Entries in Computer Stuff Category

Over the Christmas break, I spent some time trying to eliminate what I believe was a Trojan DNSChanger from my father-in-law's computer. This one was tough; every time I rebooted the problem kept popping up.

So I figured that I had something pretty low in the OS that was preventing the Virus Scans/Spyware removal from being able to remove the stuff. To get past this, I first tried booting into the Trinity Rescue Disk (http://trinityhome.org) and running a virus scan from there. It found nothing.

Interestingly, I did not find any Spyware removal software for a bootable Linux distribution, so I went looking. What I found was the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows (http://www.ubcd4win.com/index.htm). This let me build a bootable CD that was running Windows XP. It did require that I have a copy of my MS Windows XP install disk, but I had that so it was no problem. The really good news is that it came with Spyware/Virus removal tools pre-installed, so it was easy to use this disk to boot into windows, update the Spyware definitions and scan the drive.

In the end, even these steps did not remove this Trojan and I ended up re-installing XP on his computer to eliminate it, but I thought these tools were pretty handy to have in the tool bag.

For the past couple of months, I've been working on the team that redesigned the HGTV.com web site. I began to look at my own site and really did not like how it looked, so I gave it a fresh face-lift.

If you've been around here before, you'll notice the change. It's not a great design, but the code changes have positioned me to easily update the look in the future. The current design looks just like my blog pages have for a good while now.

I started working on the update a couple of weeks ago and finally finished it tonight. I had no idea that I had so many pages on my site.

If you are a graphics designer (I am a developer and make thing work; I'm not so good at making them pretty), and interested in offering me an updated look, drop me a note!

I don't think most iPhone users are unaware of a little detail made available with the 2.0 update. The ability to connect to an Exchange server not only let's you get your e-mail from an Exchange server, but it also lets you synchronize your contacts and calendar with that Exchange server.

The really interesting thing is it is pretty easy to imitate an Exchange server and in reality pull/push the data from some other location. A company, NuevaSync, has done just this and is making it's service available for free.

From their web site:
NuevaSync allows direct, over-the-air, native synchronization of certain smart phones and PDA devices with public PIM, and calendaring services including Google Calendar. NuevaSync does not need any software installed on your device because it uses synchronization protocols that are already built in.

This is very easy to setup. You notice that they mention Google Calendar; they also sync with Google Contacts or Plaxo Contacts, so your options are reasonably good for getting that data into your iPhone.

Check them out at http://www.nuevasync.com/ and enjoy!

Once again, my father-in-law's computer got hit with a virus/malware. This time it was "Antivirus XP 2008". It seemed pretty nasty, but none of the virus software that I had would get rid of it. After a bit of searching, I found this posting on the web:

http://www.precisesecurity.com/blogs/2008/06/26/antivirus-xp-2008/

which gave me step-by-step procedures (and a pointer to a handy free-ware tool) to clean the system up.

1. Download Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware (mbam-setup.exe) and save it on your Desktop.
2. After downloading, double-click on mbam-setup.exe to install the application.
3. Follow the prompts and install as “default” only
4. Before the installation completes, check on the following prompts:
- Update Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware
- Launch Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware
5. Click “Finish.” Program will run automatically and you will be prompt to update the program before doing a scan. Please update.
6. Scan your computer thoroughly.
7. When scanning is finished click on the “Show Results”
8. Make sure that all detected threats are marked, click on Remove Selected.
9. Restart your computer.

So far, it seems to have worked rather well!

It's a shame that such a nice program as iTunes would need 3rd party utilities to perform routine operations, but from my experience, it does. If you own a mac, this is generally not a problem as there are a number of nice AppleScript utilities floating around to handle things.

Here's one little utility that I found that seems to work as advertised:
iTunes Library Updater

Now, I would like to find a FREE duplicate eliminator, then I'd be happy.

Watir is an open-source library for automating web browsers. It allows you to write tests that are easy to read and easy to maintain. It is optimized for simplicity and flexibility.

Watir - Overview

Web Application Testing in Ruby

Seems like a good tool to have in the tool bag.

citumpe.com: Pure Java DTMF Detection

This application detects DTMF "touch" tones and presents the relative magnitude of the component frequencies. And it's written in java AND runs on my computer with no modifications (that seems rare with downloaded source).

