
Manually Removing Joomla Components
I’ve helped with a Joomla-based hobby site for several years. Another developer I work with added some custom-developed components that were manually added without install/uninstall scripts. All was well, but when the time eventually came that we no longer wanted these components in place, there was no obvious way to remove them from the administrative […]

Increasing VM Hard Drive Partition Size
I had an old Windows 7 VM that I upgraded to Windows 10 some time ago. Recently I needed to use it and ran out of space on the VM’s drive. It’s simple enough to use Parallels’ tools to increase the volume size, but in some circumstances this doesn’t actually work. Instead it tacks a […]

Enabling GZIP Compression on IIS 7/8.5 for use with Umbraco 7
Part of website optimization includes compressing website contents where possible. Here are some steps to get GZIP compression up and running on IIS for Umbraco.

An Example of Sony PlayStation Store Customer Service
So this happened today. I don’t blame the customer service reps, who were professional. I blame the product managers, system architects, business analysts, and lawyers behind the PlayStation Store itself. Inexcusable. They are asking for a class action lawsuit.

Gravity Forms Filter Example
RocketGenius’s Gravity Forms plugin for WordPress is arguably one of the best form builder plugins around. Support is great, licensing is simple, and the tool itself is exemplary. It’s GUI form builder is second to none, and even allows management of contact dropdowns, so notifications can be sent dynamically to the right person based on user choice […]

Modern.ie site helps with virtualized browser testing
I’ve been using VMs for browser testing since the ’90s when Connectix still owned Virtual PC. Recently, Chris Morris introduced me to Microsoft’s own Modern.ie project. It’s an effort to help developers test against IE’s rendering issues, and a big part of that comes by way of provided pre-built VMs for common host platforms. The […]

Webinar: How to Start a Junior FIRST LEGO League Team
So back at the beginning of the 2013-2014 school year, the Independence School District made a push to start Jr FLL programs outside of school. We got wind through one of our kids’ teachers, Mary Fritchie, and attended an informational meeting in September led by Bradley Drinkwater of FIRST Bots of Independence. We rounded up some […]

Heartbleed OpenSSL Issue Description and Remediation
Great article over at StackExchange.com on the recently announced Heartbleed bug in OpenSSL. The bug allows any client who can connect to your SSL server to retrieve about 64kB of memory from the server at a time. The client doesn’t need to be authenticated in any way. By repeating the attack, the client can dump different parts […]

Coda 2 Hangs on Launch with Large File Open
So you made the mistake of opening a giant text file (probably SQL) in Coda 2. The program has hung up and you have the friendly spinning Beach Ball of Unresponsiveness, and it won’t go away. So, eventually you decide to kill the program and start over. Aha, but Coda 2 is helpful and opens […]

Shadowrun 5th Edition Character Sheet PDF
By now most Shadowrun players and fans know that Catalyst Game Labs released the Shadowrun 5th Edition this past week, and are currently taking pre-orders for the printed book coming in August. My good friend Bob Iliff has created an editable character sheet form PDF for Shadowrun 5th Edition, based on the character sheet provided […]