Gearhead

By Mark Gibbs

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Check out Backspin and Network World on Web Applications for more musings from Gibbs.

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Aliph Jawbone Icon, a new kind of headset: 02/09/10; Mark Gibbs ponders what matters, other than software, in the world of personal connectivity and concludes that cell phones are the most important. And that means you need a great headset …
What your browser says about you: 02/04/10; Mark Gibbs discusses online privacy and using the EFF's Panopticlick finds out that his online activities potentially aren't as private as he might have hoped.
Annoyed and disappointed: 01/27/10; Mark Gibbs downgrades a tool after using it seriously, and finds another utility that leaves him cold.
A couple of follow-ups and syncing IMAP servers: 01/20/10; Mark Gibbs follows up on two items from the last couple of weeks and finds a cool tool for synchronizing IMAP accounts.
Clearing out the cobwebs: 01/15/10; Mark Gibbs has decided to sweep the corners of the Gibbs Universal Industries Secret Underground Bunker and look what he's found ….
Pretty pictures: Tools for diagramming: 01/06/10; Gibbs looks for alternatives to Visio and finds great solutions online, on OS X, and on Windows.
What's under the Gearhead Christmas tree: 12/17/09; Mark Gibbs pulls a few presents out from under the Gearhead Christmas tree and finds a better solution to his recent quest of randomizing a sequence of numbers, a really cool Bluetooth stereo headset and a service for building SUSE Linux configurations. Ho, ho, ho, indeed.
A couple of books and a lot of time: 12/10/09; Gibbs reviews a couple of books that have impressed him and then gets all geeked out over the eZ430-Chronos Wireless Watch system.
Pogoplug: A wolf in sheep's clothing: 12/03/09; The Pogoplug from Cloud Engines looks like its just a giant wall wart but underneath that bland exterior lies a powerful and dangerous beast.
The Droid we're looking for: 11/17/09; Mark Gibbs has got his sweaty hands on a Verizon Motorola Droid and he's really impressed (bugs and early termination fees not withstanding).
More randomness and the Synology Rackstation RS409+: 11/13/09; A reader comes up with a neat solution for Mark Gibbs' randomization problem, having got his sweaty hands on a Droid he takes a first look, and slices and dices a really impressive SMB NAS solution, the Synology Rackstation RS409+. A busy week indeed.
STFW, fix Pipes, and repair Mac disks; voila!: 11/04/09; Gibbs suggests a way to tell people they should have tried using Google, finds a workaround to Yahoo Pipes caching, and fails to fix his Mac disk drive despite using a very good utility.
On Linux and random numbers: 10/28/09; Look, I hate to bring this up, but there's something we need to discuss: Why haven't I heard from you recently? (No, not you, you've been in touch. It's this guy over here … ) Really, is it too much to ask that you put pen to paper … oh, all right, fingers to keyboard … and tell me what's on your mind?
Is it reality or is it augmented?: 10/22/09; Mark Gibbs discusses the how augmented reality works and chastises the U.S. Postal Service and General Electric for playing fast and loose with terminology.
The Revolution will be programmed, Part III: 10/15/09; Continuing his exploration of the Runtime Revolution programming system, Mark Gibbs delves into the language a little further before wrapping up this series.
The Revolution will be programmed, Part II: 10/06/09; Mark Gibbs continues his review of Runtime Revolution by delving into how Revolution applications are organized and how the event messaging model of the system is structured. Heady stuff indeed.
The Revolution will be programmed, Part 1: 10/01/09; Mark Gibbs ponders the history of HyperCard and HyperTalk and segues (rather elegantly) into the start of an exploration of Runtime Revolution, a direct descendent of those products.
Putting Yahoo Pipes to work: 09/23/09; You know how Excel is mostly really good but weirdly weak in a few areas? Gibbs has found a fix for one issue: String concatenation. And while he's on the subject of data manipulation he begins taking a look at a remarkable Web service, Yahoo Pipes
Improving Excel and Yahoo Pipes: 09/18/09; You know how Excel is mostly really good but weirdly weak in a few areas? Mark Gibbs has found a fix for one issue: String concatenation. And while he's on the subject of data manipulation he begins taking a look at a remarkable Web service, Yahoo Pipes.
Managing remote desktop management: 09/10/09; Remote desktop management is parts of the nuts and bolts of managing IT infrastructure. Mark Gibbs has found a product that makes managing your remote desktop management manageable.
The Sentimeter, Part 011: 09/02/09; Gibbs wraps up the saga of developing the Sentimeter, his near real-time topical Twitter sentiment analysis tool. Tags: sentiment, Twitter, tweets, SAP, Xcelsius, SAP Developers Network, Error #2032, crossdomain, policy, HTTP, Web, Flash, OpenAmplify, API, proxy, ASP.NET, Microsoft, Fiddler, debugging, debugger, RIA, Rich Internet Application, business intelligence, BI, dashboard
The Twitter Sentimeter, Part Drei: 08/21/09; Mark Gibbs continues the saga of developing the Sentimeter, his near real-time topical Twitter sentiment analysis tool.
The Sentimeter, Part Deux: 08/14/09; Following up on last week's column, Mark Gibbs discusses how the design of the Sentimeter evolved and the hoops he had to jump through. He may yet take up acrobatics.
The Sentimeter, Part 1: 08/06/09; Mark Gibbs looks at a service that provides a remarkable insight into analyzing the sentiment of text content and discusses how it might be applied to social media.
A new RoboForm: 07/30/09; Mark Gibbs is rather fond of some tools that make his life easier and, in particular, he has fallen in love with a utility. How weird is that?