drewk - Developer IT

MICR / Check printing

- by drewk

I want to print my own checks on blank stock from Quicken and QuickBooks. To do so, I need a virtual driver that intercepts the print output from Quicken formats the fields properly, and adds the MICR text at the bottom of the check. This is for Windows 7 or OS X. I have looked at the following: CHAX Works, but crashes a LOT. Not giving me confidence. It is also expensive. VersaCheck Looks promising but looks like it suffers severe feature bloat. I just want to print check and deposit slips, thank you. Ganson Is only for high volume really. It is also designed for batch use vs I just want to print to a virtual printer. More than $2500. GnuMICR is more of a science project. Not yet ready to use and has not been updated for years. There are a lot of solutions on the web, so please don't just google for me. I am looking for specific experience with good solid check printing solution. Thanks!!!

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Netbook without Windows?

- by drewk

I have been looking around for a netbook without Windows and with Ubuntu preinstalled. Almost all I have seen have Windows. The main issue is making sure that the computer ships with the right Ubuntu drivers and, hopefully, saving a little without having to pay for Windows. So far, I cannot find one.

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How do I insert the images of keys in Stackoverflow / Superuser?

- by drewk

Some to the questions / answers here have cool images of a key to press, like Esc but it looks like a key. How do I do that? I cannot see it documented in the editing FAQ or in http://superuser.com/editing-help or in Markdown documentation...

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How does SSMS and SQL Server Licensing work?

- by DrewK

Could not get a efficient enough answer from MSFT or some of their vendors. Trying to determine exactly how the licensing works before dropping the money on it. Looking to get Server/CAL. We will have the server at our datacenter and then be using SSMS remote on each developers computer. That is, installing SSMS on all developers machine. I am not familiar with MSFT licensing (postgresql & mysql). If I were to pay for the server license and 5 CALs does that mean we can install SSMS locally on each machine. Does each CAL have a specific lic. # that is entered when installing SSMS? We were messing with just the trial edition and the only way I know of installing SSMS is using the full sql server install and choosing only SSMS, it still requires a license number. Any information would be very useful.

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European wireless data

- by drewk

I am on my way to Europe for 20 days with the wife and teenage kids. Among us, we have 3 iPhones, 1 Blackberry, 2 iPad 3G and 2 Macbook Pro laptops. Each has Skype. I am very concerned about AT&T data charges, and I am looking for a sensible alternative. For example, the AT&T data plans for the phones and iPads are $200 EACH for 200 MB per device. That is $1,200 and does not even cover the laptops. Ouch!!! I am thinking about a prepaid data plan from a European cell system of some sort combined with a GSM data modem and a Cradlepoint router, such as the CTR500. So, questions: 1) Anyone know of a GSM data source in Europe where I can buy a GSM Modem compatible with the CTR500 at a reasonable prepaid rate? 2) Experience with the CTR500?

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Disappearing Arial on 2 Macs

- by drewk

I noticed that Safari started rendering common web pages in a funny manner on two different Macs that I have. One is a Macbook Pro and the other a Mac Pro desktop. Yahoo and Google would appear all excessively bold or all italic and not at all look right or acceptable. The computers are all running OS X 10.6.3 "Snow Leopard" Turns out that "Arial.TTF" and "Arial Bold.ttf" got deleted somehow on these two computers. I restored Arial through Font Book and got my web mojo back. So questions: 1) Anyone seen "arial" strangely randomly disappear? The only thing in common is these are the only two computers out of eight on site that recently got Adobe CS 5 installed. Has anyone had CS 5 delete arial? 2) When I restored arial with font book, it goes into User fonts rather than the All fonts. Can I use Font Book to restore a font in /System/Library/Fonts or do I need to do that manually? 3) I located THIS article on the web regarding OS X fonts. Essentially, Snow Leopard did away with the older .dfont format and replaced with open True Type. There is a minimum font list, but Arial is not among them. Arial is installed by MS Office. 4) Why are web sites affected by Arial being missing anyway? If I look at the HTML source for Yahoo for example, "arial" is specified by name only in an ad. Yahoo itself does not specify a font name. In my Safari preferences, I have Times and Courier specified as the default font which is the default for Safari when installed. How does a missing Arial screw things up anyway? Thanks in advance.

