Tuesday, August 21, 2007

JXplorer - Free LDAP Utility

so i wrote a blog entry on dev2dev about using OpenLDAP with WebLogic Server and a very nice reader pointed me to JXplorer.  It is a very handy free LDAP browser that is more intuitive than the out of date u.s. government provided browser mentioned on my entry, that also has limitations with export apparently.
here are some screenshots that show the configuration screen and the resulting object browser that has both an html view and a table view.  very handy.

Thursday, August 9, 2007

my simpsons character

one of my colleagues pointed me to http://simpsonizeme.com which generates what you would look like as a simpsons character.


the movie / burger king has done a pretty good job of making a viral web tool here.  this in combination with their efforts to actually brand certain real brick and mortar stores as kwik-e-marts is taking the marketing to an entirely new level.  with the simpsons, people can excuse such shameless marketing because they're funny and they get some slack, but i can imagine some brands trying to do this wouldn't get the same amount of leeway.  in fact, if not done correctly, this type of marketing could potentially do more harm than good if there would be a big negative reaction because of a backlash.  as far as the movie goes, i haven't seen it.  i'll probably wait for video on this one.

Thursday, August 2, 2007

search utility - locate32

so my buddy john was telling me about this handy utility called locate32 that has ported the locate linux/unix utility to the windows platform.  john has used google desktop search and microsoft desktop searches before, but finds that doing simple searches are difficult with those tools and that the indexes take up lots of space with a big index that always needs to be run.  i actually use microsoft desktop search on my laptop now and find it very useful because most of the items i search for are in email and it integrates very nicely with outlook.  john's use-cases are slightly different though and he usually knows some basic criteria such as file type, size, creation date, directory structure that the simple index is based on.  i must agree that i've often missed files with the ms search and have to launch the search companion, which takes a few clicks and isn't indexed, so it takes longer.  another use case this tool can be used for is for searching non-local archives (dvd's or unattached drives) that are indexed locally.

Wednesday, August 1, 2007

who killed the electric car

emily and i watched who killed the electric car last night.  i really enjoyed it.  i had some depressed thoughts that crossed my mind in terms of lost opportunity for the american auto-makers and the powerful industries and government forces that suppressed this technology for their self-interest.  my friend kelly had commented in my post on health care about how we should all look in the mirror and realize that we're all part of the problem with respect to health care.  he made the point that many of us have retirement investments that indirectly invest in these powerful industries and expect a nice return on our investment.  in a sense, many americans are greedy stock-holders in many of the companies they do not directly support.  in this case, it is big-oil instead of health-care, but the point is similar.  i see his point but still disagree with the crux of the matter.  while i might benefit to some small degree by the success of pharmaceutical companies or big-oil, my realized benefit is many orders of magnitude smaller than the corporate executives and politicians that are taking huge cuts of the profits.  it seems like a terrible pyramid scheme in which politicians and companies are mucking with the free market and demand by leveraging regulations that are not in the interest of consumers, but are in their interest.  consumers still need to take accountability for not forcing the issue enough and with all of the easy access to knowledge that the internet provides, i hope these kinds of situations are harder to repeat themselves in the future.  the problem is that corporate and government interests are strong forces that might be up for meeting this new challenge as well.  let's be honest here, if gm had marketed the ev1 the way the tesla guys are marketing theirs, we'd all have electric cars.