O’Reilly: Building My MythTV Box, Part 1: Hardware
Tuesday, June 28th, 2005One of the other things I want to do:
O’Reilly: Building My MythTV Box, Part 1: Hardware
(also found via make).
Archive for the ‘HowTos’ Category
DIY Solar Power
Tuesday, June 28th, 2005Too much stuff I want to do…here’s another:
“How to make a solar power generator”
Podcast tricks
Monday, June 6th, 2005This is exactly what I was looking for. Great tips.
Update: I setup mine to do this…works like a charm. I love it.
Colorize in Perl
Thursday, May 26th, 2005In case you ever need to ‘colorize’ a log file from the command line…a guy at work (if he had a blog I’d link to it…nudge nudge) put this together:
use Term::ANSIColor;
while (<STDIN>)
{
if ($_ =~ /ERROR/) {
$color = "red";
} elsif ($_ =~ /WARN/) {
$color = "magenta";
} elsif ($_ =~ /DEBUG/) {
$color = "green";
} else {
$color = "white";
}
print color(${color});
print "$_";
}
print color("reset");
Upgrade Websphere’s Ant version
Thursday, April 21st, 2005Few months back had some issues with WebSphere 5.1.1. and ant…don’t remember the specifics now, but it had something to do with a plugin class loader leak bug. Found some posts online…followed a slightly modified path:
- Close WebSphere
- Copy C:\apache-ant-1.6.0\lib\ant.jar to C:\Program Files\IBM\WebSphere Studio\Application Developer\v5.1.1\eclipse\plugins\org.apache.ant_1.5.3
- Open WebSphere to your workspace
- Open Window->Preferences
- Select Ant->Runtime
- Check the Set Ant Home checkbox and browse to C:\apache-ant-1.6.0
- Delete the xerces-impl.jar from the jar list
- Switch to the Properties tab and add a property with the key ‘build.compiler’ and a value of ‘org.eclipse.jdt.core.JDTCompilerAdapter’.
Guide to keeping control of your Computer
Sunday, April 10th, 2005I recently helped some non-tech-savvy friends restore their computer. There were some hard drive issues (couldn’t boot…couldn’t see files when booting to diagnostic disk)…serious stuff. I took it to a friends house and slaved it to another xp install (I don’t have one at home…macs here) and, to my suprise, upon booting…before getting to the windows screen/loging in/etc, windows told me the drive was screwed up and that it would go ahead and fix it. We thought “what the hell, go ahead.” And it did. Booted up and was able to see the files on the slaved drive just fine. Swapped the drives again and was able to successfully boot. Then we put on adaware and spybot and found tons and tons of stuff: 1700 ‘critical entries’ found by adaware and 200 programs found by spybot. WOW. So, I’ve put together the following set of instructions for them:
- Install Firefox - never use any other browser unless you have to (some sites may not work on anything but IE).
- Get a Gmail account (gmail.com) - never use any other email accounts (ESPECIALLY those given to you by your ISP)
- Forward all the emails you want to keep to your new gmail account.
- Backup all the files you want to keep onto a CD.
- Re-Install windows and other software (including norton or other virus protection software). DO NOT INSTALL THE SBC SOFTWARE
- Connect to the internet
- Disable norton live protect (complains about changing system files on the next step)
- Go to Windows Update (from the start menu)
- Install all the updates and reboot (some need to be done individually…it will tell you)
- Repeat previous 3 steps until all updates are installed
- Re-Enable live-protect (if not on)
- Install Firefox browser
- Install adaware and spybot (search google for them…yes from firefox)
- Run adaware (do this regularly…at least every couple weeks)
- Run spybot (do this regularly…at least every couple weeks)
- Never use the power button to turn your computer off…tell windows to shutdown and it will turn off after making sure all is well