I’ve been using the web-based version of Evernote in earnest ever since Google announced their intention to abandon Notebook. It’s nice overall but has some quirks that I do not like. The upload quota for one. The fact that I have to login all the time. Also the pop-up upgrade ads. And I don’t like [...]

So I thought I was losing my mind when a simple LEFT JOIN on a new table was taking forever to complete: SELECT email FROM a LEFT JOIN b ON b.email=a.email WHERE b.email is null That’s about the simplest LEFT JOIN you can write to get all rows in a that are not in b. [...]

I love how the word hacker is slowly acquiring connotations of the word artist. Creating art with computers isn’t really new (depending on your definition of art), but computers are definitely being associated with art more and more. A Wikipedia entry for Hacker Artist was created in 2006. The image above is a page from [...]

The new web-based AWS Management Console is a fantastic tool for managing your EC2 instances, images, EBS volumes and more. Amazon did a super job on this. I have to keep reminding myself that Amazon is a book store.

I’ve stopped using Google Notebook twice now. The first time, I took all of my notes offline for privacy reasons and stuffed them into a desktop application. That worked great and I still do that for a lot of my notes but I’ve found there is a class of note taking that is better suited [...]

Just signed up for the beta of Ubuntu Server Edition for EC2 being released by Canonical. The servers I wrote about deploying recently were Ubuntu servers built using the images from Alestic.com. Bighugelabs.com is running on Ubuntu Server Edition as well (on a physical server). It’ll be nice to get “official” images directly from the [...]

In your /etc/vsftpd.conf add: pasv_min_port=10000 pasv_max_port=10024 pasv_address=1.2.3.4 (Where 1.2.3.4 is your external public IP address.) Then: ec2-authorize default -p 20-21 ec2-authorize default -p 10000-10024 and restart vsftpd. What this does is configure vsftpd to use ports 10000-10024 for passive data transfers. Then ec2-authorize opens ports 20-21 and 10000-10024 for active and passive connections. I was [...]

DBDesigner 4 “DBDesigner 4 is a visual database design system that integrates database design, modeling, creation and maintenance into a single, seamless environment.” Looks very robust. One of the few tools that supports reverse engineering. MySQL Workbench “MySQL Workbench is a cross-platform, visual database design tool developed by MySQL. It is the highly anticipated successor [...]

Last November, after around 25 years of computing, finally, I setup a reliable, automatic backup system for all of my important files, documents, photos, and music. And today I needed it (timing, eh?). A bunch of important files took collateral damage from a program I was writing. And I almost panicked. But then the backup [...]

Last week I asked for some help finding a new note taking application. I was becoming frustrated with BasKet Note Pads because, despite all of its great features, it would intermittently delete notes when I moved them (obviously, unacceptable). Otherwise, BasKet is a very good application for general note taking if you like the outline [...]