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By Dave, September 26, 2005 5:48 pm

NewsForge | Creating an invoicing system with OpenOffice.org

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Interesting

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By Dave, September 21, 2005 11:32 am

Centre – Open Source Student Information System – Home

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Looks interesting. Don’t know what yall are using now, Steve, but this warrants a close look.

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By Dave, September 21, 2005 11:29 am

Aquamacs: Emacs for Mac OS X

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Cool!

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By Dave, September 15, 2005 10:56 pm

Opinion: Must free beer always taste like Schlitz?
Having just bought a house, I’ve been busy constructing a Linux-based media server. The experience has left me both amazed and frustrated by the state of desktop Linux software.

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Any article that starts like that has gotta be good… 😉

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By Dave, September 12, 2005 11:43 am

Free Ruler for Mac OS X

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Cool tool! Must have for any kind of design work. Mac only…

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By Dave, September 5, 2005 9:22 am

Fingerstring: a very simple, personal database

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Interesting. Will have to try it out.

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By Dave, August 23, 2005 3:11 pm

Jville.net

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Just getting through with a facelift on Jville.net. Now got to get the Jacksonville Business Directory pulled apart and into a database and I’ll be about through with this site anyway…

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By Dave, August 18, 2005 10:09 am

BlogBridge: Home
Don’t know what BlogBridge is? No problems – we think it’s the best news feed and blog
aggregation system – bar none! Not only will BlogBridge let you subscribe to your favorite
RSS feeds, it will also help you sort through your existing feeds and help you discover new
feeds.

It also comes with a server-based service that will let you synchronize all your feeds
across multiple computers, and even maintain your read/unread status across those computers.

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Just trying it but it looks nice, especially for those that use a bunch of different computers but want to keep up with feeds of whatever kind.

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By Dave, August 17, 2005 3:26 pm

Slashdot | Booting an x86 Virtual Machine from an iPod

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And at what point does this navel gazing sequential vortex of platform and os’s create a black hole and suck itself and everything around it into oblivion?

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By Dave, August 15, 2005 10:55 pm

WIL WHEATON dot NET: Where is my mind?: not enough living on the outside

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I love it! Very well put, Will…

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By Dave, August 15, 2005 10:18 pm

Boing Boing: DTV: an open source video publishing/viewing/downloading tool

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Mac only right now but has a Windoze version coming soon. Downloaded it and tried it but was taking way too much time to get the feeds downloaded. Will try again in a day or two and see if the first big demand slows down a bit. Looks interesting. If its distributed so all of the clients take up some of the load would be faster I think. Course here I am criticizing it and not knowing how it is set up. Need to at least read the readme before mouthing off…

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By Dave, August 15, 2005 10:05 pm

Boing Boing: Partially paralyzed cat uses mechanised platform to move

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Okay. Interesting container…

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By Dave, August 14, 2005 10:48 am

Microsoft Security Bulletin MS05-039: Vulnerability in Plug and Play Could Allow Remote Code Execution and Elevation of Privilege (899588)
Microsoft Security Bulletin MS05-039Vulnerability in Plug and Play Could Allow Remote Code Execution and Elevation of Privilege (899588)Issued: August 9, 2005Version: 1.0sID=’l1-EYAA’SummaryWho should read this document: Customers who use Microsoft WindowsImpact of Vulnerability: Remote Code Execution and Local Elevation of PrivilegeMaximum Severity Rating: CriticalRecommendation: Customers should apply the update immediately.Security Update Replacement: NoneCaveats: None Tested Software and Security Update Download Locations:Affected Software:

Everything after Windows ME – So if you have XP or a Win 2000 or better (HA-HA-HA-HA-HA) server, you best get you butt in gear and PATCH the sucker! The first worm is on the way right NOW!

F-Secure Computer Virus Information Pages: Zotob.A

Summary: Zotob.A is a Mytob clone that spreads using a vulnerability in Windows Plug and Play service (MS05-039).

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By Dave, August 13, 2005 8:11 pm

KLOTH.NET – about radio and internet, nslookup, whois, antispam

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Interesting lookup tools on this site. A definite bookmarker!

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By Dave, August 13, 2005 10:08 am

Scripting News: 8/13/2005
Mean International Software Monopoly 
Some at Microsoft complain they don’t like the name RSS and propose to change it to something they like better.

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Give em hell, Dave!

