Brad Wardell's Blog


Stardock releases beta of StyleVista

Published on Tuesday, August 16, 2005 By Brad Wardell In WinCustomize News

Stardock has released the first beta of a new program called StyleVista.  StyleVista allows Windows Vista beta users to alter the existing "Aero glass" interface to have different opacity levels and different colors.

By default, Windows Vista's new user interface has semi-transparent title bars and borders. While it looks quite cool, it is not currently configurable.  StyleVista enables users to change both the color and opacity (how transparent the title bars and borders are) of the GUI for the active and inactive window.

StyleVista is not similar to Stardock WindowBlinds which can change the actual skin of the GUI.  It alters the existing GUI. Stardock may make some of the features in StyleVista part of WindowBlinds 5 which is due to go into beta next month.

StyleVista is a free and can be downloaded at www.stylevista.net.

Screenshots:

Download: http://www.stylevista.net

WindowBlinds 4.6 released!

Published on Monday, August 15, 2005 By Brad Wardell In WinCustomize News

Stardock has released WindowBlinds 4.6.  WindowBlinds is a program that enables users to "skin" their entire Windows GUI to give it a totally different look & feel.  When installed, users apply "visual styles" that change title bars, push buttons, radio buttons, the Start bar, etc.  WindowBlinds also includes a number of usability enhancements such as supporting roll-up buttons, always-on top buttons, links, and other additions to the Windows title bar (or borders). 

System Performance can also be enhanced using WindowBlinds. The program supports a host of performance enhancing features such as Hypercache, a technology that uses the extra video memory in most modern video cards to increase performance along with features to change the way users interact with the GUI to match their needs.

Visual styles in WindowBlinds support a wide variety of features such as animation, sound, flexible button placement, alpha-blended Start menus, skinned menus, toolbar icon changing, and even replacing the copy, move, download animations in Windows.

The new version of WindowBlinds adds the ability to have alpha blended "glow" effects for title bar buttons, push buttons, and other controls. When a user mouse-overs a control in a visual style that makes use of this feature, a glow effect appears that can go outside the window (i.e. it's really cool looking). 4.6 also has a number of tweaks to further increase performance and reduce memory use.

WindowBlinds is available as shareware at www.windowblinds.net.  An enhanced version is available for $19.95 that adds a host of additional features. The enhanced version is also part of Stardock's Object Desktop (www.objectdesktop.com) suite of Windows extension utilities.

Download:
 WindowBlinds 4.6

Screenshots:

What would you like changed?

Published on Sunday, August 14, 2005 By Brad Wardell In Poweruser

One of the things we're trying to go for is a bit more light-hearted podcasting.

When we were first starting up PowerUser.tv, we listened to a lot of podcasts and we noticed some trends:

  • Nearly all are by men
  • Nearly all are very dry
  • Nearly all are very very serious

So how do we stand out?

First, we wanted a female host.  Kristin Hatcher was the logical choice because she has a lot of experience in both public speaking and sound editing (she's more than just the host, she's the producer).

Secondly, we wanted to keep it light and entertaining. That meant we needed to make sure our guests knew the topics so well that they could also have energy to try to be funny as well.

So that's what you've been seeing so far.  Each one we do I think we get a little better at.  But what do you want to see?

Game Design at College

Published on Sunday, August 14, 2005 By Brad Wardell In Game Developers

The Washington Post has an interesting article about how colleges are increasing their support for game developers as a genuine career.

Highlighted in the article is Stardock's own Scott Brodie, an intern at Stardock from Michigan State University who is working on the space battles for Galactic Civilizations II.

JoeUser blog community

Published on Saturday, August 13, 2005 By Brad Wardell In WinCustomize News

Web logging, or blogging for short, has become quite popular.  And we invite you to join JoeUser.com -- the world's first blog community.  It's a free blog site in which you can use your WinCustomize UserID and create your own blog site that automatically creates your own sub-domain (like http://frogboy.joeuser.com). The topics you write there are syndicated elsewhere based on the topic (such as to here at WinCustomize.com if it's related to computers or to TotalGaming.net if it's about gaming.  And like I said, it's free.

What makes JoeUser.com special is that your blogs become part of a general community. The home page of JoeUser.com has articles featured from across the community with top bloggers and their articles highlighted. 

Evolution vs. Gravity

Published on Saturday, August 13, 2005 By Brad Wardell In Biology

It never ceases to amaze me how blinded some people are by their religion.  They seem to be completely unaware of how their religion has biased them taking a more open-minded approach to scientific research.

Let me give you a tale of two theories.

Evolution is a theory that stipulates a set of principles on how life on earth changes (evolves) over time.  It has a great deal of documented evidence to support it.  However, because evolution contradicts the bible, many religious people try to find ways to discount it. They close their minds to it.  In the bible, life as we know it did not evolve but was rather created directly by the hand of God. This is especially true of humans.  Most religious people either take the stories in Genesis to not be true in the literal sense but try to argue that it is true symbolically (though even that's a stretch).  But the point being, because evolution contradicts an existing deep held religious belief, some people have trouble accepting it.

