http://blog.jdlh.com Helping business go global, live from British Columbia Mon, 30 Jan 2012 04:43:59 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en CZBB, Boundary Bay airport, is my home field. I rent aircraft from Pacific Flying Club there. And the friendly air traffic controllers in the CZBB control tower are my rock and my safety. Saturday, I was at the airport with some spare time, and lousy weather made it a quiet ... http://blog.jdlh.com/en/2012/01/29/czbb-tower/ This spring my spouse Ducky and I took up paragliding training. The training so far has given us many vivid experiences, and I'm itching to share those stories with you. Let me start by telling you why we wanted to enter the sport. I'm a big fan of flying, in just ... http://blog.jdlh.com/en/2011/08/31/paragliding_us_thing/ In honour of the Vancouver Pride Parade and Festival today, which celebrates the spice which lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people contribute to our community — by means of a parade that ran literally past our front door — I'm kicking off a blog post series featuring my top ... http://blog.jdlh.com/en/2011/07/31/it-gets-better-7/ I want to pass along a tip about confusing field names used in the Ads Factory component for Joomla for geographic data.  I encountered this while customising this component for a client. At first I thought it was a bug, but now I think it's just an odd naming convention. Ads ... http://blog.jdlh.com/en/2011/06/30/adsfactory-x-y/ I never met Derek Miller. I take that back. I may well have met him, say at the Northern Voice conference, the annual gathering of the B.C. blogging and social media scene.  I almost certainly heard him play drums; I'm told his band, The Neurotics, played at the start line ... http://blog.jdlh.com/en/2011/05/31/derek-k-miller/ Last January I got around to introducing my handy Canada Post and USPS postage rate quick reference card on this blog. On April 17th, 2011, the United States Postal Service put new, higher postage rates into effect. I've revised my rate cards to reflect the new USPS rates. http://blog.jdlh.com/en/2011/04/21/canada_post_usps_postage/ I use the EasyEclipse distribution of Eclipse, the free (libre) software development environment. I just figured out how to fix an obscure error message: Eclipse Web tools editors (2.0.1) requires plug-in "system.bundle" Eclipse Data Tools (1.5.1) requires plug-in "system.bundle" When I would start up EasyEclipse (version 1.3.1 for Mac OS X, with Python, ... http://blog.jdlh.com/en/2011/03/31/eclipse_systembundle/ Living as I do with one foot in the USA and one foot in Canada, I find myself sending letters from Canada to Canada, Canada to the USA, and sometimes carrying mail with me over the border to mail in the USA to the USA.  I have one pile of ... http://blog.jdlh.com/en/2011/01/21/canada_post_usps_rates/ Software engineers sometimes are called on to specify which encoding a text file format should use.  These days, the top contenders for encoding are UTF-8 and UTF-16, both based on the Unicode Standard. One factor (amongst several, and perhaps not the most compelling) in choosing between them is storage efficiency: ... http://blog.jdlh.com/en/2010/12/31/bytes-per-char-utf8-utf16/ Are you using PHP (or libGD) to generate PNG images?  Are you having problems getting your text anti-aliased, and also having your "transparent" colour recognised as transparent?  Well, I had that problem too.  libGD, the component which PHP uses to handle image operations, gives you a choice: you can have ... http://blog.jdlh.com/en/2010/11/30/php_transparent_png/