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Category Archives: utilities

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

By carson | 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 carson | 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 carson | 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 | Leave a comment

PowerDNS Makes Custom DNS Backends Easy

By carson | 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 carson | 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 carson | 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 carson | 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

Using Flash video metadata to display annotations

By carson | Published: December 9, 2006
Now that you can create a streaming Flash video player with PHP or Ruby and you know add metadata for cuepoints to Flash videos you are ready for something else. The following code will show you how to create a video player with PHP that will watch for metadata events and display annotations contained inside [...]
Also posted in php, web design | 6 Comments

How to create and use Flash video metadata to add cue-points with flvtool2

By carson | Published: December 8, 2006
Adding cue-points allows you to spice up your flash videos created with FFMpeg. Adding metadata to a FLV will allow you to introduce cue-points that have their own metadata that can be display when the cue-point is reached or let you jump to that cue-point. In the following tutorial you will learn how to add [...]
Also posted in linux, web design | 8 Comments

How to Create a Streaming Flash Video Player Using Ming PHP or Ruby

By carson | Published: November 29, 2006
I mentioned in creating Flash videos using FFMpeg that you could use Ming to create your own Flash video player. I've added a patch to the ruby -ming extension for video streaming so now it is possible to create a streaming player with both PHP and Ruby using their Ming extensions. The following examples show [...]
Also posted in php, ruby | 4 Comments