I found this article on Life Hacker
Hack Attack: Back up and sync your Firefox bookmarks with your personal server

It talks about the firefox extension that will sync your bookmarks to either the foxmarks server of your own server. Very handy for making your bookmarks available from everywhere.

Today's task was to upgrade my Apache environment from 1.3 to the current for Debian, 2.2.3.

The upgrade went pretty smooth. All I had to do was figure out how the new configuration was done (as opposed to the old httpd.conf file, everything is very modular now). I created a new "site" called personal where I put all of my specific configuration; this should make future upgrades easier.

Since I'm planning ot use SSL just for myself (to encrypt some of the stuff that I'm doing), I do not want to pay for a real certificate, so I just followed the examples I found on the internet on How to create a self-signed SSL Certificate and made my own.

Other links that I found helpful:

Apache Virtual Hosts
Authentication, Authorization and Access Control
A helpful little tidbit (near the bottom about AuthBasicAuthorization

Today I decided to do some playing with MYSQL's Spatial Extentions.

I started by creating a simple table of "Points of Interest"

CREATE TABLE `poi_spatial` (
`id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
`name` varchar(255) NOT NULL,
`lon` varchar(20) default NULL,
`lat` varchar(20) default NULL,
`loc` point NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
KEY `name` (`name`),
SPATIAL KEY `loc` (`loc`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM

The only really interesting column in this table is the loc column. It is declared as type "point".

To play with this, I then inserted some rows in the table. To make that easier, I created a function "ToPoint" that would accept the Latitude and Longtitude and return a POINT:
DELIMITER $$

DROP FUNCTION IF EXISTS `ToPoint`$$

CREATE FUNCTION `ToPoint` (lat VARCHAR(11), lon VARCHAR(11) )
RETURNS POINT DETERMINISTIC
BEGIN
DECLARE result POINT;
DECLARE loc VARCHAR(50);
SELECT CONCAT('POINT( ', lon , ' ' , lat , ')' )INTO loc;
SELECT GeomFromText(loc) INTO result;
RETURN RESULT;
END$$

So now I can insert with a simple call:

INSERT INTO poi_spatial ( name, lat, lon, loc ) VALUES ( "name", "lat", "lon", ToPoint( "lat", "lon" ))

To get some good data, I downloaded some GNIS data from the USGS. I read the data with a simple perl script and added data to my table.

Now, I wanted to find the entry in the poi_spatial table that I was closest to. The version of MYSQL that I'm running does not have a built-in DISTANCE() function, so I (with the help of the internet) wrote one:
DELIMITER $$

DROP FUNCTION IF EXISTS `Distance`$$

CREATE FUNCTION `Distance` (a POINT, b POINT)
RETURNS DOUBLE DETERMINISTIC
BEGIN
DECLARE dist DOUBLE;
SELECT round(glength(linestringfromwkb(linestring(asbinary(a),asbinary(b)))) * 100, 1) INTO dist;
RETURN dist;
END$$

Now, I simply query the database with something like this:
SELECT name, distance( loc, ToPoint( "myLat", "myLon" )) as distance FROM poi_spatial ORDER BY distance.

This is not the most optimal solution, but it seems to work pretty well.

More links for reference:
MySQL Reference Manual
Doing the same thing without using MySQL spatial extensions
Some help from the MySQL Forums
A really helpful presentation

Well, according to Comcast, I am. I got an e-mail from then today (click here to read the complete message) telling me that they have determined that my computer(s) have been used to send unsolicited email.

I did some searching - I sure don't see anything going out and I've ran virus/spy ware scans on everything that I have and came up empty.

In doing a web search (google provided this for example), I see that this has happened to other people too. It would be nice if the message from comcast would provide some details...

This did prompt me to investigate eximstats. I now have this running hourly and placing the results here: /sm/report/mailreport.html (authentication required) so I can see what my server is sending out.

I did find that GMail offers an outgoing e-mail service; that may be worth investigation.

Later in the day, I realized that Comcast was also blocking port 25 incoming. This makes it nearly impossible to run your own mail server locally. I ended up turning to DynDNS.com and their MailHop Relay service. They now serve as my primary mail server and they relay the messages to my local server. They hold mail if my mail server goes down (or off-line by comcast as is more often the case), and they deliver mail to an alternate port thus getting around the blocked port by comcast.

I had some time today, so decided to setup OpenLDAP on my server at home and play with it a little bit.

For starters, I installed it with a Debian apt-get install slapd. Then I found the Quick-Start Guide gave me a working LDAP.

