Jan 30, 2012
Data Crow for Collection Cataloging
Recently I took on the task to catalog my video and music collection. This need was driven by the fact that I was purchasing duplicate movies. The criteria was simple. It had to be able to use a barcode scanner, handle movie and audio collections, more if possible and have connections to access IMDB, Amazon and others if possible and able to run on different OS’s. And lastly the cost had to be... read more
Jan 26, 2012
Installing Capistrano on Fedora 16
Recently there has been a need to deploy a package with customization to several hundred systems and we looked to use Capistrano to make the deployments. According to the site Capistrano is a developer tool for deploying web applications. It is typically installed on a workstation, and used to deploy code from your source code management (SCM) to one, or more servers. It can also be used for delivering... read more
Jan 23, 2012
Install BlueGriffon Web Editor on Fedora 16 x64
Just recently had the need to try out a new wysiwyg web editor and remember from years ago using NVU which is a simple graphical editor based on Netscape / Gecko engine. Development stop and was taken up by Kompozer which was stopped as well, but now has new life under BlueGriffon. BlueGriffon is a new WYSIWYG content editor for the World Wide Web. Powered by Gecko, the rendering engine of Firefox 4,... read more
Jan 20, 2012
Using Powershell to Parse Event Logs
Powershell is a well needed addition to Windows. For a longtime there has been Windows admins wanting a powerful and flexible scripting language similar to what Linux / Unix users have had for years, or at least I have. One of the great command line tools for Linux has been the use of commands like cat, less, more and grep as a few to parse files. Enter in Powershell for Windows. A recent need for parsing... read more
Jan 16, 2012
Using Powershell to check service and send email
Ran into an issue with services stopping for no reason and causing IIS to stop. This was happening in the middle of the night and was sporadic in nature, making it hard to find a root cause. As a band-aid I created a Powershell 2 script to check for the service, restart if not in a running state and send and email. Here is the script. # Checks for a service to be running and starts if needed. # Author: Me... read more