But compared to the theory of gravity, evolution is rock hard fact.  We actually do not know how gravity works.  We have observed that gravity is related to mass. And we have made some formulas that describe how gravity is related to mass (F=MA for example).  But we still do not have a clue as to what causes gravity.  Why does mass create gravity? No idea (and things get sketchier about strong and weak forces too but we'll hold off that for another time).  But religious people don't challenge the theory of gravity even though it's on weaker ground.  But imagine if the bible had stated something vaguely that God's arms push down on all things to keep them in place on the world. That his infinite arms pushed objects towards bigger objects.

One can imagine the debates we'd be having if the bible spoke on gravity.  Instead of the accepted belief that gravity PULLS objects towards each other, we would instead have people arguing that no, God PUSHES people towards things based on their size or something. We'd have "Intelligent Gravitation" or something like that.  And because of that, we could potentially have real damage done to genuine scientific research because some people would insist on looking for data that supported that some mystical, super natural force was pushing people against objects rather than focusing on mass creating a pull effect (gravity) and trying to figure out why that is.

That's why things like intelligent design are so problematic. Because they're not based on any scientific evidence (no more than the belief that some unknown force is pushing all things towards other things based on their size) it can slow down scientific advancement and cloud education.

I much prefer to have my beliefs be based on the evidence rather than looking for evidence to support my pre-existing beliefs. But religion tends to be pretty dogmatic and blind people to looking at other possibilities.  It's not as if religion doesn't get its shot for explaining the universe.  Most Americans who believe in evolution (statistically) were raised in a Christian household.  That means most of them changed their views because the data supporting evolution was more compelling than the data supporting Creationism. 

Evolution wasn't taught in my high school.  I, like most people, started out believing in the bible's explanation on how humans got here.  It was only over time that I found that the bible's explanation was not plausible.  The earth was simply too old. There were too many extinct creatures. There was too much rather obvious local adaptation by animals to believe that some super natural being (or alien) was sitting around tweaking some caterpillar to look like the local vegetation in South America that had only been growing there for the past 8 million years. 

As time went on, evolution and natural selection became more and more compelling as causes of where the bio-diversity we have came from. And even once I was convinced that the theory of evolution was fact, more evidence still came my way. Just a few years ago when DNA came to be better understood there would be occasional reports on how scientists tweaked some gene in some animal to produce a radically different animal.  Then came Mitochondrial DNA tracking in which we can tell when one species was another and when.

But such evidence doesn't exist in the same form for the theory of gravity.  Luckily, the bible doesn't speak about it (which is odd since gravity is a pretty crucial thing that you would think a super being would want to talk about unless of course the writings were not by a higher being but rather by pre-industrial humans with a limited understanding of their environments but I digress).

Zoology Primer

Published on Saturday, August 13, 2005 By Brad Wardell In Pure Technology

Most people are aware that politics can affect how history is recorded. But every scientific endeavor suffers from such things.  In biology, zoology has gone through the same sort of thing.  When you are dealing with anything subjective (and lots of things in science is subjective) politics come into play.

And few things are more subjective than organism classification.  With that said, zoologists have a basic classiciation system. It's not perfect, but it is accepted and that's what matters.

Lay people tend to mix up the different types of classifications on a regular basis.  So here is a chart of the basic ordering of creatures on Earth:

 

The basic unit of organism is species.  If creature A and B and reproduce together and produce offspring that can reproduce, then they are the same species. If they can't, they are different species.

Hence, a Poodle and a St. Bernhard are the same species -- they can (unfortunately) reproduce. 

Moving up you have similar animals.  A Lion and a Tiger are both types of cats. But they are different species. They cannot reproduce viable offspring.

Further up you have Families.  Dogs and Cats are actually quite similar.  But they're obviously not very closely related.  But they are in the same basic family of animal.  They are, a lot more similar than say a Cat and a Mouse or a Dog and a cow.  Dogs and Cows are both in the same order.  They're both types of mammals. 

Next up you have classes. Now you're really talking different things.  Mammals and birds are a lot more similar to one another than say Insects.  So Mammals and birds would be part of the same Phylum and Insects would be in their own.

And then finally you have Kingdom.  Animals and Plants for example. There's also fungus, and protistas which should be called "Pretty weird stuff".  And there's even one above this not regularly referenced but if you're really geeky like me you can talk about and that's Domain where you have Bacteria, Archaea, which I've never seen as they live in extreme environments. They were probably amongst the first lifeforms.  We're part of the domain Eukarya incidentally.

That said, once you get outside species, things get more subjective.  For instance, Bacteria, why should they get their own Domain? Couldn't they be argued as a plant? Admittedly, I doubt there are message forums where PhDs sit there and have flame wars over the classification of bacteria.