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3 Mar 2007Wow. I decided to upgrade yesterday, and noticed that downloads were disabled. Guess this is why. (Glad I didn't decide one day sooner.)
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3 Mar 2007An old, but interesting, look into what happens when the manager of the software team gets to design your office space. It ends up being awesome.
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10 Nov 2005
Welcome to WordPress. This is my first post with the new system. Things are going to be a little hairy here for the next week or so, as I make things work the way I want them. But the important things are all set.
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3 Sep 2005
Yesterday, I passed my Red Hat Certified Engineer exam with flying colors. I'm willing to call it a legitimate certification. The entire test was hands-on troubleshooting ("Here's a machine that won't boot. Fix it") and installation and configuration ("Here's bare metal, and a four page description of how we want the machine setup. Go"). It's very indicative of the kind of work I do on a daily basis, so it's far more useful than a multiple-choice test would have been.
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18 Jul 2005
Today, I gave an intro to wiki class at work. Ever since I moved the Unix group's home page from a wad of hand-edited HTML files to wiki, it's been a far bigger hit than I expected. There are now nine teams using wikis for their documentation or interested in migrating, and I expect there are probably a few more that will be converting soon. It's great to be able to feel that I'm making a bottom-up difference at work, and that open source (not to mention Wikipedia) is touching a few more people who might not otherwise ever feel it.
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17 Jul 2005
Almost all digital cameras (with the notable exception of all but the newest camera phones) support a JPG comment format called Exchangable Image File Format (EXIF). When you take a photo, a lot of nice details about shutter speed and aperture are saved along with the image (and a lot of confusing and technical data, too). Unfortunately, if you take photos with a film camera and scan in the photos, the data is all missing.
Luckily, there are a number of tools made exactly for such a situation. Exifer is a good freeware option, but there's also MaPiVi, which is open-source and cross-platform. There are a ton of them out there, if you ask the right people.
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25 May 2005
I've created a new Greasemonkey user script awkwardly named "Metafilter mark contact contributions". I mark people that I've met at meetups as contacts on MetaFilter, and I like to be able to have a reminder when I see something from that user. Slashdot has a feature like this built in (it uses small green and red globes), and I figured that with some of GreaseMonkey's cross-site XMLHTTP functions, this would be pretty easy. It was.
Install Firefox and Greasemonkey and right click here to install the user script. Here is a sample screenshot.
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23 Feb 2005
The "Alt-Tab Replacement" Power Toy never behaved properly with my text editor of choice, EditPad Lite. So yesterday, I set off on a search for a new screenshot-enhanced program switcher for Windows. I came across (and am extremely happy with) TaskSwitchXP. It's both more configurable and Open Source. Anyone who often has more than 4 or 5 programs running at a time should try this out.
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23 Nov 2004
As of this morning, I am now using Remote Clip to synchronize the clipboards on my SunBlade 100 desktop (running Solaris 10) and my IBM T40 laptop (Windows XP). It's got exactly the feature set I always wanted in ClipCopy, and since I don't suffer from NIH syndrome, I have no problems abandoning the latter for the former.
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11 Nov 2004
RealPlayer is a steaming pile. I didn't want to install it on my computer unless I absolutely positively had to, but NPR archives are all in streaming Real audio format. So I set about trying to be able to play Real audio and video with some sort of spamware-, spyware- and uglyware-free solution. Here's how I did it:
Real Alternative. This contains the codecs needed to decode the Real file formats. If you don't mind Media Player Classic, make sure you select it during the Real Alternative install, and you're done.
If you prefer Winamp (like me), don't install MPC. Get Tara's Real Audio Plugin for Winamp. You'll need to close and restart Winamp for it to recognize the new plugin, and it should even prompt you to associate itself with the proper file types.
