Two words - “DOS prompt”. Get comfortable and back to your 1980’s roots ! You will need to get familiar with the UNIX shell commands. It’s actually not that hard, or at least it has not been a great stress for me but perhaps that is because there was UNIX somewhere, way back in [...]

One thing you will most likely need is the ability to share folders form the “host” OS to the “guest”. In my case, one of my test machines has WinXP2 as the host and I have SUSE as my guest. If it were Windows as the guest, then this is pretty easy, you just “browse [...]

I’m traveling today (daytrip between Boston and DC) and the weather in the northeast is not cooperating. Thus, I have *lots* of airport time.
When I took this job, they told me to “get a Blackberry” because it’s what most of the team uses. Get lots of minutes and while you are at it, add the [...]

A good friend, Libby, wrote in her blog …
This always-on attitude that pervades the workplace (not just mine, but many) requires that we, as the workers (both teachers and those in other fields) to decide what our lives will be like and when we will work, then set our boundaries, and then stick to [...]

I’m a bit slow but I do get a clue eventually. I finally put two and two together with respect the the barrage of jewelry and diamond ads running on television lately - it’s all about Valentines Day.
So, what is the holiday all about ? Well … it’s for the birds …
The popular customs [...]

A post on Kolabora links to the following new story …
Sramana Mitra submits: IBM’s (NYSE: IBM - News) entry into social networking is a smart move. Anyone who has experience with large enterprises knows how tedious it is to locate people with the right expertise. Thus, I envision a LinkedIn equivalent which serves less [...]

I’ve been a PC users since the dawn of time (or 1980 depending on what calendar you use). I’ve always known and accepted that the Mac has a great user interface and the tools I would want “if I were a creative guy”. However, now it seems everyone is using a Mac!
I blame it on [...]

I envision a conferencing service that is as easy as a cellphone. Imagine a service with the equivalent of voice dialing …
“Get Rocky, Carl, and Libby”

The service locates the participants, but discovers Libby is busy. It scans forward and backward in time to find Libby is available 30 minutes ago, but only for a few minutes, [...]

Artist: Achille Superbi, Italy
I am not trying to make a political statement with this piece of art. I was just Googling and stumbled across this from last year. The image was posted on wittyworld.com. If you really like this style, the artist, Achille Superbi, has a website where you can purchase his work.
I am amazed [...]

My Tag cloud implementation started from the Matt’s weighted-categories implementation on hitormiss. It was working fine but I needed two things (yeah, just 2)

the hover text to be more informative
WordPress 2.1 support

I only needed to change one line to make the hover text include the category name (for cases where my font size was tiny). [...]

I continue to “surf” various blogs, adding them to my feed reader and a few days later deciding whether or not to vote them off the island. Well, “Creating Passionate Users” has made it thru the first council vote and has survived. Kathy Sierra’s post about “writing style” is a good reason to keep reading [...]

I was watching FutureCar on the Discover Channel the other night and they showed a race car that averaged 155MPH and 113MPG in an endurance race. I figured there must be real-world production cars somewhere in the world that the average American didn’t know about. So I hit Google (… what else is new).
…There is [...]

I use VMWare for testing, sandboxes, security, and lots more. Carl Tyler, at Instant Technologies, is a strong supporter of VMware and has been a speaker on the technology numerous times.
I received a news letter today announcing yet another free tool from VMWare …
Convert Physical Machines to Virtual Machines – Free!
Use the intuitive wizard-driven interface of [...]

It’s now been 3 months since Zen injured her right rear leg. It’s been a bit frustrating, not knowing the exact nature of the injury, but all signs pointed to a deep muscle / soft tissue injury.We had a follow exam with Dr. Schulz at the end of January. I even brought a video of [...]

Well, for some unknown reason, all of my network devices went into a cascading failure. Actually, I think it was some network packet monitoring software I was running for work. Anyway, it caused my wireless to fail, then my wired networking.
Fortunately, my HDD was still good. I used a large USB2 HDD to copy off [...]

Is it turned on ? - that may sound like a stupid question for a 20+ year computer geek but one of the issues was the fact my new X60 has an “off switch” for the wireless. It got bumped somewhere along the way.
Verify you backups. - I would have been up and running a [...]

We’re getting a *real* snow storm for the first time this year. It reminded me of a litle tool I created last year when I first got my Blackberry. I call it PocketRadar.
There are two versions of it - one for the older devices with only 240×160 screens and one for the Treo and newer [...]

Here is today’s picture of my neighbor’s house. Normally, I look out my office window and see my neighbor’s automotive maintenance shop (and his cow because everyone should own live stock).
With the storm today, you don’t see much beyond the road at the end of my driveway.
Shoveling the snow is pretty useless. The [...]

I was watching this week’s episode of FutureCar on the Discovery Channel. The entire show was nothing extraordinary until the very last 30 seconds. Throughout the program, they kept returning to this group of young designers, each with their idea of what the future car would be. For me, every design they showed, looked futuristic [...]

This one surprised me. I had not seen the “invisible green dot” and the “disappearing pink dots” demonstration before. If you don’t know what I mean, it has been posted over on Flikr ! (Don’t forget to read the description under the image.)
My favorite illusion is an audio sequence called Deutsch’s Scale Illusion. (I can’t [...]

I have settled into a rut as it relates to my morning routine. I’m not complaining. I actually like this rut ! I’ve blogged before about my espresso addiction. Like most coffee addicted people, I now start my day with a little “giddy-up”.
What struck me this morning is the vessel for my morning elixir. Back [...]

