Author: Bobby Rockers

To understand a woman

In what will surely go down in history as “the day husbands around the world finally figured out what the hell their wives REALLY want”, I offer this story from eetimes.  Lie-detector glasses, does not really seem like an accurate description though, as the work on voice intonation.  Still, with the range of emotions they claim to work on…  maybe I can finally be an understanding man.

There and …; a space story.

Found this great op-ed piece about human travel to the Mars.  I must say that I totally agree with his conclusions (I have for a long time believed that we should consider one way space travel.)  The problem is that there are so many soft-hearted people in this country who have very little desired to do anything that might involves loss of human life (i.e. Iraq war) even it is obviously in the best interest of our country/world.

People willing to sacrifice progress, knowledge, and freedom in the name of safety or security are doomed to loose all of them.  Such people would let the last great space achievement of the U.S. be the trip to the moon; and watch while other countries leave us behind.

HIG and QA

Three great articles from Bruce Tognazzini (i.e. Tog) the founder of Apple’s Human Interface guidelines (HIG.)  Back in the day Apple payed millions to figure out what exactly allowed a GUI to be useful and easily understandable… and they incorporated that knowledge into the old Mac OSes.  Tog gives his opinion about the OSX Dock and Panther (the latest release of OSX.)  For more information about human interface guidelines check out Fitts’ Law and Principles of Interaction Design (based on Fitts Law.)

If you think you are really knowledgeable concerning HIG you can take a Designed To Give Fitts test provided by Tog. 

The final article is a discussion on quality assurance procedures called When Good Design => Bad Product.  Its an absolutely wonderful synopsis of why good QA is fundamentally required for any level of application dependability.

Virtual Bochs

Yes it has support for more than 16 colors! Just a quick link to anyone who is interested. After more than a year of waiting for a new stable version bochs is here. For anyone who does not know what bochs is here is a pretty good description:

Bochs is a highly portable open source IA-32 (x86) PC emulator written in C++, that runs on most popular platforms. It includes emulation of the Intel x86 CPU, common I/O devices, and a custom BIOS. Currently, Bochs can be compiled to emulate a 386, 486, Pentium, Pentium Pro or AMD64 CPU, including optional MMX, SSE, SSE2 and 3DNow instructions.

Bochs allows you to create a virtual PC inside of your PC. Need to run Windows 2000 once in a _great_ while. Install a full blown version of Windows inside of a bochs virtual PC… some of the more interesting features are VMware virtual image support, 3DNow!/SSE/SSE2 (i.e the virtual processor has these instructions available), and support for high/true color… Go get it Mike!

How-to tutorials

This is the most random thing I have ever posted but hey… its my blog.  Found a site with some instructions on how to do your own book binding. Just in case anyone wants to print their favorite online tech manual.

If you are interested in doing other “home” projects (only more tech related) be sure to check out Gideon Tech. Everything from case mod’ing to creating a digital card reader to power on your computer… its all there.  I like the tutorial showing you how to make it look like your case is full of water.

The Voynich Cypher

An article in Nature discusses whither or not the Voynich Manuscript is a well designed fraud using a known form of encryption. For those of you who are not familiar with the Voynich Manuscript, its Elizabetian era “book” that is in a never before seen “language”. Most fraudulent manuscripts from that era have been demonstrated so by linguists and cryptographers. So far the Voynich Manuscript has stumped experts (mostly because it contains so many similarities to actual language structure. You can find out more about the Voynich Manuscript at Philip Neal’s Voynich Manuscript page.

Return of the King

Just a quick note.  Went and saw the Lord the the Rings “Return of the King” yesterday.  It is without a doubt the single greatest movie ever created.  The trilogy itself will almost assuredly go down in history as the greatest movie epic ever made.  The battle sequences we amazing.; the story execution was enthralling;  and the climaxes were overwhelming.  “Return of the King” is as close to a perfect movie as I have ever seen.

KOpenOffice

Undoubtedly the most powerful Office suite for Linux is OpenOffice.org/StarOffice (aka: OO.org.)  It has most of the features of Microsoft Office and many many features that are not available in MS Office.  The biggest problem with OO.org is its overall lack of UI integration with any Linux desktop.  Sure it looks and acts fine but it does not fit with the rest of the desktop when using something like KDE or Gnome. 

Ximian has worked to fix this by “Gnomizing” OO.org through their OpenOffice.org Bonobo Integration project (which has evidently died since being bought by Novell.)  But that still left the best Linux desktop environment out in the cold.  Well that has changed.  The OpenOffice.org KDE Integration Project has been made an “incubator” project by OO.org (meaning that if it continues well it will be come an officially “accepted” OO.org project.)

This is good news for the KDE desktop community.  The interesting part is that lots of KDE/OO.org integration has already taken place.  KOffice already had plans to switch its file type to OO.org’s document type; and there is already an KPart for OO.org files in Konqueror (the founder of that project is also the founder of the OO.org KDE Integration Project.)  The X11 calls have already been replaced and work will hopefully start on a KDE NWS.