Geek Page!

Well, just bee-bopping around tonight on my website I discovered that some of my less-travailed pages were defaced with spam links to unseemly locations. Perhaps the saving grace here is that almost nobody visits the affected pages, so let's hope the spammers didn't get any hits here.

I've grepped through the site contents looking for links, so I feel confident I've removed it all now, but anyone my apologies to anyone who stumbled upon anything offensive here (at least, anything offensive put here by someone else).

I'm on the verge of removing that old shoutbox code too, since it seems inherently susceptible to spam no matter what I filter. leave your comment (1 comment)...

So, what does a respectable *nix user do when one of the primary databases he must support and query goes from Oracle to MS SQLserver? Use a VM? Well, for some things, yes, unfortunately.

For day-to-day querying, however, I wasn't about to put myself through that nonsense. Unfortunately for me, my trusty Tora does not deal with ODBC robustly. Despite getting to to talk to the mssql server over ODBC, the results weren't usable. Never mind that it doesn't give me schema browsing, all the string columns were showing up as "null" values -- not real useful, you might say.

I managed to set up FreeTDS on my kubuntu system, along with the awesomely-named sqsh. Using these tools, I am able to log in to my mssql servers and run queries. Sqsh is quite powerful and flexible, but I wanted more than what it offered alone. So, I turned to emacs. read more and leave your comment ...

Note to self: next time I develop a financial application using postgresql, AVOID THE MONEY DATA TYPE LIKE THE PLAGUE.

Lesson learned. That is all. leave your comment ...

I've been an apple guy for as long as I can remember. It all started in early childhood with the red delicious variety, a staple of my preschool snacks and later sack lunches. As years when by, I explored golden delicious, granny smith, Jonathan, and Rome apples; finally, a few years ago, I settled on the gala variety as my old standby apple. I saw no need to switch varieties again, but recently the Fuji apple, with its snappier texture and more complex flavors, has caught my attention.

Before making the switch, though, I thought this might be a good time to check out an alternative fruit, the orange. Now, oranges aren't nearly as popular as apples, so you may not have heard of them; but these strange wonders of the fruit kingdom (hailing originally from Asia, but now grown in the tropics worldwide) have been around for quite some time and attained a small but loyal fanbase.

So, to appease my curiosity, and the imploring of a few of my orange-eating friends, I decided to take the plunge and replace my weekly supply of apples with a bag of oranges. I'd spend a week with oranges, and write about my experiences here.

Day One: A rough start...

read more and leave your comment (7 comments)...

Well I haven't done the posting I promised, because I've been working on a small project in my spare time: my first python plasmoid for KDE 4. It's a nice little dictionary plugin similar to the kdict panel plugin in KDE 3.

read more and leave your comment ...