Windows

Between work and home, I had four different computers on which I used Pidgin for my instant messaging. When I really enjoy about Pidgin is the ability to log my conversations so I can search back through for information that I was discussion previously, mostly with coworkers. I hated that my logs did not sync between my computers so I figured I would create a basic workaround to allow me to synchronize my logs using Dropbox on all of my Windows machines: ...

update 10/21/2011 - it appears that this bug has come up again with a number of people who have updated to iOS 5. luckily, the solution is the same as before. i have updated the instructions to help with any changes that iOS 5 added. before you start - this will only work if your photos actually exist on your device but do not show up in in the camera roll. you can verify that photos exist on your device by looking graph at the bottom of iTunes and by checking your device for the actual picture files. if you post comments about having problems but don’t mention that you haven’t verified that your photos are still available on your device, i’m sorry but i won’t be able to help you. ...

as many people are aware, many ISPs block traffic on port 25 in order to attempt to prevent spammers from using bot infected hosts on their networks. this can be a problem for people who want to run a mail server from their home connection. yes, i realize that running an email server violates the TOS of most providers but that is a discussion for another day. i personally use my email server as a learning experience but i also use it for my primary personal email. ...

like many people, i like to tinker with all sorts of different technology including multiple operating systems as well as the different roles they can play. one of the best ways that i can do that is by using a virtualization product. i just happen to use vmware server 2.0 on my debian lenny server. vmware is one of the leaders in virtualization (if not the leader). at home, i have five virtual machines that i rely on heavily for my day-to-day operations. i have two windows server 2008 domain controllers, two windows server 2003 servers running exchange 2003 and one windows server 2008 computer i use for remote desktop and management of services. some of these services can provide a fair load on my server and i was starting to see the impact, especially from my win2k8 vms. it seems that there are a number of optimizations that are not enabled by default in vmware server. i searched far and wide through vmware kb docs as well as blogs and web forums and came up with the following optimizations: ...