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MakerBot Replicator - Tips n Tricks

Wed, 05/09/2012 - 16:50 — sgrover

I've spent the past few weeks learning a LOT about 3D printing, and the subtle nuances of the MakerBot Replicator in particular. This post offers a quick summary of the more important tips I've come across thus far.

Level your build platform

Getting Started in 3D Printing

Sun, 04/15/2012 - 18:56 — sgrover

Being involved with Protospace, our local hackerspace, I've been exposed to laser cutters and 3D printers for the past year or so. Laser cutters require some special considerations that make them somewhat unsuited for a home based office. Poison gas resulting from cutting some things tends to demotivate the staff. So, while this technology is amazing (and fun!) to play/work with, it wasn't really an option for us. 3D printing on the other hand has few such downsides.

Poor IRC Support

Mon, 03/19/2012 - 14:27 — sgrover

With Open Source software, finding the right place to ask for help can sometimes be a challenge. The traditional areas are either web forums, mailing lists, or IRC channels related to the item needing support. Over the years these areas have been a great source for me to learn what I needed. That is changing.

Vic Toews Sent Me an Email!

Wed, 02/22/2012 - 17:11 — sgrover

Today I received an email purporting to be from Vic Toews. This is clearly a response to the public outcry over bill C-30 currently being considered by the government. The bill is titled the "Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act" and fails to mention the term "child" or "predator" even once. This is a very bad bill that grants very broad Orwellian surveillance capabilities to the government and anyone the government designates.

Upgrading a PostgreSQL Database Cluster

Wed, 02/15/2012 - 13:35 — sgrover

While it rarely happens, sometimes your SQL statements for building a database (or database item) stops working due to a version difference on your server(s). In my case, we were working on a development server which is "up to date" with the latest version of PostgreSQL (version 9.1 at the moment). The SQL code to create our database works fine here. However our staging server is using an older version of Ubuntu, and therefore an older version of PostgreSQL - 9.0 to be exact.

Batch Scanning of Documents

Sun, 02/05/2012 - 04:25 — sgrover

It's tax season once again. Usually, I bundle up my paperwork, classify and sort it, then ship it off the my accountant to work on. In the past I've run into issues where I would need to look up something that had been passed to the accountant. So this year I decided I want to do things a little different. Instead of just blindly handing things over, I want to scan every document and file the resulting image in a directory structure that mirrors the file cabinet.

Zend Framework - Session Madness

Thu, 02/02/2012 - 12:38 — sgrover

Working with sessions in Zend Framework is both easy and hard at the same time. Easy because ZF provides Zend_Session for working with sessions. Hard because you have to understand the underlying PHP session framework AND the quirks and methods that ZF adds to sessions.

UPDATED: My first approach at this seemed to work, but ended up failing. The post has been revised with the approach we have proven to ourselves works properly.

Zend Framework - The Master Application.ini file

Wed, 02/01/2012 - 16:11 — sgrover

Came across a great Zend Framework link today. Florian Eibeck has posted an application.ini file on GitHub that contains ALL the possible resource settings, and other possible options. I often have to go look up the resource options when building an application.ini file. So this is a good reference resource for me.

Untangled Internet connection

Sat, 01/28/2012 - 02:20 — sgrover

I've been meaning to update my firewall to the Untangle Multi-functional Firewall Software system. I finally got around to it tonight. In the process I've noticed a few quirks and felt they should be documented.

Installation
First, visit the Download page and grab the ISO.

I tried to set up the ISO onto a bootable USB stick, but this failed. In the end I had to dust off the old spool of blank CD media, and fire up the CD burner for the first time in more than a year.

jQuery Combo Boxes

Thu, 12/08/2011 - 18:24 — sgrover

With web applications, I find that I often need to create a drop down list that contains hundreds or maybe even thousands of possible options. And then I often need to have many rows that contain the same drop down list, resulting in very large amounts of page size (which means slower page loads) going to just populating the list. I've tried using an autocomplete type box in their place with some success, but users don't like them.

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