Author Archives: Todd Huss

Migrating from Outlook to iCal

Posted on February 27, 2006 by Todd Huss

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

Posted on February 26, 2006 by Todd Huss

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

Posted on February 23, 2006 by Todd Huss

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!

Posted on February 22, 2006 by Todd Huss

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

Deconstructing Earl and Yuri

Posted on February 19, 2006 by Todd Huss

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

Posted on February 17, 2006 by Todd Huss

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

Posted on February 8, 2006 by Todd Huss

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

Posted on February 7, 2006 by Todd Huss

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

Posted on February 3, 2006 by Todd Huss

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

Posted on February 1, 2006 by Todd Huss

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