Category Archives: Technology

Programming, software, hardware, and electronics.

Enabling Wake-On-LAN on a Toshiba Satellite A505

This post describes how I fixed my Wake-On-LAN problem using the powercfg tool. My Toshiba Satellite A505-S6986 wouldn’t respond to magic packets sent over the network. Before using powercfg, I first checked the following: Wake-On-LAN was enabled in the BIOS. … Continue reading

Posted in Technology, Windows | 1 Comment

Job Demand: Java, C#, C++, and Windows Compared

As a long-time Windows/C++ developer, I’m curious to know what technologies are in demand. I’ve personally used Dice.com almost exclusively in the past, but they don’t provide a good interface for viewing job trends. Indeed.com is an aggregating website which … Continue reading

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iTunes COM SDK for Windows and Encrypted File System

The “iTunes COM SDK for Windows” archive from the Apple Developer Center contains files which are marked as encrypted. Shortly after extracting the files to my libraries folder, I was surprised to receive a popup dialog from Windows 7, “Encrypting … Continue reading

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Where is the iTunes SDK?

The Apple iTunes SDK (“iTunes COM SDK for Windows”) is astonishingly difficult to find. It can be found on the

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Domain Registrars as Recommended by Hacker News

If you’re looking for domain registration/DNS reviews, you probably know how hard it is to find pages that aren’t just poorly concealed spam or astroturfing ‘affiliates’. While for a registration option better than GoDaddy, I found a bunch of suggestions … Continue reading

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id3v2: Command Line MP3 Tag Editor Compiled for Cygwin

id3v2 is a powerful command line tool for editing MP3 ID3 tags.  Getting it to compile on Windows under Cygwin, though, took a bit of effort. For the convenience of others, here is id3v2 0.1.12 compiled under Cygwin.  It depends … Continue reading

Posted in Cygwin, Technology, Windows | 2 Comments

Cushion Treemaps

Today, I learned that the technique used to create visualizations like those used in WinDirStat and KDirStat is called a cushion treemap. This page has examples of treemaps used in a variety of software, and links to treemap algorithms in … Continue reading

Posted in Algorithms, Technology | Leave a comment

Ubuntu: Keyboard Reverts to German After Reboot

Every time I rebooted or logged out of my Ubuntu virtual machine, my keyboard layout would switch to “Germany Eliminate dead keys” (“Deu”). Removing the offending layout from the keyboard manager seemed to work, but the problem would reappear the … Continue reading

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db46 Checksum Error During MacPorts Upgrade

Problem When upgrading my MacPorts installation, using sudo port upgrade outdated, I ran into the following error: —> Verifying checksum(s) for db46 Error: Checksum (md5) mismatch for patch.4.6.21.1 Error: Checksum (md5) mismatch for patch.4.6.21.2 Error: Checksum (md5) mismatch for patch.4.6.21.3 … Continue reading

Posted in OS X, Technology | 1 Comment

Mac OS + MySQL-python-1.2.3: ImportError | Library not loaded | libmysqlclient.16.dylib

Attempting to get Python communicating with MySQL via MySQLdb on OS X resulted in the following error when I tried to import MySQLdb: Traceback (most recent call last): File “./dbtest.py”, line 3, in import MySQLdb File “build/bdist.macosx-10.6-universal/egg/MySQLdb/__init__.py”, line 19, in … Continue reading

Posted in Technology | 7 Comments