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Enabling the Partner Repository in Ubuntu 10.04 (Linux)
I am in the process of setting up Alfresco Community Edition on Ubuntu 10.04. In case you don’t already know, Alfresco is an open source collaboration suite that is a replacement for the Microsoft SharePoint offering. It requires that you install the Sun Java Development libraries. These are not a part of the Ubuntu repository. [...]
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Amazon Opens Wireless Store
I have to confess that I am a major fan of Amazon. They have consistently delivered on time and provided me with exceptional customer service. Whenever I have complained about anything, they have immediately taken action and not tried to blame UPS or some other third party. This is in sharp contrast with Borders. I [...]
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iPad is Awesome! (and fast too!)
On April 5th, 2010, I was one of those so called “early adopters” who went to a BestBuy early in the morning to buy an Apple iPad. It is bad enough that I woke up early on a Saturday to do this, but I also had to endure a great deal of sales incompetence at [...]
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Windows Phone 7 – Microsoft’s Revolutionary Software
I have not written about Windows 7 Phone because I have been contemplating its implication to the advancement of computing, telephony and gadgetry in general. Microsoft wiped the slate clean with Windows Phone 7 and acknowledged that its previous offerings were less than stellar. I never thought that the Windows Mobile platform was undesirable, it [...]
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CardScan 800c = Excellent Support
I purchased a CardScan 800c based on a recommendation from a colleague. I saw him scanning a stack of business cards effortlessly and asked him what he was using. He told me that he was using a scanner called “CardScan Executive.” He stressed the “Executive” [...]
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iPad? Does Apple Marketing Employ Any Women?
After waiting more than a year for Apple’s entry into tablet computing, I was not disappointed or surprised by the device. It is simply a larger form factor iPod Touch or iPhone without the phone functionality. Apple took existing technology and made it bigger and in many cases better. The only aspect of the device [...]
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Microsoft/HP Tablet Considered a Dud
After several technical glitches and power outages, Steve Ballmer finally gave the opening speech at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) yesterday. Perhaps it was appropriate that the new Microsoft/HP Tablet was introduced in the middle of a desert (Mojave Desert – Las Vegas, NV), it was more mirage than real product. The demo only showed [...]
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Microsoft & HP to Introduce Tablet (before Apple’s iSlate!)
There are many reports that Microsoft and HP will introduce a tablet PC way ahead of Apple’s rumored iSlate. If the reports are correct, then Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, will use his keynote address at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) tonight to make the announcement. The current thinking is that the device will be [...]
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Google’s Secular Problem
Google is a very successful company that is very worrisome to me. It has a corporate culture instilled from the very top of the company that is disdainful of religion and of any conservative view points. One obvious example of this behavior is their logo designs. They change the “Google” graphic logo to represent various [...]
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SkyGrabber – Satellite Stream Capture Software
It was reported today that the Taliban in Afghanistan are using inexpensive software to view video from United States drone airplanes. The software is called “SkyGrabber.” It can capture picture, video and audio streams that are downloaded from satellite Internet connections. You do not even need an Internet connection to have this work for you. [...]
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Have You Heard Any Good Tiger Woods Jokes?
The scandal surrounding Tiger Woods is unfortunate. His name, however, is an easy target for jokes. Some are more tasteless than others. My favorite is that he is changing his name to Cheetah Woods. Since this is a mostly a technology blog, you are probably wondering why Tiger is relevant here. Strictly speaking, he isn’t, [...]
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Upgrading the Memory on an Apple Mac Mini in 26 Steps
The Apple Mac Mini comes in a variety of configurations and price points. If you buy the base model, it typically does not have enough memory to handle the Adobe Creative Suite. You will definitely want to upgrade it. Although it It is relatively easy to upgrade the memory, it looks daunting when you look [...]
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Happy Birthday Windows 7
Microsoft’s Windows 7 was released today and the consensus is that it is a great new operating system for PCs. It is fast, elegant, stable and even visually appealing. Windows 7 has plenty of features, but features are not its claim to fame. Microsoft is [...]
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BitLocker To Go on Windows 7
The clock is ticking towards the release of a faster and generally more robust operating system for PCs. As many of you know, Windows 7 will be released in two days. What does this release mean to you? The most immediate impact is that it will become increasingly difficult to find any machines with Windows [...]
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MySpace Moves to SSD Drives – Saves 99% of Power
I am normally wary of any claims of power savings, recycling or turning green made by large corporations. I know that most of the claims are just lip service to the environmentally conscious amongst us. However, I read some news today that makes sense. It seems that the MySpace web site has dumped all its [...]
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Windows 7 Libraries – An Awesome Addition to Windows
Everyone is so concerned about Windows 7’s stability and performance that little has been said about the user interface improvements. I have been using the final code now for a couple of weeks and have begun to notice some of these easily overlooked and misunderstood improvements. For now, I will only discuss one that I [...]
