Codedrop™ Weblog

Like most people I have accumulated a mass of old technological devices over the years. VHS tapes and old 8mm camcorders have pretty much been obsoleted with the digital age. I recently embarked on a mission to clean house of my old toys but found it a bit of a challenge to convert my old [...]

I had the painful experience of recently having to update some windows .bat scripts with some new functionality…. I’ve pleasantly re-affirmed why I DON’T WORK ON A WINDOWS PLATFORM!… In any event, for any of you poor suckers that do and need access to datetime components within a batch, here’s an ugly solution… If you [...]

Well after sitting on my install disks for a few months I finally figured I better upgrade my primary MacBook Pro. As expected, my rails projects and several other things did not function…. Rmagick and MySql were borked as well.. After spending several nights reinstalling Xcode, updating my macports, trying to compile from src to [...]

Setting up trac on dreamhost isn’t a very well documented process.  The one-click install does setup a project, but your left with bare bones install and no help on getting the initial admin account created.  I found the dreamy-trac installation script worked well.  Beyond this and the basic config changes you have to do I [...]

Here’s a nice use of linux find to locate all ssl certificate files on a filesystem stored in directories name /certificates that excludes pesky .svn results: find . -path “*/certificates/*” -not \( -name .svn -prune \) I recently used this technique for pulling all certificates that were scatterred throughout a svn repository. Taking this output [...]

Running the TIBCO stack on a RHEL 4.7 environment I recently hit a problem where uploading a new .ear file through the Adminstrator console would error and render a blank page.  Some digging into the logs yielded an error when trying to write to a temporary folder that was under /tmp.  Restarting the entire system [...]

Looking for a good tool for testing SOAP web services?…soapUI to the rescue! What exactly is soapUI?soapUI is the leading desktop application for inspecting, invoking, monitoring, simulating/mocking and functional/load/compliance/surveillance testing of REST/WADL and SOAP/WSDL-based Web Services over HTTP. There are plugins Eclipse, IntelliJ, NetBeans and Maven.   I’ve tried the plugin using IntelliJ 8.1.1 and it [...]

After recently purchasing a new Sony Hybrid Plus (HDR-UX10/UX20) video camera I found myself spending alot of time trying to figure out how to pull the video files off the camera and play them back on my Mac or Linux computers. M2TS files are used primarily with Sony hardware. Camcorders make use of M2TS in [...]

I recently purchased a blackberry and was looking for a good way to syncronize my google calendar to both my macbook pro’s ICAL app as well as my blackberry.  The first app I found called Spanning Sync seems very promising. Although its not free a never ending license only costs $65 bucks so it might [...]

Well its been a long lull since I’ve blogged.. so time to get back to business! I’m currently attending a course about “Practical Product Management” put on by the Pragmatic Marketing folks. So far I’ve been very impressed with the content and delivery. Its definately a course geared towards product managers however there is a [...]