It’s great when the non Star Wars uber fans show up to cause trouble. :) Triumph, back off the RISK!

Quicksilver is one of my favorite and most used apps on the Mac. Nicholas Jitkoff covers some of the more interesting Quicksilver features than the basic launcher I’ve been using it for.

Having blogged about innovation, here’s another article on innovation — an interview with Pixar’s Brad Bird. It pretty much explains what’s needed to develop new products and fostering innovation.

Involved people make for better innovation… Involved people can be quiet, loud, or anything in-between—what they have in common is a restless, probing nature: “I want to get to the problem. There’s something I want to do.” If you had thermal glasses, you could see heat coming off them.

The first step in achieving the impossible is believing that the impossible can be achieved. … “You don’t play it safe—you do something that scares you, that’s at the edge of your capabilities, where you might fail. That’s what gets you up in the morning.”

link

I want to play ball with my kids before I get too old, and before that happens I need to get laid, and before that happens I need to be in love, and I don’t want to hear edddon’tknow I can’t help eddon’tknow. No, No I’m a catch and I’m not going to be the one that got away.

…

There’s nobody I hate enough to write her name on this card.

brilliant

I was going to put in the time and get a forked ruby out to fill in some feature gaps, but the maker of tender love beat me to it.

Brobinus adds some much needed features like Object#tase! and brobinius –screencast my_code.rb for youtube integration. link

I’ve been using Chicken of the VNC for the last month only to be annoyed by it’s slowness and scrollbars added because of the higher resolution server. I did a search for VNC clients for Mac and found the.taoofmac.com Mac VNC list.

JollysFastVNC is my new VNC client and it is much faster than Chicken of the VNC. Switch and be joyful.

OMG Some behemoth bugs! For instance, those variables at the top should be declared constant. Any ole dev could decide to increment the feature count, decrement the bugs, and set ready to release!

Chances are you didn't port install git-core with the svn option:

post uninstalling the old hullabaloo

In BlackBerry: Innovation Behind the Icon,

If you really want to build something sustainable and innovative you have to invest in R&D. If you build the right culture and invest in the right facilities and you encourage and motivate and inspire both young and seasoned people and put them all in the right environment—then it really performs for you. It's what I call sustainable innovation.

Amen. If your competitors build cheaper products that's in the same market as you, innovation is the only thing will keep you alive...in the long run.

Came across this document that is the progress report for the first half of the grant that CSU Chico received for robotics while I was there. The report included example project papers, one of which was from one of my groups and included several pictures of my lovely boebot along with some colorful language:

That particular design was used the two sensors pointing at the ground to follow a line and detect the ending point, a perpendicular line.

From the look of the Intelligent Systems Laboratory page they are doing well with several interesting projects in the works.

Wooohoo Ubuntu 8.04 beta works perfectly in parallels on Leopard. I had some problems with 7.10 from the iso and cd so instead of using the alternate (text based install that is reported to work) I downloaded 8.04. So far everything is running flawlessly. Parallels tools reportedly has problems running due to an Xorg change, but I haven't gave it a try for my self yet and that post/bug was submitted a couple of months ago.

Check out the Ubuntu 8.04 features. It's exciting to see the new apps, features, and versions in open source land that are all being pulled together to create a great user experience.

From this post,

Texas Instruments (TI) and Micron's Aptina Imaging division have teamed up on an ultra-low-cost WXGA IP camera reference design for surveillance applications. The DM355IPNC-MT5 design runs Linux on a $10 TI DaVinci RISC/DSP digital media processor, and has an eBOM under $40, the companies claim.

The royalty free TI/Aptina HD IP network camera reference design is available for order now, and expected to ship in the second quarter.

That's a good deal. I wonder if I'll get one of these for Christmas. :)

So I was sitting here trying to decide whether to re-setup my few small drives into a big chunk of storage with LVM as I had in my previous Gentoo setup. The LVM draw is not having to think about which drives you've stuck x, y, and z and the drawback being having to set it up and not being able to easily recover the data in the case of system failure.

However, it turns out that Ubuntu or Linux or some sort of supermagical force made my old volume group that existed in Gentoo still exist in Ubuntu! I mounted the logical volume and walha, all of my old files were still there. LVM must record special LVM data on to the drives in a volume group that dictates the configuration rather than storing the configuration to the system (in a file somewhere). Sweeet

On a side note it was tough to nuke Gentoo after a great 6 year ride and at the same time its really nice not waiting hours for software to compile. Plus Ubuntu is beautiful + just works.

Black, president and principal consultant of RBCS, emphasized the cost-effectiveness of creating quality software. "The money you spend to build it right the first time is always less than the money it costs to fix it," he said.

He listed four ways testing saves money: Finding bugs that get fixed, finding bugs that don't get fixed, running tests that mitigate risks and guiding the project to success through timely, accurate, credible information for project tracking.

This article explains it very well the Return of Investment on testing early in the software development lifecycle.