My nephew had his first encounter with the infamous Blue Screen of Death which left his desktop computer utterly useless. Having been appointed the family “computer guy” many years ago, I received the casual, yet mildly panicked, inquiry, “Hey, can you fix Thomas’ computer? It says something about an unmountable boot thingy.”

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I’ve been doing a lot of work over the past year with PHP, and have been loving this language for dynamic web page development. I program in a couple of other languages so I have a few personal preferences for how I write code regardless of the language. Therefore, I often write standard if statements in PHP the same way I do in other languages; however, there are at least two other ways to write a PHP if statement that I often forget (old habits die hard) and am writing today’s post a quick “cheat sheet” type of reference for myself, and anyone else that needs a quick reminder of the available PHP if statement styles.

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On Monday I answered the question (at least in from perspective) why Microsoft Office continues to dominant the realm of word processing, spreadsheets and presentation graphics — it’s the proprietary document formats for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Basically, once you’ve started amassing a pile of documents saved in .doc, .xls, or .ppt format, you’re stuck with an application that can read and edit those formats. Obviously, many find it easy to just stick with Microsoft Office; however, for those that prefer a non-traditional route, alternatives do exist.

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Last week I wrote a 3 part series explaining how to copy (a.k.a. rip) a DVD movie to your iPod:

The first article listed the two pieces of necessary software (DVD43 and Handbrake)
The second article described how to install and use those two applications together to decrypt and then copy a DVD movie into a format [...]

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In the first article in this series I identified the basic free software you need to rip a DVD for your iPod (DVD43 and HandBrake). In the second article I gave instructions how to install and use these two pieces of software. If you’ve been following the series since the beginning, you should have successfully ripped a movie from a DVD. Also, if you got that far in the process, you’ve probably already imported that movie into your iTunes library and synced it with your iPod; however, just in case you haven’t done that last step, this article will walk you through the final piece of the puzzle.

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This is the second article in my three part series on how to rip a DVD for your iPod. The first article in the series outlined 3 available options for putting movies on your iPod. Then it focused on the third option and listed the 2 pieces of software needed. In this article, it’s time to install those two applications and learn how to use them together to rip a DVD movie for iPod viewing.

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If you own a video capable iPod, and already have a few favorite movies on DVD, then you’ve probably wanted a simple way to bring the two together. Set aside the question of whether it’s legal to rip a DVD for your iPod, and consider the question of “how” to put a DVD movie on [...]

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I’ve been working on a project that required some date based MySQL queries. I’m not sure what it is, but I always find date based queries a little tricky. Seems that the data I need is never in the format I want or I’m always looking for data from a few days back and need [...]

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Look at any free WordPress themes and you’ll notice that most of them have a “Meta” section in the sidebar. Options to login, logout, or jump to the WordPress Dashboard are often found in this section. And while the links are convenient for the owner of the site, they are only useful to that individual. Wouldn’t it be great to dynamically display standard meta links to only those people that could use them? Fortunately, with a little theme modification you can do just that, and here is how.

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Been dragging my feet on this task for while but I finally got around to upgrading my current 2.2.x WordPress installation to 2.3.1. Overall not a bad experience but there are a few things to watch out for during the process.
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