brians's blog

Hiatus No More

Submitted by brians on

Well, it's been far too long since I've made a post here, and after receiving some, ahem, encouragement from a great friend and colleague, I figured it's high time I put fingers to keyboard and get back to flinging more bits into cyberspace. So, here goes...

Calendar Tables: An Invaluable Database Tool

Submitted by brians on

It's Friday, and the boss just asked you to produce a report that summarizes all the issues your team has dealt with in the past year, along with a chart that indicates at a glance the average number of business days that passed between the date an issue was reported to the date it was closed. No problem, right? But how can you reliably count only actual business days without including weekends or holidays? And to make matters worse, your company has a policy of giving employees Fridays off if a holiday falls on a Saturday, and Mondays off if one falls on a Sunday.

Running Drupal on Quercus

Submitted by brians on

A web developer's quest for the ideal application platform always seems to be a never-ending journey. What may appear to be the perfect package today is likely to be discarded tomorrow in favor of an even better one. Drupal is an excellent PHP-based content management system (CMS) upon which to build web applications, but in an enterprise environment, integrating Drupal modules and content with back-end databases and systems can be challenging. Quercus, a Java-based implementation of the PHP language by Caucho Technology, offers the potential to ease these interconnections.

Configure KDE4's Device Notifier to Download Photos With Picasa

Submitted by brians on

My wife has been asking me for some time to make it easy for her to dump photos off of our digital camera and upload them to Shutterfly. After some research, I determined that Google's Picasa software was capable of interfacing with Shutterfly, so I installed the Linux version in her Kubuntu laptop. However, when I inserted the memory card from the camera into the reader, KDE's device notifier pop-up only offered three options to process it: download the photos with Digikam, open the file manager or do nothing. I wanted a fourth option to download the photos with Picasa, and here's how I managed to get it working.

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