It has been a while since I posted.  Life has been pretty busy.  I had switched to Joomla and I’m not sure that helped my posting.  So, I’m giving WordPress a shot.  The install was easy.  And so far the learning curve has been pretty nice.  I haven’t had to do much referencing of the documentation to get this bugger setup. It will be a little bit before I get completely moved in.  The photo albums are getting moved to pathfinder.rsbauer.com.  The bandwidth is slower over there, but I can abuse it so much more. The “look and feel” is … Continue reading Site Refresh

Olessia was approved for her green card! 

We had the interview on Thursday and it went good.  We were in for probably about 20 minutes.  A lot of the questions where standard "what is your name?" type questions.  Only about 2 or so were a bit more personal (who did we meet?  what is your husband's birthday?).  I'm glad that's over! 

Continue reading “Green Card Application”

Rsbauer.com is back with a new look.  It has been a while since I did a redesign.  I cheated here and swiped the design work I did for Tekro.com.  The news has been ported over and you can find them by clicking News or Blog.  There's a log of static content that got bumped offline.  The TI files seemed to be pretty popular so I'll bring those back. 
Continue reading “New Look”

Its been a while since I’ve posted here.

Tekro.com had a hard drive replacement which took a bit of effort to get settled. The timing worked out to be pretty good and everything is back online and working great. Whew!

This ties into the gallery situation. In an attempt to update the gallery, I really hosed things up. It was so bad, I just installed it on Pathfinder (pathfinder.rsbauer.com) and decided to call it a day. Well, Pathfinder can’t keep up with the image processing. So all the old albums from rsbauer.com will still stay on Pathfinder (see the Photo Archive link) and new pictures will go in to the gallery on rsbauer.com (the Gallery link).

School starts next week. Calculus 2. This will be try number 2 for calculus 2. tutor + hard work + water = passing grade? Hopefully!
Continue reading “Update and Stuff”

Well, the plan was to upgrade the gallery to the semi-most recent version so I could move it over to my home machine to make some room on tekro.com. I hosed things up a bit. All the pictures did get moved to the new machine though.

Now the machine only has an Intel 233MMX processor with 256mb of RAM and an 80gb drive. Server web pages it can do, but performing image manipulation it can’t do (in a timely fashion at least). So if you’re browsing the gallery, and its really really slow, don’t worry. Just give it some time. Its working on generating the images. Once the images are generated, it’ll go a lot faster.
Continue reading “Gallery moved”

Last week I installed Subversion both at home and at work. Subversion? Subversion. Its an open source revision control application, like CVS or SourceSafe.

I figured at some time I’d be forced to use a revision control system. Hasn’t happened yet. Its weird, but I had all sorts of fun sticking things in Subversion. I persuaded it to play with Apache which isn’t overly straight forward (especially on a Windows box – its much easier on Linux).

What does it all do? Well, it allows you to manage stuff you create/edit. In theory, if there is ever a problem, you can revert back to when the problem wasn’t there. Its also handy if you have multiple people working on the same stuff (not a problem yet, but hopefully sometime in the future). Its just Good Stuff.
Continue reading “Subversion”

Tekro now has a new billing software installed. Sadly, we don’t yet have credit card processing. In theory, sometime this weekend or the beginning of the week we should be credit card enabled. In the mean time, we still accept PayPal and checks. Tekro Web hosting.
Continue reading “Tekro”

My X10 setup is rigged to control some lights and that’s about it. The important task my X10 setup has is lighting my lizard’s house. When the sun rises, his lights need to go on and when the sun sets, they need to turn off. I have a Linux box figuring out when sun rise and sun set is and turns the lights on and off accordingly. Many times the sun is up, the lights are not on. And every now and then, I’d go to bed and his lights would still be on. This had been a problem I didn’t know how to work around. I think its an interference problem. My working work around has been this:

issue X10 command

sleep 3

issue X10 command

sleep 3

issue X10 command

If there’s a way to setup for looping in a shell script, this would be ideal, but I didn’t look into it (yet).

By adding sleep, the script takes a nap for 3 seconds before trying the command again. There’s no harm done if the lights get toggled on the first command. But if they don’t, then there’s 2 more chances. So far its been working great!

Continue reading “X10 trick”

Ugh. Migrating to a new server doesn’t go very well with Gallery v2. I looked around the ‘net and didn’t find much on how to work around a couple of the errors I was having (it complained about the thumbs and not enough space or too many). Oh well. I figured it would be quicker to blow away the archive and database and build from scratch. I think I’ve got all the images back up. Now they’re a little out of order.
Continue reading “Gallery v2 hosed on server migration”

I whipped up a little document to aid those looking to jump into PHP and already have some coding experience. Here’s the link: Getting Started with PHP. Its not going to teach you how to code in PHP. What it will do is show a couple of the tricks and techniques unique to PHP. For the ultimate in PHP documentation, check out PHP.net and read through the user comments. There’s some really good stuff in there.
Continue reading “Getting started with PHP”

This will probably be my last post on rsbauer.com until its moved to its new server. I hope it goes smoothly!
Continue reading “Tekro Site Move”

It was about time I updated the about page. It was getting a little stale.

New: Our Wedding info! It’ll be a work in progress of course as we get closer to the wedding.
Continue reading “Updated: About Page, New: Wedding Page”

Someone sent me a message via the website asking to make some scripts available. I don’t enforce email address checking, but at the same time, you kinda have to supply one if you want a reply (and I like to think I’m pretty good at getting all responses answered in less than a few hours – unless I’m sleeping).

