Watch, Read, Listen


  • We have changed ourselves as a country and as a people when we think that the social safety net MUST come from government. When my grandparents came to Lynn in 1904 they came to a community that took them in and shared responsibility for them. If a kid was misbehaving, the first adult in the

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  • After the Command-S startup, type the following on the command prompts, allowing time for each to do its thing:  /sbin/fsck -y<return> /sbin/mount -uw /<return> /sbin/autodiskmount -va<return>  launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.diskarbitrationd.plist /usr/sbin/diskutil repairPermissions / 

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  • I have a series of 6 machines that I need to occasionally deploy the same file to in exactly the same place.  I got tired of it being such a pain so I wrote this little script I call mcp.sh  It’s certainly easy enough for a shell script master to do this, but for me?

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  • So we got a new Mac Book Pro in the house, and it came without an installation disk.  That’s weird, but so be it.  So then I wanted to install bootcamp on the mac.  When you run through Bootcamp Assistant it gives you a chance to download the drivers you’ll need for windows if your

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  • I’ve been working with Google’s chart tools — specifically their Image Chart tools.  My problem — I’m using BIRT as my PDF report engine, but I have a web interface.  I want the report to look the same on the web as it does in BIRT (which has it’s own excellent native charting library).  I

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  • My good friend Greg mentioned that I should use bitwise operators to perform a toggle, as opposed to my earlier method of using integer math to manipulate the state.  I had not done that because the bitwise implementation is imho not comprehensible by a developer who does not have a CS degree. As an example it is not

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  • We were talking about a way to use an integer to indicate teh state of a series of switches.  e.g. if there were 5 switches and the first 3 were on we would say think of that as 11100, or 28 Not a bad method — you can very quickly toggle switches on and off

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  • The corporation was initially a construct of government to enable efficiency in business.  Now government is a construct of corporations to enable efficiency in business.

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  • The problem with power is that… well… it’s POWERFUL.  It can be used for both good and ill, but regardless of it’s usage, the more power there is behind a command, the harder it is for the individual to resist.  That’s pretty close to the definition of power. It’s become clear that throughout history there

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  • I’ve been using BIRT a bit and in our project we generate alot of PDFs and have found BIRT to be the beswt product there is for that.  One thing BIRT does NOT allow you to do is to combine reports.  The below is my Servlet based solution for that which correctly renumbers the pages 

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