How to Backup is a free online mini-book explaining basic ideas about how to backup your network, backup technologies, and backup strategies to keep your systems online, and your data available.

This is a short list of links to groups that organize or try to organize programmer labor unions and other computer-based worker unions, as well as lobby organizations.

Bathroom tissue is expensive, and everyone needs to pinch their pennies when they pinch off a loaf. Cell phone calculators don't have enough precision to calculate the per-unit cost of toilet paper. They also lack parentheses to do some necessary grouping to calculate:

PRICE / ( SHEETS PER ROLL * ROLLS )

Solution is below the fold.

This is weird. The authors turn OpenOffice.org into a spreadsheet server -- and then create a front end in Dojo with Javascript, and tunnel events from the front end to the OOo spreadsheet via a Tomcat servlet.

Amazon was totally sleeping on the iPad, which many predicted. So they announced and the Kindle Development Kit.

These are links to my various online selling locations:

Craigslist
Amazon
Ebay
Kijiji
Backpages

How many times has this wheel been reinvented? According to Google searches, not enough - because I couldn't find a good one. Over the years, I've definitely build this wheel a few times, so, here goes again. This is a lot better than the stock nl2br() function.

The attached code and test files show it off, and only a description follows.

2010 is upon us, and unlike the Arthur C. Clarke sequel to 2001, wherein the world is exploring space, in the real 2010, the world is trying to find a goddamn job and avoid a huge, double-dip recession and rapid price deflation.

An Amazon press release said that they sold more Kindle books than paper books. That might be true, but, they probably included the thousands of books being sold for free, or a few dollars. There are numerous public domain books "for sale" on Kindle. I downloaded several dozen.

Here are a few Amazon Kindle tricks.

I was testing a new product called Mailarchiva, and I misunderstood the instructions. The upshot was that a mailbox full of messages was moved into Mailarchiva, and I wanted to restore them to the mailbox.

I feel lame when it comes to mobile phone hacking because I'm so far behind the state of the art, by at least five or more years.

The best ways to improve WiFi reception is through antenna positioning and using reflectors to guild the signal.

Rlib is a report writing engine that takes report specifications in an XML language. It emits reports in several formats including HTML and PDF.

Visit RLIB

I stumbled across RLIB while figuring out how to implement some MS Access report writing features in PHP. MSA users will know what writing a report is, but PHP coders probably don't, so I'll explain.

After doing some research on the subject, I was totally confused about Cisco terminal cables. These are just regular serial cables, with with all kinds of weird "cisco-y" features. The big tutorials on the web really confuse the issue by trying to cover every possible type of cable.

A couple years back, I used a technique to simplify code that iterates over an array and displays it as a table.