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   07-10-2009 - New Disease Fighting Idea
With the stock market constantly down, and the world seeming to be falling apart... sometimes there is an idea that stands out with a shimmer of hope. After watching this video at TED I decided after months of nothing on my blog, it was definitely news worthy. It was worth the 2 minutes of my time.

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04-23-2009 - UTF8 and Your Database
Most people reading my blog probably are scratching their heads now at this entry. What the crap? UTF8? Well, let me explain. There has been a problem that has crept up with the postgres database that I've been using. Somewhere along the way they switched from UTF16 to UTF8. What is means is that the extra character set isn't compatible. Extra characters such as the ' at the end of cafe'. Typically, the ' is more tilted to the right on the end of cafe'. This is isn't available in UTF8. I found this php link that helps filter out non UTF8 characters.

http://us3.php.net/utf8_encode

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03-26-2009 - PHP Charts Class
I found this pcharts class for php and had to make note of it. It looks like they provide the code for a class to make it easy to integrate graphs and pit charts into your website. Rewind that, dynamic graphs and charts. It was important enough to make not of it to come back to someday. Hopefully soon.

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03-18-2009 - denyhosts and fail2ban
For a quite a longtime now there has been a non-stop flood of ssh brute force attacks all over the world. To try to stay on top of security, I came across denyhosts and fail2ban. Denyhosts ending up being my preferred choice, because it said the was sometype of collective feature like a blacklist where if an attack was detected on 1 machine, then it updated the blacklist for the IP. This seemed to mean you could automatically block someone before they even attempt to access your machine. I thought it was important enough to make a note about it on my blog.

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02-20-2009 - Multiple Domain Email Server
For a while now I've been using squirrelmail. It's been great, but the question had been asked years ago "Could I setup a server to handle multiple domains"? That question had nagged me for years. Today, I finally found a walk through that someone explains the steps for multiple domains. I thought it was important enough to make note of it for me to revert back to someday, and for the rest of the world to see.

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02-12-2009 - Polybius
As much as I've been into computers most of mylife, I had never heard of the Polybius urban legend til today. It seems in Portland Oregon back in 1981 there was a tempest style type of video game that appeared in only a couple arcades. It was said there was psycological effect from playing the game. The best part is where men in suits show up and don't care about the coins, andjust want data from the machine.

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02-10-2009 - Interesting Copyright and Government
I was looking through public records and came across how some County Recordes give information away for free and others charge a fee. Anyhow, I was shocked where I saw this message for Salt Lake County:

Attention: The compilations of materials on this website are copyright property of Salt Lake County.

From my understanding, 90% of government data is public domain. Except for national security stuff. In fact I knew someone that was trying to print NASA photo's on T-Shirts and that is what brought up the debate. It makes sense that you already pay for the government data through taxes, so it typically belongs in public domain. To sum it up I was shocked to see a government agency copyrighting material and information.

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01-27-2009 - 93 Year old man freezes to death, with my own twist
This here (MARVIN E SCHUR). Here is the ironic part, from what I can tell, the state of Florida had some money for him in relation to FLORIDA POWER AND LIGHT COMPANY. Even though he was living in michigan, it was a different power and light company.

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01-09-2009 - VW stock and what happened
I while back I remember hearing something about VW stock and tons of people shorting it. What I missed was how tons of money was won and lost. I found an excellent article that explained it in detail. To sum it up, porsche spent 3 years buying up VW stock. Speculative investors thought that VW stock had no place to go but down, so they started shorting the stock. This means betting the price will go down. Anyhow, porsche kept on buying the stock until there was almost nothing left. People that shorted the stock lost big. My summation doesn't do the article justice, so you must read his version.

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12-17-2008 - ImageMagick html2ps and pixelating problem
Lately, I've been trying to add .pdf automatic generation to one of my websites. The steps I had been taking was:
  1. Create my desired text in html
  2. Use html2ps to convert the html to a postscript format so that it was compatible with ImageMagick
  3. Use ImageMagick to convert to .pdf
Anyhow, the problem I started getting was that when I was adding text for the 2nd page all the text started to pixelate. This seemed really odd that just a 2nd page would make it harder for all the text to be readable. After digging around and trying tons of different things, I found a -density option. The example I found used 600x600. This seemed way to overkill for what I was doing. At that size it took forever to genereate and download. After some more testing 350x350 seemed to work fine. Obviously, we always want faster with more power, but it seems to be close enough to not be a problem. Here is an example of the command line to help those that found this entry

convert -density 350x350 test.ps test.pdf

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