Author: dan

I have a series of 6 machines that I need to occasionally deploy the same file to in exactly the same place.  I got tired of it being such a pain so I wrote this little script I call mcp.sh  It’s certainly easy enough for a shell script master to do this, but for me?…

So we got a new Mac Book Pro in the house, and it came without an installation disk.  That’s weird, but so be it.  So then I wanted to install bootcamp on the mac.  When you run through Bootcamp Assistant it gives you a chance to download the drivers you’ll need for windows if your…

I’ve been working with Google’s chart tools — specifically their Image Chart tools.  My problem — I’m using BIRT as my PDF report engine, but I have a web interface.  I want the report to look the same on the web as it does in BIRT (which has it’s own excellent native charting library).  I…

My good friend Greg mentioned that I should use bitwise operators to perform a toggle, as opposed to my earlier method of using integer math to manipulate the state.  I had not done that because the bitwise implementation is imho not comprehensible by a developer who does not have a CS degree. As an example it is not…

We were talking about a way to use an integer to indicate teh state of a series of switches.  e.g. if there were 5 switches and the first 3 were on we would say think of that as 11100, or 28 Not a bad method — you can very quickly toggle switches on and off…

The corporation was initially a construct of government to enable efficiency in business.  Now government is a construct of corporations to enable efficiency in business.

The problem with power is that… well… it’s POWERFUL.  It can be used for both good and ill, but regardless of it’s usage, the more power there is behind a command, the harder it is for the individual to resist.  That’s pretty close to the definition of power. It’s become clear that throughout history there…

I’ve been using BIRT a bit and in our project we generate alot of PDFs and have found BIRT to be the beswt product there is for that.  One thing BIRT does NOT allow you to do is to combine reports.  The below is my Servlet based solution for that which correctly renumbers the pages …

My co ex-MGH Institute of Health Professions colleague and generally good guy Calvin R. Hill is running for School Committee in Worcester MA. Calvin and I worked together for a year, and that was enough for me to form a pretty good impression of the guy. Calvin’s a person who get’s things done, but he…

Oil goes to $200/barrel — an almost certainty in the next 20 years. You don’t think that cost constraint will affect the nations that can’t afford oil like we can? Maybe they’ll be the ones who engineer their way out of this. This may end up being a cell phone type situation. Because the US…

I just installed ubuntu on my asus 900a. If your flash drive isn’t being recognized, try a different usb slot. Third time was the charm for me.  The front right slot was the one that worked.  Others have reported left only works for install, so try them ALL Sent from my Samsung Captivate(tm) on AT&T

I was thinking the other day that it would be useful to have a select option that people could also put their own options into on the fly.  Obviously you wouldn’t do this if you wanted completely normalization, but many times I have made selects with an “other” option, and then below put a text…

Need to curtail your surfing during certain time periods?  I’ve tweaked Gina Trapiani‘s original code to make it a little more tolerant.  Put a few numbers into the “surfHours” array and you’ll be able to access your “blocked” sites for one hour after each hour listed.  As an example, if surfHours = [9,13,17] you can…

I’ve been very frustrated recently with the fact that in facebook groups, if you press enter while typing a post, it submits the post.  If you just want to make a line break you have to hit shift-enter. Fortunately we don’t have to live that way any more.  I’ve made a greasemonkey script for people…

I just read this intriguing piece in the Times:  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/opinion/28rich.html?_r=3&hp What’s great about this article is that I think the means that it describes and ends we would all find desirable: a government that votes it’s conscience. We differ greatly as to the means. I’ve been thinking recently that the problem is lack of accountability.…

I’ve been an anti-flash guy for a pretty long time now but I’ve been “ok” with running flash on machines when I had flashblock installed.  Today however I ceded to Adobe’s nag and installed the latest upgrade to Flash — bringing me to Flash Player 10.1  It ran mostly in the background, and I had…

I wrote this in summer of 2008.  My gang of friends had all come down to Woods Hole, and Mark Z. had brought a sweater he had found in his apartment.  All the girls we knew were assembled, yet no  one claimed the sweater.  After the weekend, emails flew among the group trying to decide…

I’ve had some issues with pushing strings in JSON to a browser and having the browser parse them correctly.  Some browsers will take strings as argument, some want numbers — it’s a bit confusing.  To avoid all confusion, I recommend making a new date and then setting the values, rather than using the ambiguous constructors,…

Using vi as a hex editor – linux instead

I’ve been playing around with Voldemort recently for a robust enormous datastore at Esped.com.  One of the frustrating things I found in getting into it was the lack of complete existing code samples, so I thought I’d contribute one to the community. This is a bit more than simple put/get because I need versioning associated…