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.
Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by Greg Pinero (Primary Searcher) as VNC, win32 at 8:35 PM MST

11 Comments »

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:
Read the rest of this entry »

Posted by Greg Pinero (Primary Searcher) as Python, Web Services at 10:37 PM MST

1 Comment »

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

Posted by Greg Pinero (Primary Searcher) as Python at 2:55 PM MST

3 Comments »

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

Posted by Greg Pinero (Primary Searcher) as Other at 5:11 PM MST

10 Comments »

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

Posted by Greg Pinero (Primary Searcher) as Other at 6:47 PM MST

Comments Off