I code, therefore I am... a software engineer.

Tutorials

My Entire Ebook Library Online

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Oh… you didn’t think that title meant I was providing my entire ebook library to the public, did you? Sorry. Thar be no pirates here, maties. This is more of a tutorial on how I make my ebook library available to me. Onward, hoe!

I love using Calibre to maintain my ebook collection. If you have not heard of it and would like more control over your ebooks, then you should take a look. Calibre also has a built in server that you can access via a web browser. This allows you to browse your ebook collection and download them if you like. This is a really neat feature, except that the software has to be running in order to access it.

What I really want is to be able to publish this library and be able to access it from anywhere without any dependence on my computer and the Calibre software running.

This is my solution.

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Listing IMAP Mailboxes with Python

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I’ve been working on some Python scripts recently to manage my IMAP mailboxes and the information I found on the internet was fairly good, but lacked a completeness that my newbie Python skills required. So, I figured I’d post a complete example to list mailboxes (folders) for your IMAP account. This was developed using Python …

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Windows Vista crcdisk.sys – System Won’t Boot

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I recently had a friend call me in need of computer repair assistance. I’ll save you the many hours of troubleshooting and simply list the fix here.

The Dreaded crcdisk.sys

I found this symptom of the problem by booting into Safe Mode and watching the drivers load. I noticed that it always hung for a long time on the crcdisk.sys file. Well, if you perform a search on Google for “windows vista crcdisk.sys” you will find a plethora of woes from computer users desperately trying to regain the functionality of their PC. There are also a plethora of fixes, advice and this worked for me posts. I tried many of these to no avail.

The Road To Recovery

The laptop I was working on was a Toshiba laptop and it had a system restore disk. Great! Sort of. Restoring the system to factory condition from the disk (after the owner had backed up their data of course) resulted in a system that was broken and still had the problem listed above. Hmmm.

Another operating system perhaps? I installed Windows XP from scratch. Worked great. I installed Windows Vista SP2 from scratch (another disk). Worked great. Re-tried the system restore from Toshiba. No good.

At this point I figured I was just going to install Vista from scratch. So I reinstalled Vista and downloaded the Toshiba drivers from their website. One by one I started installing the drivers. Until I got to the driver for a flash media card reader (front of laptop). Bam! It froze up during the install. So I rolled that change back using Windows System Restore and then continued with all of the other drivers. No problems. I tried the flash media driver one more time just to be sure, and sure enough it failed again. That’s good! Predictability is key in diagnosing computer problems.

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Dump A MySQL Database To YAML Using PHP

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The Problem

I was recently working on a project that is built on WordPress / BuddyPress. I built up some content using the CMS features of WordPress in my development server and then I transfered the WordPress content to a beta server using the export/import functionality. That kind of stinks having to do that every time I want to push updates to my beta server. So I looked into using Doctrine to generate data fixtures which I could repeatedly run against the different database. Doctrine supports YAML files, which are extremely easy to edit by hand, so it seemed like a good idea.

So what’s the problem? Well, I didn’t currently have any of my data in YAML files. I didn’t want to had edit them or do some sort of copy and paste madness. So, I wrote a script in PHP to dump my data into a YAML file.

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Modify PHP CLI Include Path Dynamically

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I was working with an application platform that I had just downloaded today. I just wanted to check it out and play with it a bit. In the application framework was an executable script that provided some command line utility. I fired up the script and received an error like “PHP Fatal error: require_once(): Failed opening required…”. Of course non of the files from the downloaded archived were in the include path for my system, but I didn’t want to just go adding it to my php.ini file just to play around with it short term. What to do.

Command Line Options

First I wanted to see if there was a command line option that I could pass to PHP to tell it what include_path to use for just this one execution. If you execute the following you’ll see the usage:
php --help
There is no include_path command line option, but there is the -d foo[=bar] option which allows us to modify any of the INI entries by key/value.

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Manage Video Clips in iPhoto 6

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I was searching the internets this past weekend in search of a simple solution for managing and organizing my video clips on my Mac. I have a somewhat dated iMac with OS X version 10.4 and I don’t have the latest iLife versions. My current version of iPhoto is version 6. I’ve imported short video …

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