Tech Advent Calendars

As in year’s past, several tech communities are running Advent calendars during the month of December. Read on for links to Perf Planet, 24ways, Perl and Web advents, including an RSS feed that combines articles from all of them.

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Posted in: Web

Movable Type 5.2 on Mac OS X

It’s been a while since my notes about local development copies of Movable Type and WordPress on XAMPP – a local LAMP stack that runs on Windows. I’m still using both blogging platforms and wanted to update the steps now that I’m doing most of my work on a Mac laptop. The steps aren’t too difficult, but there are lots of details to get right. Read on to see a detailed walk through for the installation of a local copy of Movable Type 5.2 on Mac OS X.

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Posted in: Web

Understanding Email Security and Privacy

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has a good summary of the laws governing email privacy protections in the context of the scandal that led to the resignation of General David Petraeus, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. At the heart of the protections afforded to email is the The Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) from 1986. The EFF article explains how ECPA applies in this case, but is seriously outdated and doesn’t seem to offer much protection at all.

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NASCAR Race – Phoenix 2004

Eight years ago this week my wife and I spent the weekend in Phoenix Arizona for the NASCAR race. We had a great connection through my uncle and were able to get Sprint Cup garage passes. (We also had Nationwide garage passes through Yahoo, but our driver didn’t even qualify for the race…)

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Smart Voter Mobile Website

With the US Elections coming in a couple weeks, I’ve started to take a closer look at mobile options for learning about the candidates and issues, and for watching the results. First up, the League of Women Voters site: Smart Voter (m.smartvoter.org) with the tagline: Unbiased Election Information. This site looks very complete, including lots of pre-election information. Not sure about election results though.

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