Author Archives: Robert S. Robbins

My old hard drive needs defragging. Look at all the red in the defrag analysis below: I’ve ordered a 100 GB hard drive on Amazon but I don’t want to copy over all these fragmented files. I downloaded PerfectDisk 7.0 … Continue reading →

My 80 GB hard drive went bad on me today. I have lost some of my email, data, and work from 6/17 thru 7/13. Fortunately I never put Linux on my old 40 GB hard drive like I intended to … Continue reading →

Working in the Information Technology field really develops your problem solving skills and requires you to think logically. One of the most important steps in quickly solving a problem is to test your assumptions. Technical errors are sometimes quite cryptic. … Continue reading →

I’ve been having a lot of problems with my Verizon DSL line. I keep losing my Internet connection. Today I moved all of my computer equipment into another room to be closer to the phone jack and to use a … Continue reading →

Today I upgraded my hard drive from 40 GB to 80 GB. I used PowerQuest’s Drive Copy 4.0 to transfer the operating system and data from my old hard drive to my new hard drive. I made the new hard … Continue reading →

I have a small project involving converting web addresses like category.aspx?id=6 into more search engine friendly web addresses like category6.aspx or even better sports_memorabilia.aspx. Search engines don’t like dynamic web pages with their lengthy query string values and would prefer … Continue reading →

I have made an important improvement to my C# script that parses an entire web application for significant code. I have added the ability to parse subdirectories using a recursive function. This was necessary because not all web applications keep … Continue reading →

I’ve gathered all the local news feeds I can find into my BlogLines account. BlogLines lets you see how many subscribers a feed has and for many local news feeds like the Williamsport Sun Gazette, I am the only subscriber. … Continue reading →

I have written some code to secure the database administration scripts I use to manage my books database. Now my simple web application has a log in page and you cannot access any other pages without a valid log in. … Continue reading →

Today I came across something I never heard of before, the Microsoft Universal Data Link (UDL) file type. It is used for database connections. I tried to look it up on Wikipedia but they did not have a page on … Continue reading →

Tonight I installed two more web applications on my Mandrake 8.2 Linux server. These web applications finally give me a reason to use my Linux system. And I am gaining experience in installing the types of web applications that are … Continue reading →

Last night I installed Dot Net Nuke 4.0.2 on my system. It gave me almost as much trouble as a Linux web application install. The two aspects I found tricky were renaming the release.config file to web.config and then updating … Continue reading →

Tonight I finished reading Blogging For Dummies by Brad Hill. Amazon recently added it’s very own version of the blog called the plog which allows writers to have a blog on Amazon targeted to their readers. If you have bought … Continue reading →

I’ve found it easier to install web applications on my Mandrake 8.2 Linux system which is running Apache-AdvancedExtranetServer/1.3.23 and PHP 4.1.2. I recently installed phpMyAdmin 2.8.0.3 with only a few minor problems, mostly in editing the config.inc.php file and then … Continue reading →

Over the weekend I tried to upgrade my Corel Linux system for PHP 4.0. Unfortunately I was unable to accomplish this because Corel Linux is so obsolete. All I managed to do was upgrade Apache from 1.3.3 to 1.3.35 and … Continue reading →

The XBM image format is a simple image file format that can only be used for black and white line art. But the cool thing about XBM files is that you can create them through JavaScript. This means you can … Continue reading →

Yesterday I blogged about how to document a MySQL database by a rather involved process of importing the database into SQL Server and then Microsoft Access. Actually you could simply use phpMyAdmin 2.5.0 to display the same information by clicking … Continue reading →

My blog software is WordPress which is using a MySQL database. My task is to document the database design. Let us see how I accomplish this goal. My first step is to back up the database because I need a … Continue reading →

Tonight I started learning the Object-Oriented Programming aspects of C#. I’m reading the free online chapter of Microsoft Visual C#.NET 2003 Kick Start by Steven Holzner at http://www.samspublishing.com/articles/article.asp?p=101373&seqNum=6 Web development is based on scripting languages, JavaScript, VBScript, PHP, Perl so … Continue reading →

Today I download the MySQL Connector/Net, an ADO.NET driver for MySQL, and wrote a C# ASP.NET page to connect to my books database. I now have 13 topics on C# in my Notes.chm compiled help file. An extensive language reference … Continue reading →