I recently had an issue at a remote location (12000km away) where the old multi-purpose Linux server that had been working for the past 5 years wouldn’t boot again after a nasty power failure. The server was used as a firewall, a local email store, a file server and a backup server, so its failure... » read more
In my previous article about changing the MS Access colour scheme I had the need to allow the user to restart the database after the colour scheme was changed. (__Article and Code Updated 13FEB2009.__) Being able to cleanly restart and compact the application is also useful in other instances: * Changes made to the environment... » read more
Business Week has a recent article where the author foresee the demise of Windows in favour of Apple’s OS. Reading it, I couldn’t help thinking I was reading one of these overenthusiastic 1925 popular-science article promising us that within just a few years we would all use our own flying car to get to work.... » read more
MediaWiki is the wiki software behind WikiPedia. The issue, when using it as a software development tool, is formatting code in a pretty way. As we did with WordPress before, here are some details to make dp.SyntaxHighlighter work fairly seamlessly with MediaWiki. ###Install the client-side highlighter### Download dp.SyntaxHighlighter. Uncompress its content under a new `/skins/common/SyntaxHighlighter`... » read more
Sometimes your computer crashes without reason. It happens at any time, for no particular reason. Other times you’re trying to install a new OS on a brand new PC and at some point, it fails, reboot itself or just hangs. A couple years ago I had this really depressing experience with a brand new system... » read more