Monthly Archive:: January 2008

Statistics are fun, aren't they? Contradictions all over the place. "Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system is proving far less popular with new PC buyers than Windows XP did during XP's first year on the market, if statements by company chairman Bill Gates at this week's Consumer Electronics Show are any measure."

I detailed Fitts' Law not too long ago in one of my usability terms articles (the series will pick up later on, by the way, I am currently too busy with my bachelor's thesis), and this article is a very detailed addition. It is a little old (October 2007), though. "Back in school, I remember that it wasn't until I started taking classes in physics that calculus made any kind of real sense to me. I just need diagrams to function. In that spirit, I thought it would be nice to go over Fitts's Law, a staple in the HCI diet, with a few visuals to explain both the concept and why it's ideas are a bit more complicated than most would have you believe."

Apple today announced upgrades to the Mac Pro and the Xserve, which now feature Intel Penryn processors. Quad-core processors that go up to 3.2 Ghz, powerful video cards, and superfast front-side bus and memory make these especially delicious, however, there are still no Blu-ray drives available. Macrumors has more.

After an extensive development period, the Syllable project has released Syllable Desktop 0.6.5 with improvements all over. As always there are bug fixes, most notably in USB and the network stack, leading to large reliability and performance improvements. LibUSB and SANE were ported, so there is now USB access from user space and support for scanners. There are new network and video drivers, including a unique S3 DeltaChrome driver that Arno Klenke wrote from scratch. Two new window decorators debut from John Aspras. CD burning ability is now integrated in the form of SimpleBurn and CDRTools. A new network preferences applet from Andrew Kennan was integrated, and also Arno Klenke's port of OpenBeFS. Many ports were upgraded and the system layout has been heavily reorganised. Files needed for compiling software have been split off in a separate package. This is also the release that harmonises a number of things between Syllable Desktop and Syllable Server. The full change log is here. Installation CDs, the upgrade, and images for emulators are here. Additional software can be found here.

Abdel Benamrouche announced that he has updated the original 0.01 Linux kernel to compile with GCC-4.x, allowing it to run on emulators such as QEMU and Bochs. After applying his series of small patches, Abdel explains that the 0.01 kernel can be built on a system running the 2.6 Linux kernel. He added that he's successfully ported bash-3.2, portions of coreutils-6.9, dietlibc-0.31 (instead of glibc), bin86-0.16.17, make-3.81, ncurses-2.0.7, and vim-7.1 all to run on his modified 0.01 kernel.

Measure the total time of entry and verify the time between keystrokes to help authenticate a user regardless of the data being entered. Learn how to apply the open source tools xev and Perl in keystroke dynamics to measure the more-subtle characteristics of human-computer interaction. This article uses example code to demonstrate keystroke dynamics for enhancing the security of your applications in authentication and continuous data entry contexts.

A lot of details have leaked on Microsoft's next major revamp of Windows Mobile, version 7. "Windows Mobile 7 will use touch gestures, similar to how the iPhone does. You will be able to flick through lists, pan, swipe sideway, draw on the screen. A lot of emphasis has been put on making navigation easier and doing away with scrollbars, including a new scroll handle that allows for multiple ways of finding items extremely fast. Windows Mobile 7 will use motion gestures, something the iPhone does not. It will not use an intricate and complicated series of gyroscopes and accelerometers. Instead, it will use the camera on the phone to detect motions and create appropriate actions. You will be able to shake, twist and otherwise manipulate the phone and get things done. The phone will be able to perform actions when placed face down on a surface, and it will know when it is in your pocket or bag."

"The Cray-1 is to supercomputers what Sigmund Freud is to psychiatrists. That is to say: it's likely the only one of the bunch that you've heard about, and you can feign cleverness just by dropping the name. So let's take a whack at this computer legend."

After seven months of comprehensive development, the popular Unix software packaging tool RPM Package Manager (RPM) was released as stable version 5.0.0. This version builds portably on a wide variety of Unix platforms and includes initial support for XAR as a package format, among other features.

Haikuware carries a Q&A of Ingo Weinhold, one of the main contributing developers to the Haiku Project. In this mini-interview, Ingo talks about his beginnings in the community, his motivations for adopting BeOS, his involvement in Haiku development, and a bit about his professional work too. He also gives a bit of insight about his Haiku-related subprojects, and expresses his determination to port the development tool chain and optimize critical services as the first steps to make Haiku usable as a full time OS for early adopters. “Being a professional Java developer and enjoying Java hacking,” Ingo also seems to be thrilled by the recently announced Haiku Java Team and the prospect of finally getting Java on Haiku.

Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst said yesterday - his fourth day on the job - that he’s angling for a showdown with two tech titans in what he describes as a struggle to protect information sharing in software development. No longer satisfied just defending a company as he did while working at Delta Air Lines, Whitehurst is ready to go on the offensive against Oracle and Microsoft as he builds Red Hat toward billion-dollar annual revenues.

While this might be a bold statement, all things point to this. Blu-Ray was already winning in market share slowly but surely, and today's Warner decision to go BD-only puts the final nails into this HD format war as Warner is the biggest movie distributor. The HD-DVD Group didn't seem to know about Warner's decision and they canceled their CES conference out of the blu tonight, amidst making vague references to possible legal action. My take: I wish Blu-Ray had a region-free policy like HD-DVD does. Living in USA today but one day moving to Europe, it will have an impact in my media library.

According to a news post on the Haiku project website, a new port team is being formed to bring Java technologies to the Haiku platform. The goal of the Haiku Java Team is to port OpenJDK to Haiku, and they would like to see the port included within the structure of Sun's OpenJDK project. The Haiku developers have already been in contact with members of the OpenJDK Porters Group to pursue their objective, and a formal proposal has also been submitted for consideration by the OpenJDK project. The Haiku Java Team is an initiative lead by Bryan Varner, who together with Andrew Bachmann worked on the port of Java to BeOS in the past (demo video).

"New Year is traditionally a time in which the achievements, surprises and disappointments of the previous year are reflected upon. Often, in spite of the fireworks and wild parties, time is set aside in which to dwell upon one's private thoughts. As 2008 is now underway I've found myself mulling over my involvement with RISC OS. Whether I like it or not, my involvement in the Acorn and RISC OS scene has been a significant part of my life over the past 27 years."