Joe Peichel

Browser cleanup (aka, Stuff I wanted to Blog about) Time to reduce, reuse, & recycle those browser tabs: CIO.com Hi, I'm a Mac and I'm Your Enterprise Computer BlackBerry from Verizon Works Worldwide The Big OS Questions: Windows, Linux, or Mac Others Six Basic Truths of Free APIs BlogCircles Uninstalling IE7 renders machine useless Sales Updates:PCs, Macs, iPods and Zunes Confluence:Podcasting Plugin Apple - iTunes - iTunes Store - Podcasts - Technical Specification Podcast feeds for librivox inner.geek urltea.com-About Bear's Journal Eric Meyer's CSS/Edge The Layout Reservoir - BlueRobot Three Columns - Flanking Menus Apple Working on iWeb Pro MyEclipse Download Eclipse and MyEclipse Tutorials & Docs Video: RSS in Plain English Tomcat 6 Downloads Google Search:apache tomcat build for Mac OS X Java and Tomcat on Mac OS X, Part I Apache Tomcat 6.0 - Documentation Index Ed Bott on Windows Home Server Windows Home Server Redmonk: Flex SDK Going Open Source Hybridi...

Microsoft Loves Open Source (or Should!) Seven Reasons Microsoft Loves Open Source This came across my Twitter feed from friend giovanni and I couldn't resist checking it out! The author, William Hurley , provides a rational, unbiased 7-point summary of the complicated relationship between Microsoft and open source. I particularly like his assertion that "even the most closed-minded executive in Redmond realizes open source is in their future." So often Microsoft is vilified for their efforts to crush their competition, but they remain a powerful technical and economic force and everyone should respect their efforts to embrace openness.

My Love Affair With Storage OK, so it's not quite a love affair, but with close to 2TB scattered around the house it at least qualifies as an obsession! A few weeks ago I bought a Seagate 500GB SATA drive and a nifty eSATA/USB 2.0/Firewire 800 external case in which to mount it (full disclosure: I work for Seagate). You see, we've been bursting at the seams around here. My wife's eMac, which hosts our iTunes library and most of our photos, is down to about 500MB, the kids' iMac is in similar straights (who knew TuxPaint would be so popular?!?), and I'm constantly struggling to keep a bit of space available on my Mac mini and my MacBook Pro. I've got a couple of big scanning and video projects waiting in the wings, and without more capacity on our homenet they'll be waiting when I start having grandkids! Along with the drive and enclosure, I bought an Apple Airport Extreme , thinking that it'd be a great way to position the homenet for next-gen WiFi...

One Laptop Per Child - Poor Use of Funds? A digg post links to a blog posting by a representative of European think tank Globalisation Institute who believes that the OLPC initiative is a waste of money and that its organizers and backers should "leave computers to the market economy." Interestingly enough, it's because of OLPC that "the market economy" is finally recognizing the opportunity emerging among developing nations. Just last week Microsoft announced a $3 software bundle for developing economies. "Microsoft and others needed to begin reaching out to the developing world through existing, lower-cost technologies such as cell phones and television to provide basic computing and educational opportunities, according to Gates." While cell phones will undoubtedly permeate emerging economies more quickly than traditional PCs, they fall far short of delivering the educational value of devices like OLPC . Governments around the world are recog...

Good Karma My wife and I completed a yard project yesterday that should bring us good karma. A few years ago Kim was inspired to "reduce, reuse, recycle" a commodity of which we have a consistent and significant surplus. As you might imagine, our horses generate quite a bit of output, and normally we just scrape it into a large mound in the back pasture. Kim's inspiration came when she started using the aged waste for gardening, and our flowers and veggies flourished. She started advertising our compost on the local freemarket site for anyone who wanted to come collect it, and we've been inundated with calls and emails ever since! This year Kim decided we'd build a box in the front yard by our garden to make it easier for folks to get to (instead of them having to drive out to our back pasture and load up from the big compost heap). Now people will be able to back a few feet into the driveway, fill their containers from the box, reload and be on their way. We...