They don’t like it maybe they need to play in their own sandbox and leave the rest of the RSS world to us…

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By Dave, August 10, 2005 4:09 pm

Linux Today – vnunet: SCO Resellers Turn Blind Eye to Linux Lawsuit
“SCO resellers are burying their heads in the sand when it comes to the firm’s controversial legal claims over ownership of key elements of Linux source code, and are focusing instead on the quality of its operating system.

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In the first place, who knew there were any SCO resellers left?

In the second place, Quality? Or do they mean they need to focus on improving the quality?

The last 3 SCO setups I have seen were so outdated that they make tandy co-co’s look like last years compaq’s in comparison.

But what do I know…

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By Dave, August 6, 2005 9:24 am

Slashdot | Can a Customer Loyalty Database Change a Society?

The following is taken from the comments and illustrates a LONG standing problem with family owned business
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The village where I live is about 3 miles from the nearest Tesco and, one by one, the small family-run shops are closing. But they themselves are partly to blame – apart from Saturday mornings, they’re closed when I’m at home. I would buy my meat fresh the butchers, fruit and veg from the greengrocer, and fresh bread from the bakers, but they don’t give me that choice. If they stayed open late, just by a couple of hours, one day a week they’d get my business. At the moment the only people able to shop there are pensioners, the unemployed, housewives and shift workers.

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I see this constantly. The family business that is open to the public (brick front vs web store) only wants to be open during “business hours” or 9 to 5 then everyone wants to be off and go out and do things. Big problem.

I was thinking of opening a book store a few years ago and one of the things I had decided to do was change the open hours to reflect the people I was trying to sell to. Was planning on being open from 3 pm to 11 pm 4 days a week. But health and inertia intervened and now we are surrounded by books 24/7 and selling on the web. Much lower overhead and no set hours. But no walk-in traffic. To offset the lower overhead on rent and utilities is the shear amount of work that it takes to get the book ready (on line) for someone to buy.

Whereas in a brickfront used book store you take the boxes of used books and take the books out, search and see what the book is worth, pencil in the price, enter it into inventory, assign a shelf location and put them in on the shelf.

In a online used bookstore you take the books out of the boxes and search to see the current price range on the particular book, decide how much the book is worth, enter the book and it’s condition into the database, scan the front and back of the book, convert the scans to the proper size, enter the picture number in the database, assign a shelf location for the book, and put them on the shelf.

After putting it down on the screen it looks like the bigest difference is the addition of the scan and the detailed description of each book.

I’m already working to automate a lot of the steps required to scan, resize, make thumbnail, rename, upload to correct places, so maybe it will be less labor intensive and human error prone.

Ah well. Ramble over. Time to get back to the php/wordpress mines…

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By Dave, August 3, 2005 3:26 pm

“Darknets” cast to cloak identities of computer file swappers

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I wonder just how many of them are out there now. Bet “The Shadow” doesn’t know the answer to that…

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By Dave, August 3, 2005 11:36 am

Been poking at wordpress for the last few days and it’s starting to poke back a bit.

I’ve been trying to figure out a way to have a thumbnail on one page and the full sized picture on another without having to add a bunch of excess code. The site(s) that I need this for are for collecting and/or selling books and I want to display the front and back covers of each. The location on each page will be the same.

The problem was having to do a lot of copy and paste on each page.

I spent days looking at image handling programs or plugins or anything with image in the name by the end of it as there doesn’t seem to be anything quite for that purpose.

So… I got to looking at the custom fields that WordPress has already built in. I looked around and found a plugin by the name of Get Custom Plugin Values that allows a whole lot of customizing using a few simple calls. This sucker rocks!!

It took me about 15 minutes to get it working and start converting the site over to use the new format. The way I have it set up allows me to add one custom field with the name of the file stripped of the ending (a=front cover b=back cover) and the .jpg. The code then adds the img= and all the prefix info. I could do most of the prefix with wordpress calls and I plan to at some point but for now this gets me past a bottleneck…

Then I got to thinking about it some more. With the addition of another custom field – price – and some added pre and post stuff I think this can turn any wordpress post into a “for sale” page. Planing on using paypal for the shopping cart and payment gateway, so that code is already done just got to plug it into place.

The only thing left is to see if it will work. With the proper code on the paypal return page I think I can clear the price field with so the item shows up sold. 😉 Inventory control at point of sale… Simple. I think.

Add a few category pages with different search criteria and it looks like wordpress can be a full e-commerce platform that also allows blogging…

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By Dave, July 31, 2005 9:32 pm

Knoppix Hacks: Use Knoppix to rescue Windows

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Knoppix strikes again! Good article. I’m looking forward to the upcoming online release of the Knoppix DVD. Quite a list of programs on it.