Posts from ‘December, 1969’

Paymaxx, a payroll services provider, recently confessed to a major mistake that essentially made public many of their customers' employees' W-2 forms. My firm uses Paymaxx to run payroll. So, as it happens, does another Harvard-associated person's small computer firm. This person, however, has more time (or more curiosity) than I, and discovered a gaping [...]

SWI-Prolog is available as prepackaged binaries for Mac OS X 10.3+, but not for 10.2.  If you try and install the 10.3 binary package, you will get errors (at least, I did).  The answer is to compile from source.  You are probably compile-savvy if you are looking to install a Prolog interpreter, but if not, [...]

The Perl module Mail::Mailer, and those modules that rely upon it (at least, Mail::Internet and MIME::Entity), have an undocumented fork that can wreak havoc with your code if you call the send() method within an eval {} block.  The solution is to either be very anal about checking for PIDs or to use a different [...]

Portland, Oregon is working toward a citywide, privately-operated wireless network, under a public-private partnership model that leverages city rights-of-way, among other assets, in return for certain “public benefits.”  I strongly support this effort (the “Unwire Portland” project). The issue at hand is that the currently-proposed public benefit structure is to create a “walled garden” of [...]

The MD5 hash function is dangerously unusable at this point.  I was under the impression, casually following crypto over the last couple years, that it was weak but likely “good enough” for non-military, non-banking types of applications.  Dead wrong. There are now known attacks — and doubtless toolchains for specific exploits — that permit creating [...]

If you are a small business with a Profit Sharing Plan / defined benefit plan set up through an independent benefit advisor firm, someone may have counseled you to set up your investments at Fidelity.  They will create a “Non-prototype retirement account” in the name of your Profit Sharing Plan trust.  You can make trades [...]

I am trying to sync my contact information between apps and machines. Here are my absolute, non-negotiable requirements: (“Works with” means I can round-trip in the given format — not necessarily that it is native, and it's OK if I have to use a tool or a script intermediary since I'll be scripting this stuff [...]

If you hook up an external monitor to your Mac OS X machine and run Excel 2004 for Mac on it, you might move your toolbars completely or partially over to the second desktop area. If you then remove the external monitor, it is possible for the toolbars to get “stuck” such that only a [...]

ActiveRecord (latest versions of ODBC, DBI, and AR as of today 2005-12-01) seems to be having trouble with at least two things that SQL Server 7 does: 1. The SQL Server adaptor (sqlserver_adaptor.rb) get_table_name sub expects a name to have no whitespace in it.  The conditional and regex need to be changed to look for [...]

If you see “There was an error opening this document.  A temporary file could not be opened.” when trying to open a PDF file, you may need to clean out C:Documents and SettingsUSERNAMELocal SettingsTempAcr*.tmp Cheers to “gprellwitz” who suggests this here: http://www.experts-exchange.com/Web/Graphics/Adobe_Acrobat/Q_20790405.html Jeers to the MSFT developer who decided that “Documents and Settings” with spaces [...]