The housing market begins it's downhill slide

I hate to say "I told you so," but I did...

The economy is now taking a beating as the situation with the housing market worsens. It all started about a month ago with record defaults in the sub-prime lending market. Simply put, people purchased homes they could not afford. I should say it all started with the mortgage boom back in 2003. Rates were at an all time low and housing prices were also low.

Life lessons: saving

I have definitely learned the importance of saving my money with my latest engine debacle, and the best ways to do it. I am going to share what has worked for me.

First, you have to "pay yourself first." No matter how in debt you are, no matter the bills, you have to save something every paycheck. Start with 10% off the top, before you do anything with your money. I am up to about 30% now.

AWStats On IIS 6.0

After setting up AWStats On IIS, I wanted to use awstats.pl instead of the static pages. I configured it according to what I found on the internet, but there was a problem. I would go to the awstats.pl and I would get the html on the page rather than the rendered html. I found the problem, but it requires editing awstats.pl.

On line 550, there is a function called http_head. In line 553, the following line:

else { print "Content-type: text/html; charset=$PageCode\n"; }

should be changed to:

else { print "HTTP/1.0 200 OK Content-type: text/html"}

Vista, IE 7 And Secure Certificates

I ran into a strange problem at work today. We have a web server on which is installed a self-generated SSL certificate. This page has worked fine as far as I know for several years. The certificate, however, was not generated for the URL and is therefore not valid. This is something we were going to get around to fix, but it looks like we'll have to do it sooner than later.

Normally, in Windows XP with Internet Explorer 7 and 6, Firefox on Windows and Linux and many other browsers and platforms I assume, a prompt is shown to the user asking if they want to connect to the website anyway.

Linux Tips: Rip A CD

Why is Linux so cool and fun? Because many of the things people do with their computers are very easy to do in Linux. Like ripping a CD.

Using Kubuntu 7.04, go to the KDE menu and click system settings. Click on the advanced tab. Click on audio encoding and finally the MP3 Encoder. This is where the MP3 settings are located at (quality, bit rate).

Now, put a CD into your CD-ROM drive. You should see an icon that looks like this on your desktop.

MS SQL: Insert Multiple Rows With One Query

Just figured this out. Using Microsoft SQl Server 2000, you can insert multiple rows into a table with one query as in the following examples:

Single Column:

CREATE TABLE test
(
val1 INTEGER NOT NULL
)

INSERT INTO test
SELECT 62
UNION
SELECT 91
UNION
SELECT 95
UNION
SELECT 98
UNION
SELECT 99

This will insert 5 rows into the table. To do multiple columns, use the following:

CREATE TABLE test
(
val1 VARCHAR(10),
val2 VARCHAR(10),
val3 VARCHAR(10),
val4 VARCHAR(10)
)
GO

INSERT INTO test
(val1, val2, val3, val4)

Linux Tips: FTP with gFTP

gFTP is an open source graphical FTP client. It has a nice user interface and is easy to use. I've had problems with it doing large ftp transfers, so in those cases or cases where I want to transfer server to server, I use kasablanca. The GUI is a bit clunkier and is lacking some features, but it is best for certain situations.

Linux Tips: Image Editing With The Gimp

The Gimp, or GNU Image Manipulation Program, is an excellent, free image editing software package for Linux, and Windows. As far as I can tell, it does everything the big name programs do, except allow the creation of shapes. Coming from Fireworks, it was tough to get used to. But you can create vectors and areas, and then fill them. While I am not a professional, I did create this graphic using The Gimp.

Linux Tips: Installing And Updating

One of the reasons the average person complains about Linux is the perceived or rumored difficulty in installing software, or performing updates. It is true that it is somewhat difficult if you have to compile your application or driver, as I do with vmware (the only way to run Windows) and my video card driver, but installing and updating a Kubuntu system is not difficult and automatic most of the time.