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By Mark Gibbs

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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?
Web site monitors and PowerPoint timers: 07/23/09; Mark Gibbs discusses a really cheap, er, cost-effective Web and service monitoring service and then goes looking for an onscreen timer for PowerPoint. What an exotic life he leads.
Sound and lightning: 07/16/09; Mark Gibbs covers some user feedback on podcast recording software and discusses some serious gear for detecting lightning so as to protect your electronics.
Ensuring you get pizza with sync tools: 07/06/09; Here's the answer to missing files compromising your plans for pizza, beer and TV.
Automating anything (on Windows), anywhere: 07/06/09; Mark Gibbs reviews a really powerful and impressive enterprise-scale Windows automation system that even figures out automatically its own ROI. Now that's automation.
Building an RSS podcast feed, Part 3: 06/18/09; Mark Gibbs starts by discussing audio editing tools and then wraps up his discussion of building an RSS feed for a podcast with a couple of news feed building tools.
Building an RSS podcast feed, Part 2: 06/11/09; Mark Gibbs continues to explore the details of creating an RSS feed for a podcast.
Building an RSS podcast feed, Part 1: 06/04/09; Gibbs explores the details of creating an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed for a podcast.
Xandros 'Presto: No rabbit in this hat: 05/29/09; Mark Gibbs takes a look at an interesting new Linux-based operating system from Xandros called Presto that can be booted instead of Windows in 10 seconds. Gibbs likes the idea but has reservations.
Excel, Twitter, FreeBASIC and a book: 05/14/09; Mark Gibbs points to a great directory of Twitter resources, explains how he finally solved his self-imposed challenge to analyze Twitter with Excel, waxes enthusiastically over FreeBASIC and reviews a book. He has been know to leap over tall buildings in a signle bound as well.