brentashley

thatbrentguy: I finally figured out why I would ever want to load up Cygwin with Xfree86 on Windows.
fuzzygroup: ok
thatbrentguy: Then I can run the perl TK debugger using X forwarding in an ssh session
fuzzygroup: ok you’re a bigger geek than i am
thatbrentguy: Or any sort of X forwarding for that matter. Nice to putty into somewhere, run something from the cmdline and have an x-window come up locally!
thatbrentguy: just figured you’d appreciate the combination nerdly-studliness of it all.
fuzzygroup: oh yeah
fuzzygroup: that’s very studly.
thatbrentguy: heh heh
thatbrentguy: don;t go getting a nerd-on
fuzzygroup: roflol
thatbrentguy: you can have that one. freshly coined.
fuzzygroup: blog it. I dare you.’
fuzzygroup: Heck I double nerd dare you.
thatbrentguy: with your permission to cut/paste
fuzzygroup: yep

I’ve been working pretty hard over the past couple of months and not blogging a lot. On one of my projects, I wasn’t really able to say what I was working on and for whom, but it’s all in the open now.

Today all that hard work paid off with the news that McDonald’s Canada announced the kickoff of their wireless hotspots, as a part of the company’s North American wireless hot spot initiative.

There’s been a lot of teamwork among the KnowledgeWorx crew that came together to make this happen and we all deserve a break today. Just a short one though – there’s much more to do!

When I recently moved my ashleyit.com site to imhosted, I decided to upgrade Movable Type and move from Berkeley DB to MySQL. I thought it would be easiest to simply export all my entries from the old system and import them into the new.

This worked for a while until I realized that all my old posts were not where they were expected to be by external links and search engines. It seems that export/import doesn’t preserve post IDs – they just all get resequenced.

Since I still have the old site at PHPWebhosting, I was able to grab the old db files, bring them across, and get everything back to where it was, import the few entries I’ve done since the move, and I’m off to the races again. I think I’ll just keep it on Berkeley DB at this point – MySQL just required an extra sql dump in my nightly backups anyhow.

You’ll notice that indeed, I’m holding onto two hosting services. I’m using mail from PHPWebhosting and web services from imhosted. I can swap from one to the other at a moment’s notice because I keep my DNS at ZoneEdit, an ass-saver of great renown.

At 2 X US$9.95 per month, I have a total of a half a gig of storage, with redundant web and mail, two separate shell accounts, cron jobs, raw logs, you name it.

And many corporations pay hundreds of dollars a month to have people host their low traffic brochure sites.

From my referrers, I find joatBlog, and although there’s no explanation just who or what joat is, the many tech nuggets to be found there are full of chewy goodness.

Terry says I should write that series of books I’ve always meant to do. Maybe it’s time, I dunno.

Have you ever seen some thing and said to yourself – “How the f*ck did they do that? – I’d like to implement that if only I had a frickin clue about such sh*t”. Don’t kid me, you have.

Tim Aiello and I have always said that we need to write a series of books not that just generally tell you about technology so that you can apply it in abstract ways, but books that distill real popular technical solutions down to the steps necessary to replicate them. It’s called the “How The F*ck They Do It” series.

E-Commerce Shopping Baskets – How The F*ck They Do It.

Secure Shell and Tunneling on Windows – How The F*ck They Do It.

We could do like the Dummies and Idiots series and expand beyond technology to other topics:

Beer Butt BBQ Chicken – How The F*ck They Do It

or for the few that are REALLY seriously in need of a clue,

F*cking – How The F*ck They Do It

My friend Dave of OmegaBid fame sends me this image of the text ad he got from google when searching for info on Perl’s ‘ord’ function.

While I’m on about Dave, here’s a story about complete bastardly brazen fraud on the net:

Dave wrote OmegaBid, a really neat piece of software that allows you to keep tabs on last-minute bidding opportunities on eBay. He packaged it up and sells it online via credit card service provider, provides support, all that.

So then some completely brazen bastard comes along and sets up a site thats EXACTLY the same, selling Dave’s very product, along with cracked passwords, all the while pretending to be the official site with a very similar name. It’s all done through enough international anonymous middlemen that Dave will have a hell of a time fixing it, and will have lost all sorts of dough in the process.

What a loser. The effort it took to set up this scam could have been spent making a legitimate buck.

I’m not going to put a link here, but you can find the rat bastard fink at omegabidsoft d0t c0m. Be sure to give him my warmest regards. Anyone who can provide info that might help Dave fix this bugger’s little red wagon, I’ll be only too happy to pass it along.

Busy as a freakin bee for the past while. But you knew that, because I’ve been quiet.

A couple of years ago, my JSRS library won a contest at Planet Source Code. I selected CodeCharge as my prize. Because of this reason and that, I never got around to spending the time to get over the hump with it.

Lately I’ve been working on a project where a colleague uses CodeCharge to generate database maintenance screens, so I was motivated to have a second look, and then to use it myself in another project I’m working on.

Wow, what a great tool to do all the gruntwork associated with building database screens. Simple yet powerful, and it generates code for a whole bunch of environments (asp/jsp/perl/php/cf) and connects to many different databases both design side and runtime.

I’m liking it!

Inspired by Chris Double’s success running Radio under Wine, I finally managed to get my home Windows 2000 box turned off. Radio was the last always-on application keeping that machine humming away 7×24, and now I’ll only turn that machine on to get old email out of my outlook PST file.

I still have Win2k on my laptop (dual-booting with Mandrake Linux), and I still use it every day. I still haven’t found a Linux editor to rival UltraEdit (don’t start me on emacs) and I have a Windows-based accounting package for my business that I still have to run. My clients still run Windows networks that I will happily connect with via both Windows and Linux as necessary. I’ll continue to have plenty of Windows-based projects – right now I’m doing some Exchange / Outlook Forms development and some Installshield scripting.

My primary desktop machines now, at home and at my main client are Linux boxen. All the servers I use daily run Linux or BSD.

I’m still riding along with Windows in the car, but I’m not locked in the trunk, I’m in the driver’s seat, shifting gears at my own pace, in full control.

Where do you want to go today?