April 29, 2013

A Script to Automatically Update Clamav Packages — 2013

Five years ago I posted a script to automatically download and compile the latest clamav (an excellent open source multi-platform antivirus program).  Due to the reorganization of sourceforge, it needed to be updated.  Here it is: #!/bin/sh ############################################ ## Documentation: ## Please modify…
July 20, 2012

Oracle Nightmare: Recovery With Missing Redo Files

Here’s a mistake you only do once: delete Oracle’s flash_recovery_area thinking that you can save space.  You see, to quickly configure Oracle Backups (here is a great and brief how-to), it’s best to turn on “archivelog”, which instructs Oracle to create transaction…
January 30, 2012

My Southwest Flight Hit a Light Pole, but They Really Impressed Me…

My wife and I happened to be on today’s flight #792 from Los Angeles to Denver that hit a light pole. (Since we were taxiing, most of us had our phones turned on, and were able to get some pictures…) We had…
December 30, 2011

Firefox 4 Saved My Android

As a side project I have been working on an HTML5 app designed to permit real-time playing of board and card games on multiple devices (PC, iPhone, Android, etc.).  This led to some interesting research about touch events and getting click events to…
December 1, 2011

Elegant Code’s Wonderful Blog Series on JavaScript

Up until this point, JavaScript was something I held my nose and used to get dynamic and Ajax interactions working on my websites.  jQuery made it more tollerable with its mysterious “$” syntax and its ability to zip through the DOM…
September 14, 2011

Use your iPhone/Laptop/Android as a remote control for MythTV

Four years ago, a blogger named Kyle blogged about a simple but effective web script that allows most smart phones to control a MythTV setup.  Though he built his script for MythDora, it works wonderfully on MythBuntu with the following steps as root (assuming…
August 16, 2011

Fight Mail Bounce Spam with a Catch-all Address

If you send an email to a non-existant address, most mail servers are polite and will send you your message back with a notice that it couldn’t be delivered (called a mail “bounce”).  Alas, this service can be hijacked to send spam. How?…
July 6, 2011

Emergency Recovery of Zimbra’s OpenLDAP

Last weekend (July 3rd, 2011), Washington had a tremendous thunderstorm, which led to a long power outage.  We have a number of experimental and development virtual machines in our local server farm that were impacted, but what was truly hit hard was an…
May 5, 2011

Why 0.99999… = 1, proof, and limits

If you took calculus, believe it or not, you have the tools to prove that 0.9999… = 1 .  Think back to the concept of a “limit.”  OK, I really don’t expect you to remember it, so please be patient as…
December 30, 2010

TinyMCE WYSIWYG BBCode Editor

TinyMCE does have a pretty functional BBCode Editor, but the latest version doesn’t work perfectly out of the box.  Specifically, in the sample on the TinyMCE page, quotes and code styles are not displayed differently and quotes cannot be embedded (i.e.…