I had a tough time finding a compiled binary for mod_proxy_html (mod_proxy_html.so) and thought I should share now that I've found it. First, some obligatory keyword stuffing: mod_proxy_html.so is a compiled binary third party contributed module for apache SuSE 10.1. I couldn't find it on rpmfind. To learn to use it, check this tutorial on setting up a reverse html proxy, but then, you probably just came from there!

In SuSE, this file lives in:
/usr/lib/apache2

Microsoft Office 2007 has turned me, a knowledgable and agile geek, into an end user. I used to be able to at least fumble around until I found some features, but now I'm utterly lost and am very dissatisfied with Office 2007.

There are a couple phrases you should be familiar with to understand and get along better with your geeky friends.

So, some time ago my sister sent me a nice gorillapod-- it's a small, flexible-leg camera tripod that grips onto almost any surface. As time and interest permits, I've tried mounting the video camera onto my violin in various ways and captured some YouTube worthy media. Below is how it is done!

I attached the gorillapod to the camera and mounted the camera to the far end of my violin by wrapping its tripod legs around the scroll. Because this camera doesn't have a convenient flip-out view-finder, I just faced a mirror and adjusted the camera's angle such that my fingerboard was the focus and my face was not.

WOW what a cool thing to see on my way to work this morning!

(play video -- need quicktime)

I got out of the car quickly, just in time to snap a few pics and record a little cell phone video of this gigantic, undulating mass of soap-foam bouncing, crawls, ascending, and descending with the wind almost as if it had a life of its own. The mass was cohesive enough to stick together on all the twists and turns and look like a single amorphic unit, but it was lightweight and slowly drifted along as if it were some alien life form.

Why is it that every children's keyboard I come across has the most annoying and imagination-inhibiting feature sets-- most notably "demo" or "songs" buttons that play complete sets at the touch of a button?

I can't stand seeing bright, intuitive children sit back and let the machine do the work when they discover the little "song" buttons, so I decided to disable this little keyboard's "demo" buttons.  All that remain now are notes and single-shot sound effects.

Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (2nd Edition)

Recently, I started into a great, handy, and very attractive book called Don't Make Me Think. It's an easy-to-follow guide to creating usable interfaces on the web.

Ok, I have to admit. I say "recently," but really, the attractiveness of the book caught my eye while at FlashForward2006 a few months ago. I haven't even finished reading the book... It's not tough to follow at all, but with all that it covers, one thing it doesn't do is create pockets of reading time and bark at me to return to it when time does present itself.

When I leave Firefox open for a few days (opening and closing lots of tabs all the while), for some reason firefox ends up juicing like 250+megs! What a hog!

 

To clear up memory and not have to bookmark all the open workspaces (tabs), I force a restart via Windows TaskManager. The goal is to improperly force an exit so that when you fire up firefox again, you'll get the option to "restore session." You get this by opening task manager and clicking into the Processes tab and clicking End Task. If you End Task under the Applications tab, you don't get the same result. When you restart Firefox, you will be prompted to reload all previously opened tabs! Perfect!

Using a PHP IDE with integrated debugger allows realtime debugging, step thru, watch, etc. in PHP. However, some things can be tricky to set breakpoints: the Drupal module imagecache is one of them.

The trick to setting a breakpoint in imagecache is to understand that it's not really the same "debug session call" as when you actually hit the page containing imagecache references. It's really the respective img src="" that calls the imagecache module that needs to invoke the debug session, so rather than trying to debug the page, try opening the url that shows in src="" and debug that.

This was a fun adventure.. A couple weekends ago, a police officer issued a warning for my expired State Inspection sticker. I dutifully took the car in for inspection, and they replaced my sticker.

Just recently, I was watching my photos go by via my FlickR screensaver and saw a picture go by that revealed an inspiection sticker that expires several months in the future from now!

The photo was taken back in January.

I am delighted to have had the opportunity to play with the Brazos Valley Symphony on Monday March 26, 2007 for the annual children's concert. Due to my busy schedule, it has been a while since I've played with the orchestra, but I just couldn't turn down an opportunity like this. To my surprise, Wow what a production these concerts have become! There are even dancers on stage in full costume to act out Peter and the Wolf-- and what a good job they're doing!

Yay local kids-- hope you enjoyed the show!