Install CasperJS with PhantomJS on Cygwin
Stumbled across this much easier solution today for rigging up my favorite modern headless javascriptable browser tools on my favorite Windows-compatible shell. Should work in pretty much all versions of Windows/Cygwin/phantomjs/casperjs. Download phantomjs and casperjs and unzip them in c:\phantomjs…
PHPUnit for XAMPP on Windows with Cygwin
Steps to get PHPUnit to run on my XAMPP setup with Cygwin, so I can write and run Symfony2 unit tests. 1. Upgrade PEAR Download http://pear.php.net/go-pear.phar to C:\xampp\php\go-pear.phar Run this in cmd.exe (cygwin prompts hosed somehow), taking all defaults c:\xampp\php>go-pear.batc:\xampp\php>go-pear.bat…
Open files in Emacs from the Cygwin command line
I just got this working today. The weirdnesses of Cygwin’s half Unix-half Windows nature had stymied me before, but I’ve prevailed! I’ve got Gnu Emacs 23.3 for Windows installed in c:/emacs, and a fairly recent install of Cygwin on Windows…
Convincing IIS7 to accept URLs containing plusses (+)
Problem: Old retiring IIS 5.0 web server has been accepting URLs containing plus (+) for spaces instead of %20 for like 74 years. People have the old URLs bookmarked and stuff so they’ll keep going to them. The content will…

More Secure AND More Convenient: Secure Shell keys and agents everywhere you go
As security increases, convenience tends to decrease. But in this case we gain some of both. CONCEPTS Problem 1: Brute force SSH attackers I recently made a Linux machine accessible by port 22 from the Internet, so I could remotely…
Getting PHP’s GD module to work with IIS
Grrr, this cost me about 10 hours, and was hard to research, so I’m documenting it here for The Good Of Everyone: Problem I work with PHP on a bunch of different web servers. In this case I needed to…
Relocating iTunes music on Windows
Problem: On my corporate image Windows XP laptop, “My Documents“, “My Photos“, “My Music” etc. secretly live on my (uber redundant, backed up, etc) network home directory. That’s a great idea for most things, but when I’m away from the…
Synchronizing Hiveminder with Outlook
Whee. I finally did it, though it’s been on my list for a couple years. I wanted to use the sweet todo-ticketing goodness of Hiveminder.com, but my mesozoic Palm T|X handheld was holding me back, and I’ve got several reasons…