This guide to setting up and maintaining an OpenLDAP server also had some good information...I decided not to use the LDAP as an authentication source for my server.

The detail of what types of information that I could include in the standard schema was easily found here: http://www.zytrax.com/books/ldap/ape/#attributes

The next thing I wanted to do was get some data out there. So I used this script to export my contacts from Outlook.

Understanding queries (filters in LDAP terminology) was my next hurdle and this site gave me the answers to all I needed to know.

Then I wanted to play with LDAP via something other than the command line tools, so I did a quick search and found that Net::LDAP existed for Perl, so Perl it was!

All-in-all, it was a day that I learned a fair bit...and now I have an LDAP server to play with. I did connect this LDAP to my installation of squirrel mail, so now I have all of my addresses available everywhere - I like that!

Since my Linux boxes are generally setup and leave it alone, I forget the details about how I do things in my Linux environment from time-to-time.

This time, I forgot how to grant a new user access to a file share. The magic that I was missing was simple; I needed to map UNIX to Samba users. Run smbpasswd -a username

I found my answer in the samba How-To

Chapter 38. The Samba Checklist

As I learn about WebSphere Portal, it's interesting to find out about some OpenSource alternatives.

Jetspeed is an Open Source implementation of an Enterprise Information Portal, using Java and XML. A portal makes network resources (applications, databases and so forth) available to end-users. The user can access the portal via a web browser, WAP-phone, pager or any other device. Jetspeed acts as the central hub where information from multiple sources are made available in an easy to use manner.

Jetspeed - Jetspeed Overview

Help -
The information center where you can find product documentation for various offerings of WebSphere Portal.

Apache Derby

Apache Derby, an Apache DB subproject, is an open source relational database implemented entirely in Java and available under the Apache License, Version 2.0. Some key advantages include:

* Derby has a small footprint -- about 2 megabytes for the base engine and embedded JDBC driver.
* Derby is based on the Java, JDBC, and SQL standards.
* Derby provides an embedded JDBC driver that lets you embed Derby in any Java-based solution.
* Derby also supports the more familiar client/server mode with the Derby Network Client JDBC driver and Derby Network Server.
* Derby is easy to install, deploy, and use.

Softerra LDAP Administrator & Browser: Overview of Directory Management Tool

Softerra LDAP Browser is a lightweight version of Softerra LDAP Administrator with limited functionality and is absolutely FREE for all kinds of use including commercial! Unlike Softerra LDAP Administrator, the Browser does not allow its users to modify LDAP directories.

BSW Professional Audio Gear

A nice web site for good audio gear.

Enable Autorun on DVD, CD and other removable media

I had some problems with a USB drive not auto running when inserted. So I did some searching and found the information on this page to be very helpful. Specifically, the "Additional Technical Info" section gave me the details that I needed.

RemoteCalendars


This appears (I just installed it a couple of hours ago) to be a wonderful tool to integrate iCalendar data into MS Outlook 2003. I'm using this to merge multiple calendars into one for syncing with my iPhone.

The best application for splitting ports is GPSgate from Franson Software.

This utility can split the incoming data stream from either a physical
serial port or a virtual com port created by a USB-to-serial dongle into
almost any number of virtual com ports that other programs can then use.
It can also convert to/from TCP/IP so that a com port source can be
distributed over a LAN via TCP/IP. On other PCs on the lan, copies of
GPSgate can then convert TCP/IP back to virtual com ports.

In addition, GPSgate can convert Garmin proprietary binary format coming
in on USB, to standard ASCII NMEA on multiple virtual com ports! This
allows you to use just about any Garmin GPS, even those without NMEA
and/or serial outputs, with almost any program that can use standard
serial NMEA data.

GPSgate is available in two versions. A lite "Express" version that
spits a single input, real or virtual, into just two virtual outputs is
USD $13. The "Standard" version that can split multiple source ports
into any number of outputs is USD $40. If you "split" a virtual
comport into just one new port, you can create the equivalent of the
1-port-to-1-port bridge utilities described in 1) above.

You can run multiple instances of GPSgate Standard on a single machine.
For example, you could have one instance splitting a GPS from a physical
port for use with multiple mapping programs. At the same time, a second
instance could be joining a soundcard soft TNC to an APRS application
like UIview or APRSplus.

