Timothy E. Archer

Tonight I ran across the following piece written by Isaac Asimov, and felt is was worth sharing:

What is intelligence, anyway? When I was in the army, I received the kind of aptitude test that all soldiers took and, against a normal of 100, scored 160. No one at the base had ever seen a figure like that, and for two hours they made a big fuss over me. (It didn’t mean anything. The next day I was still a buck private with KP – kitchen police – as my highest duty.)
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Today I had a slight crisis…I had to reinstall QuickBooks 2006 on a new computer and restore the backup file that QuickBooks creates with the “.qbb” extension.

Everything worked great, and it was literally as simple as popping in the QuickBooks CD, installing the software, launching the program, and then following the steps from the “File->Restore menu”.

However, once I went into the Loan Manager to make a loan payment, I discovered none of the loans that I setup were there. I learned the hard way that the Loan Manager data is not backed up with your QuickBooks backup file. I really did not want to re-key in my loans, figure out what payment number I was on, determine principal and interest components, etc…Needless to say I was a little sad and looked for a way to get my Loan Manager data back.
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I just got a new computer and had to figure out how to bring over all of my Firefox bookmarks and saved passwords over to it from my old computer.

For reference, my old and new computers are both running Windows XP, and my old computer is running Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.3.

In order to bring over all of my personal settings to my new computer I performed the following actions:
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Today I had a very simple need for my Drupal based blog. I needed to get the number of blog entries by user and publication status.

To accomplish this, I put together the query below which will dump out this information showing the username, publication status (0=unpublished, 1=published), and the count of blog posts for that username and publication status combination.

The query is:

SELECT users.name, node.status, count(*)
FROM node, users
WHERE type = 'blog'
AND   node.uid = users.uid
GROUP BY users.name, node.status
ORDER BY users.name, node.status;

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        Over the last few years a new genre of computer gaming has evolved referred to as Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG). Within these games, game players design their own fictional character (such as a wizard), which they then immerse into a virtual world containing millions of other people who have done the same. The players control the actions of their characters and guide them throughout this virtual world completing various tasks, venturing on quests, trading their treasures, earning and spending virtual money, and interacting with other players. With the growing popularity of these games many questions are raised as to what laws, if any, govern this virtual world, especially since this is an environment that is not under the control of any given government, or within the borders of a given territory.

        Within these MMORPG games the players obtain treasures and money through game play, which they can then use within the game to buy better equipment or other property for their characters. In some games, players can also buy their own virtual land. It often takes many weeks of game play for a player to earn some of the more valuable treasures. There is a rising trend for players to trade their virtual property in the real world, using real cash. Some real world companies have actually been formed to “farm” game characters and equipment and sell them for real money to individuals who want a quick way to get ahead in the game. continue reading…

               John P. Eckert is credited with being a coinventor of the first electronic digital computer. While he was a research associate at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering of the University of Pennsylvania, he collaborated with J.W. Mauchly in designing and constructing the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator (ENIAC). Eckert used the basic digital concepts in designing ENIAC which John V. Atanasoff had used earlier in a device he had built in the 1930s. By using these digital concepts, Eckert was able to substitute electronic components for mechanical ones. This change in design made ENIAC about 1,000 times faster than the previous generation of relay computers.

               Eckert and Mauchly decided to build ENIAC when the outbreak of WWII produced a desperate need for computing capability for the military. ENIAC was designed to calculate ballistic trajectory tables for the new weapons systems which were being developed. ENIAC was successful at doing this, and thus was officially put into operation in 1946 and was used for the next 9 years. continue reading…

About two weeks ago I had setup Drupal 4.7.4, MySQL 4.1.12, and Apache 2.0.52 on my RedHat Linux AS 4 server to serve my site, timarcher.com.

Now one of my friends would like to setup a site for himself. We wanted to leverage everything that I had already configured for timarcher.com and not have to setup another Drupal code base. The basic requirement was to use the same Drupal installation/code base, but allow my friend to have his own configuration, database, users, etc and allow his site to display entirely different content than my existing site.

The remainder of this post will detail the steps I took to get this to work, and assumes you already have a working Drupal installation.
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At the University for which I work, we had a need to integrate our Sungard HE Banner ERP system with Barnes and Noble (our outsourced bookstore) to process book vouchers, and with our credit card processing API (Intellipay). Both of these applications required us to post charges and payments directly to the student’s account.

With our Barnes and Noble integration, the process works as such: continue reading…

Today I wanted to create the favicon.ico file for my blog. I had a PNG version of the graphic I wanted to use, and I figured I’d quickly use Paint Shop Pro to open it and save it to a .ico file. No dice, PSP does not save files in the .ico format.

So, my next step was to ask a co-worker who has Adobe Photoshop to do it for me. I figured that this would be a done deal and he’d email me back the .ico file I desired. However, he also walked up to me and told me Photoshop can’t do it.

What is so special about the .ico file format that these major programs can’t create them? continue reading…

Are you a Sungard HE customer using the Banner ERP Software?
Have you ever wanted to know how to easily select a student’s account balance?

Well, all of a student’s charges and payments are held in the tbraccd table. Banner defines the tbraccd table as the “Account Charge/Payment Detail Table”. Furthermore, each entry in the tbraccd table has a specific detail code defined in the tbraccd_detail_code column. This column relates to the tbbdetc table, which Banner defines as the “Detail Charge/Payment Code Definition Table”.

Essentially, the tbraccd table stores the type of transaction, and the transaction amount. The tbbdetc table tells us whether that transaction type is a charge or a payment. continue reading…