Category Archives: utilities

Segmenting WebM Video and the MediaSource API

By | Published: January 3, 2012
For a while now I've seen people ask when support for Apple's Pantos HTTP live streaming would make it past Safari and iOS. The answer seems to have been that it wasn't clear that Pantos streaming was the best option and something else would come about eventually that would be more flexible. There have been [...]
Posted in utilities | 4 Comments

Google Analytics Dashboard WordPress Plugin Version 2.0 Released

By | Published: February 22, 2011
It has taken me a while but I've finally been able to release version 2 of the Google Analytics Dashboard WordPress Plugin. The primary enhancement of this version is that it no longer blocks the dashboard, posts or pages interfaces while loading. The next major change is an upgrade to using Google's OAuth login system [...]
Posted in utilities | Tagged | 1 Comment

Java AirPlay Client

By | Published: January 25, 2011
Ever since getting one of the new AppleTV devices I have been wanting to fiddle with AirPlay. I finally got around to looking at a dump of the traffic between an iPad and the AppleTV over Christmas and was surprised at how simple it was. Soon after I noticed a blog post about AirFlick for [...]
Posted in utilities | Tagged , | 4 Comments

VNC on OS X + Devil's Pie = seamless desktop

By | Published: February 9, 2009
I've been doing iPhone development lately using a mac mini. When we first started looking at developing for the iPhone it seemed like overkill to go out and buy multiple macbooks or one macbook to share between developers so instead we got a mac mini to share using Vine VNC. For reference we are able [...]
Also posted in linux | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Using scrub to destroy a hard drive

By | Published: January 20, 2009
Recently I had a hard drive failure that pushed me into getting a little NAS device that I could back up to S3 easily. After consolidating a lot of data to the NAS I was left with a few old hard drives that I needed to do something with as well as some existing hard [...]
Also posted in system administration | Tagged , | 1 Comment

The Search for Timezone Maps

By | Published: October 16, 2008
For a while I had been casually searching for a way to overlay US time zones over a map for a project I was working on. It was never important enough to have a solution that required paying for something so I was searching for some type of government data source.
Also posted in gis, meta | 1 Comment

PowerDNS Makes Custom DNS Backends Easy

By | Published: September 14, 2008
I ran into PowerDNS recently when I needed to find a DNS server that would allow me to produce custom responses to domain queries. I needed to have a request for a DNS entry return a different IP depending on some factors in a database and I needed that data to always be accurate (not [...]
Also posted in java, linux, software, system administration | Leave a comment

10 Tips For Creating Good Looking Diagrams Using Inkscape

By | Published: July 11, 2007
After multiple attempts to find a good free diagraming application I think I have found a decent solution. I'm not creating enough diagrams to justify buying something expensive and I don't feel like finding a graphics designer to make Dia diagrams prettier. If you have a Mac you are probably not in as bad a [...]
Posted in utilities | 20 Comments

Acrobat Reader 7 and FC6

By | Published: February 14, 2007
I broke down and wanted to install Adobe Acrobat Reader 7 on my FC6 box to replace xpdf. After installing it from the tar.gz version the acroread startup script bombed out with the error: expr substr 2400000000000 1 After a little searching I didn't find much help so I started looking at the script myself [...]
Also posted in linux, software, system administration | 4 Comments

Akismet spam graphs with PHP RRD

By | Published: January 1, 2007
After reading a post on hacking Akismet to add graphs I decided I liked the idea but I didn't want to store the data in a database. It seemed like it would be better to store it using a RRD and then use the PHP RRD library. So after a little hacking I've created a [...]
Also posted in php | 1 Comment