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Creation is Art

Drawing on cave walls was one of those definitive moments where our ancestors showed superior intellect. Since then, art forms have been an integral part of our expression as a species, translating the human condition into tangible objects and experiences. It's interesting to look into those attributes that elevate a simple creation to a form of art and investigate the parallels with application development.

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Being Original

Any work of art encapsulates an originality that derives from the unique qualities of the creator. This is why creation can be a messy process. There's a lot of wandering while trying to find the meaning, the hidden desire a creation tries to fulfill, that makes everything purposeful.

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The Dark Side of Open Source

The road is long, with many a winding turn, as the song goes. And the experience of open source development holds more than a few painful surprises: Failure, betrayal, discredit, shaming, envy... Time to reflect.

A bloody history

First there was hardware, and for some time things were good. Then Man realized he could abstract instructions from the machine and software was born. And he saw that it was good... But as humans like to share things, guided by their survival instincts, so they did with software; calling it free software. And then all hell broke loose. Since then there hasn't been one generation of developers that hasn't battled through the perceptions of what's considered proprietary and open source territory.

Open source is under constant debate, even today. **Processes, contributions, methodologies are all up in the air and opinionated parties allo

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Source: http://www.calmar.ws/vim/256-xterm-24bit-rgb-color-chart.html

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History lessons for the Disruptors

How many apps have come and gone? How many developers have had their moment, shining under the public spotlight as an example of ingenuity and achievement, only to be absorbed and forgotten by the monolithic machine we call "big business"? What is excellent one day becomes obsolete the next day. As a result, users experience our products on a superficial level and have no problem discarding in an instant what might have taken years to create. Is this the only way things can be?

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If you examine Silicon Valley you may eventually come to an interesting realization: innovation is more often communicated than experienced. We seem to be playing with the odds although chances are not in our favor since we're failing more times than we're succeeding. In sight of this reality, many are under the impression that history cannot guide us when we are thinking about the future; but as they say "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it". A closer look in

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Manual:

./letsencrypt-auto certonly -a manual -d {{domain.com}} \
  --server https://acme-v01.api.letsencrypt.org/directory --agree-dev-preview

(same, single line)

./letsencrypt-auto certonly -a manual -d {{domain.com}} --server https://acme-v01.api.letsencrypt.org/directory --agree-dev-preview

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The Little Server That Could

A cautionary tale about machine intelligence and how it can aid in sustaining the Web; the importance of automation in our professional lives and a foresight in embracing the next evolutionary step in our human/machine relationship.

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Servers can't even

We treat servers as mindless drones. We set them up in a rigid fashion and they simply appear online through a network interface. Uptime and response time are important attributes for these machines but at no given time do we question what a server is doing. Their parameters are very well defined and their limits are narrow and small. Many servers are so dumbed down they operate like ATMs. You request something, you receive something: end of transaction.

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https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNELID
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=USERNAME
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=PLAYLISTID

Notes:

You can get the channel id by searching for the attribute data-channel-external-id in the source code of the youtube page

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Collaboration Generation

For the first time in history we have a connected society where people can work together from the edges of the world, in real time. This powerful way to cooperate comes with a lot of caveats, gray areas and necessary adjustments in our best practices for "getting things done".

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Collaboration is a means to an end, not an activity. Through it we aim to achieve a goal and be more productive by combining our efforts. Collaboration without a goal is just play. That statement can also be a guide how good collaboration can function, as we perceive play to be executed effortlessly and with highly positive success rates. When the logistics are in the background and on the surface there is the sense of play still alive, collaboration just works. That's the subject of gamification and other similar trends.

Beneath the surface there should be of course process; and if the process is cumbersome or even offensive, no superficial adjustments

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Upgrade

• Download latest version: http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop

• Create bootable USB http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/create-a-usb-stick-on-ubuntu

• Installing Ubuntu 15.10 - Wily Werewolf on a Macbook Pro 12-1 (2015)

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CSS Particles

Generate particles using CSS transitions

Examples

• jQuery version