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Arizona Desert: Usery Mountain Regional Park
These are a few of my favorite shots from Usery Mountain Regional Park over the last year. All were taken in color on a Canon XTi using a 28-135mm EF lens, but are presented here with no color saturation to allow for more dramatic contrast adjustments.
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The $1K Home Recording Studio Mac Add-on
Update 1: Check out “Making Friends With Some Guy Named Mike” on this band page of mine for an awesome example of this studio in action. 20 years ago digital home recording wasn’t plausible. 10 years ago we started to see its potential, but most hobbyists (read: very cash-limited people) were limited to using still-primitive…
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Apple Aperture Features Explained For Non-Photographers
The RAW format pictures produced by my Canon XTi are often in excess of 10MB. Couple this with “continuous shooting” and a fast CompactFlash card, and I can easily fill a 4GB’er in a couple days. I’ve used Apple’s Aperture for about a month now through the holidays and a friends wedding, and have been…
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RAZR v3, Bluetooth, T-Mobile Internet & OS X
Here’s the lowdown on setting up your Motorola RAZR to connect to the internet wirelessly via your bluetooth enabled Mac after signing up for T-Mobile internet services. I live in Arizona and have had no issues following these steps on several Macs. Grab this. Copy the “Motorola GPRS CID1” file into /Library/Modem Scripts Go to…
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Tips For CS/CSE/MIS Seniors
As the Spring semester approaches, seniors start attending job fairs and submitting resumes to the Word-parsing, keyword-detecting machines of industry HR giants. In the seemingly few years since I completed my bachelors, I’ve been through the motions enough to have learned a great deal in the process. Here’s some advice for seniors trying to land…
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Business Logic Code Generation
On numerous occasions I’ve seen Java code generated by other Java code as part of a standard build process. I’m not talking about “stub†or “boiler-plate†model code produced by tools such as rmic or hibernate, respectively, but logic code produced by a script. I’ve also seen this done in other languages, but it particularly…
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Must-Have OS X Freebies
As far as I’m concerned, no Mac is complete without these great freebies.. Cyberduck Great SFTP/FTP rich-client. Colloquy An intuitive, native IRC client VLC Dirt simple media player capable of handling things that QuickTime can’t. Handbrake All-in-one DVD ripping and encoding utility. Provides plenty of features for most of us without be overly complicated. Skype…
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Network De-Perimeterization: The Jericho Forum
The presenters from the Jericho Forum at DEFCON 14 this year did an acceptable job of highlighting the principle that border firewalls are much less beneficial that they used to be for security purposes. WiFi, VPNs, MANETs etc. provide constantly changing IT environments which are not realistically plausible for IT to completely control. Our new…
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Encryption: Use it, lest ye be thieved.
The most valuable thing on your computer—the stuff you want to secure if nothing else–is your personal data and information, NOT the machine itself. Don’t be thieved. Encrypt everything.
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Singletons Cause Cancer
It’s been said before. I’ll say it again. The singleton pattern sucks. From a pragmatic point of view, it has two primary drawbacks: reuse and testability. Reuse A public static getInstance() method is, by definition, statically bound at compile time. Since you can’t override static methods, reusing singleton code via inheritance means you’ll need to…
Got any book recommendations?