David Luhman's blog

In my discussion of my home-based server, setting up a Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V was one potential solution for my requirements.

On the server side, I've mostly used Linux/Ubuntu solutions over the past 5-10 years. But my family still mostly uses Windows clients. Since I need SMB-based backups of the clients, I thought I'd give Windows Server 2008 R2 a try.

I recently purchased an HP ProLiant N40L MicroServer as the basis of a small home network. Basically, I need to be able to backup a few Windows client machines and run 2-3 virtualized Ubuntu servers.

To me, backing up the Windows clients means I need the MicroServer to expose SMB-based shares to the Windows machines. I've been doing this in the past with a D-Link DNS-323 NAS with rsync. It seemed to work fine for me, and I thought I'd continue with that but use the Microserver for the backups as the DNS-323 has more limited size and capability.

I attended a recent BadCamp 2011 event on SEO and learned of the following useful modules :

Alchemy : http://drupal.org/project/alchemy

Content Analysis : http://drupal.org/project/contentanalysis

Keyword Research : http://drupal.org/project/kwresearch

If you want to much of anything useful in a Greasemonkey ("User") script, you'll want to use jQuery or similar library.

Greasemonkey uses a "@require" command to pull in these libraries, but Chrome won't allow this.

To include jQuery in a Chrome user script, here's a good link which pulls in jQuery by adding a element to the page you're working on.

http://erikvold.com/blog/index.cfm/2010/6/14/using-jquery-with-a-user-script

Greasemonkey uses a "@include" syntax to indicate which web sites a given script should run on.

I believe Chrome accepts the older "@include" syntax for the sake of compatability, but Chrome prefers a "@match" syntax.

For example,
@match http://*.google.com
will run the indicated script on any google.com domain.

http://www.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/user-scripts

Yahoo is a pretty good source for historical stock and ETF prices. For example, here's a link that will provide historical prices for the SPY ETF :

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/hp?a=10&b=19&c=2008&d=08&e=10&f=2011&g=d&s=spy

The link at the bottom allows one-page downloads of CSV content, or you can try this link :

I had an earlier post describing free or cheap UI mock-up tools.

To take things to the next level and start creating prototypes, I was looking for rapid application development (RAD) tools that would allow me to draw out HTML pages with dragging and dropping.

I haven't yet found a suitable RAD HTML editor, but I did run across a blog post which provides copy-and-paste HTML elements (source) which you can use to quickly cobble a UI together. Here's that link :

jQuery Formwizard

* Pretty full featured. Lots of examples. Nice looking.

* Seems to handle branching better than SmartWizard

* http://plugins.jquery.com/project/formwizard

* http://thecodemine.org/

* MIT license

jWizard

* Pretty configurable

* Well documented

* Side menu

* Some form validation

* Able to open as modal dialog

* http://dominicbarnes.us/jWizard/

* License ?

jQWizard

* Kind of simplistic. Nice to show progress.

* http://plugins.jquery.com/project/jQWizard

* MIT & GPL license

I'm certainly no expert in UI design, but it's nice to mock-up things before you start committing them to code.

I like what I've seen from Balsamiq (http://balsamiq.com), but $79 for a license seemed a bit of a stretch for my modest needs.

I found the free app "Pencil" (http://pencil.evolus.vn) seems to work pretty good.

You can use Pencil as a Firefox plugin, but I ran it as a stand-alone XULRunner app.

Documentation is kind of sparse, but here's one useful link :
http://www.graphicrating.com/2009/10/05/creating-wireframes-with-pencil-...

I was interested in looking at Node.js as a potential framework for some back-end network services.

I initially thought about installing Node.js on Ubuntu, but then thought about trying it in webOS since webOS has been shipping with Node.js since Oct, 2010.

Getting webOS running in a virtual machine (VM) is easy enough. You'll first need to have Java and VirtualBox installed on your machine.

Then download the webOS 3.0 SDK here :

https://developer.palm.com/content/resources/develop/sdk_pdk_download.html