Author: Robert Buccigrossi
March 26, 2008
Creating an RSS feed From an iCalendar Zimbra Stream
At TCG, we have moved to using Zimbra for company-wide collaboration and are rather pleased with its mail and calendar capabilities. Within the system we created an event calendar to hold vacations or company events, and I thought that an RSS…
March 2, 2008
Simple Date Validation and Year Completion in JavaScript
Dates in Web forms drive me crazy! On some sites, you must enter a date in a very particular
format. On other sites, you must have 4
digit years, but 2 digit years on other sites. For this reason, we have decided to…
February 5, 2008
Write Permission Problems with Apache? Check for SELinux…
While trying to install MediaWiki on my CentOS 4.5 box, PHP could not write the Wiki configuration file. So, I conducted the standard checklist:
Figure out what user and group Apache was using (apache/apache),
Ensure that the path to the configuration…
January 29, 2008
Choosing Between Being Hacked and Accidentally Breaking Services
As is good practice, on internal mission critical systems that are accessible from the Web, we run automatic security patching utilities (like yum and Microsoft Update). For example, we are currently running (and enjoying) Zimbra 4.5.10 OSS as our mail…
February 28, 2007
Dovecot Invalid Messageset Error and Solution
Though working for a long time, while trying to read their mail, two of our Thunderbird IMAP users suddenly received the error: “The current command did not succeed. The mail server responded: Invalid messageset: ‑2147483648:*.”
A bit of research revealed that…
October 27, 2006
Resolving CVS Commit Conflicts with Word Documents
CVS is extremely popular for configuration management (with Subversion quickly gaining speed). It uses “optimistic locking” in which multiple users can work on the same file at the same time, and any conflicts are resolved when the file is “checked-in”. …
October 25, 2006
TinyMCE, Spellchecker, and Firefox Crashes
TinyMCE is a powerful JavaScript-based WYSIWYG HTML editor that you can embed into TEXTAREA fields of your Web forms. In addition, a PHP based spell checking system called Spellchecker allows TinyMCE to highlight unknown words (using aspell or Google’s spelling Web service).…
September 19, 2006
An Exercise Left to the Reader in “Godel’s Proof” by Nagel and Newman
In 1931, the mathematician Kurt Godel showed that any axiomatic system in natural number theory that is “complete” (can prove every postulate that is true) will not be “consistent” (it will prove a postulate that is false). While having an impact…
August 31, 2006
Dreaming of an English-Based Object Oriented Language
MIT’s media lab has created “Metaphor”, a facinating tool that parses
standard English into a programmatic pseudo-code. Take a look at: http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2005/032305/Tool_turns_English_to_code_032305.html. Metaphor seems very cool, but to deal with the ambiguities of its English parser, it ends up with non-working pseudo-code. They…
May 3, 2006
CPAN (Net::FTP) for Perl Hangs on Cygwin
CPAN is an essential tool for Perl developers. With the “cpan” command, you can install whole Perl libraries effortlessly. However, on many default installations of cygwin, cpan simply hangs:
cpan> install LWP
CPAN: Storable loaded ok
Going to read /root/.cpan/MetadataDatabase…