Hire Your Next Consultant Using Twitter

At Portero we had an issue with our network. I know enough about networking to understand the basics. I actually used to work on the IOS back during the dawn of the internet. Though things have changed since then, the biggest issue is I don’t remember enough to fix network...

Promotion

Permit me to shamelesly announce my promotion to Chief Information Officer at Portero Inc. Here is the Press Release on the wire this week. Portero, Inc., is pleased to announce the promotion of Steve P. Francia to the position of Chief Information Officer (CIO), effective imme...

Why are you still shopping offline?

Today I visited one of the largest national office supply outlets. I had a specific purpose in mind. I needed to pickup 2 wireless routers and 1 audio cable. What transpired caused me to wonder why anyone does any offline shopping anymore. My experience at the store caused me to...

Managing Multiple Firefox Profiles in OS X

One of the great features of Firefox is the ability to manage multiple profiles. This is a very handy feature with many different uses. Unfortunately, it isn’t easy to do on a mac. I will show you how to setup multiple profiles on a mac that appear and run like normal mac appli...

Using SVK to Increase Productivity

SVK is a client for SVN built using perl. It makes a number of improvements over the standard svn client, while retaining much of the same feel. It works with the standard Subversion server and works perfectly in an environment with some users using svn and some using svk on the...

The 15 Best Vim Plugins

One of the things that makes vim great is that it can be extended through plugins. There are plugins for more than you would expect. I have gathered together the 15 best plugins. I’ve included these plugins as part of my ultimate VIM configuration which has been featured on man...

Implementing a Corporate Wiki

It seems all of a sudden, the two buzz words in the corporate IT world are wiki and blog. Corporate wikis are emerging as cheap, intelligent, flexible systems for shared-document collaboration and content management. Because they are browser based, wikis are quite easy to impleme...

Why are you not on Twitter

Over the last 2 weeks I have found myself asking that question more times than I can remember. When I first heard about microblogging—or Twitter, the primary service that started the microblogging movement—over a year ago I thought it was a stupid fad and wouldn’t last. I m...

Be more productive using GNU Screen

Despite living in the age of multicore processors, GUI everything and mountains of ram, I continually find myself more productive with a terminal open. Especially when that terminal is running GNU Screen. About GNU Screen GNU Screen is a free terminal multiplexer developed by�...

Computing History at Bell Labs

Doug McIlroy’s rememberances