I have always prided myself on being savvy enough when browsing the web to avoid things like viruses and other malware. I’m not so confident anymore, after I got hit with the triple cocktail of Virtumonde, Smitfraud, and Worm/Downadup. The first sign of trouble was when Firefox started randomly opening unrequested web sites. It turns […]
Author Archives: priebe
Killing a Philips photo frame
It’s rare that you do something purely in a software space that renders hardware irreversibly damaged. But somehow I managed to do it with my Philips digital photo frame. 🙁
Advanced photo management issues in Picasa
I recently did a reorganization of our photo library (approximately 30,000 photos). We had previously been using a centralized desktop computer to store our photos, which we would access via Windows laptops. The desktop bit the dust recently, so I moved the library to a pair of external USB drives, which we connect directly to […]
Trouble syncing iTunes and Apple TV
I was having trouble syncing iTunes to my Apple TV (this is after I have been syncing for a number of months). All of a sudden, iTunes would crash during the synchronization with Apple TV. I tried limiting what was being synced (unchecking Movies, TV Shows, and Photos). Nothing was working. Turns out Genius is […]
Auto-refreshing pages and bandwidth optimization
I have the pleasure of managing the technology side of a fairly large-scale Web site for a traditional media company. We do somewhere around 2.7 million pageviews on a normal day, and as many as 7 or 8 million on a busy day. Obviously, with traffic levels like this, optimizing our bandwidth usage is critical. […]
Mootools Hash Cookie Compatibility Class
Mootools is a fantastic Javascript framework library that gives you clean, well-tested, cross-browser mechanisms for browser capability detection, manipulating the DOM, injecting SWFs, making AJAX requests, and building animation into your client-side applications. I’m won’t try to sell it over other libraries like scriptaculous, dojo or jquery. But if you’ve selected mootools as your javascript […]
AppleTV: one of my favorite things
When I first heard about the AppleTV, I was underwhelmed. It seemed like a sort of gateway into the iTunes Store, with a focus on video purchase and rental, something I wasn’t particularly interested in at the time. It also was only 720p-capable, when I was lusting after 1080p components. I also thought that you […]
Dish Network ViP 622: Worst DVR Ever?
I am the not-so-proud owner of a Dish Network ViP 622 DVR. This is my third receiver in 5 months. Before I get too far into this, I should say that I’ve really had no problems with Dish Network. I’ve been a subscriber for a number of years. We made the switch from DirecTV when […]
Accessing SMB servers with PHP
NOTE: this is not supported at this timem. Please use newer code, like https://github.com/icewind1991/SMB. Recently, we had a need to retrieve and put files onto a Windows server from a Linux box. I looked around for a good way to access samba or Windows file servers from within PHP, and I didn’t find anything promising. […]
JSON-encoding private class members
In an AJAX application, it often is necessary to transport objects from your server-side PHP to the client-side Javascript. Using JSON to encode objects makes your life very easy on the client side — a quick eval(), and you’ve got an object to work with.