Recent blog entries for brondsem

Backup Day

<!--tags backup backup-day-->This Friday is Halloween. And it's this year's backup day. At least, according to Maxell. Two years ago, they inaugurated Fall Backup Day to be the Friday before the United States' "fall back" daylight savings time change. So each year it is the Friday before the first Sunday in November. (Assuming no new legislation is passed to change DST dates)

Just yesterday I was thinking there should be a backup day, where everyone is reminded to burn some CDs/DVDs of their important files, or make sure they have an automated backup to a remote computer or external hard drive. Because it's so easy to keep putting it off and never doing it. One of my hard drives died several weeks ago, and even that painful reminder wasn't enough for me to get backups in place right away for all my other files.

So I searched for a backup day, but I didn't find much. A few random declarations of random days as backup day, and Maxell's declaration seemed to be the most prominent (even their day seems weak, nothing but a few news articles about it). But I, at least, will start celebrating it.

So during a lull in the trick-or-treaters this year, start burning a DVD. Or find some software to do automatic backups of your files to a remote location.

Syndicated 2008-10-30 02:48:26 (Updated 2008-10-30 20:24:53) from Dave Brondsema's Blog - Programming

Populate Form Fields Bookmarklet

<!--tags javascript forms-->Sometimes you need to fill in lots of form fields, but you aren't using Firefox with the Web Developer Toolbar and it's "Populate Form Fields" tool. So I wrote a javascript bookmarklet that does basically the same thing.

Drag this to your bookmarks toolbar: Populate Fields

Syndicated 2008-08-15 15:03:46 (Updated 2008-10-10 20:55:00) from Dave Brondsema's Blog - Programming

Drop-down menu without javascript

<!--tags javascript css menu -->Some time ago I was looking for a CSS-only (no javascript) cross-browser technique to make a drop-down expanding navigation menu. I found the GRC Menu that did this, but it had a lot of site-specific stuff in there. It was not something I could easily use as a starting point for my own sites.

So I hacked around with Steve's CSS and HTML and developed a minimal version. Here's the minimal version of GRC's script-free pure-css menu.

Syndicated 2008-05-19 19:17:57 from Dave Brondsema's Blog - Programming

That doesn't happen very often

On Saturday morning I woke up to people talking about string concatenation, and how many parameters some function needed.

Syndicated 2008-05-14 01:57:52 from Dave Brondsema's Blog - Programming

MS SQL matrix query

<!--tags sql microsoft mssql -->If you use Microsoft SQL and you want to do a query to turn some rows into columns, it can be tricky. I don't know what that type of query is called, I think some call it a matrix query or a cross-tab query or a pivot query. Here's how I've been able to write a pivot cross-tab matrix queries for Microsoft SQL Server including an extra variation for SQL Server 2005.

Syndicated 2008-02-07 04:09:24 from Dave Brondsema's Blog - Programming

MediaWiki software and rel=nofollow

In case any of my readers run a MediaWiki site, you should know: By default, MediaWiki is configured to use rel=nofollow on links. This means anyone who sets up a MediaWiki site, not just wikipedia and its siblings. Here's more info and how to reconfigure it. That makes me mad. They should have better defaults.

Syndicated 2008-01-09 04:10:16 from Dave Brondsema's Blog - Programming

Event notifications in linux

<!--tags knotify growl notifications bash-->Envious of slick Mac notifications via Growl, I looked around for similar systems for linux. There doesn't seem to be anything quite as nice, but KDE has a knotify subsystem that is used by KDE apps and easily scriptable. And Galago has libnotify (or is it libgalago?) a gtk-based system for notifications.