My house is on the market and as we have all heard, the market is generally not good. Some places in the US are doing alright and others are seriously hurting. I’d say my area is pretty much in the middle - slow but not desperate.
My realtor has not had much activity for my listing [...]

I have added a new poll (on the right). I am designing a clock face for a clock tower (such as those found in old town meeting halls, churches, etc.)
Which clock face do you prefer …

[Poll=2]

Now that is a mouth full !
The more I learn about tower clocks, the more I think they make up longs winded mixed-language labels just to mess with people and make them feel dumb. The whole thing is a mish-mash of colonial English, French, and German. I haven’t found any Italian parts yet but [...]

I’ve worked on my scone recipe for quite a while.
My cooking “process” is to get a good recipe / result and then try to find out just how simple / fast I can make it. For my scone recipe, the evolution took some time but the results are well worth it.
For anyone wanting to [...]

The timing could not have been more perfect …
Conventional approaches to flexibility, such as flextime, don’t help time-zone warriors very much … Instead, they need ways to regain control over their time. … being explicit about personal commitments when they intervene, says Tess Mateo, Wyckoff, N.J., a director in the CEO’s office at PricewaterhouseCoopers. [...]

Gene Lavancy, on the Boston Fox 25 morning news called it “woosification’ when describing the recent proposed Massachusetts law required helmets for kids headed out to go snow sledding.

I’m reading a text book which was published in 1883. The material is very good but the writing is very hard to follow.By today’s standards for English writing, most teachers would give it back to the student for “re-write”.So, should old English books be “translated” to modern English ?

Back in part one of “building my Linux server”, I wrote …
partition the disk with four primary partitions
Source: theSalmonFarm Blog Building my Linux server - part 1
I now want to recant that recommendation. Having setup 4 servers now (mostly in anticipation of Sametime 7.5.1 for Linux), I have settled on a much more simple installation [...]

A Rudimentary Treatise on Clocks, Watches and Bells by Grimthorpe - Project Gutenberg
This book is now available as a free distribution under “Project Gutenberg”. Oddly enough, someone on eBay is trying to *sell* the downloadable PDF for $4.95.
It’s not “Harry Potter” but if you have an old clock, it’s interesting to sit down with [...]

Here are the results of the “choose a clock face” …
[Poll=2]
The new poll is about health, lifespan, and instant gratification.

I’ve used “voice over Internet protocol” or VoIP for many years. It’s not my primary phone service but it is an important one. I don’t have a traditional telephone “land line” or POTS but that’s only because I’m in the process of moving. I rely on a cellphone most of the time. Once I get [...]

I was about to call it a night but decided to do one last task at the computer. For grins and giggles I decided to Google “+Zen +Pug” to see if there were any pictures of my dog. (It’s a bit like Googling your own name to see what you find.) Well, I did [...]

All non-geeks, ignore this post
If you are still reading, you are either truly bored, a geek, or much too curious. In any of these cases, I will tell you what you get when you …
… combine an old microphone, digital oscilloscope, band-pass filter, signal trigger, and signal capture …

I used Visual Analyzer and [...]

This recipe started evolved from my grandmother’s apple pie recipe. The big change is the addition of cranberries to balance the sweet-tart experience.

I’ve spent much of the past 5 years doing hosted solutions in one form or another - both for my employer and some of it’s large customers (mostly telecommunications). The answer to how to use software in a hosted solution is driven by the solution, the target customer, and the software.
Let’s start with the big [...]

Here are the results of the lifespan question …
[poll=3]
The new question is about Linux.

I created an end-user provisioning tool a while back and it’s been running on “autopilot” ever since. Recently I received a question from a new contractor on the project via the service Helpdesk. It seems, someone triggered the “email routing test” on behalf of the contractor.
The contractor (a software developer) contacted Helpdesk asking for help [...]

I keep wasting hours tweaking and re-writing my blog’s look-n-feel. No sooner do I get it working the way I like, that I go too far and then decide to start over with some other theme.
The most recent activity was to leverage a theme with lots of cool JavaScript. I wanted it to be flexible [...]

Upon reading a commentary from Irwin Lazar, Carl Tyler asks
Is instant messaging the death knell for email?
I think the answer is “no”. What I do believe is that individuals will gravitate to a single interface to whatever content they use most.
Email, IM, Blogs, Web, and applications all have their own user interfaces. When these start [...]

It could be a whole lot worse …
I just got a humorous but very real picture from my brother up in Maine. Guess I’ll shouldn’t be complaining about spotty Internet performance when he’d just like running water !

Kathy Sierra, over at Creating Passionate Users has a thread of articles on the topic of “Inspiring your user-evangelists“. In a recent post, Kathy writes …
If you have to PAY people to evangelize your product or service, you probably don’t have a product or service worth evangelizing.
She goes on to say …
How to Create Evangelists [...]

I fell out of the software developer track for a number of years. I was a strong (although not the best) C language developer and had some C++ talent but I shifted gears when Java took off at my company. Since that time, I have done mostly scripting based hacks and small tools as “brain [...]

This video was referenced over on Vowe dot net. I agree with most when I saw “I WANT ONE” !
Two things came to mind when I saw the video - the concept definitely has applications (and one would be as a rich interface to PersonalBrain) and the second thing is it reminded me of [...]

The snow may be gone soon but I managed to capture a few “Zen moments” on the snow this past week. She loves the snow so I tolerate the cold to see her so happy. This year, the Valentines Day snow left a crust just hard enough for her to run on top … most [...]