Charles Darwin’s Survival of the fittest.

This states that in a herd, there’s a slow group and a fast group. And when a predator attacks the fast one survives while the slow one dies. The fast one to run away from the predator survives.  The strongest one to defeat a predator wins. The wittiest one to outwit a predator wins.  But not knowing what the predator look like and how it attacks would kill the fast/strong/wittiest if they cant identify the attacker.

Survival then would require the ability;

1. to anticipate the threat
2. to counter attack the effort used by the threat
3. to eliminate the occurrence of the threat
4. to eliminate or decrease loss during that event.

In this time of great danger, I cant afford to sleep while the enemy plans for my destruction.  Homeworld 2

Mockups

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/09/01/35-excellent-wireframing-resources/ site has lots of info regarding using of wireframes before really doing the design process for a system.

Mobile learning

I’ve been meaning to research the possibity of learning a new subject on route using PDA or smart phones when I first get my PDA and so far reading ebooks from it is a little off compared to reading from a book or from my computer. Now I got my iPod touch reading from an ebook is only a tip of an iceberg. Now searching from the net is also possible and having other tools like taking notes and computations could help a lot in the search of new found interest on knowldege.
Two of my favorite would be Stanza where I can bring my PDF files and read it on iPod and the 2nd is gFlash+ where I can get quiz while travelling. Both apps can insert new files from your computer.

That and surfing on wifi using safari, google, wikipanion, wordpress for blogging and others helps me daily. I just need to look more for task specific apps and my iPod is complete.

Mercury vs xp

last year I got the Mercury QTP and installed it on my xp terminal. Not really noticing changes but i forgot to use it, went to my Mac and focused on xcode and all that is mac.  I reformatted my xp terminal again this month and installed work related apps and remembered to play with mercury again.  Thats when i noticed the Windows user login page started popping after screensaver and reboots.  I wonder why it needs to change that so I System Restored my xp. Id research further before I’ll get QTP installed in my terminal again. I’ll go use Selenium IDE and other testing management tool for now.

Selenium to replace Chickenfoot in my world.

OK for months I’ve been trying to make my chickenfoot do regression testing on several sites we developed and deployed with NO luck.  Last week I installed the Selenium IDE and in minutes looking at it running my web sites from login to all pages I could think of to logout.  This is great, though I’m still waiting for its alert/prompt commands in the future release.  But doing something else while having it run my repetitive testing activities is a big leap, and I haven’t touch full features of Selenium just yet.

Modem acting weird

 

LED wrong!

Bridge 2009 Cont.

I got my new table made for 1 week.  I should note its a lot faster and cheaper to buy new ones than get them made, but Im not sure i can get the dimensions i like. 18x30x50. This brings back my rooms space and making it looks bigger. And also the table’s design can be used as a side table in the future.  And while its getting made, I bought 2 Dell 19″ LCD’s. I hope it lasts like my CRT which was 5 yrs old already. And hopefully current consumption drops as they kept on saying 1:8 ratio. (1 crt : 8 lcd) 

New table and 2 LCDs.

Both Mac and PC share one keyboard/mouse using Synergy.  I dont know how to share a speaker for both terminals, maybe a wire with two inputs and one output exist somewhere. Cables are still hanging without ties. Need a bigger AVR, smaller speakers that I can place farther apart, and a mic that does its job for voice recognition and recording.

Sketchup easy.

Its hard to study Autocad and blender and modo.   But Sketchup is amazingly faster. it took me less than an hour to both understand how to use it and draw my house.  

Front view of my house.

 

Back view

Though its true its not correctly sized like windows and doors, but imagine in just less than an hour!!!

 

With a car!

My car is done in 30 minutes too playing around with moving lines and offsets.

Mac OS X Automator

Renaming multiple files simultaneously, getting screenshots and saving it on a specified folders, or even writing it on dvd and so on are just some of the things the Automator have helped me in making my life much easier.  Now recently I thought if it can check a web site everyday and send me feedback when there’s something wrong? By saving the Automator workflow as a plugin for iCal and using it as a repeating event, daily, I have made that task automated. No more loading and typing and clicking and typing and clicking again and again.  

The automator can ask you if you like to proceed before it opens up the site, hides all other running applications, launches up Safari and loads the url you wanted to check.  Now you can also use text to speech so it can voice out every step its doing while your doing something else.  Also you can use Growl to show notifications whenever possible.  Now using additional Actions downloaded from Ottomate  one can choose to click a page button and type strings on text boxes. Just by looking at the Actions in the Automators sidebar would give one an idea of how powerful and easy to use Automator is.  Another toy to play with.

Mind Mapping software

Since I have started using learning maps, I’ve been continuously looking for better mindmapping tools based on simple rules I considered a requirement for upgrading my current utility.  Efficient,  or faster and easier,  ways in creating the map,  moving around and getting information from the map, and over all look, or

• faster data input, 
• easy to layout/arrangement data, 
• easier to read or search the map, and
• adding additional data formats other than text, like audio, pictures, video,  etc

My first, Freemind, is great in getting your thoughts since you can have your hands stick on the keyboard and add master/parents /child  and so on to the map. Its faster.  No need to move from mouse to keyboard at any time.  However its limited to its layout as it can only follow the original theme and you cannot arrange the branches without affecting the others.  Viewing the map is also fast, moving, panning and zooming is also easy.  Searching however cannot look at the nodes above it so you need to go first to main node to search the whole map.  Cannot add pictures on it but you can use built in tags or little icons and can use Clouds to group nodes together.   The whole map would be made up of lines, words, colors and icons.  

When I got my Mac, I used Mindnode and it does have the same ease  the freemind provides in placing data on the map plus you can import and export files to freemind.  Also it allows you to rearrange your branches without restrictions that Freemind does.  And it allows you to move/pan/zoom by simple mouse keyboard combinations.  Pictures are not possible though, so you still end up with a map with lines and colors and text on it.

Now I saw Xmind and it looks like adding data has almost the same ease compared to that of the first two applications PLUS now it does allow to add pictures on it.  A lot more  themes can be used unlike the first two.  However moving/panning around,  working with the whole map, finding where you are and deciding what the whole map is all about needs a little getting use to. You don’t have the “Space bar then press the left mouse button then drag” panning style that the Mindnode has. You use the mouse scroll wheel to move and zoom, which is too slow for me and a problem for those without the wheel.  Then the branch width default isn’t multiline unlike the Mindnode where in all branches have a specified width so sentences with more words than the width gets automatically written on the next line. This makes the Xmind map flow horizontally more even if the branches are spread around the main node. This can be changed though but would need users to change it first.  Also like freemind, xmind wont allow you to rearrange the nodes without rearranging the nodes closed to it.  This wont allow you to maximize the use of the total area of the page. Without the ability to add pictures, this new application wouldn’t replace mindnode from my arsenal.  

This is just a personal opinion since some of my friends have different ways and needs in making and using a mind map.