Why PayPal is telling you about the DigiCert Global Root G2 Chain
If you have a PayPal account - and especially if you're selling anything and getting paid via PayPal - then you've no doubt received a strange e-mail (or ten) recently. In short, you're supposed to add the DigiCert Global Root G2 Chain to your "trusted store". Bad...
Why You Don’t Want a Green Hard Drive
These days, the fad is GREEN. Everything is "eco-this" or "green that". Of course, we're supposed to be terribly concerned about saving Mother Earth. Well, I've got news for you: Mother Earth is plenty capable of taking care of herself... Whether or not humankind...
How to Remove Java Console Add-ons from Firefox
Most likely, you have at least the Java runtime environment installed on your puter. And, if you're using Firefox, you may have some strange add-ons installed that just won't go away. With every Java update you install, yet another "Java Console" add-on may be...
Why You Need Sprites on Your Web Site
In the olden days, video games relied heavily upon sprites given the rather severe limitations of computing hardware at the time. You can use this "old" technique to reduce the bandwidth load on your server. Most major web sites use them, but you may never have even...
Linux Tips and Tricks, Part 2
More linux tricks to help you become a better command line commando!
Ghost in the Machine: Solar Flares, the Electrical Grid, and What It All Means to You
On August 3, 2010, a C3-class solar flare caused a coronal mass ejection that headed towards the Earth. The impact of the flare resulted in a G2-class geomagnetic storm that lasted almost 12 hours. The official story is that the storm caused beautiful northern lights to appear from Europe to North America. Well, that doesn’t seem so bad, does it?
Fix Slow Windows Networking Problems When VirtualBox is Installed
VirtualBox is a simple, cross-platform virtualization solution that lets you set aside a chunk of hard disk space, give it a name, and then you just tell it, “I want to install linux here”, pop in your install disc (or whatever), and VirtualBox takes care of the rest. It’s really handy! Only one problem: Sometimes when VirtualBox is installed (but not even running), your Windows networking gets REEEEALLY slow. Fortunately, there is a very quick and easy way to fix it!
How to Make Your Rails 2.3 App Work with Ruby 1.9
If you’re like me, you’ve got a Rails 2.3.x application running on Ruby 1.8.x – or perhaps Ruby Enterprise Edition. Well, that’s all fine and dandy, but Ruby 1.9.2 is about twice as fast as even REE 1.8.7. So, you’ll probably want to upgrade to the new version of Ruby. Problem is, you upgrade Ruby and then your Rails 2.3 app starts whining about character encoding problems and possibly other stuff. Nobody seems to have written a one-stop guide to upgrading your Rails app to Ruby 1.9… Until now!
Move Your Docs, Music, Pics, & Vids to a Different Drive or Folder in Windows 7
Let’s say you’ve got Windows 7, and you install a second hard drive. Perhaps you have an SSD as your primary drive, and you want to store your GB’s of MP3s, videos, and documents on your second data drive. Well, you could just copy the data into a new folder the old fashioned way. But there is a better way to move your My Documents, My Music, My Videos, My Pictures, and even your Downloads folder automagically – and Windows will still keep track of everything for you!
Scottie’s SuperDuper CSS Drop Shadow
Okay, I know this one has been done like 8 bazillion times, but this method of creating a drop shadow on elements in a web page via CSS and a 1 pixel by 1 pixel transparent PNG file actually DOES work. You see, I tried all kinds of different methods of creating drop shadows in CSS, both with and without an image file, and there was always a problem. It would render properly in certain browsers. It would render properly, but it only worked for fixed-width elements on the page. Or, maybe it would only render properly for variable width page elements. Or, the darn thing just didn’t work at all. Well, I got tired of all of that, so I decided to make my own version of the CSS drop shadow. It may not be the prettiest, but it works.
How to fix “Windows cannot connect to printer” Errors in Windows 7
Let’s say you’re running Windows 7 on a computer connected to a local network. There is a shared printer running on a different machine on the network. The drivers for the printer are installed on the remote machine, and the printer is shared. You think that you’ll just sit down at your puter, use the Add Printer feature, connect to the remote printer, the driver will be copied over to your machine automagically, and you’ll be off and running. But then you see this: Windows cannot connect to the printer. Operation could not be completed (error 0x0000007e). The solution to your problem is very simple, and is even available as a Hotfix from Microsoft that will be incorporated into Windows 7 SP1.
Hits, Unique Vists, and Page Views: Which is best?
When it comes to web sites and the amount of traffic they claim to have, what is the difference between unique visits, page views, and hits per day? Which measure is the most honest?
How to Make Rails and PHP Apps Fully UTF-8 Compliant with MySQL
Every web programmer knows that UTF-8 is where it’s at these days. Even if you are coding something for only the US market, you’re still probably going to run into names, addresses, or whatever with accented characters. You’ve probably run into the situation where you hope into phpMyAdmin and edit some table row, and what to your wondering eyes should appear, but something like this: “Voici un article français.” And yet, when you view the web page and edit the content in your app, it looks and works fine! What’s going on here?
Save Money and Brew Your Own Glass Cleaner
After my last post entitled Make Your Own Carpet Cleaner Solution, I realized that there is one other cleaning solution which never hangs around very long: glass cleaner! I don’t know about you, but I can never find a bottle of the stuff. As you may have guessed, glass cleaner is ridiculously simple and cheap to make. And so, in this post, I shall endeavor to instruct you on how you can brew your own Bling Glass Cleaner!
DIY Stain Remover that costs Pennies and works Wonders
If you happen to have pets, children, or a husband, then you most definitely will need some kind of product to clean tough carpet stains. There are many commercial products out there that claim to do the trick. After having tried many of them – from sprays to powders to foams – I was truly amazed that none of them worked that well. Here’s how you can make your own super-powerful carpet cleaner…
Adding Videos, JavaScript, and Other Goodies to Posts in WordPress MU
Some of you may recall my earlier post Adding JavaScript to WordPress Posts without a Plugin. In that post, I talked about how to add JavaScript for, say, embedding a video without having WordPress “sanitize” your code… and without any plugins! WordPress MU, the version of WordPress that allows multiple blogs to be run under one WP installation, uses a different content sanitizer. In fact, it’s so seriously anal that it blows away not only JavaScript, but all kinds of other HTML tags in your posts that the regular WP leaves untouched! Bad juju. So, here’s how to convince WordPress MU to play nice with the HTML in your posts…