Recently in Computer Stuff Category

I have a project that I've been working on for quite a while now. I wanted an easy way to manage photo galleries and make them available for myself and others to easily view.

I'm finally at a point where I'm happy to share my current solution with others who may be looking to do something similar.

You can see the working results in my Photo Galleries and read probably more than you care to about the implementation here.

This project is not complete, but it does work well for what I need. Management of the photos is all handled on my laptop using DigiKam the hosting/viewing is all on my little home server.

I'd love to hear feedback about the approach/techniques.

I upgraded to Mavericks on my Macbook this past weekend. You can't really complain when the upgrade is free, so this is not a complaint, just a documentation of the facts.

I was excited for the upgrade for one feature: improved multi-display support. I don't often use multiple displays on my mac - I've found that the resolution (I run at the 1680x1050 setting) and the multiple "spaces" (I run with 4) have virtually eliminated the need for an external display. When I do want an external display, it's when I want to open something up to watch or reference as I continue my normal work. Prior to Mavericks, I could not switch spaces without "loosing" the content that I had on the external monitor and I could not make the content on the external monitor full screen. With Mavericks, both of these are possible.

With my schedule during the week, I didn't have the time to get to the upgrade until Friday night. I started the download before I went to bed and let it download the ~5GB update.

The next morning, I began the update and it mostly went ok. After the update, however, I began to notice problems. I had to reinstall a few pieces of software, including XQuartz, the Java JDK, Oracle SQL Developer, and Mercurial.

I had to find (that was the hard part) where to change a setting to let DashExpander and ShiftIt work (turns out it was in the Security & Privacy settings, under Privacy, Accessibility). After I found where, it was a simple matter of checking a couple of checkbox.

Since I had replaced the distribution vim with a version that I built locally, I had to re-do that replacement also.

In the process, everything that I had to re-install was upgraded to the latest version, so I should get some nifty features with all of those apps!

So far, I've not encountered anything that I can't use after the upgrade, so I'm super happy.

Over the Christmas break, I spent some time trying to eliminate what I believe was a Trojan DNSChanger from my father-in-law's computer. This one was tough; every time I rebooted the problem kept popping up.

So I figured that I had something pretty low in the OS that was preventing the Virus Scans/Spyware removal from being able to remove the stuff. To get past this, I first tried booting into the Trinity Rescue Disk (http://trinityhome.org) and running a virus scan from there. It found nothing.

Interestingly, I did not find any Spyware removal software for a bootable Linux distribution, so I went looking. What I found was the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows (http://www.ubcd4win.com/index.htm). This let me build a bootable CD that was running Windows XP. It did require that I have a copy of my MS Windows XP install disk, but I had that so it was no problem. The really good news is that it came with Spyware/Virus removal tools pre-installed, so it was easy to use this disk to boot into windows, update the Spyware definitions and scan the drive.

In the end, even these steps did not remove this Trojan and I ended up re-installing XP on his computer to eliminate it, but I thought these tools were pretty handy to have in the tool bag.

For the past couple of months, I've been working on the team that redesigned the HGTV.com web site. I began to look at my own site and really did not like how it looked, so I gave it a fresh face-lift.

If you've been around here before, you'll notice the change. It's not a great design, but the code changes have positioned me to easily update the look in the future. The current design looks just like my blog pages have for a good while now.

I started working on the update a couple of weeks ago and finally finished it tonight. I had no idea that I had so many pages on my site.

If you are a graphics designer (I am a developer and make thing work; I'm not so good at making them pretty), and interested in offering me an updated look, drop me a note!

I don't think most iPhone users are unaware of a little detail made available with the 2.0 update. The ability to connect to an Exchange server not only let's you get your e-mail from an Exchange server, but it also lets you synchronize your contacts and calendar with that Exchange server.

The really interesting thing is it is pretty easy to imitate an Exchange server and in reality pull/push the data from some other location. A company, NuevaSync, has done just this and is making it's service available for free.

From their web site:
NuevaSync allows direct, over-the-air, native synchronization of certain smart phones and PDA devices with public PIM, and calendaring services including Google Calendar. NuevaSync does not need any software installed on your device because it uses synchronization protocols that are already built in.

This is very easy to setup. You notice that they mention Google Calendar; they also sync with Google Contacts or Plaxo Contacts, so your options are reasonably good for getting that data into your iPhone.

Check them out at http://www.nuevasync.com/ and enjoy!

Once again, my father-in-law's computer got hit with a virus/malware. This time it was "Antivirus XP 2008". It seemed pretty nasty, but none of the virus software that I had would get rid of it. After a bit of searching, I found this posting on the web:

http://www.precisesecurity.com/blogs/2008/06/26/antivirus-xp-2008/

which gave me step-by-step procedures (and a pointer to a handy free-ware tool) to clean the system up.

1. Download Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware (mbam-setup.exe) and save it on your Desktop.
2. After downloading, double-click on mbam-setup.exe to install the application.
3. Follow the prompts and install as “default” only
4. Before the installation completes, check on the following prompts:
- Update Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware
- Launch Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware
5. Click “Finish.” Program will run automatically and you will be prompt to update the program before doing a scan. Please update.
6. Scan your computer thoroughly.
7. When scanning is finished click on the “Show Results”
8. Make sure that all detected threats are marked, click on Remove Selected.
9. Restart your computer.

So far, it seems to have worked rather well!

It's a shame that such a nice program as iTunes would need 3rd party utilities to perform routine operations, but from my experience, it does. If you own a mac, this is generally not a problem as there are a number of nice AppleScript utilities floating around to handle things.

Here's one little utility that I found that seems to work as advertised:
iTunes Library Updater

Now, I would like to find a FREE duplicate eliminator, then I'd be happy.

Watir is an open-source library for automating web browsers. It allows you to write tests that are easy to read and easy to maintain. It is optimized for simplicity and flexibility.

Watir - Overview

Web Application Testing in Ruby

Seems like a good tool to have in the tool bag.

citumpe.com: Pure Java DTMF Detection

This application detects DTMF "touch" tones and presents the relative magnitude of the component frequencies. And it's written in java AND runs on my computer with no modifications (that seems rare with downloaded source).

I found this article on Life Hacker
Hack Attack: Back up and sync your Firefox bookmarks with your personal server

It talks about the firefox extension that will sync your bookmarks to either the foxmarks server of your own server. Very handy for making your bookmarks available from everywhere.