Note: this post is another technical one, so if you are a member of my immediate family, you probably won’t find it of much interest.  If “ports” make you think of boats (rather than the numbers 80 and 22), then why don’t you mosey on over to my christmas photos?

I frequently have trouble communicating between systems which are separated by different private LANs. This often happens when you have your computer on a home wireless network which is separated from the rest of the internet via a router and firewall.  Fortunately, SSH tunnels can be used to link these machines together, provided you know which ports need to be interfaced and you have a common server which both machines can reach. Here is how. Read more »

I’ve been trying out CakePHP, a framework for creating DB driven PHP based websites using the MVC design pattern.

Warning: In case the above sentence didn’t make this clear, this post is largely technical gibberish. If that’s not your thing, then you can move along and look at the pretty pictures from a hiking trip up Mt. Monadnock from back in September.

My feelings with CakePHP so far are mixed. As with many open source projects, the documentation for getting started is a little rough.  To help with that, here is the list of resources I’ve found most useful so far.

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Sorry this is not a very exciting post, but it will probably be useful for somebody…

For some reason the people at Apple think that the Home and End keys should scroll you to the top or bottom of a document rather than the start or end of a line. After searching far and wide, I have finally found how to get back what I consider the normal functionality in a bunch of applications I regularly use: the terminal, Firefox, Emacs, and Eclipse. Read more »

I recently got a shiny new Macbook from my advisor. While I’ve briefly used a Mac a few times in the past, this is the first time that I’ve ever really worked on one. I can appreciate that it is a very attractive laptop, but I’m less convinced that this machine is supposed to provide the ultimate user friendly experience, particularly for users who like flexibility in how they work on their system. I make an effort not to complain about things here since that is what 90% of blogs are, but unfortunately I need to relax that rule for this post… Read more »

We’ve had a very snowy winter this year in Massachusetts. This animated image shows the view from my bedroom window looking out down our driveway. The pictures were taken sporadically since we had a big snow in early December. Click the picture for a full version (a large 2MB file).

Since I’m sure to forget how I made this, here is what I did using the Imagemagick program:

• convert -delay 100 -loop 0 IMG*.jpg output.gif —– 1 second delay between fames, loops forever, uses all files like IMG_XXX.jpg to make the image
• convert output.gif -resize 20% small.gif —– resizes the image to 20%