Here’s a mistake you only do once: delete Oracle’s flash_recovery_area thinking that you can save space.  You see, to quickly configure Oracle Backups (here is a great and brief how-to), it’s best to turn on “archivelog”, which instructs Oracle to create transaction…

If you use Google+ Hangout, you can now play board and card games during your video chat by using the Anywhere Board Games Hangout App.  Kick off ABG in a Google+ Hangout using the following button: It’s in beta and we’re…

As a side project I have been working on an HTML5 app designed to permit real-time playing of board and card games on multiple devices (PC, iPhone, Android, etc.).  This led to some interesting research about touch events and getting click events to…

Up until this point, JavaScript was something I held my nose and used to get dynamic and Ajax interactions working on my websites.  jQuery made it more tollerable with its mysterious “$” syntax and its ability to zip through the DOM…

Four years ago, a blogger named Kyle blogged about a simple but effective web script that allows most smart phones to control a MythTV setup.  Though he built his script for MythDora, it works wonderfully on MythBuntu with the following steps as root (assuming…

If you send an email to a non-existant address, most mail servers are polite and will send you your message back with a notice that it couldn’t be delivered (called a mail “bounce”).  Alas, this service can be hijacked to send spam. How?…

Last weekend (July 3rd, 2011), Washington had a tremendous thunderstorm, which led to a long power outage.  We have a number of experimental and development virtual machines in our local server farm that were impacted, but what was truly hit hard was an…