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    Windows 7 Review

    Recently I installed Windows 7 RC on the Dell Latitude D830 I use at work and I have been slightly impressed. One of the most useful features so far has been the ability to right click on an image and select "Burn Image" thus I no longer need to use third...
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    Reactions to "My nine biggest professional blunders"

    In Confessions of an IT pro, Becky Roberts talks about her nine biggest professional blunders. It really brought back some old memories. Maybe I'll write a later post discussing some of my less-than-finest moments. A minor points in the article really struck me and I wanted to point them out: Not...
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    Image Processing Using ImageMagick and JMagick

    ImageMagick® is a software suite to create, edit, and compose bitmap images. It can read, convert and write images in a variety of formats (over 100) including DPX, EXR, GIF, JPEG, JPEG-2000, PDF, PhotoCD, PNG, Postscript, SVG, and TIFF. Use ImageMagick to translate, flip, mirror, rotate, scale, shear and transform...
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    Business Development

    Working in Rapid City, SD on a consulting engagement for First Administrators (a partner of Source Allies that is a subsidiary of Wellmark) I was responding to an invitation to get together with colleagues from a former employer, MetLife. Looking at the email addresses of my friends and former coworkers...
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    Source Allies Office Culture

    With one step into our office on Ingersoll Ave, visitors are greeted by a pile of shoes and several racks of slippers. Watching the expressions of first time guests is priceless. Some don’t even notice this small detail while others are quick to question the story behind the slippers. On my...
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    Open Source Enterprise Search

    Has locating information across a multitude of systems on your corporate network finally made you consider an enterprise search appliance? Our company has a number of systems in place designed to capture corporate knowledge and subject matter expertise. Once it became too time consuming to find information across these systems (and...
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    Regarding JPA - is the EntityManager a DAO...

    Do we really need ServiceInterface, ServiceImpl, DaoInterface, and DaoImpl? Or can we just say the EntityManager is the DAO, and blow away a generally unnecessary layer? On CRUD apps, 9x out of 10, the service layer is merely a pass-through to the DAO. Is there time to...
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    Internet Routing Tables Reaches 300,000

    A few weeks ago the global routing table reached its 300,000th route.  Below is a graph showing the exponential growth over the last 15 years. Let's do a little math: Assuming all 4.3 billion IPv4 addresses are used (which isn't quite true), each route represents approximately 4,294,967,296 / 300,000 = 14317 addresses....