Archive | Desktop Apps
09
Mar

Geeking Out With Netbeans and PHPDoc

I’ve been playing with phpDoc and NetBeans a lot lately.  I’ve found that having well documented code using the phpDocumentor 2 format makes for a much more efficient coding environment.   For one thing, if you have NetBeans setup properly and are using PHP classes that are fully documented, writing a line of code is as [...]

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27
Sep

Using Netbeans

Chase introduced me to Netbeans a couple of months ago.   It looked cool, but as with any dev tools there is some inertia involved in switching to a new editor. I’ve been using Netbeans on my Linux dev box for about a month now.  While there are some quirks and some problematic areas with Netbeans, overall [...]

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25
Apr

Connect To Your Database With Emacs

The recent Emacs post made me think of a useful SQL trick I recently learned that I wanted to share. Emacs refers to different SQL engines as ‘products’, e.g. MySQL, SQLite, and so on. You can connect to an SQL database through Emacs but you have a call a different command based on the product. An easier [...]

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07
Jul

Ubuntu – No Audio When Playing Videos

I recently tried to play a video on Ubuntu 10.04, but got no audio because of missing a Windows Media Audio codec. My video player tried to automatically find a suitable plugin and failed. So here’s how I fixed it by hand. Step One: Update mplayer The version of mplayer that comes with Ubuntu is [...]

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22
Jun

Word 2007 Blank Pages Between Chapters

While working on a documentation project for a client we ran into a unique problem.  According to good technical writing practices, you always want chapters to start on an odd page.  This puts new chapters on the right-hand page of a bound book.  You also want to ensure that any preceding blank page is not [...]

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10
Nov

PuTTY Window Name Trick

We’re working with Amazon EC2 instances on a regular basis these days and my current preferred method of connecting to the command line is via PuTTY.  It is a fairly simple program that gets the job done (though I prefer SecureCRT for a more robust terminal app).  However, the Amazon host names are setup to [...]

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15
Dec

Microsoft .Net Framework

Cyber Sprocket and the .Net Framework Many of the Cyber Sprocket desktop applications require the Microsoft .Net Framework. Older windows computers do NOT have the .Net Framework installed. All new windows programs that access the Internet will require the .Net Framework, and thus it is a component of newer Windows operating systems. If you are [...]

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