Author: Kevin

New Mozilla Theme!

Kevin6 Comments

Announcing a Very Special Mozilla Theme! This theme is based on Pinstripe and follows the Aqua Human Interface Guidelines to the letter:

“In order to make toolbar icons easily distinguishable from one another, each icon should be a distinct animal. Use real-world objects (such as a moose) to facilitate quick recognition by users.”

farm_pinstripe.png

New Music: Mambo Sinuendo

Kevin

Mambo Sinuendo by Ry Cooder and Manuel Galbán: This is the kind of album that I often look for when selecting music to fit the mood I’m in. The groovin’, swingin’ and sometimes muted tunes don’t demand your full attention – they can float by themselves in the background. Click the link above and listen to some samples.

The Meaning of Life

Kevin

I’ve come to the conclusion that I have no life. Thankfully I have access to a large selection of products designed to solve this complex problem. Most of these solutions are “digital” in nature.

Apple Computer’s iLife suite of products helps me effortlessly manage my “digital lifestyle”. AT&T’s mLife let’s me be mobile on my own terms. Their advertisement tells me that “we are meant to lead a truly wireless life“. They promise me “more minutes than ever before”. I’m not quite sure what that means but it sure sounds exciting! Sign me up!

Of course these products would be meaningless without a support system to guide my transition to digital Nirvana. Luckily my good friends at T-Mobile prompt me to “get more out of life”. And thanks to interventions by the kind folks at Verizon Wireless, I’m making progress every day.

Redesigning the Button of Doom

Kevin1 Comment

Slashdot has a link to an interesting article about an effort to design a smarter “temporal” Back button for browsers. This paper describes the experiment in detail, complete with pictures of a prototype “enhanced” Back button. According to the paper’s conclusion, the reimagined button is not less confusing than current implementations and it doesn’t necessarily make users more efficient. While the idea of helping users navigate web page history easily is definately worthy of consideration, web authors should be building their sites so users don’t need to use the Back button in the first place.

I'm a moron

Kevin5 Comments

I’ve been building a new computer over the past few days. I had read Asa Dotzler’s experiences with Red Hat Linux 8.0 and I was looking forward to trying it out myself.

After a little over a year using Mac OS X, my life has been relatively free of compiling drivers and kernels and dependency hell. And wow! The Red Hat install went very quickly and seemed to detect all of my hardware.

The Redhat desktop came up and I tried to play a wav file. Silence. I tried bringing up the Volume app and I saw an error message that complained about a problem with the sound driver. I opened the Sound preferences and it listed my sound card with the correct kernel module loaded, but I heard nothing when I tried to play the sample sound.

So a Google search lead me to a few discussions that suggested the drivers from the ALSA Project. Ah! This is the Linux I remember. Configure. Make. Make install. After about 15 minutes I had the ALSA drivers installed, but still no sound. But there were no error messages in /var/log/messages and the volume app worked.

After 20 minutes of combing message boards, checking my modules.conf file, and more dithering, I looked at the back of the machine and noticed that I hadn’t plugged the speakers into the sound card. Oops!