Since I do wear a number of hats in my world I find that I want to have degrees of separation between what I'm doing. Sometimes I just don't want those things to overlap. For example, I have a number of tools and things that I use internally at IBM as well as social networking and other things... [More]
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firefox
cleese
profiles
customization
creativity
john
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Today I was looking over an interesting article called " Great open source map tools for Web developers ". Look, I'm taking off my IBM hat and setting it way over there. Now it's just you and me with no major corporations to bother us or be represented in any way. When you work in a... [More]
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opensource
apis
open_source
server
data
ruby
consolidation
public
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Today I came across a slideshow about fifteen products that Google has killed. This is interesting to me. We often focus on successes or downfalls, but rarely on those day-to-day ideas that didn't make it all the way. I've heard over and over that success in any area is a matter of trying enough... [More]
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blender
success
inspiration
visualization
data
google
failure
motivation
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Some time back-- actually quite a while back-- I wrote a series of articles called the Windows to Linux roadmap. Now that I'm editor of the Linux site on developerWorks, I have to look at these things from a different perspective and it is bittersweet to watch them age. Ubuntu wasn't around at... [More]
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rsync
linux
duplicity
backup
ubuntu
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I was reading things through my Twitter feed the other day and came across this article by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols discussing the choice that Google, Canonical and others have made to not use Linux in the name of their products. It's not going to turn your world upside down, and it's fairly... [More]
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cassandra
blender
storage
artwork
inkscape
linux
gpt
clipart
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This is actually kind of cool, so I thought I'd share it. PROBLEM: To create textures for the planes in my 3D bumper video I need to do screen captures of various developerWorks articles in my browser. This is easy. I can use GIMP to capture a section of the screen, but it's just a little slow... [More]
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imagemagick
commands
editing
blender
3d
scripting
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Today I saw a Wired article " Linus Torvalds Gives Nvidia the Finger. Literally. " (WARNING: This article contains some explicit language-- which is probably why it's kind of funny.) At the bottom in the comments was a comment by Dave Shaw which said "How about a kickstarter campaign to... [More]
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I was visiting with my parents and my father made an interesting revelation to me. He said that when he's helping people with computer things he now offers them free software solutions as a first option to solve their problems. He says that the free things are often good enough for their needs and... [More]
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This has been a very difficult week to concentrate on anything. In the United States we had a holiday, Memorial Day, honoring fallen soldiers. That shaved a day off of the week. Then my nephew is graduating from High School this weekend and we need to travel for that, shaving off another day. ... [More]
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mit
computing
education
rauf
scratch
summer
abdul
typing
libreoffice
testing
selinux
gimp
hadoop
turtlegraphics
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(QUICK ONES are bigger than a tweet, but not much!) Today I made a few tweaks to the blog which you might want to try as well if you use the Community tools. First, I added the features. If you've set up a custom blog template, like I did in " Using CSS Sprites in your developerWorks... [More]
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I just LOVE some of the names of Open Source project. They reflect the fun that open-source developers have with technology. Some are weird recursive achronyms like WINE (Wine Is Not and Emulator). Others are just odd names, like SLURM, which stands for Simple Linux Utility for Resource... [More]
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QUICK ONES are bigger than a tweet... but not much! I finally saw The Avengers this week and enjoyed the concepts of all the 3D interfaces that they use in that universe. In this article, " MIT Creates Amazing UI From Levitating Orbs ", we see how MIT is exploring how 3D spacial interfaces... [More]
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I use a VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) line as my office phone. The monopoly phone company charged me a ridiculous amount for the privilege of the line because it was business-oriented so I fired them. They still call me relentlessly to tell me they value my business and I get to... [More]
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Today I got a tweet from Mark Fernandez pointing me to the article " The Disappearance of Open Source? " It was mildly depressing. Basically it affirmed a concept set forth in everything from " The Little Red Hen " to " Atlas Shrugged " that says those who can do for... [More]
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Today I got a tweet from author, Uche Ogbuji, about his blog entry . I've noticed for a while that Uche is a poet as well as a technical guy. (I love it when people mix art in their life.) Here he combines a bit of both and points us to a Wikipedia report he participated in on analytics. Check it... [More]
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