Handbrake Settings

Now that I am getting comfortable with Handbrake and its settings I have noticed the dearth of information online about peoples’ preferred settings. I feel that this information is very valuable and so have decided to share some baseline information about my own settings. Unless otherwise stated I do my conversions to the .mp4 MPEG4 …

Are You Vista Capable?

Following my last article on Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system and its review from the New York Times I felt that I should provide my own insight into the state of Windows Vista. I have been using Windows Vista for almost a year now. I am an IT professional and an early adopter of most …

Solaris Dstream Package Format (Package Stream)

If you have worked on Solaris for a while you have probably stumbled across the package stream or “dstream” package format sometimes used for Solaris packages. Dstreams can come as a surprise to Solaris administrators who have become accustomed to the traditional package format. But Dstreams are very easy to work with if you just …

CPUs, Cores and Threads: How Many Processors Do I Have?

In my job role I am very often called upon to determine how many “processors” a machine has or how many we will need for a specific task. Ten years ago this was a simple process but today even the very concept of the “processor” is fuzzy at best and only a very few people …

Simple Website Management with PHP Includes

We all know the importance of the careful separation of websites into their three discrete elements – content in the form of XHTML, style in the form of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and behavior in the form of JavaScript. This is the basic foundation of correct, clean and functional web design. Once one has accomplished …