Gmail Chat emoticons are the most popular search terms here at techrageo.us. And now there’s a new robot smiley. In the past we’ve covered Gmail Chat—and its emoticons in particular. Of course everyone who uses Gmail knows it now supports smileys in email, but there have been a couple minor changes for the chat smileys [...]

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The charting in Flex is a pretty good tool, but there are a few small features that it would be really nice if it had. One of these would be the ability to have a chart series that changed colors depending on it’s value. Conditionally colored charts are something that a lot of us (and [...]

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Google Adds New Smilies to Gmail Chat Update: For a complete list of Gmail chat emoticons, including the new category four smileys and the new robot and poo smileys see Gmail Chat Smileys. With the recent update to Gmail chat, Google has added (both round and squared) graphic smilies. What’s more, some new hidden smilies [...]

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Edward Tufte has promoted the use of inline, word-sized graphs called sparklines to communicate data more effectively, giving rise to several methods of creating inline graphs within documents, including spreadsheets. This article describes one very simple way of incorporating dynamic bar graphs in your spreadsheets. It works in Excel, IBM Lotus Symphony, OpenOffice, and Google’s [...]

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The problem If you have a company laptop and your company forces you to use a proxy server you probably know about the mild annoyance of bringing your laptop home and finding that the internet doesn’t work because your browsers are setup to use a proxy that it can no longer find. So you probably [...]

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For the last several years, Acrobat Reader has drifted between sluggish and mind-bogglingly slow, particularly when starting up. Acrobat is a great tool and PDF files widespread enough to make the reader software a requirement on any system. So why is it so dang slow? There are tools to speed up Reader and articles describing [...]

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Update: Gmail chat has been updated with a tabbed smiley interface and new emoticons. In addition to the standard Gmail Chat emoticons listed in a previous article here, some hidden smilies have turned up. Whatchamuhcallit They’ve added a cool equal, slantmouthy face =/. Yeeesh, That Had To Hurt If you wince, you need this one. [...]

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Update: For the full list of Gmail chat emoticons, including the new category-four smileys and the new robot smiley, see Gmail Chat Smileys. Currently Gmail Chat does not support formatting like Yahoo or others do. But there are some things you can do to spice up the experience, such as it is. Some of this [...]

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For this tutorial you will need a copy of The Gimp. You can download it here for Windows, Linux and OS X. For any project you need a goal, so for this tutorial our goal will be to create a fantasy image of a far away galaxy. Cheesy? Yes, but also very easy if you [...]

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Programmers, get out of your cube and play nice, share your knowledge, be open to learning from others… just a bit of great advice based on the concept of peer code reviews in Jerry Weinberg’s book The Psychology of Computer Programming. It is often tough for developers to detach themselves from their code. Code reviews [...]

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