This really was a bad Wall Street day

From msnbc.com:

best stock quote ever.

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If only it was 1992

I would SO wear these.

Nike Marty McFly 2015

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Hello, Technorati!

Technorati Profile

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Followup on the art toolset

OK, so after living with Ubuntu for a week or two, I don’t know. I like the free part, but I’m not digging the broken stuff, such as:

• Rhythmbox crashing randomly
• Weird glitches
• Wireless connection cutting out and forcing reboots
• Substantially high nerd status of running Linux and posting about it on one’s blog

We’ll see. So far, I nearly lost my old data, and have made no art. More on that later.

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Building the ultimate (and cheap) web and art development toolset

Since I left UIUC in 2006, my spare time has been devoted to pretty much everything except making art/data visualizations. At my day job I get to play around with web technology, which has satisfied my curiosities, but I miss doing my own work.

Unfortunately I no longer have the resources of an art school at my disposal, and I’m not excited about dishing out hundreds of dollars for software. So I got to thinking: how can I build a decent art-making setup with mostly open-source/free tools?

Requirements: I need to be able to do everything I already know how to do, and I don’t necessarily want to spend months relearning new software that duplicates software I already use. It’s doesn’t all have to be free, but AFAP (as free as possible!) I also would like to stay compatible across OSes and use the least amount of hardware possible.

So here it is, my new art/datavis-development tool set. I’m still in the process of completing this task, but I’m going to chart my progress here. Doing this has convinced me to bail on Windows, but I’m sticking with OS X for Photoshop, and any other absolutely necessary commercial applications.

Hardware: (1) home-built Intel Core 2 Duo desktop/server with a 24” LCD, and (1) Apple MacBook.
Operating Systems: Ubuntu 8.04, Mac OS 10.5.

The Ubuntu machine:

• File Server with 500GB+ of RAID 0 storage
• Print Server
• Remote access with SSH and VNC
• Subversion server for project management
• Web server with LAMP/phpMyAdmin and Ruby on Rails
• Tomcat (maybe)
• Music playing and serving with either Rhythmbox or Amarok
• Photo management with flickrfs
• A place to work when a 13.1” screen won’t cut it.

The Mac will do:

• Adobe CS apps when I need them
• Windows in VMWare Fusion (for testing only)
• A place to work when carrying a 30 pound desktop won’t cut it.

Both machines will have:

• Processing
• Eclipse (Europa JEE) with:
  • Web Tools Platform
  • Aptana Studio (no more Dreamweaver!) with PHP and RoR Plugins
  • Adobe Flex Builder

that should be enough to get started. Hopefully soon there will be some output from this new setup :)

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