Archive for the 'Technology' Category

Home Theater

Saturday, January 29th, 2005

When we started looking at finishing the basement at our house, I really wanted to put in a home theater. Eventually we ended up with a 6 seat theater with a 12 foot screen and surround sound. The total cost was less than you might pay for a large screen television […]

Unix Cut Command

Saturday, January 29th, 2005

The cut command in unix lets you specify which part of a line you want to echo. For example if
cat file.txt
produces something like:
12345678
23456789
34567890
then you could pipe the file into the cut command to show only the 3rd character like this:

cat file.txt | cut -c 3
3
4
5

You can also specify ranges like this:

cat file.txt | cut […]

Taking Apart the Mac Mini

Wednesday, January 19th, 2005

Blog with Video file
This is a video showing how to open up a Mac Mini. I doubt that it is quite as easy as it looks in the video, but it looks very doable.

Dyson Vacuum Review

Saturday, January 15th, 2005

I guess it seems a little odd to be reviewing a vacuum cleaner here, but this is a very special vacuum cleaner. I first heard of the Dyson vacuum when talking to some graphic designers. They used it as an example of the design process. I looked into it because I was […]

Creating Passionate Users: The effect of sound on users

Saturday, January 15th, 2005

Kathy Sierra has an interesting article about the impact of audio on people’s perception of video quality.

I don’t have a link handy, but there’s a study that showed that the quality of the audio causes people to change their evaluation of the quality of the visuals, but that it doesn’t work in reverse.
Creating Passionate Users: […]

Using Bluetooth and a Mobile Phone for Internet Access

Tuesday, January 4th, 2005

In the past I’ve been stuck using Nextel for mobile internet access. Nextel service seems to work ok, but it is very slow, has limited coverage, costs $79 per month, doesn’t support Bluetooth, requires third-party software to work with OS X. So when I had an opportunity to switch to a different […]

New Sun Java Programmer Test for 1.5

Sunday, January 2nd, 2005

The new certification test for Java 1.5 (or Java 5 or Tiger) is going to be coming out as a beta soon. According to Kathy Sierra’s weblog the new test is going to avoid the complicated “puzzle” type problems and concentrate more on your ability to accomplish specific objectives with Java code. It […]

Comments in Java

Sunday, January 2nd, 2005

One of the questions I ran into when preparing for the Java Certification exam dealt with how Java handles nested comments. Since this isn’t something I usually do in my code I wasn’t sure how it worked. It turns out the results were different than I expected.
First lets look at the double slash […]

Passing the Java Programmer Certification Exam

Sunday, January 2nd, 2005

After using Java for about four years, I started wondering how well I really understood the language, so I started looking into Sun’s certification. Sun offers the following certifications:

Sun Certified Programmer
Sun Certified Developer
Sun Certified Web Component Developer
Sun Certified Business Component Developer
Sun Certified Developer for Java Web Services
Sun Certified Enterprise Architech
Sun Certified Mobile Application Developer

The […]