Open Source Mechanic blog

During the 1991 Persian gulf war, a laser guided bomb was dropped into a building air duct.  Why isn’t it possible to drop a few hundred gallons of boric acid water into an open pool whose roof is already gone?  (the borax could be in an aerodynamic shell) If the water cannon doesn’t work, could [...]

I’m making some progress on data driven accessiblity testing using mago+ldtp2.  I’ve also built enough atspi2 to get atspi over dbus to work on Solaris.  There was no smoking gun with respect to performance except that the dbus_daemon consumed the most time within syscalls (you knew that didn’t you?)    I suppose I should see what [...]

So now I’m inspired to try to help accessibility by: Formalizing the standards for different types of accessibility so that they can be written as rules which are pulled into data-driven automated regression tests. Improve Accerciser, add capability to use automation tests in a plug-in. Add link from interface view to documentation, improve general documentation. [...]

I just returned from the First international Aegis accessibility conference and Gnome hackfest in Seville, Spain. I began with a presentation of my automated accessibility testing prototype. I intended for this to be a round-table discussion rather than a one way presentation but things got off to a slow start and Peter gave a detailed [...]

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, an age which celebrated the diversity of the human spirit, it was an age when differences were feared and outsiders were loathed. It was the epoc when we knew we could bring our dream to the world, it was the epoch when we [...]

Here is a story spectrum application I’ve been working on. It highlights “purple” prose as well as prose which appears in Shakespeare or Canterbury tales http://opensourcemechanic.com/stories/submit/ Here is the facebook application I’ve tied to it: http://apps.facebook.com/textrum/

Sometime in the late 1980s or early 90s I bought a Casio SK-200 sampling music keyboard. It has been a lot of fun over the years. I’ve sampled everything from radio static to hulusi’s and harps. The sound quality isn’t brilliant, it’s only 8-bit sampling at 10 kHz, but slightly higher quality than the more [...]

While I was in China working with the desktop QA team,

I was pleasantly surprised at the quick progress in plugging the breach in the weir and repairing the broken viaduct. Today marked a milestone, it was the first time since the rail problem that I saw a rail car traverse the broken section of track!

My friend Ron at inventorsagarage.com found this proposed Minnesota legislation which would grant an employee the right to use a patent if his/her employer sits on the patent for too long: (b) An employer who has a right to develop or utilize an invention or proposal 1.11must make a substantial investment in the invention or [...]