Real world applications that I have used:

I routinely split the single physical COM port on my Panasonic Toughbook
mobile laptop to feed GPS data into UIview, Visual GPS, MapPoint,
Delorme Topo USA, and Precision Mapping at the same time. GPSgate is
set to load automatically each time the computer boots.

Using a second instance of GPSgate on the same laptop, I have
intercepted one output of the first instance and converted to TCP/IP. I
then distributed the IP NMEA stream via ad-hoc WiFi to a second copy of
GPSgate running on a second laptop in the back seat of the car, where
several more mapping apps were running.

--

Stephen H. Smith wa8lmf (at) aol.com
EchoLink Node: 14400 [Think bottom of the 2M band]
Home Page: http://wa8lmf.com --OR-- http://wa8lmf.net

Here's a handy article with what appears to be an in-depth discussion about using MS SQL Query Analyzer to debug stored procedures.

http://www.15seconds.com/issue/050106.htm

http://freedominput.com/site/index.php


This site has some neat stuff for smart phones including the "Freedom Mini GPS" It's a bluetooth GPS unit.

http://www.planetc.com/


If you need internet access in East TN and dial-up is not fast enough, but cable or DSL are not available (or you just don't like those options), this is another option. It's wireless access. It is available in Sevier and 16 other counties.

http://www.tscustomseats.com/gpage.html


This is a source for custom seats for the GoldWing. The seats look really nice (in person) and the folks that I've talked to who have them say they are great.

http://www.techsmith.com/screen-capture.asp

SnagIt lets you capture, edit, and share exactly what you see on your screen.

I heard this mentioned by Andy Ihnatko on the Apple Phone Show's podcast today. The feature that makes it worth considering for me is that you can set it up as a printer and it will accept printer output from any program and turn it into jpg files which can then be uploaded (or sync'd) to the iPhone. A handy way to get reference information onto the iPhone.

http://wiki.jeffsandquist.com/default.aspx/GTD/GTDTools.html

GTD Tools

If you are looking for tools to help you implement Getting Things Done, this is a pretty comprehensive list of available options. Just about any technology that you can imagine appears to be represented here.

http://www.visit.se/~pointless/

Network audio utility for amateur radio.

I've been told this is a simple tool to facilitate getting audio from point A to point B via the internet (or similar). Worth an investigation.

http://www.simplegtd.com/

What is Simple GTD?
Simple GTD is a completely free web-based tool which help you in organizing your stuff and will assist you to applying "GTD Principles" in your daily life.

I've been doing some "research" on GTD. It's a theory of organization to "Get Things Done" based on a book by David Allen. More information can be found on his web site http://www.davidco.com/.

http://trinityhome.org/

Home of a neat package that will boot a computer into Linux and let you perform some handy "rescue" type operations. It claims to work with NTFS. It will let you do a virus scan (the reason I found it) without booting into Windows, thus avoiding root kits, etc..

http://tuttletree.com/nerdblog/?p=44


A handy (but I can't make it work thus far) little bit of javascript to help figure out what's in your object.

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/gettingstartedwithajax/

Getting Started with Ajax

One of many tutorials out about using Ajax.

http://www.cascade.org.uk/software/php/calendar/index.php

This is a PHP calendar class, suitable for use in both PHP 3 and PHP 4.

It is very customisable and has the following features:

* Month View
* Year View
* Specify start day of week
* Specify start month of year for Year View
* Highlight today's date
* Forward and Backward navigation between months and years
* Individual days within a month may be optionally linked to another page.
* Appearance set by CSS style sheet.

http://severinghaus.org/projects/icv/

This is a handy tool to use if you are trying to figure out why you .ics file will not process in some application.

http://www.lifehacker.com/software/top/geek-to-live--keep-your-calendar-in-plain-text-with-remind-186661.php

In my searching for a centralized calendar, this may be something to look into.

http://feedcrier.com/


This is a pretty cool site. You just tell it what RSS feeds to watch and when something new pops up, you'll get an IM. Makes keeping up with feeds extremely easy.

http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/hunter_logging.html


J2SE 1.4's Logging library

Something to look into. Right now, I do all of my logging by just writing to System.err; this looks like a better approach.

http://pymt.sourceforge.net/

PyMT is a simple Python module which allows you to easily connect to a Movable Type weblog, using it's built in XML-RPC API. PyMT is capable of handling every MT call available.

I found it very easy to use to allow me to build a python script to accept e-mails and post them directly to my blog.

