Ruby on Rails – Tutorial 1 – Creating a Rails Project

I heard about Rails back when I was a programmer at BlueHost / Hostmonster since they are one of the “preferred” web hosting companies for Ruby on Rails type applications. There weren’t very many clients who used it, but when questions came in about it, I always seemed to be approached with them. I guess tech support people think that if you are generally willing to help them out and you know a programming language, you know them all. Well, I eventually got sick of saying I don’t know and got some basic knowledge going of Ruby on Rails, and was pleasantly surprised!
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Remote Desktop – overview of Microsoft’s Remote Desktop client.

Microsoft’s Remote Desktop is a decent application for allowing you to remotely control a networked windows computer. The Remote Desktop client which is included with Windows XP and Vista is only a small part of the larger Terminal Services package which is included with Windows Server. This tutorial will introduce you to the Remote Desktop client application.

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Remember WebTV?

It seems that Intel and Yahoo are teaming up to create a new version of the failed WebTV. An article on bbc describes it pretty well. The main difference here is this new chip from intel, designed specifically for web-connected devices, will allow you to use widgets (if you have an igoogle account, you’re probably quite familiar with widgets) and still view television as normal – something WebTV could not do. I could see this actually catching on, depending on initial price, etc. How many people do you know who watch television with their lap-top on the coffee table? I can think of five off the top of my head. One thing that is not mentioned, is if the ability to harness the internet outside of the widget capability will be included. The picture-in-picture functionality could be quite fun; one screen playing the new season of Heroes, while the other is posting “OMG did you see that” in the fan-boy forums. It could just be what WebTV was trying to do.

PowerShell tutorial 5

You will undoubtedly need to use variables in your PowerShell scripts from time to time fortunately PowerShell has you covered. There are many built-in variables you can use to provide such information as the home folder ($pshome) or the current working folder ($pwd). If you would like to see a list of the built in and user defined variables available to the current session type;

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Perl on Linux – Greedy Regular Expressions and the Question Marks that Tame Them

In 1986, Larry Wall invented a scripting language to solve the problems of generating reports for system administrators on unix. He called it the Practical Extraction and Reporting Language since that was its function. And it does do that. In a Unix based OS where everything is output in text, Perl has dominated somewhat because it so easy to use but mostly because of its powerful and easily used regular expression capabilities.
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BREAKING NEWS, INDEED!

There’s been a flood of emails around the net today pretending to be from MSNBC. According to MXlab, the “Subject starts with msnbc.com – BREAKING NEWS and can contain the following: ‘Google launches free music downloads in China’, ‘Plane crashes into prep school, hundreds of kids killed’, ‘Please give your opinions for change’, ‘US Dollar hits 6-year high, further gains expected'” and more. The URL does appear to be legit but the site it leads you to is not. Upon arrival you’ll be asked to download a spoof adobe flash update that is, in reality, a trojan horse.

PowerShell tutorial part 4

Almost all of your PowerShell statements are going to include string values. Most of the time these strings are simply passed to cmdlets as arguments, but in a few cases, those strings are enclosed in either double or single quotes. The rules that govern when to use single or double quotes are referred to as quoting rules. This tutorial will attempt to explain those rules.

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Perl on Linux – Formatting Text and Reports

Surely one of the most annoying things about working in a non-gui environment is convenient formatting. We have all had output that was off due to tabs or new lines or variables that overran their boundaries in the output area, etc. Provisioning for such things can be tedious, time consuming, and highly annoying. Luckily for us, perl provides a text formatting feature that is built in and fairly easy to use.
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