August 1, 2008

How open should open source be?

On behalf of the NIH, TCG runs a project called the Neuroimaging Informatics Tools and Resources Clearinghouse, otherwise known as NITRC. It’s a resource for neuroimaging researchers who are developing or using software to analyze things like fMRI scans and other kinds…
July 18, 2008

Zimbra: Getting Away Messages to Work With Domain Alises

While most of our mail is simply sent to “person@tcg.com”, our Zimbra server has a larger qualified domain name (let’s call it “mail.tcg.com”).  To get this to work, we completely configured up the domain “mail.tcg.com” and all the users within our…
July 7, 2008

UK government launches data mash-up

The BBC reports that the UK government is releasing terabytes of data to the country to enable users to create new ways of using it that might be beneficial to the country as a whole. This is a fantastic idea, in my…
May 21, 2008

Recovering a Slightly Corrupted Zimbra OpenLDAP Directory

Zimbra uses OpenLDAP for its directory, and after way too much fiddling with domains, we ended up corrupting our database.  There was a partial “.net” entry in our LDAP that we couldn’t remove.  So, we decided to dump the LDAP contents…
May 15, 2008

Reducing Spam Blowback Bounce Messages in Zimbra

With our company’s move to the Zimbra mail server finally complete (and working very well), we noticed an sudden increase of a particular type of spam: fake bounce or mail server error messages.  This was surprising since our old mail and…
May 9, 2008

Git – Fast Version Control System

Git is an open source version control system designed to handle very large projects with speed and efficiency, but just as well suited for small personal repositories; it is especially popular in the open source community, serving as a development platform…
May 5, 2008

Office 2007 converter for OSX

After receiving a lot of files with the dreaded “.docx” filename extension, I discovered that Microsoft has a converter available for OSX that transforms these Windows Office 2007 files into Mac Office 2004 format. It’s not perfect (it’s in beta right now) and…
April 28, 2008

GForge 4.5.11+ works well on PHP5

For our NITRC project, which is based on GForge 4.5.x, we wanted to integrate it with MediaWiki.  However, while the latest version of MediaWiki (which has group workspaces) runs on PHP 5, and all of the GForge documentation refers to…
April 8, 2008

Using VMWare to Watch TV?

I remember being so excited the first time I played PacMan in an emulator.  Now virtualization has become so fast, I can watch TV in a virtual machine.  Specifically, VMWare Server 1.0.5 is able to run Mythbuntu 7.10 as a front-end at 640x480 at…
April 7, 2008

Thunderbird and Google Desktop

I love Thunderbird. I love using Google Desktop with it — two whaps at the “Ctrl” button and I get my search box, and I’m seconds away from finding any message. Unfortunately, Google Desktop still doesn’t index documents attached to email messages…