How to setup a PPTP VPN server using Debian in your home or corporate office

How to setup a dedicated PPTP VPN Server at your home office or main office

Ajax Examples: XMLHttpRequest & Ajax Working Examples, Ajax Demos

Ajax Examples and Demos

Creating Clickable Appointments

Creating iCalendar/vCalendar "files" with asp pages.

ContactItem Object

Some more good information for working with Outlook contacts

Adding Outlook Contacts In Perl

Adding Outlook Contacts In Perl

I recently purchased an iPhone and by default, it only syncs with Outlook. So to get my contacts from Notes to Outlook, I used a bit of Perl from the above site (and a few other tools) to export my contacts from Notes and import them into Outlook.

Removing the old processor

ClarkConnect - Server and Gateway - Linux Small Business Server SBS

ClarkConnect is a powerful yet easy-to-use software solution for deploying and managing dedicated servers and Internet gateways. Thanks to the power of open source software, the Linux-based solution is a secure, extremely reliable and cost effective solution.

van Gelder

Query Editor is an Excel Add-In for maintaining ODBC or OLE DB Query Tables.

A very nice piece of work and very handy!

This is a really handy thing that is simple to do. By using a hosts file like this example:

Example hosts file

it prevents your computer from going to "bad" sites (either web or otherwise). It prevents it in a very simple manner...it redirects all requests to said host to the local computer.

An invitation to KDE

An introduction to the K Desktop Environment

This list was started back in -95 when I heard about (more or less)
uniqe problems that was solved by using a BASIC Stamp. Especially
Guy Gustavson's story (see #001) about how he saved his beloved cat
Kesha gave me the inspiration to start writing L.O.S.A. I hope Kesha
still is alive and having a great life. Now 6 years later there are
225 applications described and I hope you will enjoy reading all
(or parts) of them.

The main purpose of this list is to get an idea of what other people
are using their BASIC Stamps for and maybe get some inspiration or
hints for your own projects. Some of the projects described in the
list also have links to source code and schematics for download.

Link

Chris Justus - Server Side Guy: Google Suggest Dissected...

Google Suggest Dissected

Google suggest Javascript code dissected and
rewritten for all of you web developers out there. Cool piece of web
reverse-engineering!

Stransim/Software/3DTRACER

3D G.P.S. Trace Viewer

3DTracer is a software application that displays tracks recorded from GPS (Global Positioning System) receiver data in full three dimensions.

SolarPC

EducatingMario Home, Game Boy, School, Science, GameBoy, Instrumentation, Photos, Education, RS232

Free phone booth at Burning Man

Free phone booth at Burning Man

An exercise in establishing a VoIP phone in the middle of nowhere using a Satalite Internet connection. Many good details on how to do this or something similar yourself.

BroadVoice: Broadband Telephone Service

To connect the phone, I would need what's called an "Analog Terminal Adapter" or ATA. These are made by companies like Cisco, Grandstream, Sipura and others, and used by the new broadband phone companies like Vonage and Broadvoice. They have an Ethernet jack on one side and a phone jack on the other. I had been playing with BroadVoice which has very good rates, and described the project to their CTO, Nathan Stratton, whom I had met. He offered to provide free global long distance for the week using their network, and a Sipura 1000 adapter.

XSLT Tutorial

XSLT Tutorial and complete XSLT references about XSLT elements, attributes, and functions.

Linux Mobile System

Linux Mobile System (LMS) is a full Linux system whose support is the new USB Flash Memory Drives. The intention is to boot any PC with USB support with our system and therefore we will have every administration and analysis applications that we have selected, so we will not need install it. This way, always we will be able to get our Linux system ready to use in our pocket.

Viktor's Home Page: Energizer ER-OF800 UPS under Linux

This is a very simplistic implementation of a UPS monitor for the Energizer ER-OF800 UPS

LCDproc - Home

linux LCD display driver

Cwlinux Limited, Products - Graphical Serial LCD / USB LCD CW12232

Graphical Serial LCD / USB LCD Kit, CW12232

Advanced Linux Sound Architecture - ALSA

The Advanced Linux Sound Architecture (ALSA) provides audio and MIDI functionality to the Linux operating system

Wireless Extensions for Linux

The purpose of this document is to give an overview of the Wireless Extensions. The first part will explain the reason of this development and the generals ideas behind this work. Then, we will give the current status of the development. The third part will explore the user interface. We will finish by some implementation details and the possible evolution of the Wireless Extensions.

