Cory Lievers' personal blog - Development / Tech

How the vi editor would seem if it has been made by Microsoft

cory.lievers@gmail.com (Cory Lievers) — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 09:49:43 -0500

Ha ha, lol. This is hilarious. Check out the image of what vi would look like if it was Microsoft's.
http://blogs.sun.com/marigan/entry/how_the_vi_editor_would

Two more free books...

cory.lievers@gmail.com (Cory Lievers) — Thu, 24 May 2007 05:47:53 -0500

It seems as though I'm getting lucky with free books. I just won two more from Free Software Magazine. I love this site. It's got a lot of great articles, and free books are definitely a bonus. The two I won are titled Practical Subversion (from Apress), and Pro Open Source Mail: Building an Enterprise Mail Solution (also from Apress).

I'm really looking forward to reading through these books, especially the Subversion one as the Open Source Mail one wouldn't apply to me for quite some time.

The article for this contest is here.

Thanks to Free Software Magazine for picking me to win these book, and thanks to Apress for giving them away.

What would happen if...

cory.lievers@gmail.com (Cory Lievers) — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 05:57:59 -0500

I came across this page today about some actual questions from Microsoft Interviews. I haven't read them all yet, just browsed through them. I cam across the question:

If you could gather all of the computer manufacturers in the world together into one room and then tell them one thing that they would be compelled to do, what would it be?

and wondered what would happen if my answer was: Provide an option to pre-install Linux.

Do you think I would get the job?

The Microsoft Interview Questions

Yahoo! Answers - Level 4

cory.lievers@gmail.com (Cory Lievers) — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 03:23:20 -0500

Woo hoo, congratulations to me. I've just reached Level 4 of Yahoo! Answers. You can view my profile here.

For those of you who don't know what Yahoo! Answers is:

It's the place to ask questions and get real answers from real people. Its fun and educational because you can ask questions on any topic from the serious to the not so serious. And when you know an answer, you can help others by giving answers to their questions. It's all about sharing what you know and what you want to know. So, why keep your gnawing questions and brilliant answers to yourself? Jump in and start sharing!

It's definitely a great place to go and ask questions you need answers. And if you have an expertise in a specific area (or even just know 'something' about something), help others out by submitting your own answers.

Cheers!

Hilarious hosting website - No Uptime

cory.lievers@gmail.com (Cory Lievers) — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 08:20:40 -0600

It's pretty funny to read about No Uptime hosting. I wonder how many Clients they have?

View the website, No Uptime Hosting.

Rsnapshot Web Interface

cory.lievers@gmail.com (Cory Lievers) — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 09:36:32 -0600

As you know from an earlier posting, I wrote on my experience with the backup tool rsnapshot.

Well I've been thinking that it would be nice to have a web interface to browse the backups and be able to download certain file(s). So I've started giving this a little thought, and also started a page on my website for it: Rsnapshot Web Interface.

Lievers.ca Search using Google Custom Search

cory.lievers@gmail.com (Cory Lievers) — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 09:21:37 -0600

A while back, Google released their Google Custom Search (Google Co-op). It allows you to use Google Search for a defined set of URL's.

So, this is useful for my lievers.ca domain because it allows me to search on all of my specified sub-domains, against the Google Search Index.

You may be asking, "Hey, but on your www.cory.lievers.ca website, I can see a 'Google Search' on the site, what's the difference?"

Well, the difference is that with Google Custom Search, I can tell it to search on more than one site, ie: all of my sub-domains. So search all my sub-domains from one location.

Another use for Google Custom Search is if you visit a lot of related websites, or just always need to search against a certain set of websites, you can set up a Google Custom Search against the URL's. Then you enter your search query, and voila! a Google Search is done agains those sites.

Get Started, visit the Lievers Domain Search.

Thanks.

Test your Nerd/Geek

cory.lievers@gmail.com (Cory Lievers) — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 03:18:47 -0600

Took this nerd/geek quiz. I got 72 (Mid-Rank Computer Geek). At the time of taking the test, out of all others who took the test before me, 27% scored higher than me (more geeky), 1% scored the same (same), and 72% scored lower than me (less geeky, duh!).

.

