Daily Archives: June 9, 2008

How to be more keyboardy

Being more keyboardy is good. The mouse is good, too. But if you can do more things with the keyboard, those things will usually happen faster and with less mucking around. Also, it is very, very cool to sit there and go “tap tap tap” and have stuff happen on the screen without the mouse. Like in that Star Trek where Scott was forced to use a Mac Classic to design Invisible Aluminum. First he tried to use the mouse as a microphone to communicate with the computer. When that didn’t work, he just went after the keyboard and tap-tap-tap had a design for Invisible Aluminum ready to go. To put whales in.Since most of your time is spent using a web browser, and the main web browser you use is Firefox, I thought I’d pass on a few keyboardy shortcuts. Keep in mind, however, that many keyboard commands are used in common system wide for many different programs, like the first three I’ll mention … they work, in one way or another, in all programs that also use a mouse. Most of the time. Continue reading How to be more keyboardy

Microsoft Attempts to Patent the Very Essence of Humanity

What? Consider this Abstract from the patent:

A software design process includes three elements–an object/component driven element, a situation/scenario driven element, and an arbitrator/communicator element that is logically interposed and serves as an intermediary between the object/component driven and the situation/scenario driven elements. Through an iterative communication process overseen by the arbitrator/communicator, software design can take place and be measured against a metric. The communication process overseen and implemented by the arbitrator/communicator can allow ideas and developments provided by one element to be translated into a format that the other element understands. Once the metric has been achieved, the design process can be terminated.

Continue reading Microsoft Attempts to Patent the Very Essence of Humanity

New Development with Reiser

Hans Reiser developed a file system a while back, for LInux computers (but in theory useful for other systems as well) which is probably the best file system out there. File systems vary in how good they are at handling very large vs. many small files, with something of a trade off between the two. File systems can be super duper fast or very very secure, but there is a trade off between the two. And so on. The Reiser File System addresses these trade offs better than other systems, at least, so many think. This is an open source file systems.There is one small problem: Continue reading New Development with Reiser