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Archive for the ‘Programming’ Category

Much Ado about DabbleDB

Wednesday, January 17th, 2007

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 ...

Using PostgreSQL on Windows with ADO and VB

Tuesday, January 16th, 2007

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 ...

RSS Feed for Kashrus Alerts

Thursday, August 3rd, 2006

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.

Fixing Malformed UTF-8 via Regex

Wednesday, June 21st, 2006

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 ...

Appropriate Uses of SSL in Web Applications

Friday, June 16th, 2006

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 ...

Pre-Holiday Housekeeping

Wednesday, April 12th, 2006

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 ...

Publishing web pages on Amazon’s S3 service

Thursday, March 23rd, 2006

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]

Tracking security advisories for specific products via RSS

Thursday, March 2nd, 2006

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. ...

Saving and Loading Files from Web Pages via AJAX

Thursday, February 16th, 2006

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 ...

Added more readers to SingleSub

Tuesday, February 14th, 2006

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)