Resources for geeking out and helping your geekout processes.

Filezilla is an open source FTP client that’s lightweight and FREE.
Among others, the features of FileZilla include the following:

* Easy to use
* Supports FTP, FTP over SSL/TLS (FTPS) and SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP)
* Cross-platform. Runs on Windows, Linux, *BSD, OSX and more
* Available in many languages
* Supports resume and transfer of large files >4GB
* Powerful Site Manager and transfer queue
* Drag & drop support
* Configurable Speed limits
* Filename filters
* Network configuration wizard

Seth

I use this tool (Firebug) daily to hack, modify and debug.

Great for so much more than just CSS!

-Seth

Anyone hates phpyadmin?

It’s clunky and complicated, ewwww!

I’ve been looking for an alternative and found one:

TurboDBAdmin http://turboajax.com/products/turbodbadmin/
is fast, breeze to install and use. It’s very lightweight, since it’s not overburdened by features like phpmyadmin. In other words it’s great for those of us who just need to modify an occasional table and run simple querrys.

We’ve had multiple projects over the years that needed to export to excel. CBSL for Cycle 15-16 will need to do this as well. Here’s a link to an interesting approach that puts it to the browser first:

http://weblogs.asp.net/dburke/archive/2004/04/06/108823.aspx

Here’s an interesting free library written in c# that outputs excel xml files. since this does not require interfacing with excel directly, its a likely more stable approach:
http://www.carlosag.net/Tools/ExcelXmlWriter/Default.aspx

Additionally, should ooxml become a standard, this type of programming/approach will become more widespread.

Hey everyone- I found this typing tutor to be the best since you didn’t have to download anything and there are also a lot of different test to choose from. They also do a good job of incorporating a lot of different keys to help you become more comfortable with the keyboard as a whole. Excellent tool- http://www.learn2type.com/TypingTest

Access reports can backdoor to vba code to handle tricky formatting:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/access/HA011494721033.aspx

This was necessary on c15 to get the access report fields to line up properly. The design called for 5 fields to stack one on top of the next within a row where other fields were much taller. The design would not have a lot of whitespace. unfortunatetly, access distributes the fields vertically across the entire space of the row so the result looked all spaced out.

Drupal versions less than 5.1 (i believe) are not compatible with the new version of php. To workaround this problem on SiteGround, you can modify your .htaccess file with the following line:

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php5 .php .php5 .php4 .php3

However, its not likely that the isp’s will continue to support the older versions of php due to security issues that have since been fixed. Now is the time to upgrade your sites.

http://code.google.com/apis/calendar/developers_guide_dotnet.html

Use this to hack around with accessing your icstars google calendar via code.

For any of you that are interested

Read the story firsts must have student status.

http://apnews.excite.com/article/20080219/D8UT829O0.html

https://downloads.channel8.msdn.com/

And I ment that too!!!

ClickTime ($5/user/month):
http://www.techsoup.org/stock/product.asp?catalog%5Fname=TechSoupMain&ca…

eTimeSheets ($3/user/month):
http://www.etimesheets.com

Making the change from sql to excell can be jarring, one thing that helped me out was a bit of advice from Marc delay :

in SQL, you write statements from left to right and you add components as your statement requires you to,

In excell, you add statements by clause, beginning with the most intracate and working your way outwards until you think all the conditions are met

Thanks Marc, and I hope this helps future cycles

Microsoft has beginner training modules that are not bad and have video/screencam tutorials. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/beginner/bb308733.aspx You can also download visual basic express for free to get started with this.
Video: Introduction to the Visual Basic Programming Language 16 lessons to get you up to speed in developing with VB http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/beginner/bb308737.aspx this is about a 9 hour course that covers all the basics and walks you through creation of a full blown app to read RSS feeds. This gets you enough context to start reading programming books without glazing over in confusion. It does not replace those books, and some of the concepts in this tutorial you will be able to DO, but you won't quite UNDERSTAND until you spend the time reading and/or structured playing around.

http://code.google.com/edu/

Worth a look

We’ve been using an instance of MediaWiki lately as the platform for capturing requirements. Wiki lends itself well to design as it is very easy to drop in a link to something that you need to come back later and define. Its also nice to have revision history and discussion about an item in a design.

The biggest headache for me with working with a Wiki is that text written in word gets mangled when you copy/paste into the wiki. The biggest barrier is line breaks vs. paragraphs. Other annoyances are bulleted lists and numbered lists.

I found and modified a macro you can add to word that will convert your word text into wiki text and put it on the clipboard ready for pasting. The macro is non-invasive, meaning it leaves your word document intact. You can get the macro here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tools/Editing_tools#From_Microsof…

Please feel free to correct me here, but as long as I can remember, most project managers used MS project for either scheduling or tracking actual effort against estimated effort, not both. This was, I believe, due to the infuriating attempts by the MSP scheduling engine to tell you what actually happened. Here's an example: I have a task that was supposed to take 1 hour over the course of 1 day and be completed by 9/8/2008. If it actually takes 4 hours to complete but was still completed on 9/8, I would like to be able to say that. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell and from the documentation, that is not possible in Microsoft Project. You get the following error message when you try and state the actual finish date was 9/8: "the actual finish date is before some of the previously entered timephased actual work values. If you continue with this operation, will truncate some of the previously entered timephased actual work values." I must be doing something wrong because googling that error message produces no hits. I cannot be the only project manager in the world who has tasks that go long on effort but still meet their target finish dates. My workaround for now is to capture actual effort in one of the "extra" fields, "number 1", turn on rollups, and relabel it Actual Effort and I'm off to more important things. Anyone know otherwise?

for our events, we need the designers to be able to ftp large files for printing up to somewhere. and we'd like the ability to have them put them in a folder and just share a link to that folder via http. in the default configuration however, drupal looks to see if the folder referenced is a path it knows about, and when it doesn't, you get a page not found error. to accomplish this, simply create a blank .htaccess file with one line: Options +Indexes and upload to the top level directory that you want to provide access to, e.g. /share in our case.

http://asp.net-tutorials.com/

Code examples and tutorials on .NET framework (ASP, C# AND AJAX) along with material on PHP & jQuery. Good for some beginner, self directed study.

http://www.dbtutorials.com/tutorials.aspx

More tutorials, all centered around data retrieval in some fashion. Went here to brush up on LINQ and saw there was a lot content.

Just another link to allow the zen of programming to find you…

http://www.techbooksforfree.com/