Posts in the “technology” category

Should you ever need to edit the hosts file on a Microsoft Windows computer, you'll find it in this directory:

I just read that Steve Ballmer is now saying that there is a "$500 tax" on the Apple logo, or something similar to that. Huh.

Before I get started here, I'll be the first to admit that I don't like Mr. Ballmer. He always sells FUD instead of features, which I strongly dislike. Now that I have that out of the way ...

Vista and OS X are equals?

In this case I strongly disagree with his basic premise. His statement assumes that the two operating systems -- Windows Vista and Mac OS X -- are equal and interchangeable, which they are not.

Wow, I was really surprised last week when Steve Ballmer made his statements about Apple being a $500 logo, but now I think it's even more surprising -- and dangerous -- that Microsoft wants to take the Kia/Yugo slant in their advertising.

Their most recent ad with the lady that starts off wanting to buy a Mac and ends up buying a PC because it's cheaper sells one and only benefit:

"Buy our product because we're cheaper."

My normal Login Use Case -- and what OpenSSO did to it.

When I first start working on a new project, it's often hard to get customers to talk about a new web application. They tend to vaguely know what they want, but when I ask them specific questions things can come to a grinding halt. It's like they realize they need a software application, and they've thought it through partially, but they just don't know how to get started.

OpenSSO FAQ: Why do I get the following error message after installing the OpenSSO web agent in Apache and then trying to hit a URL on my Apache web server?

It used to really amaze me that some people always knew immediately when there were new updates to software applications -- and this goes back to the old days when many applications weren't self-updating. I always wondered how they knew about these software updates so fast. With today's RSS feeds it's pretty easy.

This OpenSSO tutorial is probably the best "getting started with OpenSSO" tutorial around, but I'll add one caveat to it: Until you know what you're doing, just follow this tutorial to the letter, and I mean to the letter. Specifically, when they say "use Glassfish", you want to use Glassfish, and not something else, like Tomcat.

By default jEdit stops at the beginning and end of each word when using the "next word" (CTRL + Right Arrow) and "previous word" (CTRL + Left Arrow) actions. Personally, I don't like this; I'd much rather it stop only at the beginning of each word. Fortunately the authors have made it easy to change this, if not easy to find.

To change this behavior in jEdit, you just need to remap the keystrokes to alternative actions. Just follow these steps:

After all these years -- and despite some of the bad things I've written about Microsoft and Windows in the past -- and all the people that laugh at me for using it, FrontPage is still my favorite HTML WYSIWYG editor.

Introduction

After reading this article by John C. Dvorak, I can start buying into the need for Google to create their own operating system, aka, the GoogleOS. More specifically, the OS should be a binary-compatible replacement for Microsoft (MS) Windows.

Aren't the Google Apps enough?

Next question: Why should Google create an operating system? Isn't it enough for them to create their own suite of Office applications (Google Apps) as a replacement for MS Office? Why get into the operating system battle?

MS: The ultimate guard dog

Throughout their history MS has always acted like the ultimate guard dog. Not only do they protect their own territory (operating systems, applications, development tools), they also protect anything in their neighborhood. They're a little like this:

Going after Windows and Office

In the business world I prefer being aggressive, and if someone is coming after me, I in turn am going to go after them -- but only if I think I can win the battle. So that becomes the question, can Google win this battle?

MS fights back

The next step in this chess match is that MS won't take this lying down. On the Office front I don't think they can do much to fight back. Office applications should be a commodity -- they ran out of good new features years ago. ("Ribbon", anyone?)

“The big war brewing in UX is for the voice UX.” ~ Vocal IQ (via this Forbes article)

There’s also this quote from the Vocal IQ website: “The consumer demand for a self-learning multi-domain conversational voice system where consumers can freely talk about movies, restaurants, music, hotel bookings and the meaning of life, is huge and undeniable. The first one to meet that demand will rule the smartphone and wearables market for the next decade.”

When I wrote the Scala Cookbook I often thought, “I want to make this chapter so good that it alone is worth the price of the book.” Sometimes I even had that thought about some of the longer recipes that I was really able to dig into. I find that I have that same thought again as I work on my new book.

Boeing makes what could be the lightest, strongest metallic lattice material known to mankind:

Many news outlets are reporting something like this Washington Post headline: “The strange star that has serious scientists talking about an alien megastructure.”

A few quotes from this Washington Post article, Tesla Model S P90D: A normal person drives the ‘best car’ ever made:

“I didn’t know how to turn the thing off.”

“It feels impossibly fast.”

“Damn, no other car is going to feel good after this.”

“Driving the Model S feels like driving an iPhone.”

“You forget all of that when your battery gets low. The problem of ‘range anxiety’ in electric cars remains very real. You become obsessed with your battery percentage, like how I imagine teenagers feel about their iPhones.”

Yesterday Google announced the release of an open source machine learning library named TensorFlow. This video briefly explains what TensorFlow is, and Google’s motivation for releasing the library as open source:

Here’s a link to the TensorFlow website.