On the heels of my post yesterday, I want to share a strategy I’ve recently started using to manage third party dependencies with Subversion. In my code, I rely on many packages like jQuery, Dojo and FCKEditor. It’s easy to fall behind as they release new versions, especially when you have to overlay [...]

I searched like crazy and couldn’t find this information very easily anywhere so here’s the documentation. Many subversion clients, like TortoiseSVN, look for bugtraq properties in your repository. When it sees these properties, in the case of TortoiseSVN, it adds a new box to the UI when you’re committing code changes that allows [...]

Based on my geocoded zip code database research, I wound up purchasing the ZipList Can-USA GeoCode database. Here’s what I did to get their 848,000-record CSV file into a PostgreSQL database table. First, create a table to hold the data:
CREATE TABLE tblLookupZipCode (
vchCity varchar(33) DEFAULT ” NOT NULL
,booDST boolean DEFAULT false NOT [...]

If you want to search by zip code, provide distance-from calculations or verify the city and state when someone enters a zip code, you’ll need a zip code database.
For MotorsportReg.com, I originally used a free but outdated USA zip code database with latitude and longitude. I know it’s outdated because my application sends me [...]

Need passport photos? Need a lot of passport photos? The going rate is between $5-10USD for a couple of 2″x2″ photos. For my recent trip, I needed around 20 of these pictures for visa and permit applications and I’m a cheapskate. Read on to see how you can make your passport [...]

Goal: have a single master source of email, contacts and calendar data accessible from any number of devices including desktop, laptop, internet cafe, and mobile device without using Outlook.
My Software:

Mozilla Thunderbird + Lightning calendaring extension plus:

Lightning Toggler - shows/hides the Lightning month/task options in the folder pane so you can switch between calendaring and email [...]

When I started my consulting firm years ago, we used a lot of Sun hardware. All Sun boxes provide dedicated console access through a serial port (or an RJ45 version of one) allowing you to remotely admin or plug your laptop in without needing a graphics card, monitor and keyboard. PC-based Un*x also [...]

We have a web-based IMAP client running in a subdirectory on our mail server and I wanted to force all usage to be protected by SSL. Google turned up a lot of hits but none of them worked out of the box. Here’s the mod_rewrite snippet which is inside of a <VirtualHost> block:
[...]

I use Thunderbird as my email client and have been converting my accounts from POP3 to IMAP to access my mail from multiple devices (Laptop, Internet Cafe, Phone, etc).
Our fantastic anti-spam solution, DSPAM, occasionally misses a message. With a POP3 account I would forward it to a special address on our server configured to reclassify [...]

In preparation for my trip, I did pretty extensive research on computer hardware to find what I was going to haul around with me to stay connected.
I couldn’t find this information elsewhere so I’m posting it for posterity. It’s a basic comparison of how the IBM X-series notebooks stack up against each other and [...]