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Geocaching Bug

Sun, 04/03/2005 - 10:45 — charles

Charles gets bitten by the travel bug

Late in 2003, a good friend of mine suggested that I might be interested in a new outdoor activity that he and his family had recently been enjoying. It combines hi-tech resources with elements of a traditional treasure hunt, and it's known as "Geocaching". I later learned that this was basically Letterboxing with gadgets, but it was the gadgetry that piqued my interest.

If you've never heard about it, there's an entire web site devoted to geocaching. I guaranty there's a geocache near you!

MySQL and Mac OS X

Fri, 02/18/2005 - 00:53 — charles

Leopard Update

With the release of Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard", Apple has made a few more changes. Whereas prior versions came with Apache 1.3, PHP 4, and MySQL 4, Leopard comes (sort of) pre-configured with Apache 2.2 and PHP 5. The MySQL part is still a little tricky.

Here are some notes regarding MySQL under 10.5:

  1. There is still the discrepancy between the old and new locations for mysql.sock
  2. NetInfo is no longer available for setting up users & groups, however...
  3. Leopard comes configured with a _mysql user and _mysql group

Netjuke

Mon, 01/17/2005 - 10:06 — charles

NetJuke is an open-source php/MySQL-based jukebox for your digital music. Basically, it provides a web-browser access to your digital music from any computer on your network. It uses the ID3 metadata to create and maintain a database of artists, albums, genres, and so on which you can search using any standard browser.

I Hate Spam

Sat, 08/07/2004 - 03:17 — charles

I found this info... somewhere. I can't remember where, but I saved it because I think we all need to fight spam. Most of our spam busting efforts are defensive, that is, they act to block or reject spam. This approach is an offensive one and attempts to stick it to the spam bots by foiling their attempts at harvesting addresses.

Apache on Mac OS X

Sat, 06/12/2004 - 14:29 — charles

Note: The following entry refers to Apache 1.3. Much of the content of this post still applies, but if you are running Apache 2, please refer to the updates.

Mac OS X comes with the robust, industry standard web server Apache preinstalled. When you turn on "Personal Web Sharing" in the System Preferences Sharing pane, you are actually enabling the Apache server which runs on many Unix- and Linux-based web servers across the internet.

CPAN

Tue, 03/30/2004 - 09:41 — charles

An acronym for Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, CPAN maintains a huge library of perl modules and provides semi-automated access to them.

HotLink Blocking

Wed, 03/17/2004 - 12:26 — charles

A couple of months ago as I was checking my web server access logs, I came across something odd. A single image file was being requested repeatedly and often from the same host IP. Although I wasn't aware of the term at the time, I had become a victim of Hot Linking. Since I wasn't aware of a technical means of blocking this heinous practice, I simply performed a reverse lookup on the IP, then emailed the owner of the domain with a "cease and desist" warning. Turns out it was a college dude, and he promptly removed the link.

Kibibytes, Mebibytes, and Gibibytes, Oh My!

Wed, 03/03/2004 - 12:16 — charles

So, we all know that a 'kilobyte' is not 1,000 bytes but 1,024 bytes (2^10), right? Wrong. A kilobyte is actually defined as 1,000 bytes, and therefore is a rather useless word to everyone except hard drive manufacturers. What we really mean to refer to is a kibibyte. Seriously. And scaling up there are mebibytes and gibibytes. Or so the International Electrotechnical Commission decreed in December 1998. The topic was discussed in the March 1999 Tech Beat, the online publication of the National Institute of Standards and Technology

GeoCaching

Tue, 02/03/2004 - 18:21 — charles

Charles gets bitten by the travel bug

Late in 2003, a good friend of mine suggested that I might be interested in a new outdoor activity that he and his family had recently been enjoying. It combines hi-tech resources with elements of a traditional treasure hunt, and it's known as "Geocaching". I later learned that this was basically Letterboxing with gadgets, but it was the gadgetry that piqued my interest.

If you've never heard about it, there's an entire web site devoted to Geocaching. I guaranty there's a geocache near you!

Mac OS X Audio/Video Tools

Tue, 11/04/2003 - 21:48 — charles

I have found the following tools to be valuable on a sliding scale between useful and indispensible. Here they are with a brief description, grouped by command-line and GUI.

Terminal/Shell Based Apps

You can find most of these on sourceforge.

  • ffmpeg: The swiss army knife of audio/video tools
  • flac: Free Lossless Audio Codec. Compress/Decompress without losing quality
  • lame: The standard for compressing audio to MP3 format
  • macape: Monkey's Audio (ape) compression/decompression

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