Author: peteware

News

Art theft in Paris

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Someone stole 5 paintings from Paris Museum of Modern Art:

The stolen works, part of the museum’s permanent collection, were “Dove With Green Peas” by Picasso, “La Pastorale” by Matisse, “Olive Tree Near l’Estaque” by Georges Braque, “Woman With a Fan” by Amedeo Modigliani and “Still Life With Chandeliers” by Fernand Léger.

It doesn’t sound very high-tech:

According to the authorities, surveillance images show a hooded man, dressed in black, who smashed through a window and then used bolt cutters to remove a grid.

gallery-arttheft5.jpeg

Technology

NY Times Review of Darwin from 1860 now online

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From [The NY Times](http://www.nytimes.com/1860/03/28/news/origin-species-origin-species-means-natural-selection-preservation-favored-races.html?pagewanted=1) review in 1860 of Darwin’s “The Origin of Species”:

It is clear that here is one of the most important contributions ever made to philosophic science; and it is at least behooving on scientists, in the light of the accumulation of evidence which the author has summoned in support of his theory, to reconsider the grounds en which their present doctrine of the origin of species is based.

Technology

How much do tech companies spend on advertising?

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Here’s how much various tech companies spend on advertising. I’ve always thought the quality of a product is an inverse of how much is spent advertising it — if it was great you hardly need to spend much to get someone to buy it.
So, it’s clear Google and Amazon are doing well. Yahoo is slated to increase to $80 million. It’s the “Ad Spending As a Percent of Revenue” that is important. This is from Business Insider:

Technology

Adium (or iChat) and Facebook

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I just read that Facebook chat is now based on Jabber/XMPP. What does this mean? Basically, any of the instant messaging clients that can talk to sites such as Google Talk such as iChat, Adium, or pidgin can be used to connect to Facebook.
First, you need to make sure you have an account setup on Facebook — not just able to login to Facebook but an actual, short name. Go to “Account” menu:


And then you can set your “Username”:

Then you can setup your IM client to connect using the “Jabber” (or XMPP) protocol with your Jabber ID as the above username@chat.facebook.com. This example is for Adium but other clients are similar:

You probably don’t need to change the port to 5222 but you may need to make sure SSL/TLS is disabled.

After that, it should connect to Facebook. You don’t have to have Facebook open in a browser.

Technology

Pixel Editor on Mac OS X

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I grabbed a simple, free pixel editor for Mac OS X called Paintbrush.  It seems adequate for my simple needs which are usually just adding  a note to a screen grab.
You can make it the default for opening an image by an existing image with Command-I and changing the “Open with” to the application and clicking the “Change All…” button:

Technology

iPhone and Snow Leopard Server’s failure to communicate

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A few months ago I was complaining about not being able to synch my iPhone with Snow Leopard Server. Today, I realized that email push wasn’t working either!
This ARS Technica article iPhone and Snow Leopard Server’s failure to communicate provides more detail.

Imagine if the iPod worked with a Windows machine but not on a Mac. Would make zero sense, right? Amazingly, this scenario describes the current reality with the iPhone and Apple’s server edition of its Mac OS X operating system. Mac OS X Server has some great features, such as podcast production and collaborative wikis. But from the perspective of iPhone compatibility, it’s one of the worst server OSes available.

This ZDNet Snow Leopard Server review mentions the same problem:

For example, Apple told us that the new Mail 2 server software supports push notification to iPhones. But we couldn’t get this working in our lab tests. This Apple document describes push email support on the iPhone but does not include Mail 2 push configuration.

Technology

Distributed Version Control is here to stay, baby

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[Joel on Software](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2010/03/17.html) has this to say about Mercurial:

In Subversion, you might think, “bring my version up to date with the main version” or “go back to the previous version.”

In Mercurial, you think, “get me Jacob’s change set” or “let’s just forget that change set.”

Plus, he wrote a [Mercurial Tutorial](http://hginit.com/).