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Laptops are the best remote controls.

Posted by John Adams on November 9th, 2008

Here at my loft, which we lovingly refer to as The Concrete Bunker, or just Bunker for short, I have a Mac Mini attached to our 46″ LCD TV via a DVI to HDMI cable.
The Mini does a fair amount of work for us, playing music during dinner parties, pulling movies off of the hackintosh [...]

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Obama Wins!

Posted by John Adams on November 4th, 2008

What a night Tuesday was - Obama won. Twitter Stayed up. OMG!
I’m in the lower left of this photo. It’s not the best, but it’s representative of our collective emotion at Twitter HQ on that historic night!

Image Courtesy of Scott Beale, Laughing Squid.
The rest of the photos and Scott’s article Lives here …
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Obama [...]

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VOTE!

Posted by John Adams on November 3rd, 2008

It goes without saying that tomorrow is one of the most important days in our country’s history. When you go to the polls, do everything you can to ensure that your vote is counted.
If you’re in California, vote No On 8. It brings hate crime directly into the state’s constitution. 
In San Francisco, vote Yes on K. [...]

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Improving links and tags with Kaalga and Tagaroo

Posted by John Adams on October 24th, 2008

I have a couple of interesting tools for you to use to improve links and tags with when composing your next blog post!
The first one is from Tagaroo, which uses the (Reuters) Calais API to determine tags that match the content of your posting. Like Akismet, you need to sign up to use the Calais [...]

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Got lolz? Web2.0 Expo Berlin does.

Posted by John Adams on October 24th, 2008

Brady just posted links to numerous presentations from Web 2.0 Expo Europe. The LolCats have taken over presentations at most major web conferences these days. Nearly every presentation I looked at had a LOLCat on one of their slides. 
Those that were lacking in an actual LOLCat slide featured lots of LOLSpeak. I know we’re discussing [...]

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Hack the Debate

Posted by John Adams on September 27th, 2008

Here I am at work, at Twitter during the 1st Presidential debates, making sure things are running and keeping track of our metrics. Twitter and Current.tv worked together to provide a live election site and placement of user generated tweets on live video of the debate. Our team did wonderfully and Twitter stayed up through [...]

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Improving Javascript Load Times using Google AJAX API

Posted by John Adams on September 22nd, 2008

If your site uses common AJAX libraries like jQuery, jQuery UI, mootools, prototype, script.aculo.us, or dojo, the first thing that you’ll notice is that these libraries are quite large and impact page load time.
For a browser with a completely empty cache, the browser will load the requested library (and block all other requests during the [...]

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Hackintosh Redux

Posted by John Adams on September 17th, 2008

You’ve probably read my other article here on the Retina blog about building a Hackintosh, and recently I made the fatal mistake of killing my machine by attempting an upgrade of the working Kalyway 10.5.2 installation with Kalyway 10.5.3. It pushed the machine into a horrible state and all attempts at recovery have been lost. 
I [...]

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random media mention…

Posted by John Adams on August 19th, 2008

My discoveries with the Wall of Sheep at Defcon 16 and it’s application to Twitter security were mentioned on the August 12, 2008 Data Security Podcast.
They called me one of the “good guys”. Heh!
You can listen to it here:
http://datasecurityblog.wordpress.com/2008/08/11/data-security-podcast-episode-13-aug-11-2008/
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “random media mention…”, url: “http://www.retina.net/tech/random-media-mention.html” });

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Automated Face Replacement

Posted by John Adams on August 18th, 2008

As someone who takes many photographs of random people in nightclubs and at events, I’m intrigued by the efforts of Columbia University’s team to write software that performs automated face replacement in digital photographs.
The software is able to replace faces within images from a database of candidate images drawn from the Internet and other sources, [...]

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