Nalla pointed me to an article called Painless Merging with SVK: An Interview with Chia-liang Kao. In it, the author of SVK talks about why SVK makes source control and merging easier, along with giving some insight into those using SVK in their development environments, including Apple.
Author Archives: Ron Bieber
Flickr Photo Album Finally Integrated
I was finally able to integrate the photo album on Flickr into the actual site, thanks to the FAlbum WordPress Plugin released at version .5 by Elijah Cornell. Once again, no brainer to install. All I had to do was modify the falbum-wp.php file to close the extra divs in my theme.
The plugin supports permalinks, tags, and all of the goodies you would expect from a Flickr based photo album.
To see the new photo album, go to http://www.bieberlabs.com/wordpress/photos, or click the photo album item in the menu at the top of the site.
Bar made from Crystal Clear Artic Ice Opens
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In London, a bar opens that is made completely of arctic ice. You have to check this out. It’s the Fortress of Solitude for Alchoholics! For a small cover charge you are given a thermal cape and heavy gloves and a heavy glass made entirely of ice.
Disabled Man Seeks Payment for Prostitute Visits
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WordPress Plugin: UltimateTagWarrior
I’ve installed the UltimateTagWarrior plugin for WordPress in order to experiment with tagging on the site.
Installation was almost a no-brainer and consisted of unarchiving the downloaded zip file into my plugins directory and activating the plugin. I then messed around with different tag cloud types for the sidebar and wound up settling on the sized cloud. The code in the sidebar looks like this:
Tags
That got the tag cloud to display in the sidebar. Rather than go with the default tag editing that comes per post when you have local and technorati tags on in the Admin Manage/Tags screen, I turned them off and added the following code to enable Ajax based tag editing to the blog entries:
And thats it. Tagging is enabled!
Just to be clear, the almost no brainer has nothing to do with the quality of the plugin, but because I was picky as to how I wanted things to work. If you want plain vanilla tagging without Ajax, the default install and adding the code to the sidebar should suffice.
Happy tagging!
Steve Vai: Explanation of Lotus Feet
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From Vai.com, two articles explaining the title of the song ‘Lotus Feet’. The first is called The Sublime Essense of the Lotus Feet. The second is Pamposh, or Lots About the Lotus.
Innovation
Yesterday I watched a video of a lecture given by Gary Hamel, author of Competing for the Future with our management team. The lecture was excellent, pointing out some of the very real problems with innovation in corporate environment.
One of the things that Gary points out in the lecture it is very hard to reinvent yourself these days because things move very fast. Additionally, as you try to introduce change, most of the time in order to justify it people look for historical data to prove that what you are attempting to do will work, which in a true situation of reinvention may not necessarily be there.
Another distinction that Gary mentions, which was also mentioned on an episode of the Killer Innovations podcast was the fact that rarely is innovation ever a truly new idea, but is normally an application of a solution from some other industry to your own to solve a new problem. I found this distinction to be a truly useful one. A really good example of this that I used in the discussion afterwards was Larry Page’s application of the academic citation principle (which I’m told by Tom the Architect essentially an application of Bayes’ theorem) to the application of search, resulting in Googles PageRank algorithm and a completely new and more reliable method of search.
It’s interesting how many times one can actually come up with ideas only to have them rejected because “we are not in that business” or “that isn’t our core competency” when it could actually be a whole new business model to help the company. Gary talked a little about these situations in the video as well.
One problem: I have no idea what the video was called. However, it was useful and I am definitely ordering his book. I’ll find out the name and post it up here within the next few days.
I’m becoming quite enamoured with the research around innovation available and how most companies just don’t understand the principles involved, or worse, are just too comfortable with where they are.
Seems to me there could be quite an industry built around consulting on this stuff …
O’Reilly: What Is Web 2.0
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Tim O’Reilly answers the question “What Is Web 2.0?”
Our Score from Yesterdays Flea Market Trip
Photo by rbieber
We also found this. We like the old Wizard of Oz stuff. If anyone knows where to get a set of fake ruby slippers, let us know.
Here’s our big “score” from yesterdays flea market trip with Jonna’s family. This is a poster made of tin. This was actually our first trip to a flea market and I rather enjoyed it. It was fun to see some of the stuff that they have on sale there and amazing to see the things that people actually keep.
We got pictures of some of the stuff that I have posted to the photo album.
Check Out GeoBloggers.com
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Check out GeoBloggers.com if you want to see a really cool application that was written around the Google Maps and Flickr API’s. I haven’t quite figured out how to use it, but it looks really interesting and is a good example of what is possible when systems are designed with service orientation in mind.
Bieber Labs 