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links for 2007-12-30

Posted in links by Alan Keister on December 29, 2007
  • Supercharge Your Scheduling with GCal -Since I have no corporate calendar, I looked at the leading cals online, plaxo, yahoo, and google. I liked google the best by far. Here are some great tips for integrating with other apps.

links for 2007-12-25

Posted in links by Alan Keister on December 24, 2007

GridPoint = My Next Adventure

Posted in Uncategorized by Alan Keister on December 22, 2007

Gridpoint Logo I am excited to tell you about GridPoint, the company I will join in January as VP of Engineering. GridPoint was founded in 2003 to help the electric industry manage renewable energy sources and increase energy efficiency in homes and businesses. Today, they are focused on products that help electric utilities build and manage the “smart grid”. The smart grid is the next-gen electric grid that can be managed as a network of intelligent devices. GridPoint’s products will help electric utilities and consumers cut energy costs and reduce the environmental impact of producing energy.  They have an honorable mission that I will be proud to embrace.

It is no secret that clean tech companies are hot with investors now. GridPoint is no exception. They have raised over $80MM in investments. $48MM of it was raised in October. They have won a number of awards as well. Here are links to some of them:

World Economic Forum Technology Pioneers 2008

AlwaysOn GoingGreen 100 Top Private Companies for 2007

Red Herring 100 Global Award

GridPoint has been nominated for a TechCrunch award for best clean tech startup of 2007. Public voting started yesterday. Vote here http://vote.crunchies.techcrunch.com/

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links for 2007-12-22

Posted in links by Alan Keister on December 21, 2007

links for 2007-12-21

Posted in links by Alan Keister on December 20, 2007

links for 2007-12-14

Posted in links by Alan Keister on December 13, 2007
  • I can import my email, have a nice web UI, a nice mobile UI, and have it searchable by Google Desktop Search. It isn’t enough to make me switch my personal account from AOL but it is nice. Google should take note and this easier to do.  Any mail system is more attractive if I can import from another account and keep the mail forever.

    (tags: google email)

  • Want to know what waterboarding is? There is a debate going on questioning whether or not waterboarding is a form of torture. Watch the video and judge for yourself. This guy volunteered to be waterboarded so he could show the public what it is.

links for 2007-12-13

Posted in links by Alan Keister on December 12, 2007

links for 2007-12-12

Posted in links by Alan Keister on December 11, 2007

Synergy: Share a Mouse, Keyboard, and cut-n-paste between computers

Posted in Uncategorized by Alan Keister on December 10, 2007

If you have multiple PCs or Macs next to each other, Synergy is a must have utility for you. This cool utility let’s you use one keyboard and mouse on all your computers on a single desktop. It works much like having multiple monitors on a single PC. You can move

the mouse from one to another, cut and paste from one to another, and use the same keybo

ard for both. You can do this even if one is a Windows PC and the other is a Mac.

Synergy

Synergy has become very useful for me as I have a Macbook Pro and a Windows laptop laptops next to each other on my desk at home. I don’t have space for multiple mice and often wanted to cut and paste between them. Synergy solves those problems. I am using the keyboard and mouse on my Macbook Pro to control both the Mac and Windows laptops. This is not like a KVM switch. It just works seamlessly.

Synergy has one downside. Configuration is difficult. The best description I read is from an article from LifeHacker, Hack Attack:Control multiple computers with a single keyboard and mouse.

Update (8/10/2009):  I discovered Input Director on Lifehacker.  It looks more up to date and has more features.

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Windows on Mac Performance, Part 2

Posted in Uncategorized by Alan Keister on December 1, 2007

I have a little more information as a followup from the last post about VMWare vs. Parallels vs. Apple Boot Camp. This time, I looked briefly at CPU and memory footprints at idle. VMWare is easy on the CPU at idle, using only 0-10% CPU. But it is very hungry for memory. 1,630MB resident and a total of over 2,300MB of virtual memory across all processes. Wow! It was configured to allocate 1,500MB RAM for Windows. You can see details below… (click for a bigger view)

VMWare

In contrast, Parallels used a whopping 25-30% of the CPU at idle but far less memory. It was also configured to allocate 1,500MB RAM for Windows.

Parallels

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