How to make a ram disk

ram disk eenie-weenie HOWTO

Debian on the HP Pavilion zd7010

Installing Debian on the HP Pavilion zd7010

This is the most simple way to get the Linksys wireless network card to work with debian
debian wireless howto

Atmel Corporation

AVR Butterfly is an evaluation tool demonstrating the capabilities of the latest AVR Technology. The tool is shipped with preloaded firmware supporting temperature sensing, light measurement, voltage readings and music playback. AVR Butterfly can also be used as a nametag. AVR Butterfly can be reprogrammed from AVR Studio using just a serial cable. This allows the tool to be used as a development kit for the onboard mega169, or even as target hardware for simple applications.

Wireless Backpack Repeater

The backpack is built from an old camping rucksack, and is fitted with an antenna pole with an 8dB omnidirectional antenna from Solwise. A Linksys WRT54G wireless router is attached in the middle.

Interesting...

Comfoolery Download PageComfoolery Download Page

Comfoolery is a 32-bit Windows program that allows you to share a com port among one or more applications. It depends on the DeviceComm Manager from Lantronix (tm) found at http://www.lantronix.com

This is a mobile weather system for use in the air, on the water and on the ground.
Localized, current weather information is delivered via continuous satellite broadcast of data from XM WX Satellite Weather. Includes standard NEXRAD radar available from other resources and other data products to update you frequently on weather conditions.

Welcome to WxWorx

This company: Fleeman Anderson & Bird, Corp

Has a large collection of Connectors, Antennas, Adapters, and other Accessories for Radio (including 802.11) communications.

A good site to keep handy.

Re: how to convert ifo or vob files to avi or mpeg

how to convert ifo or vob files to avi or mpeg - a very simple solution

Knoppix Linux

Knoppix is a GNU/Linux distribution that boots and runs completely from cd. It includes recent linux software and desktop environments, with programs such as OpenOffice.org, Abiword, The Gimp, Konqueror, Mozilla, and hundreds of other quality open source programs.

A great site with lots of goodies:
SMARTHOME - X10, Remote Control, Lighting, Wireless Security

Want to get into APRS, but not sure what hardware combinations work?

Check this out:
APRS Station Setup Information: HomePage

People are entering their hardware information to show what components, what cables and what configuration settings work.

I purchased the Delorme Street Atlas USA Handheld software late last year. Since then, I've been trying to figure out what I needed to connect my GPS unit to my Handspring.

This page:
Using the Handspring Visor with RS-232 Devices gives all of thedetails about what is needed and directs you to the site for Blue Hills Innovations where you can buy a ready-made cable!

Good stuff!

I have began looking into Automatic Position Reporting System which uses a GPS unit in conjunction with a two-way (amateur) radio to transmit your location to a remote station.

To make all of it work, you have to have a radio and a TNC in addition to the GPS unit. This project:
Byonics - Pocket Tracker has combined a TNC (well, sorta) with a radio (again, sorta). There are two things that makes it interesting are a) it's low cost and b) it fits into an "Altoids" mint tin.

Maxim 1-Wire and iButton: Communications components for identification, sensor, control, and memory functions

The thermostat that we purchased was a good change to our heating/cooling system, but we still have some problems. It can be 77°F in the office and 67°F in the master bedroom.

Since our house is less than 1600 square feet, this is surprising.

I did some looking on the internet and found this project on source-forge:
The DIY Zoning Project.

This project is one person's way of dealing with the situation that I see in my home.

Sounds like an interesting project - I may start experimenting.

For the past little while, our home thermostat has given us problems.

The switch to select heat or cool was difficult to switch and it did a very poor job of maintaining the correct temperature.

Since this was an older thermostat, we decided to install a new digital thermostat.

We went to Lowe's and found an inexpenseive "Hunter" Programmable Thermostat.

If you are keeping up with my work on My TVListings, you may find the latest version of the mytvlisting perl script interesting.

I have simplified the script. I no longer use multiple functions to get the listings. I use a single function and pass arguments to it.

I have added some JavaScript and Style Sheet stuff to control the display of All shows or just shows that I would like, so now to switch between the two, you do not have to return to the server.

I also have worked to make this something that I can display on my Palm via AvantGo.

See: My TVListings for more details

I just found this tool and thought I would give it a try...