I really enjoyed this article, though it could have gone further in depth about some of the advances made in the 90’s. The 80’s coverage was pretty good, and the history of PARC and even before was excellent, but it abruptly ended with Windows 95 and OSX, and left out a lot of the *nix GUI “experiments” from the mid-90’s. It really made me want to learn more, especially about NeXT and BeOS (which I have actually used, believe it or not!) and their history. Thank God for Wikipedia! Oh, and there’s also a decent screenshot archive at http://www.aci.com.pl/mwichary/guidebook/interfaces.

As if we needed any more proof that lightsabers are cool, HowStuffWorks.com has a story explaining how lightsabers work. It is hilarious, and frighteningly informative, and made my entire day at the office bearable. Here are some choice quotes from the article:

…be sure to handle any active lightsaber with extreme care until you are completely familiar with its feel and handling.

By using the Force, the wielder can anticipate the path of the blaster bolt and align the blade with that path prior to the bolt’s arrival. Using normal visual tracking to accomplish the same effect can be far more difficult.

The risk of personal injury is much higher with a double-bladed lightsaber, and their practical applications around the home are limited. Therefore, it is probably best to save your money and stick with the single-blade version.

Although a lightsaber is typically used as a defensive weapon by Jedi knights, the availability of lightsabers on consumer sites such as eBay is growing. It is a sad fact of life, but if a Jedi knight falls on hard times, his lightsaber is one source of quick cash. He can always build another one.

…many new owners are pleasantly surprised by the many domestic uses of a lightsaber around the home or office.

There are also some excellent pictures with captions.

I’m pleased to say that the Hawktour project came away from IPRO Day with the website award, and picked up second place in their track. I am really proud of the team and how they managed to come together even though I abandoned them half way through this semester. Santhosh did a great job pulling everything together. Even though we didn’t win our category, for three semesters we have been a top-ranked team, and it’s a source of great personal pride to know that I was instrumental in getting us there.

But the real boon this semester was to finally beat out our arch-nemesis in the website category, IPRO 329. They have consistently beat us in the website category for the past two semesters, even though we have consistently improved our site and they have done very little, if anything at all, to theirs. At the beginning of the semester, Satish (the designer of the website that rocketed us to website stardom three semesters ago) said that it was his goal to win that category this semester. I am glad he made it happen. Topping them was an even bigger deal than winning our category. I feel that IPRO Day is a bit of a sham anyway. Of course, we’ll take the awards if they want to give them to us.

Check out the award-winning Hawktour website, and see why all IPROs should strive to be as good as we are.

I removed the Del.icio.us RSS feed from the right side of the site because it was getting too long. If I had as many as Patrick, the front page would render about a mile long. So I’m looking for a way to limit the number of entries in the feed to something more manageable, like 10. I really only want to share the most recent entries through a feed anyway – that’s what a feed is for! If I want to share everything I’ll point people to the site! So if anyone knows how to cut down the number of entries in the feed, let me know.

I finally managed to get things set up here in Redmond. Hopefully The DNS changes I made will take effect soon, so my domain will be redirecting properly. I have lots to post after such a long abscence. Stay tuned!