I wanted to have an easy way to get notifications when a build or test suite is done running, so I wrote a few simple scripts to use knotify to do so. See Putting KNotify to work for some docs and screenshots of what it looks like. Here's the docs and code: <h3>knotify-send</h3> <h5>docs:</h5>

Usage:
  knotify-send [TITLE] [BODY] - create a passive knotify popup

Example:
  knotify-send heya! "look at me"

<h5>code:</h5>

#!/bin/bash

# Copyright Dave Brondsema
# licensed under Apache License 2.0

# inspired by galago-project.org's notify-send

if [ "$1" == "" ]; then
    echo "Usage:"
    full=$0
    base=${full##*/}
    echo "  $base [TITLE] [BODY] - create a passive knotify popup"
    echo
    echo "Example:"
    echo "  $base heya! \"look at me\""
    exit
fi


dcop knotify default notify eventname "$1" "$2" '' '' 16 0

<h3>knotify-done</h3> <h5>docs:</h5>

Usage:
  knotify-done [COMMAND] [ARGUMENTS...] - runs command with args, and then runs knotify when done

Examples:
  knotify-done svn up
  knotify-done ./configure && make && knotify-done make install
     (only notifies for 'make install')

<h5>code:</h5>

#!/bin/bash

# Copyright Dave Brondsema
# licensed under Apache License 2.0

# inspired by http://sami.picobot.org/?p=19 and comments

if [ "$1" == "" ]; then
    echo "Usage:"
    full=$0
    base=${full##*/}
    echo "  $base [COMMAND] [ARGUMENTS...] - runs command with args, and then runs knotify when done"
    echo
    echo "Examples:"
    echo "  $base svn up"
    echo "  $base ./configure && make && $base make install"
    echo "     (only notifies for 'make install')"
    exit
fi


$@
title="Completed with exit code $?"
body=$@
dcop knotify default notify eventname "$title" "$body" '' '' 16 0

Syndicated 2007-09-14 02:17:03 from Dave Brondsema's Blog - Programming

Programmer's Day

Programmer's Day is today, the 256th day of the year. Sorry I couldn't give you guys more advance notice so you could do nice things for me ... but I just found out today.

Syndicated 2007-09-13 15:21:16 from Dave Brondsema's Blog - Programming

BarCampGrandRapid2 recap

<!--tags barcampgrandrapids2 facebook myspace yui-css -->BarCampGrandRapids2 was a lot of fun. I didn't get to engage quite as much as I'd've liked since I was one of the organizers, but it still went really fun and was good to meet lots of people and hang out with friends. I particularly enjoyed Calvin's and Kyle's presentation on YUI CSS and Design Eye for the IT Guy (lots of good resource links there). Hopefully I'll post some notes about my presentation on Facebook/Myspace (I said "spacebook" a few times when I was tired.. not during the presentation) and the need for open systems and protocols for social networks. Finally, I want to list off a few new people that I met. I don't know why, but I feel like doing it.

• Anthony Oliver (xamox) - Google Summer of Code participant, hacking Drupal; also had some interest in RDF & FOAF
• Bill Warters - from Wayne State and applying some very recent technology (yahoo pipes, grazr, simile timeline) to help faculty
• Zach Dennis - Ruby dev, currently
• Sean McMillan (reaper\umich/edu) - interested in a tool that could post to multiple blogs/social networks
• Matt Michielsen - interested in lots of things, seemed to grok what I was saying about Konfidi, PGP, DKIM, SPF, etc
• Greg Clark - bright underclassman working with Jeremy Frens on a RoR project

Syndicated 2007-07-24 01:01:47 (Updated 2007-07-24 18:55:46) from Dave Brondsema's Blog - Programming

The Future of Java

<!--tags java-->Last night I gave a presentation at the Grand Rapids Java Users' Group titled "The Future of Java". If anyone is interested, you can view the slides in PDF or OpenDocument (with some notes) format. The topics I covered were:

• Java 6
  • Swing
  • Scripting
• JRuby
• Scala
• Consumer JRE
• JavaFX
• Java 7
  • Properties
  • Closures

Syndicated 2007-06-21 04:50:10 from Dave Brondsema's Blog - Programming