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Free Photoshop for the iPhone
Adobe recently released a version of Photoshop for the iPhone. It is a great little program that makes it easy to edit photos that you have taken on your iPhone or photos that you take using the program. You can crop, resize, and flip your pictures. It also includes ways for you to adjust the [...]
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Moon Bombing Showcases Technological Advances
One of the most amazing things about NASA’s flying a rocket into the south pole of the Moon today was not the rocket, explosion or analysis that will follow, but instead the minimalist control room that was used to direct the rocket to its intended location on the moon. If you had a chance to [...]
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Windows 7’s Great Backup Utility
Having lost Norton Ghost’s backup functionality when I upgraded to Windows 7, I began looking for an alternative that would keep my machine safe in case of a catastrophe. I have years worth of documents on my machine that I do not want to lose to a virus or hard drive crash. I looked at [...]
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Microsoft Security Essentials
The bane of all PC users existence is malware, virus, trojan and spyware infections. It can make the PC unusable, send out hundreds of unsolicited SPAM messages to your friends and colleagues and/or consume a day or more of time to remove it. The lost productivity and tech support costs can be significant. Fortunately, there [...]
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Norton Ghost Doesn’t Work with Windows 7
One of my favorite tools for backing up my Vista machine was Norton Ghost 12. I had it set to automatically back up My Documents to an external drive on Tuesdays and to make a complete image backup of the hard drive on Fridays to the same external drive. The best part of this was [...]
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iPhone MMS Now Live
If you own an iPhone, there is good news from AT&T today. You can connect your phone to iTunes and an update will be downloaded that enables multimedia messaging from the phone. It enables the sending and receiving of photo and video messages to other phones. The functionality even works across networks which means that [...]
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Microsoft’s Cool Tablet — “Courier”
Gizmodo, a very successful blog on gadgets and technology, uncovered information about a prototype tablet computer from Microsoft that is in the late stages of development. This is remarkable because Microsoft kept this device secret for a very long time and also because it could remake a company lately thought of as a technology has-been [...]
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Google Fast Flip
Google just introduced a new way of reading news on the Internet. It provides news content from a few major print publishers that have agreed to participate and a few web site publishers. Its claim to fame is that it allows you to “flip” from one news article to another one by clicking on left [...]
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Snow Leopard Kills TivoToGo in Roxio’s Toast 10 Titanium
If you thought that incompatibilities only occurred in the Microsoft-centric computing world, you were wrong. The new Snow Leopard upgrade (OS X 10.6) makes several applications not work correctly on the Macintosh. One that I had grown fond of came with Roxio’s Toast Titanium 10 application set. It is an application for transferring video from [...]
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Beatles: Rock Band – Why Not: Linkin Park: Real Rock Band
I’ve never understood the fascination with the Beatles. They were an average pop group that had a series of hits when there was little competition in the field. I would not call them a rock band, much less the greatest band of all time. That award would definitely go to the Rolling Stones. Now that [...]
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Windows 7 – Missing Microsoft Fingerprint Reader Support
In a previous blog entry, I described how Microsoft Windows 7 recognized all my devices. This included the Microsoft Fingerprint Reader. In the past, I have used the reader to log into my accounting software and into a few web sites. This facilitated not having to type long passwords and helped me avoid typing passwords [...]
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Flickr App for iPhone
Yahoo! just introduced a free iPhone application that simplifies the task of viewing Flickr.com photos on your iPhone or iPod touch device. The application is elegant, fast and a joy to work with. I downloaded it, authorized it to access my account and was up and running with it.
I love the functionality. I can [...]
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Microsoft Word, Windows 7 and Apple Snow Leopard News
I wrote recently that Microsoft might be forced to stop selling Word because of a court ruling against them over an XML patent. Yesterday, a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit stayed the injunction against Microsoft pending an appeal. This means that Microsoft gets to continue selling Word until the appeal is adjudicated. [...]
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Snow Leopard Attacks
Apple released today its much anticipated Mac OS X upgrade. It is called Snow Leopard and is officially designated as version 10.6. This new release optimizes the Mac operating system for faster loading of the core system and applications. It also handles dual core processors better. Apple has rewritten the Mac OS to work as [...]
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Microsoft Loses Court Battle – Must Stop Selling Word
Judge Leonard Davis, a federal judge in Tyler, Texas ruled yesterday in favor of a small Toronto-based company called I4i. I4i had sued Microsoft alleging that the software company had willfully infringed on I4i’s patents on XML. XML is a tech acronym for Extensible Markup Language and is a technology that is broadly used in [...]
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Bing is Cool!
Who would have imagined someone calling a Microsoft search engine, “Cool?” In the last couple of years, the answer would have been no one. The various incarnations of Microsoft’s efforts have been lame, slow and completely bereft of any savvy marketing. That has changed completely with Bing.com. Microsoft finally has a service that works well, [...]
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Amazon Kindle = Big Brother?
In a future predicted by George Orwell’s “1984,” the government censors writing that it deems inappropriate and the population is left to read only what is approved. It seems Orwell was off by 25 years, but the dystopia he predicted may be beginning. Amazon recently deleted “1984” and “Animal Farm” from customer’s Kindle devices without [...]
