the reality tunnel

High on my list of neglected tech. projects is the Testament books to prisoners database web application.  This is the database program that projects like the Midwest Pages to Prisoners Project use to track packages sent and returned and books requested in the hopes avoiding delays in delivering books to incarcerated people and to provide [...]

Often, I find myself needing to do string mangling in spreadsheets. For instance, in an Excel dump of an MS Access database, the names of institutions were sometimes written as “Foo, University of” or “Foo U”. I wanted these to be formatted as “University of Foo” and “Foo University” respectively. I may be misinformed but [...]

I found out last night that I had forgotten to turn off new blog registration on my Wordpress Mu instance and that over 500 spammers had created new blogs on my site.  The admin interface allows you to bulk delete blogs but requires that you check the checkbox next to each blog to select it [...]

I finished wiring up my hacked USB game controller and made an updated version of my HID SooperLooper Controller PureData patch.  It might be a good reference for working with HID and OSC in PureData.

I’m trying to use Drupal’s webform module to make a subscription form to a Mailman mailing list.  Tracking thoughts and problems here.
I like webform because it stores form responses which might be useful.
Webform also lets you send e-mail on form submission and specify the sender/subject.  I was going to use this to send an e-mail [...]

My parents and brother use Embarq DSL and they just got a used Wireless router. Like most folks, they either had the DSL set up for them, or did the initial configuration without understanding or remembering what they did, so I’m writing this as a reference for them, for other family tech support people [...]

Let’s jut say you’re migrating content from a static site to a Drupal-based site.  Let’s say that you don’t want to migrate the content all at once and want to roll out the new Drupal-based site ASAP and migrate content as you’re able to.  One thing that you could do is to make your old [...]

ghing@silvertongue:~/.mozilla/firefox/imtysl65.default/Cache$ ls -lh `find . -size +1M | file -f – | grep Flash | awk -F ‘:’ ‘{ printf “%s “, $1; }’`

Update: Photos of my planner! Mine is on the left, next to a moleskin to give you an idea of the relative size.  Below is what each day looks like.

I use Sandy for most of my calendaring, but don’t have a PDA or mobile phone with a convenient calendar app (and can’t afford one).  So, [...]

I’ve been playing around with Drupal for work and wanted to use mod_auth_kerb to authenticate Drupal users. The Webserver Auth module seemed helpful, but only worked in Drupal 4. I got the module working with Drupal 5.5 running on Apache 2.2.3 using mod_auth_kerb 5.1.
Link to my patch to make webserver_auth-4.7.x-1.x-dev work with [...]