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VMware Fusion / New Machine / verify VMs?

- by drewk

I just got a 15" MacBook Pro with 8GB RAM, 2.66 i7 and 500GB SSD. Very sweet and fast! My old machine was 2.66 Core 2 Duo. I used Migration Assistant to migrate my old MBP to the new. When I started VMware to run Windows and Ubuntu I got the message first This VM has been moved or copied to a new machine. Did you move or copy it? I answered Copied. Then I got the message this CPU is a different configuration than the machine that created the VM. You may get unpredictable results. I answered Open Anyway. Windows XP, Windows 7, and Ubuntu all seem to work OK, but how can I verify? Is there some form of test harness for a VM? I have had a VM degrade and become unusable with very catastrophic data loss (on Parallels...), so I am a bit paranoid. Thanks,

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Perl unpack in list context

- by drewk

A common 'Perlism' is generating a list as something to loop over in this form: for($str=~/./g) { print "the next character from \"$str\"=$_\n"; } In this case the global match regex returns a list that is one character in turn from the string $str, and assigns that value to $_ Instead of a regex, split can be used in the same way or 'a'..'z', map, etc. I am investigating unpack to generate a field by field interpretation of a string. I have always found unpack to be less straightforward to the way my brain works, and I have never really dug that deeply into it. As a simple case, I want to generate a list that is one character in each element from a string using unpack (yes -- I know I can do it with split(//,$str) and /./g but I really want to see if unpack can be used this way...) Obviously, I can use a field list for unpack that is unpack("A1" x length($str), $str) but is there some other way that kinda looks like globbing? ie, can I call unpack(some_format,$str) either in list context or in a loop such that unpack will return the next group of character in the format group until $str is exausted? I have read The Perl 5.12 Pack pod and the Perl 5.12 pack tutorial and the Perkmonks tutorial Here is the sample code: #!/usr/bin/perl use warnings; use strict; my $str=join('',('a'..'z', 'A'..'Z')); #the alphabet... $str=~s/(.{1,3})/$1 /g; #...in groups of three print "str=$str\n\n"; for ($str=~/./g) { print "regex: = $_\n"; } for(split(//,$str)) { print "split: \$_=$_\n"; } for(unpack("A1" x length($str), $str)) { print "unpack: \$_=$_\n"; }

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"Home" of Javascript similar to python.org?

- by drewk

Perl, Ruby, Python, Javascript / ecmascript, PHP are all similar in the sense of being open source, open documentation, multi-platform, etc. Perl has http://www.perl.org Ruby has http://www.ruby-lang.org Python has http://www.python.org PHP has http://php.net Is there a "home" for javascript in the same sense as these other languages? When I say "home" I mean the go-to place for official documentation, specifications, source code of the language, examples, etc.

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Python file iterator over a binary file with newer idiom.

- by drewk

In Python, for a binary file, I can write this: buf_size=1024*64 # this is an important size... with open(file, "rb") as f: while True: data=f.read(buf_size) if not data: break # deal with the data.... With a text file that I want to read line-by-line, I can write this: with open(file, "r") as file: for line in file: # deal with each line.... Which is shorthand for: with open(file, "r") as file: for line in iter(file.readline, ""): # deal with each line.... This idiom is documented in PEP 234 but I have failed to locate a similar idiom for binary files. I have tried this: >>> with open('dups.txt','rb') as f: ... for chunk in iter(f.read,''): ... i+=1 >>> i 1 # 30 MB file, i==1 means read in one go... I tried putting iter(f.read(buf_size),'') but that is a syntax error because of the parens after the callable in iter(). I know I could write a function, but is there way with the default idiom of for chunk in file: where I can use a buffer size versus a line oriented? Thanks for putting up with the Python newbie trying to write his first non-trivial and idiomatic Python script.

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