Monthly Archives: February 2006

Migrating from Outlook to iCal

Part of my switch from Windows to OSX involved figuring out how to get my Outlook Calendar data from Windows/Outlook to MacOSX/iCal. I was really dreading having to manually reenter the whole thing. Thanks to Norm Jones and Mike Baas … Continue reading

Posted in Desktop | 4 Comments

MacBook Pro first impressions and why I switched

I just received my MacBook Pro on Friday. For me this is an even bigger switch since I’m making the switch from Windows to OSX as my primary work desktop. Over the years I’ve alternated between Linux and Windows and … Continue reading

Posted in Desktop, Software Engineering | 48 Comments

Foxmarks Firefox bookmark synchronization

I use a slew of machines so keeping my bookmarks and files synchronized between them has always been a priority. I’ve had the file synchronization issue under control for a while now by putting my documents and such into subversion … Continue reading

Posted in Desktop, Web | 2 Comments

Captcha, or is it capfcha, no maybe it’s Gopfcho, dammit!

You’re trying to post a comment on a blog or sign-up for an online service and you have to respond to a captcha (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) to authenticate that you are indeed … Continue reading

Posted in Web | Comments Off on Captcha, or is it capfcha, no maybe it’s Gopfcho, dammit!

Deconstructing Earl and Yuri

Let’s start with the difference between URL, URI, and URN because there is a lot of confusion around these terms, and rightfully so. The W3C had to issue a recommendation after URI and URL started being used interchangeably in RFC’s. … Continue reading

Posted in Web | 1 Comment

Spellchecking belongs in the browser, not on the website

With all of the different sites, forums, blogs, etc… that use textareas for writing on the web, it’s unrealistic to expect them all to have a good spellchecker. Even sites that do have spellcheckers have very different levels of quality. … Continue reading

Posted in Desktop, Web | 7 Comments

The top 5 most common XHTML mistakes

When I first started writing XHTML pages about a year ago I thought that all there was to it was closing every tag XML style. Oh how wrong I was! I’ve since learned to W3C validate as I go so … Continue reading

Posted in Software Engineering, Web | 8 Comments

Valentines day geek love song

My friend and copious blogger Ross pointed me to this hilarious geek love song. It will resonate with anyone who’s had trouble giving their significant other attention when they are too wrapped up in a coding session or video game. … Continue reading

Posted in Humor | 1 Comment

Nofollow hurts bloggers more than spammers

Nofollow really took off in the blogging community as a means to stop comment spammers and I think at this point it’s safe to say that it’s had absolutely no effect on that front. What’s worse is that it’s the … Continue reading

Posted in Search Engine Optimization, Web | 9 Comments

Load balancing across MySQL servers using JDBC

In our production environment at GreatSchools we have 3 production MySQL database servers: 1 read-write master and 2 read-only slaves. In moving our site from Perl to Java we need to load balance read-only connections across the read-only slave servers … Continue reading

Posted in Database, Java | 9 Comments