We had an emergency where our EMR provider isn't output the needed government reports. This wouldn't be such a big deal if they weren't due on Monday. The problem seems to be with the XML records and some information needed to be striped out and manually looked at. Thankfully python has easy installers for Windows and the standard lib includes xml parsing and csv output. ########################################## ### Get info from xml and make a csv ### #######################################

Problem When I restart my HP N40L it does not always recognize both drives. ESXi is on a thumbdrive and has not problem booting. Because the two physical drives are seperate datastores hosting different VMs it leaves my system in a in consistent place on restart. Solution Don't have one yet. I am going to investigate a UPS that triggers a shutdown script.

I wanted to deploy multiple copies of a base ubuntu server, easy right? Well it is now, but it took me a while to get it right. The whole problem comes from not having 'sysprep' for linux. (They probably have a much better way and I just don't know it). Because ESXi makes up a fake MAC address for the network interface, it is smart enough to make up a new MAC for the new machine. Your old VM is still expecting the old network settings and needs a minor change. I'm not changing the hostname,

I finally got my HP Proliant N40L doing something useful. Except for trying something new, it only runs a single instance of windows 7. I have it configured as two logical drives residing on a single 2TB disk. In my testing I had better performance keeping both logical drives on the same disk. Weird, it shouldn't work like that but it does. I wasn't able to stream movies from iTunes until I tried a million things, the last being adding a new ethernet card as a VMXNET3 instead of E1000. It is

A home server seems like such a good idea, until you get one and wonder, what the hell am I going to do with this? RIght now I have an instance of Windows 7 running iTunes to sync with the AppleTVs. This was harder than it should be because I couldn't add anything to the library without the system thinking it had a sound card. I found something to fake it and now it works. Amahi is a really light Linux implementation of WHS2011. It is the network share that I am storing my iTunes library. Th

My wife bought me a new toy yesterday. A HP Proliant Microserver N40L. I upgraded the RAM (8GB) and after some fighting, installed ESXi from a USB drive. The fighting was because of installing from a USB drive, ESXi recognized all the hardware just fine. I intend on running it headless, so I am using a tv as a monitor. My little sharp LCD only had dvi. My Samsung plasma has vga, but I can't turn off the power saving mode and it goes to sleep whenever it loses video signal. This means that d

I have wanted to install ESXi for a long time now, thankfully we have a spare Dell PowerEdge 1950 for me to use. I am going to install FreeNAS and pfSense to get the hang of using it. Later I will install some real machines. Here is a quick audio-less screencast showing how to connect with the vSphere client and create a new virtual machine.

We have an older medical office that we need to upgrade. It is using XP as a server and several Win2000 boxes as the clients. The practice management software is not compatible with Windows 7. We couldn't upgrade the software nor could we downgrade the new boxes to XP. I suggest VMWare (my answer for most everything lately) but this time Microsoft's Virtual PC and XP mode came to the rescue. We were able to test and configure the first machine, shut it down, save it to a network share and co

Problem : I have to use a punch clock webapp for work. It doesn't have jQuery already included and I would like it to work from the iPhone. Solution : Write a bookmarklet in javascript. Fill-in the text fields and click the submit button. (function(){ // Grab the username and password input fields user = document.getElementById('txtUserName'); pass = document.getElementById('txtPassword'); // Grab the submit button, oddly named 'punch' punch = document.getElementById('btnPunch

Here are some interview questions, when I'm back from vacation I'll have proper examples write out a dog class in JavaScript with a color property and a bark method var Dog = function(color) { this.color = color; this.bark = function() { console.log('woof'); } }; If I wanted to create a new dog var clarence = new Dog('black and white'); and if I wanted to add an eat method to the Dog class. This is will add it for all previously defined instances of the Dog class. Dog.prototype.eat = function(

In this quick video I show how to use iOS boilerplate to make a quick JSON driven blog.

Recently Google announced that Google App Engine is leaving preview. Along with a SLA they are also putting their pricing into effect. There has been a lot of speculation, but no one knows for sure how things will keep playing out. What does this mean for mcottondesign? It means that even if everything stays the same, now would be a good time to re-write this blog in Node.js and CouchDB on EC2. I have already shown how to make an all javascript blog in my screencast series with the same name

I have been pushing changes to my github repos and haven't come up with another screencast yet. The major decision is to stay with Google App Engine or to leave.

I am working on making a new screencasts series as I make a real-time multiplayer game. I need a head start before I start recording. Stay tuned.

I have several ideas for future screencasts but am not sure what direction to run in. Here is my list of future topics Use Socket.io to create a live view of database writes into couchdb Work on a prototype of my self-monitored security system Work on a iOS app used to explore the returned JSON from various APIs Improving my twilio-node module Please let me know if there is another topic you want to hear about [ http://twitter.com/mcotton ]

This week I look at quickly solving problems using JSFiddle.net

Github repo is at https://github.com/mcotton/GAE-CRM

The code is open source and on github Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 - CouchDB Map/Reduce explanation

The code is open source and on github Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 - CouchDB Map/Reduce explanation

The code is open source and on github Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 - CouchDB Map/Reduce explanation