings are not easy to locate… in fact you cannot even find them in your browser or computer settings, you have to visit a website!
When you visit this link you will first see the sites and amount of data they have stored about you,
http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager06.html
Secondly, if you look on the other tabs or follow the next link you’ll be able to control Flash access to your microphone and webcam (provided that you have them connected).
http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager02.html
Other tabs will allow you to control various settings related to updates and global security settings, as documentation is provided for each tab it should be relatively easy for you to decide which configuration you prefer in each case.
FYI – I can see some real potential for misuse of these settings if they could be altered externally by a motivated hacker.
References:
Cheers!
Tags: cookie, flash, http, microphone, security, webcam
Posted in WebStandards, Work | No Comments »