I found an interesting post this morning talking about using Pidgin on Fedora Core to communicate with a MS Communicator server. I was able to follow the instructions from Louis van der Merwe to get this working on 64-bit Ubuntu 9.04.
First I downloaded the Pidgin client plugin sourceball from the SIPE Project, and started running configure --prefix=/usr to identify missing libraries. I installed the missing dependencies using sudo apt-get install intltool libpurple comerr-dev, other systems may require more or less. After configuring, making, and installing the plugin I fired up Pidgin.
The only modification I had to make to the configuration instructions was to use SSL instead of TCP for communications as we use a certificate at my workplace. Although contacts and groups were pulled in successfully, my presence notification doesn’t seem to work (I show up as offline). However, this is good enough for me right now and I’m really happy to be able to access the corporate communication channel in my primary development environment.
*Updated to 1.6.3*
Presence notification seems to be working now, thank you SIPE team!

I wrote this during lunch to kill some time before a conference call. I liked the effect on the Moiré Pattern page and thought I would replicate a variation of it.
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This is one of the first Processing projects I wrote a few months ago while I was waiting on a large database download and import. Requires a working Java plugin in your browser.
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I was helping our IT guys out this past weekend configuring a reverse proxy load balancing environment for JBoss/Tomcat behind Apache. I kept running into problems where requests coming from Apache looked like:
GET /foo//bar instead of GET /foo/bar
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I recently worked on configuring and enabling Ehcache with our Hibernate objects for common domain objects we query on almost every page request. I was interested in whether this would improve performance, and how best to illustrate the effect of the pages across threads and actions.
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I was working on profiling some code today and wanted to obtain some summary statistics by groups with two factors. The original source was a log4j file that included entries from an aspect based logger I had enabled. I had already written a small perl script to extract the pertinent information and generate a CSV file with (clazz,method,elapsed) entries, so I was looking for some standard statistics like mean, median, etc. based on clazz+method combinations.
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I realized it should be pretty easy to use the approach as the previous R map I generated to make a smaller scale map at a country level. In this example I’m setting up an initial non-plotted map with limits on the X and Y ranges I want to display. Next I assign colors to the observations of this subset map, plot these filled areas, then plot all boundaries.
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I haven’t had much experience using R for spatial visualization, so I thought I would give the “maps” packages a go tonight and create a quick thematic map of confirmed cases of swine flue by state. It doesn’t have all the elements I would want on a production map, but I was going for speed of generation.
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Welcome to my updated site.