Hackerdude

Virtual Appliances are nano-sized virtual machines with web user interfaces for deploying instant infrastructure and applications.

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Now that I'm using Linux as my laptop, I've been using vmware for some testing and whatnot, and I've really come to appreciate using virtual machines. This crew is creating mini-VM's, devoid of everything but the application to run, for the server side. Their tomcat VM weighs in at only 65 Mb. I thought it was specially clever.

I got busy again for a little while as I settled in a new environment. But I am finally back. I have linux as my primary OS now (had not done that since 2000).

I now do Software Development and Architecture Consulting with a bunch of great people I know and trust.

So expect postings to resume shortly. 

For my latest pet project  I used subversion. I enjoyed it so much I switched everything to it now, and I set up an area for my source code repository, where you can gasp at my ugly code. I replaced the "Projects" section of the sidebar here with a link to the repository instead.

I like this so much better than my prior solution at sourceforge because it can house both my public and private projects with a minimum of server jumping. It's also on machines I have a bit more control over. And subversion is just miles better than cvs.

technorati tags: subversion, versioncontrol

The site was down most of the day, but we're back up now. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I have many computers, so using Del.icio.us has helped me a lot. Recently I found some intructions on how to post your daily links on your blog. So that's what I'm doing. Nightly, a post wll show up here with what I've linked to.

I figured it would make a nice addition.

UPDATE: As it turns out, it didn't go so well. It worked, but a post a day makes the blog look more like a dumb list of my bookmarks and I don't think this is what readers would want. You can still get to my latest list of links here (up on the top navigation, under "Links"). They are updated throughout the day with the latest I link to.

technorati tags: web, links

A subject
near to my heart today crossed Digg today - some excellent aerial
shots of Mexico City taken by Oscar Ruiz, a helicopter pilot.

I decided to open this post to add a little bit of filler
information and links, as I noticed in the comments a lot of people
don't know a lot about this city (or the country, for that matter).

By far the most common misconception of Mexico City is that of
arid and brown. Although that is true in the north, it is not true at
all where most of the population live, and it's certainly not true of
the area in and around Mexico City. Because the country is laid out
vertically, the weather is arid on the sparsely populated north, but it
quickly becomes temperate and then jungle as you travel further south.

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I'm a retrocomputing fanatic, and this is pretty neat.Go GEOS and AmigaDOS!

On these pages you will find many screen shots of various desktop computer Graphical User Interfaces and operating systems. Many different people have had different ideas of how a GUI should work and these screen shots show many of the more popular ones.

Graphical User Interface Gallery

On a side note, it's pretty amazing how through emulation and open source, old OSs simply refuse to die. I love it.

technorati tags: retrocomputing, geeky

So I'm trying to use Flock (0.5pre) so I can test it as a browser and see how it behaves. The idea is to take as little time possible for blogging and still do it regularly (and well). Flock seems to make it pretty easy. I'm liking the whole "social browsing" thing.

Flock has easy blogging tools built in to let you draft, format, and publish, right from your browser. Flock talks to your blog account and handles all your blogging from one window.

To be fair to flock, they are still a developer preview (which looks awesome by the way). Blogging seems to work okay. However - what I would die for is a source editor right on the blog post editor. I use geshi and therefore I need to go to source to set the source tags and the target language, since I regularly blog source code for my CBBTR (can't be bothered to remember) section.

Update: As you can see in the comments - there IS a source editor. Found it! Thanks! It would be nicer if it was easier to find. Now I don't have to worry about going to the admin portion of my website and edit the post again. Love it!

technorati tags: flock, browsing,

I liked Mambo, but it takes a lot to maintain, and I don't really use all the features. So I decided to move the site to Wordpress instead. The only caveats is that I didn't migrate the user registrations (or the comments).

But all the articles are still here.

Please bear with me while I import links and other content.

In the meantime, you can find the old blog here (Note: It will be removed once I moved all of the content over).

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Continuous interruptions temporarily do more damage to your train of thought than smoking mind-altering substances, according to The Institute of Psychiatry at King's college London. Discover magazine has an article describing ways of avoiding this "Data Smog" problem, using both features currently on your desktop and the theoretical applications from a project at Microsoft Research. An interesting read for User Interface developers..