Encephalosponge » Attention Deficit

Smoke and Mirrors

Jonathan Blackhall — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 03:38:51 +0000

Apparently Lenovo has put a lot of work in making Windows 7 boot “unbelievably fast.” When you go on to read the article, you see that you’ll get a boot time possibly as “quickly” as 30 seconds, which is a significant improvement for Windows. Of course to explain how they get that, you get a bunch of vague double-speak. They push back loading drivers and various Windows services until after booting “finishes.” They also make some claims about preventing “Windows rot” by doing some work with drivers. Not quite sure what they’re doing there. Sounds like they need to take some tips from the pros: 10 seconds on a mid-level machine to a logged in idle computer without delaying any background services. Your computer is ready to use in 10 seconds. That’s the goal for Ubuntu 10.04, due out in April 2010. Ubuntu 9.10, due out in a few weeks, already has Lenovo’s Windows 7 numbers beat, so 10.04 will just be some sweet icing on the cake. And then of course, there’s reason to believe boot speed will actually be closer to 5 seconds when it’s all said and done… Maybe some day Windows will catch Ubuntu.

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Panda’s Back!!

Jonathan Blackhall — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 17:01:06 +0000

I was just doing some reading yesterday and saw that PandaBear, MD’s blog is now being archived over at SDN. I’ve stayed subscribed to his original site’s feed since he retired just in case he ever popped back in to say anything. As I wandered over to the SDN archive expecting to find a 1:1 copy of his original site, I saw that he actually started writing again on this new site back in March! This just made my day. I’ve got some serious catching up to do! If you’ve never read Panda’s blog, you can start with some things that I thought were notable. Enjoy!

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Trial of A WhiteCoat

Jonathan Blackhall — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 04:09:24 +0000

Trial of A WhiteCoat « WhiteCoat’s Call Room. I can’t wait for the conclusion!

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Now with web fonts!

Jonathan Blackhall — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 00:50:01 +0000

This site now utilizes the @font-face attribute included in the new Firefox 3.5. These fonts should be visible in Firefox 3.5, Safari 3.1, and Opera 10. They may be visible in IE (I’m not sure). Thanks to exljbris and RedHat for some cool fonts. Let me know if you think I went overboard or if something isn’t looking right on your screen now. I’m not done tweaking yet, but this is a good start.

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Firefox 3.5 font-face

Jonathan Blackhall — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 03:48:53 +0000

I could try to explain why the @font-face CSS feature in the new Firefox 3.5 is so awesome for web developers (and viewers), but as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words: Firefox 3.0 (and other web browsers) vs Firefox 3.5. You no longer need a particular font installed on your computer in order to view it on a web page. Expect some changes around here in the coming weeks to reflect that!

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Death by 100 Papercuts

Jonathan Blackhall — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 03:20:48 +0000

The newly formed, Canonical-sponsored, User-Experience Team is already hard at work on their major campaign to improve the default Ubuntu experience with the Ayatana project. One of their big goals for Ubuntu 9.10 is dubbed “One Hundred Papercuts.” Canonical seems to be taking the constant criticism of the default Ubuntu experience to heart, and they’re doing their best to fix all the little quirks that should “just work” but don’t (for any number of reasons). They’ve hired a killer team of developers including David Siegel, creator of the fantastic Swiss-Army knife that is Gnome Do, and Mirco Muller, a graphics guru. The future of Ubuntu is looking pretty bright to me!

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WordPress 2.8 released

Jonathan Blackhall — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 03:01:20 +0000

WordPress 2.8, codenamed “Baker”, was just released. It’s looking pretty sweet. Unfortunately I’ll have to wait a few days before I upgrade due to exams.

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Necessary follow-up on the “Missing Link”

Jonathan Blackhall — Wed, 27 May 2009 04:36:59 +0000

Ars Technica did a fantastic follow-up on the discovery of the “missing link”, which I posted about last week. As Ars points out, it’s looking like Ida was way more hype than anything, which could end up being extremely detrimental to science. Despite being a very well-preserved and valuable fossil, she does not appear to be a “missing link” in any way. If you were interested in the Ida news, this article is a must read. Score -1 for science and the media. :-/

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Score 2 for Science

Jonathan Blackhall — Fri, 22 May 2009 03:26:13 +0000

Just popping back in to tell you about a really cool scientific discovery. Some paleontologists discovered a new genus and species in Germany that is described as the “missing link” between humans and early mammals. The skeleton, dubbed Ida (or Darwinius masillae if you prefer), is an early mammal similar to a lemur that has opposable thumbs and forward-facing eyes. Score 1 for science and Darwin! Even better, their work was published in PLoS ONE, an open-access journal. Therefore, despite the fact that this revolutionary article was just published two days ago, anyone in the world can view the full text and high resolution images for free. Plus, you can print, reuse, redistribute, or even modify the images and text as long as you give the original authors credit. Score 2 for science! (hat tip: Jamey)

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Monetizing Twitter

Jonathan Blackhall — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 03:36:51 +0000

It seems like everyone knows what Twitter is these days. News shows on CNN usually make me cringe when they start showing tweets on air. But there has been a lot of discussion lately on how to start making money off of Twitter. It seems like the first step has already begun. It’s funny, but Identi.ca, an open source microblogging service very similar to Twitter, has a much more sustainable idea of how to make money in this industry. They also have a number of technical advantages, just not the number of users. It’ll be interesting to see where they both are next year.

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