-
XML myUMBC
The new era has begun… Today I hacked our legacy myUMBC portal code to generate XML output for the registration eligibility function. The goal is to eventually get away from the big, monolithic app and separate the business logic from the presentation. Registration eligibility was a good place to start, because (1) it’s a simple…
-
mp3act
Totally OT… I got my Maryland state tax refund today — 48 hours after I filed with iFile. Can’t beat that turnaround time. And, I’ve found a promising app for cataloguing and streaming my MP3 collection: mp3act. It’s a web based app that uses PHP, MySQL and Ajax. Setup was pretty straightforward. When I started…
-
Maryland’s iFile
Well, I filed the taxes this morning, and for the second year I filed the fed taxes electronically with TaxCut, and for the Maryland state taxes I used TaxCut to prepare the return and then filed online with Maryland’s free iFile system. Net cost: $15.95 fed eFile fee – $15.95 H&R Block eFile rebate, +…
-
IE and XML miscellany
Well, I learned something new about IE today. If you use an empty-element tag in a <script> declaration, for example: <script language=”javascript” src=”/foo/bar.js”/> It breaks IE. Apparently, IE doesn’t treat the trailing slash as a close tag, and treats the rest of the page as an inline script. Firefox, as expected, has no problems with…
-
The Eternal PlacePro Struggle.
Well, I spent most of the day fixing our PlacePro single signon. Again. PlacePro is the ultimate example of why I hate doing single signon to remote webapps on third-party sites. It’s a pain doing it in the first place, and when it’s done, it becomes an ongoing maintenance hassle. When it works, it’s nice,…
-
Garage Door Opener
Well… first off, I’m back from my most excellent trip to Philly to watch first and second round action from the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament. This year’s games were great, and it’s always nice to get away from the grind for a few days. It always butts up against UMBC’s Spring Break, so I get…
-
Linux and IDE drives
I stuck a scavenged 120-gig IDE hard drive in my desktop Linux box at work. For now, it’ll house my MP3 collection, which is rapidly outgrowing the 35-gig partition it had been living on. My eventual plan is to get a couple of large (say, 300 to 350 gig), identical drives, keep one at work…
-
Two-Speed pool pump motor: Worth it?
With electricity prices set to skyrocket in the Baltimore area this summer, I’m once again looking at ways to cut down on our consumption. And in the summer, one of our biggest consumers is the pool pump. I’ve read that a two-speed pool pump motor can cut down quite a bit on energy usage. A…
-
Web Proxy channels and cw_person parameter
CWebProxy provides a channel parameter called cw_person, which is a comma-separated list of person attributes. If this parameter is set, CWebProxy is supposed to fetch the listed attributes and pass them to the back-end web application as CGI parameters. This is a potentially handy feature, because then we can develop “smart” unauthenticated apps which present…
-
Tractor deck…
I put the deck back on the tractor yesterday, and I’ve got the skinned knuckles to prove it. Every fall, I take the deck off the tractor. The sole purpose of this is so I can take the blades off to sharpen them. Now, it’s really, really easy to take the deck off the tractor,…