Techie Mumbo Jumbo | Kimball's House Of Pain | E. Kimball Larsen

1234567890 Seconds Since The Unix Epoch

Fri, 13 Feb 2009 16:31:16 -0700

mysql> select unix_timestamp() from dual;
+------------------+
| unix_timestamp() |
+------------------+
| 1234567890 |
+------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

UITableView Hints

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 22:44:43 -0600

As someone only recently exposed to Objective-C, Cocoa, and the iPhone development environments, I have been struggling with some of the ways that Apple has decided to do things.

Today I beat my head against a UITableView for most of the day, trying to figure out how to set up the view, the…

Homegrown Client / Server Data Sharing

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 09:42:36 -0600

Recently at work I had to come up with a way to have several installations of our software share application data in near-real time. I poked around a bit looking for a simple solution, but there does not appear to be such a thing.

So I came up with my own.

I don't claim it's ingenious or even…

UIPickerView SDK Permutations

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 21:58:59 -0600

I have recently begun to learn to develop applications for the iPhone. This means I'm getting my head back into Objective-C (where it's not been for several years - ever since I stopped writing WebObjects code) and learning all the cocoa frameworks and specialized SDK for the iPhone.

For a project…

Launching Real Basic Apps in Ubuntu 8.04 on 64 bit hardware

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 13:14:50 -0600

For work I have recently needed to be able to compile RealBasic applications to run on Linux. The support for Linux from RB is decent, but requires the 32 bit versions of several libraries for the build apps to run. Specifically, I had to install the following extra packages to let things work:

…

Win32 Error Codes for LastErrorCode

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 10:00:00 -0600

I am not a windows programmer. I just play one at work.

Actually, I write apps for both windows and the mac, but I do it all on a mac using RealBasic - it will cross-compile.

Today I ran into a problem on windows with one of my projects - I was trying to read the contents of a file into memory so…

Recursively Change Line Endings

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 16:29:09 -0700

So, very rarely I need to change the line endings for a large set of files scattered across a bunch of directories. Sometimes there are few enough files that I just do it manually, but today I really wanted to do a large batch of them recursively. I wound up using this in a terminal:

cd…

RMagick Ruby Gem on OS X Leopard

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 14:56:45 -0700

As I've been putting my dev environment back together on Leopard, I've been finding all kinds of things that don't quite work right - see my earlier post on MySQL.

The latest problem I've found occurs when attempting to gem install RMagick. I get this error:

Can't install RMagick 2.2.0. Can't…

MySQL Install On OS X Leopard Fix

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 12:59:04 -0700

So, I finally took the plunge and installed Leopard on my MacBook Pro - I figured that by waiting I would avoid some of the icky problems that sometimes crop up with new OS releases. Unfortunately, I did not avoid the broken MySQL install problems that appear with Leopard.

I looked around on the…

find + rm = disaster

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 14:16:37 -0700

Some time ago I wanted to to detach a working copy of some code I have been working on for several years so I could import it into a new repository on a different server. I did something similar to this:

find -name ".svn" . | xargs rm -rf

Which did *almost* what I wanted. The problem is that if…

Microsoft Vs. Apple OS Quality?

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 22:34:44 -0600

With the latest release of Vista from Microsoft and Leopard from Apple, comparisons are inevitable. In fact, there have been dozens and dozens written by folks far more qualified to comment than I. However, I had a conversation at work the other day that gave me opportunity to pause and think.…

Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: My Dinky Review

Wed, 31 Oct 2007 00:21:08 -0600

Some Introduction

So, Leopard came out this past Friday, and there have been many, many reviews of all the spiffy new features and how they'll make you lose 10 lbs, grow your hair back (but lose your back hair), and generally just be the spiffiest thing to come out of the cupertino mother-ship ever…

Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon As A Smalltime DNS

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 00:30:34 -0600

I have several domains - kimballlarsen.com, hugegrocerysavings.com, twigglesgiggles.com, ourpioneerhistory.com - for which I host DNS. Until recently, this has all been done via my ISP's hosting services, etc. A few months ago, I decided to finally learn Bind9 and figure out how to set up DNS for…

Gutsy Gibbon Initial Setup

Fri, 26 Oct 2007 00:03:32 -0600

So, Gutsy Gibbon has arrived (It's an operating system for those of you who don't follow ubuntu - and it's a "computer thingie" for the rest of you), and I'm going through the ritual initial setup tonight. Here are my notes for all the things I do initially when setting up a fresh Ubuntu box.

Give…

Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon - Home Server Setup

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 23:43:04 -0600

So, Ubuntu Gutsy came out a few days ago, and I've got a new server that I'm going to be using at home. This server is actually an old desktop machine - used to be Christine's Windows XP box (before she saw the light and let me buy her a MacBook last year) and has mostly sat idle for many moons.

…

Recursive wget

Sun, 14 Oct 2007 00:24:37 -0600

I love wget. I've used it in the past to quickly snag the contents of entire web directories, and tonight I learned a few more tricks it can do. Namely, it can recurse down as many levels deep from the first page as you like, it can ignore the reported length of items it is retrieving, it can…

Using BackupPC Locally To External Firewire Drive

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 00:24:37 -0600

So, I recently discovered the wonderful backup tool called BackupPC (Thanks, Hans!) and have set it up to backup all the workstations at my office to a central server with a large storage capacity. However, I've only set it to backup the important work-related files from each workstation. I would…

Deploying Ruby On Rails to Feisty Using Capistrano, Apache, and Mongrel

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 00:24:37 -0600

So, I've been hacking on a new RoR application for work for the last week or so, and it's time to get a deployment environment set up so I can deploy as rapidly as I can develop. I've been reading Agile Development With Rails and whilst perusing the chapter on deployment, ran across this site …

NFS + Portmap

Fri, 16 Feb 2007 00:24:36 -0700

So, at work I just installed a new spiffy NAS from Infrant Technologies called ReadyNAS. I've been impressed with the box so far, and it is pretty neat to have 1.4 TB of storage space at my disposal. One problem I ran into was that mounting the nfs share from the ReadyNAS by an Ubuntu Dapper box…

Ruby on Rails

Tue, 11 Oct 2005 00:24:35 -0600

So, a few weeks ago I was looking for a way to escape the XML pain that is involved in writing just about any web application in Java these days. Honestly, I was beginning to feel like in trying to make Java web apps so easy to write, the increased complexity to handle all the XML was actually…

PSyncX

Mon, 11 Apr 2005 00:24:35 -0600

Ever since I got a monster drive for my home server (which, btw, powers this website) I have been looking for a good backup solution for OS X. This morning it appears I have found one: PSyncX While I have just set up a simple backup to test it, it appears that this utility will do exactly what I…

jDiskReport

Tue, 05 Apr 2005 00:24:34 -0600

Ok, this will sound like a commercial - but in fear of letting this blog become too stale to even feed to the ducks in my neighborhood,

I'm gonna publish this.

Have you ever wondered where all your hard drive space went? My laptop currently has an 80 GB drive in it, and it's about 75% full. In…