Podcasts to register on

When moving to a new working station I'll need to re-register to my podcasts. Don't have much of them, and many I dropped along the way. My favorites are:

• The Java Posse - My favorites, followed them from the beginning.
• Parleys - Has some good technical talks. I actually listen to only 25% of them since a lot of them are not interesting / with bad speakers, but its worth it. I especially like the JavaPolis talks.
• Drunk and Retired - Their good, no doubt about it. But usually I don't have enough patients for their bullshit and humor. If the topic is interesting I'll listen in.
  
• 43 Folders - Some of it is good, mainly in the area of GTD and some stuff for Mac users. The video cast they have for may users is much better.
• FeatherCast - Not extremely interesting, but they sometime have interesting discussions about some of the products. Good to be kept informed.
• IT Conversations - Need to be very selective here, though some are interesting.

The problem is now that I have much less time doing commuting :-)
I'll start riding the bike to work (~40 min), that will give me enough time to listen to all I want.

Applications to install when setting up a new workstation

I'm going to loose my precious MacBook Pro since I'm quitting my current job.
So just few days before I'm handing it off I'm backing up my personal files and preparing a list of stuff I need to install when I'll get my new workstation. I consider this list as a must have for every programmer/architect/project lead.

1. QuickSilver - obviously. A necessity for every Mac user interested in productivity and not afraid of the keyboard.
2. iGTD - If you're juggling multiple context activities and sometime feels that sometimes things are getting out of hands, then you need to take a look at iGTD. On the Mac, iGTD is the best GTD tool I know of.
3. FreeMind - For similar reasons as using iGTD and much more, FreeMind had become a necessary working tool. I index and organize there tons of information. There might be better MinddMapping tools, but this is free and runs on all platforms.
4. PTHPasteboard - This is a real necessity! I don't understand how people can't work with any multiple pasteboard application. I use it all the time, especially when I do programming. Its free and minimalistic, things I like about software.
   
5. iTerm - Better then the default Mac terminal in many ways. Top of all is tabs which helps me keep the desktop sane when multi tasking...
6. Eclipse - The best Java IDE I know of.
7. TextWrangler - My favorite text editor on Mac.
   
8. Google Desktop - It does a better indexing job then Spotlight.
9. Growl - Like QuickSilver, its a Mac basics.
10. MenuMeters - I like to know what's happening with my computer.
11. muCommander - When getting down to business, its my favorite most productive file manager application on Mac.
12. KeePassX - The way I keep my gazillion accounts in control.
13. MagiCal - Far better then the default Mac calender.

Needless to mention, but there's also Skype, Adium, Firefox, NeoOffice, Gimp, VLC, Acrobat, The Unarchiver, and probably few other basic/trivial apps I forgot about.

Leaving IBM, Moving on to LinkedIn

I just announced my departure from IBM. IBM Research was a great place to work in.
If we'll not include the military (four years), then IBM was all of my career until now. I started at Haifa Research Labs when I still was a student at the Techion, and after few years moved on with my family to the silicon valley and started to work in Almaden Research Center.

I did worked on Healthcare projects in the last two years in Haifa, but things really took off in Almaden when we got into the Eclipse open Healthcare Framework project. I wrote some code, did lots of talks and blogs, and saw the great community comes into life.

I do hope to still be involved in this domain, in the next few months I'll have a better idea of how I can still contribute to the OHF community and be involved.

Anyway, now its the brave new world of Social Networks which really fascinates me. LinkedIn is a great company with fantastic people and technology. I'm excited to see what's next, but as always - looks like I'm going to have some fun :-)

The Smiteam web site is up!

With few command lines on my Dad's Ubuntu box, I installed Gallery2 and WordPress. Its so easy to do and here we go, we have our own family server :-)