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Mac Mini for iPhone Development
I recently purchased a few Mac Minis to be used in the development of iPhone applications at Alonso Consulting. This is the first time that I have owned an Apple computer and it is the first time that I have used one for any purpose other than to click on the Safari browser and say, [...]
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Awesome iPhone News App
“Fluent News” is a free iPhone application that works with all three versions of the iPhone OS. It is a news aggregator that gathers news from various reputable sources and presents it in an easy-to-use application. It is one of the fastest news applications that I have used for the iPhone. I have read New [...]
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Windows 7 Upgrade at Half Price
Earlier today I wrote about my problems with the free upgrade to Internet Explorer 8. It is with a bit of caution that I am now writing about the Windows 7 upgrade process. Probably the only reason that I felt compelled to write about it is that beginning June 26, 2009 (today) you can preorder [...]
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Internet Explorer 8 Does Not Support WebDAV
It is ironic that I wrote yesterday how Apple’s iPhone software upgrade added functionality that I had wanted for a long time. I have experienced the opposite with a Microsoft upgrade. I upgraded two computers that I work on regularly to Internet Explorer 8 and have found out that the new version of the browser [...]
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iPhone 3.0 Notes
One of the features that I always felt was missing from the iPhone was the ability to synchronize notes between Exchange/Outlook and the iPhone. I keep all kinds of small notes on my iPhone and separately on my Exchange Server through my Outlook client software. These notes are important and I find that I need [...]
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iPhone 3.0 Stocks Application
I’ve upgraded my iPhone 3G to the new 3.0 version of the operating system and am very happy with the new improved software. I will write about the various improvements over a couple entries into this blog.
One improvement which is not getting a lot of attention is the built in Stocks application. This application allows [...]
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Digital TV Transition
It is the end of an era; analog television broadcasts are now a thing of the past. As of this last Friday, the TV networks stopped broadcasting on the analog frequencies and are now only broadcasting in digital high definition on a different frequency. This has rendered millions of television sets useless. The deadline for [...]
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On-Line Dating
We live in a technologically advanced era. Everything that we used to do in the analog world is being replaced by a digital version. Now, we can even date digitally. The latest issue of Scientific American Mind magazine has an article on how significant the on-line dating scene has become and how often people lie [...]
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Biography of the Dollar
“Biography of the Dollar” by Craig Karmin is an excellent book that explains how the dollar rose to become the preeminent currency worldwide and why it is now under pressure from other currencies. The book was written and published prior to the current economic malaise, but I consider it indispensable reading for the meaningful insight [...]
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Oracle Acquires Sun – What’s Next, Universe?
A few days ago, the media reported that Oracle had acquired Sun for $7.4 billion. They also reported that Oracle will add about $1.5 billion in income as a result of the acquisition. The chief reason given for the move was Oracle’s desire to have a complete solution for its customers. This solution would include Sun [...]
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Touch a Windows Phone
Microsoft announced a new version of its Windows Mobile smartphone operating system last week in Barcelona, Spain. The new software will be rebranded to be “Windows Phone” and will feature a revamped user interface that is touch driven. The changes to the operating system, the addition of touchscreen support, a new Windows Marketplace for Mobile [...]
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Cheap Bytes
Many of you received wonderful Christmas gifts like digital cameras and computers. You may be wondering what to do with the thousands of pictures you plan on taking and storing for future generations. The laptop or desktop computer will allow you to store a couple thousand pictures before you run out of space. You should [...]
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Sony – What Happened To You?
It is amazing to me how far Sony has fallen from the dominance that it once had in consumer electronics. In the 1980s and 90s, Sony’s Walkman and Discman were must-have toys. Everyone that I knew, either had one or wanted one. If instead, you preferred large "boom boxes" that could drown out all other [...]
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Acer Aspire One
Most computers and notebooks on the market are so similar and uninteresting that they are not worth writing about. When was the last time someone got excited over a notebook from Dell or HP? Exactly. You can’t remember.
Acer was, until recently, barely known in the United States. Those that knew of the company thought of [...]
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Why Libraries Need Excellent Web Sites
When I was growing up, the Internet was not available to the public so going to the local library and understanding the Dewey Decimal System were required for any type of serious school work. The advantage of having to go to the library was that you would learn facts by accident, since you would always [...]
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Telnet for Vista
I have not been one of those complainers that is always whining about Vista. The truth is that I have liked Vista with its glitzy Aero interface and search functionality from day one. I use it on a very high end laptop and desktop. Unfortunately, lately I have noticed how inefficient the operating system is [...]
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PayPal & eCost.com Imperfect Together
I recently tried to purchase a camera from eCost.com that was priced very competitively. I liked that eCost was advertising that they now accepted PayPal payments. This was useful to me since I had sold a few old items on eBay and had a balance in my PayPal account. I chose the camera, added it [...]
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