Savannah W-ITS

As previously posted if you have a small web site (i.e. fewer than 20 pages) then manually copying your pages and uploading your images/media might be the best & simplest solution to moving to a Wordpress solution.  If you have more than pages & media files than you care to manually upload then you might [...]

Unfortunately there is no direct path (I did not find one) to migrate a Drupal 4.x site to Drupal 6.x (current version) – note that most likely you would face the same hurdles with any other CMS where you are making large version ‘jumps’.  Note that I previously explored Drupal and I am not an [...]

What are your shoe’s like?  Comfortable? How do your feet feel in a garden of needles where you are endlessly/randomly pricked?
Isn’t my ISP supposed to protect me? Hmm – yes & no.   Your ISP provides connectivity and attempts to allow the connectivity without intruding  – privacy concerns loom – how is the ISP supposed [...]

Whoops! You just ran:
rm -rf ../*
instead of:
rm -rf ./*
Now what???? Remember the THREE Bs?**
For Linux (Guis), Windows (and perhaps Mac) users when you delete a file it is essentially ‘moved’ to the trash can.  The file is not actually removed until you empty the trash. However, if you delete a file from the command line [...]

ROR (Ruby on Rails) is advertised as a data-centric development framework.  I did what I considered Data-dev back in the 1980’s using 4GLs:

you created a schema for your data (it was a bit more involved since data fields were ‘typed’)
you created views, reports, etc. for your data (just drop your fields onto screen forms, apply [...]

Binary’s Sibling Ternary
The ternary operator for many programming languages allows you to use a shorthand when making simple evaluations.  The usual sequence of conditions (and this can vary between languages, so search for ‘your_language ternary operator‘ for more information.)  Using this operator allows us to take ~6 lines of code and replace it with one [...]

Some thoughts on Automating and standardizing how you might create new scripts (or other) tools
Seasoned Unix/Linux administrators will usually have some level of experience with automating various aspects of their duties including:  backups, deployments, monitoring, code management, system config management, build management, etc.  A number of us will also have simple tools that we use [...]

Bash – Changing from a proven, ubiquitous tool to a new one – need a reason?  In this case it’s time to explore Ruby – I’m not ready to change yet but I do want to see what Ruby might bring to the table.   I’m starting with a simple Ruby script (extracted from a [...]

I previously posted about our friend Murphy – he has returned…   Stuff happens – all the time.
Seems like it was just yesterday that I purchased an external 1TB Seagate FreeAgent USB disk drive (I actually purchased the drive in February of 2009 – so I am seeing failure in ~10 months with modest use – [...]

Data migrations can be relatively simple – provided you only need to move data.  Migrating a database/codebase can be a bit more challenging.  I have clients who are still using solutions I wrote in the last century and, some of those solutions utilized Microsoft Access.
Each time a new version of Access arrives [...]