Charles Roth -- Techblog

This page is a quick-and-dirty entry point into my various "tech blog" pages.  It's mostly here so that Google can find its way into the descriptions of various interesting or annoying problems that I've solved. 

Enjoy!

  1. Cross-Browser Fixed Horizontal Bar (no frames).  How to use CSS, even with (ugh) IE6, to create a fixed horizontal bar on a page, where everything else can scroll "underneath" it.
  2. Credit Acceptance Weblog.  Various problems I encountered and solved while working at Credit Acceptance Corp.
  3. Ditto, for IBS (Interactive Business Systems).
  4. JBOSS port renumbering.
  5. Fedora 7 on Dell Latitude D520.
  6. Integrating WebHuddle with other applications.  WebHuddle is a cool, open-source, synchronous meeting tool, which includes chat, shared desktop, "slideshows", and VoIP conference calling.
  7. Merging subversion forks.  "How I learned to stop worrying and love the fork" by writing a two-way merge script 'mergeFork'.
  8. KidBasic is an excellent, open-source (free) tool for teaching computer programming to kids.  I've built a distribution that includes some additional material for parents, a CD that auto-launches when inserted into a Windows PC, and a MacOS X version.
  9. TrueCrypt is a lovely, cross-platform, encryption and security tool.  It does on-the-fly encryption of entire volumes.  A volume can be either a physical disk partition, or a (large) pre-defined file that acts as a logical volume.
  10. ThreadTracker is my attempt at bridging the Java-threads and Linux-threads divide.
  11. Rsync backup with Vista is a short, sweet, hack to doing easy incremental backups from Vista to a Linux server.
  12. Linking to LinkedIn, a primer on (minimal) integration of a web application to LinkedIn.
  13. VNC Server under Linux
  14. Margaret Mead amongst the Agilists, or my 10 weeks at Pillar Technology.
  15. Resolving the IE8 and docx file problem.
  16. Installing an OpenId server on a linux box.
  17. My draft restatement of the "official" Star Trek 3D Chess Rules.  (See also spacechess.org.)
  18. An ASCII Art version of the U.S.S. Enterprise I created many years ago.
  19. Java Bookmarks I often need.
  20. A brief 'entrepreneurial' biography I wrote for some students at my daughter's school.
  21. PowerMock Tutorial, originally written for ProQuest staff developers.
  22. The Green Lantern / Junit Oath.  Or, why fear is important to software developers.
  23. Installing PHP manually on 64-bit CentOS / Linux.
  24. I said it first:
    "Any sufficiently confusing magic is not necessarily an advanced technology." 
    In other words, the converse of Clarke's Third Law does not always follow!)  For example, I love advanced technologies like Tapestry... but some days it goes so far over into the realm of 'magic' that it becomes incomprehensible.