Holiday Lights Display

As the holidays fast approach, millions of us are pulling decorations out of the attic, grabbing extension cords and untangling the lights. Last weekend I set up the tree, put lights outside, and put candle lights in each of my windows. It certainly looked nice and festive, but I quickly dreaded having to plug and unplug each set of lights every day.

Fortunately, I had a solution! Using X10 automation modules, my windows computer and about 30 minutes of effort, my lights now turn on and off automatically every day!  This post details the steps I took to accomplish this, and provides some resources so you can set up a similar solution yourself.

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I recently set out to integrate a Subversion (SVN) source control repository with MantisBT, a free bug tracking system. I quickly found John Reese’s Source Integration plugin — available for the MantisBT 1.2.0 development branch — which promised to do exactly what I needed.

Reese provides step-by-step instructions to configure his plugin for a Git version control repository, but although his plugin supports Subversion, no walkthrough was available for an SVN scenario. Configuring the SVN plugin correctly took some trial and error, so I decided to document the process for others who want to get Mantis and SVN to play nicely.

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Clients often come to us for assistance integrating an events calendar into a web site, and we frequently recommend Google Calendar.  It has a flexible and user-friendly interface for both web site visitors and calendar managers.  What it doesn’t have, unfortunately, is a way to customize its color scheme.

I had the opportunity to tackle this shortcoming for a recent project and you can find a copy of my script below, followed by an explanation of the approach I used. (more…)