Archive for the ‘Programming’ Category
Thursday, February 28th, 2008 597 Views
Installing server side components on shared hosting is always a challenge. In the last few weeks as I have begun to undertake more web based consulting assignments, I have found myself facing the need for source code management as well as project management. At my old startup, we use Subversion ...
Posted in Programming, Linux, Website | No Comments »
Thursday, November 22nd, 2007 1,002 Views
This is an interesting problem that my wife had at work recently. In a VBA-based program, the Left function suddenly stopped working with an error along the lines of "type data mismatch". Being that this is a native function to VBA, my first thoughts were that it was caused by ...
Posted in Programming | No Comments »
Friday, November 9th, 2007 1,006 Views
An interesting issue has come up recently with my publishing company - one of our printing suppliers flagged incoming PDFs as being not-printable due to transparencies. After looking around for solutions, I came up with a way to resolve the issue without resorting to Acrobat (which we don't use). The solution is two fold:
1. First convert the incoming PDF to PostScript using XPDF's pdftops. This will flatten the transparencies. GhostScript's pdf2ps tool DOES NOT do that.
2. Then convert the PostScript back to PDF using GhostScript's ps2pdf tool.
Both tools are open source and free (although watch out for GhostScript's GPL license). One important point - pdftops requires a paper width and ...
Posted in Programming | 1 Comment »
Monday, July 30th, 2007 1,086 Views
About two years ago I coded a small experimental search engine for books which used Ajax and Amazon web services. Recently, I went back to the same concept and put up a new experiment - a meta search engine for book information that aggregates book data from about 60 different ...
Posted in Projects, Programming | No Comments »
Wednesday, July 25th, 2007 3,093 Views
One of the more mundane tasks that faces every publishing business like mine is data conversion. Recently, I have been involved in a major project which seeks to make available several hundred titles in print on demand format. Unfortunatly, the library that scanned these titles did not use PDF ...
Posted in Programming | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 10th, 2007 940 Views
For a while I have been working on a hobby project trying to make a meta-search engine that you can use to search multiple search engines by tag. The catch? No server side components. This search engine works client side only from the user's browser by using RSS feeds from ...
Posted in Projects, Programming | No Comments »
Wednesday, January 17th, 2007 637 Views
I have been working on putting together a small book database project for TorahTexts.org. Before jumping in and writing something, I decided to take a look at prebuilt alternatives. One such system is DabbleDB - an online, hosted, database/application engine.
Unfortunatly, after 5 minutes of playing around with it, I canceled ...
Posted in Programming | No Comments »
Tuesday, January 16th, 2007 1,700 Views
My wife's workplace is a through and through Windows shop running on Microsoft Access. As they have expanded, they have begun to bump against the inherent limits of a file-based database like Access. Currently, they are considered switching to a commercial server-based database such as MS SQL Server, but I ...
Posted in Programming | No Comments »
Thursday, August 3rd, 2006 543 Views
Following a comment on this post I hacked up an unofficial RSS feed for Kashrus Alerts. This is done via scraping this web page at Kashrut.com. The feed is here:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/KashrutDotComKosherAlerts
It contains alerts from all major agencies around the world.
Posted in Projects, Programming | No Comments »
Wednesday, June 21st, 2006 553 Views
I have been struggling with a weird problem on one of my sites that prevent that site from functioning. One of XML files that is used for this site is supposed to come in UTF-8 but unfortunatly it had some extra characters that were not encoded properly. After looking at ...
Posted in Programming | No Comments »
Friday, June 16th, 2006 541 Views
SSL is a nice feature to show off to customers - it has a nice lock icon which reassures users that they are secure. However, it comes at a price - the encryption and decryption process does take up time CPU time on both client and server, in additon to ...
Posted in Programming | No Comments »
Wednesday, April 12th, 2006 482 Views
I spent some time today doing house keeping on some old projects and following up on some old blog posts:
1. A few months ago when I added tags, I noticed that Technorati did not pick them up. This is till the case but it has gotten much worse - I ...
Posted in Programming, Spam and Email, Website | 1 Comment »
Thursday, March 23rd, 2006 530 Views
Amazon recently released their new S3 web service designed to cheaply store any kind of data. Some enterprising users have started using this for web hosting! Here is an example (and related blog post).
[NOTE: That I do not necessary agree with the "content" of the example]
Posted in Programming | No Comments »
Thursday, March 2nd, 2006 482 Views
A recent problem that I have been having is the need to constantly monitor security advisories for the software I use on this site, my personal computers and the servers at work. So far I have been doing that by reading CERT's twice-a-month Security Bulletins and SANS's twice-a-week RISK newsletters. ...
Posted in Projects, Programming | No Comments »
Thursday, February 16th, 2006 475 Views
I recently ran across a nifty project called "TiddlyWiki". One of the things that struct me as interesting features from the programming point of view is the fact that it is able to load and save itself to the user's hard drive using Javascript without any kind of server side ...
Posted in Programming | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, February 14th, 2006 659 Views
I took a little time today to add support for the following to the SingleSub project:
FeedBlitz
Google Reader
NewsIsFree
Squeet
(For those wondering, SingleSub is my little project that allows to use a single RSS subscribe button to subscribe to multiple readers)
Posted in Projects, Programming | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 7th, 2006 516 Views
Over a year after I posted an application to obtain the IP addresses of Sprint's GPS servers, I finally received that information in the form of three IP addresses. The first is an E-911 server, while the other two are regular GPS servers. Two of them came from someone who ...
Posted in Programming | No Comments »
