General
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Thursday, April 17th, 2008Every so often I receive an e-mail from someone who has posted something they didn’t mean to to my Nopaste site, and they want it taken down. Since I don’t check my rafb.net e-mail very often, I usually can’t catch these before they have been deleted by the 24 hour expiration period anyway.
However, as a […]
Word’s Ribbon seems to be missing an important feature
Friday, February 29th, 2008Microsoft’s Office software has been redesigned with a new “Ribbon” instead of the old toolbar. The idea is that the ribbon can give better design based on information architecture to put the give greatest prominence to whatever the most relevant tools are for whatever it is you are doing.
And rather than using obscure menu names […]
New Car Wish List
Thursday, February 14th, 2008Similar to my Mobile Phone Wish List, this is a list of the features I would want on my next car.
Keyless ignition. After trying out a car that has this, it’s enough of a convenience that I would consider it a requirement on my next car. For one thing, it makes the keyfob a lot […]
Can a Hardware Platform be Closed?
Tuesday, January 29th, 2008In the comments left for Jeff Atwood’s recent post on closed platforms, there is a discussion about his comparison between traditional dongles and the hardware of the Apple Macintosh itself.
A user named Brandon left the comment,
I’m not sure Apple hardware, say PPC and Intel on, counts as much of a dongle. Especially Intel based hardware. […]
Programming: Engineering, Science, or Art?
Tuesday, January 29th, 2008When you’re looking to hire programmers, what do you look for in their education? How should the colleges and universities be educating the next round of students who are destined for careers in software development? There seem to be several schools of thought on this.
Programming as a Science
Traditionally, going to school with the intention of […]
Ruby on Rails under Windows XP with Cygwin
Sunday, January 27th, 2008I like to use Cygwin for development under Windows, as I frequently use standard command line utilities like find and grep, and I find the Windows command line environment to be more painful to use than it is worth.
The first time I tried to get this all running, it was in this sort of hybrid […]
Mobile Phone Wish List
Monday, January 21st, 2008I’ve been shopping around for new mobile phones recently. Not necessarily because I want to buy one (my current phone is working just fine), but mainly to see what’s out there. It’s been a year or so sinc e I last looked at what sorts of phones are available.
Since I’m not seriously looking to buy […]
Logic Circuits and Video Games
Friday, December 7th, 2007In 1984, The Learning Company published a gamed called Robot Odyssey. The basic premise of this game is that you are a human who has fallen into a world full of robots called Robotropolis, and you are trying to make your way back to the human world.
I had a copy of this game for the […]
Technology from Movies and TV Shows
Thursday, November 1st, 2007The sorts of technology and computer interfaces we see in movies and TV shows are, quite often, sensationalized beyond reason. They are designed to provide visual interest and to look cool, but real-world computer and technology would most likely never be implemented in such a fashion, even if it was possible and easy to do […]
Metaphors That Outlive Their Origins
Wednesday, October 31st, 2007It sometimes happens. We create a metaphor to make something easier to understand, only to find that the new idea replaces the old, and as the old technology fades from use, the metaphor becomes almost unhooked from its original meaning.
Take, for example, the “carriage return” and “line feed” characters that are found in many computer […]
