Archive for June 2009
As you might imagine, I’ve been spending a lot of time working with Microsoft Office 2007 lately. I really love the new interface and I’m a huge fan of the new font “Calibri“. I noticed, however, that the default document now uses “Calibri Body 11pt” rather than “Times New Roman 12pt”. I was curious why the font size shrank, so I wrote up a sample document to compare the two. Here it is.
As you can see, Calibri 11pt is a bit smaller than Times 12pt, but it feels just as readable. I think it’s the difference between a serif and sans serif font. Anyhoo… I just found this comparison interesting and thought I’d share my findings with the world.
Since I’m going to be taking a long road trip from VA to TX next week, I decided I wanted to add a new audio source to my car. Rather than buying a whole new sound system, I decided to do things the “fun” way.
- I soldered a new DC plug to the inside of my console, taping into the pre-existing, externally-accessible DC plug.
- I ran a USB power cable from the DC plug through a small hole drilled in the open shelf in my console.
- I also ran power to an FM transmitter, housed in the slide-out ashtray in the dash.
- I ran the auxilarily input of the FM transmitter through the back of the console and out through another hole in the console shelf.
- Now, from a user perspective, there are aux & power connectors inside my console shelf, and an FM transmitter controller in the repurposed ashtray. The original DC power outlet still works unchanged.
This little project was waaay too much fun… how often do you get to solder wires on the inside of your car’s dash? 
MS Office 2007 has a very good reference manager, but changing the inline citation style is absurdly complicated. Standard practice for citations in an engineering paper is “[#]” where # is the reference number. Unfortunately, the default citation option in Word 2007 is “(#)”… so I needed to change it. If you need to do the same thing, just download this file, move it to the “C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\Bibliography\Style\” directory. You should then see a new “Style” option under the “References” tab called “ISO 690 – Numerical with Square Brackets”. Bingo… that’s all you need to do.
Seriously, these out-of-control “anti-monopoly” lawsuits HAVE to stop. Not long ago the EU ruled that Microsoft’s inclusion of IE8 in their upcoming Windows 7 product is “anti-competitive behavior”. As a result, copies of Windows 7 sold in the EU will be shipped without a web browser. Let me explain why this is a MAJOR problem.
If you choose to not use Internet Explorer as your primary web browser, you must install an alternative (like Firefox or Chrome). However, what’s the most basic way of installing them? By downloading them from the internet! If you don’t have an internet browser to begin with, you have to jump through all sorts of hoops to get one… hoops that the VAST majority of computer users have no idea how to jump through. Additionally, they can’t just Google how to do this because they don’t have a web browser to get to Google in the first place! It’s a HUGE disaster!
Why do you think Mac OS X has become such an enticing alternative to Windows? I’ll give you a hint. It has nothing to do with it being “the most advanced OS ever” (which I strongly contest). It’s not that it’s any faster or more powerful than Windows. The biggest thing OS X has going for it is that it’s an entire ecosystem that just works out-of-box. It includes a web browser, an email client, a photo manager, etc… and all of these applications play very nicely together.
Now, when Microsoft is finally getting their act together and releasing a not-horrible web browser, the technologically illiterate anti-trust lawyers come out and completely screw over the consumer by claiming that bundled software is anti-competitive. It’s disgusting, and a perfect example of our out-of-control sue-happy legal systems.
Source: CNet
I had my Masters Defense yesterday and to my great delight, I passed! It involved a 30 minute presentation followed by an hour of questions from a panel of 3 professors. Now I just need to make a few edits to my thesis and I’ll have completed my MS degree! Oh yeah, and I posted the slides from my defense presentation here.
