Helpful Bash Aliases
01/08/2009
Tips and Tricks
Essential Linux Commands
07/29/2008
Getting started on Linux can be challenging. Largely because the first time user won’t have any idea how to track down potential problems. The following Linux commands are essential to get additional information about your system when something goes wrong. Machine info sudo lshw -html > hardware.html – Creates an HTML page showing what hardware Read More
Change the NetBeans Default JDK
03/04/2008
A client sent me some code today to update. He was using the NetBeans, so I downloaded the IDE and fired it up to open the project he’d sent me. Unfortunately, the project wouldn’t compile because he’d written the code in Java 6 while NetBeans was using Java 5. I couldn’t find a NetBeans menu Read More
Intro to URL Rewriting with Apache’s .htaccess
02/28/2008
I have created an .htaccess file to do URL rewriting for every site I’ve ever created. If you’re not familiar with URL rewriting, it is used to modify a URL or redirect the user before the requested resource is fetched. One of its major uses is to make URLs human readable. That means your users Read More
Suppressing Compile Warnings with Java Annotations
02/23/2008
If you’ve used Java 1.5 Generics much then you’re probably familiar with the following compile warning: “Type safety: The expression of type List needs unchecked conversion to conform to List<String>” or similar. It turns out there’s a rather simple solution with annotations to ignore this problem: @SuppressWarnings(“unchecked”) A couple other possible uses of the annotation Read More
Adding Links for Navigation to the WordPress Pages List
02/18/2008
The category titled “Pages” on the right-hand side of this blog is an area where WordPress will allow a user to create wiki pages. However, I wanted to include some navigational links in that area as well, which isn’t immediately available through the WordPress admin screens. The solution I found was to create a new Read More
hCard Microformat Example
02/13/2008
What exactly is an hCard? It’s a format which specifies that some information on a web page is an online business card. The address for Lumidant in the page footer is an hCard. This means when someone with the Operator Firefox extension visits this page they will have the opportunity to do a one-click import Read More
Screenshots of Scrolling Web Pages
02/11/2008
Have you ever wanted to take a screenshot of a web page that won’t fit on a single page? I wanted to do that for a client today and found a handy utility that will do it for you. TechSmith’s SnagIt makes the process far easier that taking multiple screenshots and stitching the panorama together Read More
Opening Photoshop .psd Files without Photoshop
02/07/2008
A client sent me a Photoshop .psd file today containing a mock-up of a site he’s interested in having me design. Unfortunately, at the time I received the email, I was on a computer which did not have Photoshop installed, so I had no way to read or view the file. I downloaded GIMP (GNU Read More