Archive for March, 2006

Single Click VNC Server – Solving Grandma’s Computer Problem is Just a Click Away

Monday, March 27th, 2006


I just discovered last night that the UltraVNC people make a program called UltraVNC SC (SingleClick)

The basic idea of this program is that someone who needs computer help from me can download a ~100K executable and launch it, and I’m instantly controlling and viewing their computer screen. There’s no installation, no router settings non-sense, just click and go. It really has opened up a whole world of possibilities for me to painlessly help friends and relatives with simple computer problems.
(more…)

Python’s xmlrpclib – A Simple Example

Tuesday, March 21st, 2006

I used XML-RPC for the first time today. I didn’t really know what it was so I was basically just scratching around in the dark. Alas, here’s what I found out so far:
(more…)

marshal, Your Best Friend in the Python Universe

Tuesday, March 21st, 2006

Who or what is marshal? It’s a built in Python library that lets you save Python’s built in data types to a file for later use. It’s very useful as a simple way to store things to disk and it’s much faster than the more general purpose Pickle library.

Here’s how you use it:

good_list=[1,2,3]
import marshal
marshal.dump(good_list, file('goodlist.p','wb'), 1)

#now close your program reopen it weeks later
import marshal
good_list=marshal.load(file('goodlist.p','rb'))

More information:
3.19 marshal — Internal Python object serialization

[tags]Python, Serialization, lists, marshal, Pickle, Programming[/tags]

MySQL – PRIMARY and INDEX keys should not both be set for column …

Saturday, March 18th, 2006


I set up a table in MySQL today via PHPMyAdmin, and when I set an index on the primary key field this warning came up:

PRIMARY and INDEX keys should not both be set for column ...

I searched around for what this was and why it was bad because well, I don’t want bad things to happen to me. The answer as it turns out is that MySQL automatically creates an index on whatever your primary key is.

So at best, what I did was redundant and at worst it could have caused bad things. I’m not sure though because that was the extent of my research.

I found the answer here, and here.

[tags]MySQL, PHPMyAdmin, Index, Primary Key, Warning, Errors[/tags]

How to Stack PDF Files

Tuesday, March 14th, 2006

I ended up using a free program called pdftk to combine multiple single page PDF files into one big file.

If you want more choices just do a search for PDF AND merge. It turns out I was just searching for the wrong thing. No one calls it “stack” I guess.

My other erronious searches:

  1. “stack pdf”
  2. combine pdf
  3. combine multiple pdfs
  4. pdf stacker
  5. stack pdf
  6. free program to stack pdf
  7. stack pdfs

[tags]pdftk, stack pdf, howto, merge pdf[/tags]