I had a request for the script to convert WAPs to Google Maps. There’s 2 pieces of the puzzle: the HTML/JavaScript page and the script to convert the summary file to XML. Now, the HTML/JavaScript page can be swiped pretty easily (right click and save as). The XML page generation is a different story. I’m looking at the code right now and its poorly documented. Plus, I’m pretty sure I’m not pulling everything available out of the summary files (like SID, and such). I’d like to have the XML file contain everything at some point.

At the moment, I’m leaning more towards setting the script up to run from the web. You upload your summary file and it converts it to XML. Then, as I update the file, everyone else will have access to the latest and greatest as well. Anyone else interested or would people prefer something different?
Continue reading “Making scripts available”

I’m too lazy to hack NetStumbler’s .ns file formats. But the summary text files are pretty nice. I’ve got a ns2xml PHP script which pulls the data out and converts it to XML. Then I have my JavaScript read the XML file and pass the data to Google maps for plotting.

WAPs I’ve found

The WAPs in red (and have a red marker) are encrypted. The ones in green are open. Click on a link to view the marker data (the map will recenter and show some additional info in a bubble). Click a marker on the map to view its data too.
Continue reading “Wardriving and Google Maps”

The news I neglected to post in a timely manner? Eh, got busy.

I helped Employ Media by writing some scripts to automate a lot of the work involved in making “.jobs” domains functional. It was a bit of a time crunch. But I like to think I helped make a little bit of internet history.

Olessia is out of the house today. She and Amy (with Amy’s kids) went off to Toledo. They’ll be spending the night and coming back tomorrow.

Me? I’m hanging out at the house. I think I glued the last of the siding that might even remotely think about coming off the house. I’ve also mowed the lawn and did some shopping (food items, as well as some computer gear). Tomorrow I may go out to Lorain to check in on an autocross (assuming I get up at an early hour).

I’m still busy learning Russian in the mornings. I need to memorize “простите за опоздание” (if typed correctly, should say “sorry I’m late”). And another one that made Olessia laugh: Елки-палки

I’ve also been busy in my DSA2 class. Programming assignment 1 is done. Got a 50 out of 50. I’ve also just completed assignment number 2. I’ll post the code as I get the assignments back. Coding in Java has me pretty motivated to try my hand at J2ME (Java for mobile gadgets). I’ll post my creations as I come up with them…
Continue reading “Kinda busy”

The article.

And quote:

“Mike Quealy, a FEMA spokesperson, explained to me that they are aware of the issue, and are currently working on a application that supports all of the most popular browsers. Quealy said that the application in question was originally an in-house tool, meant to be used by call center people. Internet Explorer was the official in-house browser, so the application was coded with IE in mind.”

How about designing a site to be cross-browser friendly (aka: base web standards) from the start?

From a consulting standpoint, who ever wrote the app will probably have to come back out to redo the IE code and get paid on top of what they got paid when they started. You really want to consult with these folks? If it was done in house, then this was short-sighted thinking on the part of those responsible for building the site.

Is it a big deal? Consider this: IE doesn’t run on Linux. IE is no longer supported on Mac. That’s now a healthy number of people your site can’t help. For an e-comm website, I’d say “who cares?” because that was the e-comm’s decision to make their site inaccessible to this market. But a government website?
Continue reading “FEMA disaster website is IE only – Whoops!”

I think its fun to be able to look back on a map and be able to identify the nifty places you’ve been and where important things happened. The old way of doing it would have been to doodle no a map and tuck it away somewhere. Or, use Google Maps to do it.

Check it out: http://www.rsbauer.com/gmap. This will get you in. You can see my map here.
Continue reading “Google Mapping”

This is pretty slick: Nora Event Locations Its Google maps embedded into the Nora website. Nifty! Its XML driven so when they change locations (which is pretty often), its a quick and easy fix up on the xml file.

Also nifty, is plotting NetStumbler data (the green markers are open WAPs and red are encrypted ones). Again, its all XML AJAX driven. I wrote a quick little PHP script to convert NetStumbler’s summary text file into XML. What is a LOT of fun is browsing the map and switching it over to hybrid view. And if you’re wondering, map roughly plots my path to work. If you know me well enough, you can probably pick out which router is my router and then identify where I live. Shh! Don’t tell anyone though.
Continue reading “Fun with Google maps”

I’ve had to grab the latest version of Gallery for Nora’s website. I found Gallery 2 made it to a beta release and decided to give it a whirl. Wow! It rocks with a ton of new features. It seems a ton easier to use too. I’ve had some negative feedback about my albums with albums approach. So I’ve imported all the albums and let most of them stand on their own (some are still grouped together like the Montreal v2 trip and Tanzania trip pictures). The Gallery also supports marking things “new” and “updated” (in theory).

The really cool thing is it supports the Nokia Server API which means I can easily upload pictures directly from my phone. Nice! You’ll find them in the mobile pics gallery (which right now has a lot of junk in it).
Continue reading “New Photo Gallery Installed”

Florida Man Charged With Stealing Wi-Fi Signal. The article doesn’t specify the WiFi setup. If the router was secured, then yeah, this guy is guilty. But if this router was wide open where anyone could connect to it, then what’s the problem? This will be interesting to watch.
Continue reading “Dude charged for stealing WiFi Signal”