Backing up computers with rsnapshot

cory.lievers@gmail.com (Cory Lievers) — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 16:27:38 -0600

Backups are pretty important. I've lost files in the past and was pretty upset and frustrated not being able to get them back. So, I started doing some automatic backups using batch files and the Windows XP Backup Wizard. The information I chose to backup were backed up to a seperate internal hard drive, so if my C-Drive crashed, the information would be on a seperate drive. But what happens if that whole computer blows up? Or your backup hard drive goes at the same time as your C-Drive (drop your computer results in hard drive damage, surge faults, etc). Well it's nice to be able to store backups on a different computer.

There are various solutions out there including manually copying files, custom batch files, custom bash scripts, backup software, etc. Some of these may work better than others, for your backup needs. You'll need to make that call. This post talks about rsnapshot.

Continue reading "Backing up computers with rsnapshot"

I won a new Apress book !!!

cory.lievers@gmail.com (Cory Lievers) — Mon, 18 Sep 2006 04:29:36 -0500

Wow. I'm very excited. On September 13th I came across a posting that showed an article on ajax.phpmagazine.net, saying that they are giving away two copies of the book titled Beginning Google Maps Applications with PHP and AJAX: From Novice to Professional.

There was only one comment at the time, from someone who wrote a couple of google map tutorials. So I thought, what the heck, I'll enter. As you know from previous postings, I have my Google Maps page that shows my website visitors. So I thought that maybe if not too many people entered, I'd stand a chance to win.

Well 3 other people left comments, but all were "I'd like to do ...", so I thought maybe that I had actually done something, it would give me an advantage.

Well I got an email this morning to tell me I had won one, so I sent them my shipping address. Hopefully they ship to Canada.
The website also shows me and Jorg as winners.

Looking forward to receiving the book,

Thank you Ajax Magazine and PHPMagazine.net.

Google Maps Applications with PHP & AJAX

cory.lievers@gmail.com (Cory Lievers) — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 03:27:35 -0500

I came across a site talking about a new book by Apress called "Beginning Google Maps Applications with PHP and AJAX: From Novice to Professional". They are offering to give a way two of these books to people who are working on something with Google Maps and PHP (and AJAX?).

Anyways, I've talked about my Geocoding Website visitors in earlier posts, so I submitted a comment regarding this. Hopefully I can walk away with one. The url is: http://ajax.phpmagazine.net/2006/09/beginning_google_maps_applicat.html

Added more functionality to Maps

cory.lievers@gmail.com (Cory Lievers) — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 06:19:18 -0500

Sweet,

So the last posting informed that the marker information windows now works. Now there's another cool piece: when the page loads intially, you'll see a little animated gif image showing the the page is loading. When the map is done displaying, it will disappear.

Also, I've seemed to fix my previous Internet Explorer problem as I rewrote how it operates. The only thing is IE seems to take longer to load than Firefox, but hey what'cha going to do? My answer: switch to Firefox.

You can check it on on my Geocoding Website | Display Geo page.

Fixed Marker Info Windows on Maps

cory.lievers@gmail.com (Cory Lievers) — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 07:05:31 -0500

Sweet,

So prior to this posting, there was a problem on my displayGeo (Google Map of my visitors) page. The problem was when you click on a marker (icon on a location), it would always pop up the same marker text on the last drawn marker.

Well that has been fixed, so now clicking each marker will contain it's corresponding City Name, Country, Lat, Lon.
You can check it on on my Geocoding Website | Display Geo page.

{Still doesn't work in IE for some reason -- any one have any ideas ??}

How to pick an open source license

cory.lievers@gmail.com (Cory Lievers) — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 02:56:31 -0500

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Burnette/wp-trackback.php?p=130

Real Development '06

cory.lievers@gmail.com (Cory Lievers) — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 21:15:00 -0500

Today I attended a very cool event from Microsoft, called Real Development '06.

It highlighted different aspects in web development including:

Various user and web experience
Digital Identity and the up-coming infocard
Information on the Atlas framework
Web Security: including xss attacks, sql injection, user filtering, etc

If the event is coming near you soon, sign up for it. I definitely learned some stuff. Plus they gave away a free Microsoft Press book, which is always cool.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/canada/realdevelopment/resources/