Rob Pickering

Goodbye Quicken Essentials 2010 for Mac, Hello iBank 4

February 19, 2011

I was wrong. That’s not something anyone likes to admit, but when I’m wrong, I’m wrong, I’ll admit it. Some quick background for any readers who are experiencing my personal saga with Macintosh Finance software for the first time. Back in February of 2010, I was terribly frustrated with the direction that Intuit was taking [...]

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MySQL Database Replication over an SSH Tunnel

February 13, 2011

SSH Tunnel Setup Create an SSH key (Version 2) to allow passwordless replication: $ ssh-keygen -t rsa Copy the SSH key to the Master (assumes same user account on Master and Slave): $ ssh-copy-id master.machine.dom Setup the SSH Tunnel from the Slave to the Master on Slave Port 3305: $ ssh -f master.machine.dom -L 3305:127.0.0.1:3306 [...]

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The Dirty Little Secret in Quicken Essentials…You Lose Your Data

February 5, 2011

A year ago I upgraded from Quicken 2007 for Macintosh to Quicken Essentials 2010 for Macintosh. I wrote about that upgrade in my article entitled Quicken Essentials for Mac – The Bare Minimum. In that article I went through my upgrade experience and got the reader setup on Quicken Essentials. I then went over the [...]

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Adobe Type Units Error – How to Fix It

January 26, 2011

The Problem I was recently perusing my /var/log/system.log file under OS X Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6.6), also available by running the Console application in your Utilities folder and selecting system.log, when I noticed several error messages that bothered me: osascript[236]: Error loading /Library/ScriptingAdditions/Adobe Unit Types.osax/Contents/MacOS/Adobe Unit Types: dlopen(/Library/ScriptingAdditions/Adobe Unit Types.osax/Contents/MacOS/Adobe Unit Types, 262): no [...]

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Pilgrim’s Bounty – Or Fast Cooking 1-350

November 21, 2010

Note: Some of the quest givers are Trainers! Learn them and use them. Note: Save everything you make, until all quests are completed. Note: For best results, empty your bags of everything, you’ll need nothing and you’ll need bag space. Note: This won’t work after the Pilgrim’s Bounty Holiday is over (next Saturday it ends) [...]

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OSX Hints and Tips

August 24, 2010

There are many ways to customize your OSX environment to suit your personal tastes. However, not every preference you want to change can be modified using System Preferences or Application Preferences. Often, settings are deemed too obscure for everyday users and relegated to complex keystrokes or hidden system settings. This is my guide to a number [...]

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Battle of the Clouds – Rackspace Cloud vs. Amazon EC2

August 1, 2010

You can’t pick up a technical magazine, hang out on Twitter, or read an article on a technology blog without hearing the phrase:  Cloud Computing.  What is cloud computing?  Wikipedia defines it as “Internet-based computing, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices on demand“.  

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Moving from SquareSpace to WordPress

July 27, 2010

On July 20th, I moved my personal blog site, robpickering.com from SquareSpace to WordPress.  This article is about why I did it and then how I performed the task, maintaining all of my posts, post dates, migrating authors, and most importantly, keeping all of my user comments.  

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Track Spammers using Gmail

July 20, 2010

I hate spam.  I’m sure you hate spam.  I’ve spent a significant amount of my personal time working on solutions to combat spam.  I’m fortunate, in that I run my own mail server, and can therefore deploy a variety of spam fighting techniques.  My current mail server is running: SpamAssassin amavisd-new Greylisting Postfix UCE Rules [...]

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Inexpensive eBooks from O’Reilly Media

July 19, 2010

I love eBooks.  I’m not actually sure the last time I purchased a physical, paper book.  If I have recently purchased one, then it was a Computer Reference book of some type.  Most likely it was a Cisco Press, O’Reilly “animal” book, or any one of a number of technical books and programming manuals.  Over [...]

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