http://webmechs.com/webpress A pundit's guide to IT, Software Development, and the Web Tue, 24 Aug 2010 13:31:04 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I have always felt, despite the competition coming from .Net and the great strides made by the CLR, that Java's future prospects as a [more or less] general purpose development platform were still pretty good because of its robust ecosystem. However, the acquisition by Oracle, I believe, spells the ... http://webmechs.com/webpress/2010/08/oracle-owning-java-means-death-for-the-latter/ I just realized tonight why my internet usage billing on the iPhone seems excessive compared to, say, when I was using my Nokia XpressMusic 5800. I've seen a lot of complaints on the internet about such incidents and contrary to what many are suspecting it is most probably NOT ... http://webmechs.com/webpress/2010/02/iphone-why-youre-getting-excessive-data-billing/ Paypal now lets you withdraw the balance in your account into your Philippine bank account. Yay! But... the withdrawal has to take place in PHP, which means your USD will be converted into PHP before being deposited to your account. Currently, you cannot withdraw USD even to a Philippines ... http://webmechs.com/webpress/2010/02/withdrawing-usd-from-paypal-account/ One of the greatest frustrations I have had with using the Apple Wireless Bluetooth Keyboard with my Modbook is that it sometimes gives out inexplicable error messages when trying to pair with Windows 7 and refuses to go forward with the process. I was able to find an article on the ... http://webmechs.com/webpress/2010/02/apple-wireless-bluetooth-keyboard-pairing-with-windows-7/ The iPhone is a very nice device, but one of its many flaws are that it sucks up battery juice like there's no tomorrow (which there literally won't be if you don't charge it every chance you get).  For someone who has lots of music videos and who may just ... http://webmechs.com/webpress/2009/12/iphone-tip-playing-audio-only-for-videos/ I wrote a blog article a few months back, Microsoft's 3-front war, Part 1 where I was going to explain each of the 3 fronts Microsoft is competing on in a separate blog article and conclude with the recommendation in this article.  But I'm going to skip all these and ... http://webmechs.com/webpress/2009/12/microsoft-should-replace-ie-with-a-coreclr-based-browser/ When installing Windows and OS X side by side using Apple's recommended Boot Camp technique, you can only use one partition for Windows.  If, like me, you need multiple partitions for Windows, you have to do it another way.  The first thing to understand is that Boot Camp Assistant is ... http://webmechs.com/webpress/2009/11/installing-windows-7-and-os-x-with-multiple-partitions/ I had a nasty time trying to get the PHP module to run under Apache 2.2 in Windows 7 x64.  Specifically, I kept getting a "php_mysql.dll could not be loaded" error. After some sleuthing, decided to use Dependency Walker to help figure out what was wrong.  It turns out that ... http://webmechs.com/webpress/2009/11/windowssystem32-directory-in-windows-x64-the-big-gotcha/ My Modbook from OCW took less than five days to arrive.  Less than five days after receiving it, it also saw a ~USD100 price drop.  Lol!  Can't win 'em all. So anyway, one of the priorities was to get Windows working on this machine.  Since the Modbook has 4GB on it, ... http://webmechs.com/webpress/2009/06/installing-windows-7-on-a-modbook-macbook/ The most basic thing one needs to learn when setting up Slackware (on a VPS, especially) is how to get various packages and install them.  This is most easily done via the wget and installpkg commands. http://slackware.com/getslack has a list of mirrors where you can get slackware packages. Packages will ... http://webmechs.com/webpress/2009/06/setting-up-slackware-on-a-vps-part-2-using-installpkg-and-getting-packages/