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Entries from April 28th, 2009

What do those weird Mac symbols mean?

April 28th, 2009 · View Comments · Mac

Mac’s like their inexplicable keyboard symbols. Mac documentation, both for Apple software and third-party software make heavy use of keyboard symbols and often don’t take time to explain them. It takes a little hunting around to find what the characters mean.
Keyboard keys are the first, biggest stumbling block when switching to a Mac from Windows [...]

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State of the iPhone

April 23rd, 2009 · View Comments · Mac, iPhone

In case you didn’t follow the Apple earnings call last night (which I’m ashamed to say I did), you might have missed the news (reported everywhere) that Apple just had their best second quarter in their history. That’s in the midst of a horrible recession. Everything was roses for Apple in all but one category [...]

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What does an Oracle acquisition of Sun mean?

April 21st, 2009 · View Comments · Java

I’ve been asked by multiple people what I think of the acquisition of Sun by Oracle. I’ve assembled my thoughts on the matter. I don’t have any particular insight, just a general experience with Oracle. And all of this is subject to the deal being completed sometime in the summer.
Oracle is now a hardware company. [...]

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Send tweets from LaunchBar

April 14th, 2009 · View Comments · Mac

As I continue my attempts to increase my daily efficiency, I wanted to be able to post tweets through LaunchBar. There are numerous scripts that accomplish this. I found one that was almost what I was looking for.1 The only thing missing was the ability to automatically shorten URLs. You can find the resulting script [...]

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Enterprise Architecture in a Web 2.0 World

April 11th, 2009 · View Comments · Architecture, Web

There’s something very curious to me. While standard thinking is that you need to use “enterprise quality” languages to scale to large loads, the reality is that big Web 2.0 sites scale much, much larger then most enterprise apps and use scripting languages to do it.
So does that mean that “enterprise quality” is a bunch [...]

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Setting up your blog with Google Analytics

April 10th, 2009 · View Comments · Web

I was asked recently how to setup a blog with Google Analytics. Google has made the process extremely easy but I’ll show you step-by-step how it’s done.
1. Create an account with Google Analytics
2. Add a website profile for your blog. Click on the link to Add Website Profile.
3. Enter the information about your blog. Click [...]

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What I would like to see out of a Sun purchase

April 3rd, 2009 · View Comments · Java

I talked a little bit before about what I think would happen in a Sun purchase. But, if I could pick what I want to happen, it would be this:
IBM re-licenses OpenSolaris, DTrace, ZFS, NFS and Java under the GPL or BSD
It’s just a shame that good, useful technologies can’t be incorporated into Linux and [...]

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Creating a Hit List task from LaunchBar

April 2nd, 2009 · View Comments · Mac

I’ve posted before about creating a Hit List task from an email message. But since I’ve switched to using LaunchBar, I’ve wanted to create tasks directly from there. So I delved a little deeper into the dark world of AppleScript. A language I still have very little understanding of. One of the life savers I [...]

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