The Mother of All Demos

I think the Graphical User Interface is one of the most interesting aspects of computer/user interaction. I remember the first time I saw a Macintosh, I was immediately taken with the concept of the GUI. My fascination with the GUI goes beyond the just the aesthetic aspects of various UI implementations, but also the usability and interactivity of various GUI’s.

I have, over the years, owned every things from Amiga’s (I still have two Amiga 3000’s) to the exotic Next Cube. I never get tired of analyzing the components, both functionally and technically, of the various UI’s through time. Today I spend most of my time in front of the ubiquitous Microsoft Windows platform, but even in the Windows world there is a lot of fascination stuff going on.

One of my favorite things about Windows is the never ending parade of software geared towards fixing the Windows UI. Interestingly enough, much of that software isn’t geared towards changing the functionality of the Windows UI (though a fair amount targets adding features) as Microsoft largely got the Windows UI usability conventions right with the Windows 95 (and later) UI. Most of the software is geared towards fixing the aesthetic shortcomings of Windows.

Stardock’s object desktop suite is a good example of this software trend. Besides being brilliantly coded, it does a fantastic job of allowing nearly limitless customization of the look and feel aspects of the Windows UI. The desktops of my various machines all sport a highly customized look and feel thanks to Stardock’s excellent software.

All of which brings me to my main point; there is a great new article over at Ars Technica about the history of the GUI. I was most impressed with the authors detailed discussion of a personal hero of mine, Douglas C. Engelbart. No other computer scientist before or since has had such a profound impact on the computer industry or, more importantly, the world in general. Engelbart had a vision of computing that was so far ahead of its time, it is simply astonishing. Most importantly, he fundamentally and truly understood what was needed to make the stored program computer the human usable tool that it is today. Few people EVER have that level of insight about just one aspect of a complex system such as a computer. Yet he had that insight across the entire SPECTRUM of computer system usability. In short, it was he who invented the modern computer. I am truly excited that the Ars Technica article pays Engelbart the tribute he so truly deserves, especially given how often he is overlooked.

With that said, the article itself is a great piece that details the rise of the modern GUI in a historically accurate fashion. Ars Technica really is a great website.

By the way, if you would like to see sizable segments of the Douglas Engelbart “Mother Of All Demos” you can do so at http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html .

If you keep in mind that the Demo is from nearly 4 decades ago, then I think you will be astonished by how much of your modern computer was first demonstrated by Engelbart and his 17 researchers during the demonstration. It really is an amazing thing to watch video from 37 years in the past, and see someone for the first time doing things you take for granted today; it’s like watching someone discover fire. Really great stuff.

Later on…

Like a fork in the eye!

One of the reasons I like using Mark Russinovich’s tools, reading his books, articles and blog is the dude is just smart and makes cool stuff. That said, he has an excellent article on yet ANOTHER very good example of why you shouldn’t let users run with local admin privs.

Read all about it in his April 30th blog entry: http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/

Later…

By the power of Greyskull, I Have The Power!

So I guess it’s time for another blog entry. For today I think I shall hand out some personal hardware kudos.

First off, a big thumbs up to HP on the new Compaq NC8230 business notebook. I recently traded in my NC8000, a machine that was reliable, but not all that inspiring, for the NC8230’s my company is rolling out now that the NC8000 has been put out to pasture by HP.

Let me tell you, when HP gets it right, they really get it right. Starting with the screen, the NC8230 rights all the wrongs of the previous generation of HP business notebooks. The materials are first rate, the industrial design elements (it looks like the Darth Vader of notebooks) are the best I have seen outside of Apple and the overall build quality is second to none. Oh yeah, and the screen absolutely kicks ass; wide-aspect ratio 1680×1050 with far better color saturation and backlight brightness than any previous HP-Compaq notebook, the NC8230’s screen is simply fabulous.

The machine also performs well with an ATI x600 GPU and a Pentium M 1.86 Ghz (Dothan) CPU. In short, I think this thing is a ThinkPad killer and I recommend anyone in the market for a notebook take a close look at this machine.

I also finally got around to swapping my aging ATI 9800Pro out of my Purple People Eater (my metallic purple Alienware 3Ghz box) and putting in a Nvidia GF6800GT. Holy smokes is the GF6800GT fast; I just got done playing an hour of Doom3 at 1280×1024 at “Extreme Detail” with 2x FSAA and it ran significantly faster than my ATI 9800 pro at “High Detail” with no FSAA at 1024×768. I can only imagine what a PCI-E SLI configuration must be like. The GT is nearly everything the Ultra is for 100 bucks less (basically exactly the same part with the GPU clocked 50Mhz slower). It also uses a bit less juice than the Ultra and only needs 1 molex power lead (not that Alienware didn’t provide gobs of power leads).

On a completely different note, if you haven’t spent anytime with Windows Server 2003 SP1, I recommend doing so ASAP. It takes what was already the single best release of NT ever and makes it much more gooder. Besides the host based Windows Firewall and other Windows XP SP2 security stuff it adds, what I think, is the best security admin tool to come out of the empire in quite some time: the Security Configuration Wizard. This is the tool Windows admins have been pining for since the day NT 3.1 shipped. It steps you through in a straightforward fashion, the roles and configuration of the server, turning off all unnecessary services and closing unneeded ports. REALLY good stuff folks, definitely take a look.

Finally, while I am on a security kick, one of the neatest new features of RedHat Enterprise Linux 4 (and Fedora Core 3+) is the addition of out-of-box SELinux support. Without getting into extreme detail and the history of SELinux, essentially the SELinux kernel extensions add Mandatory Access Control policies (MAC) to Linux.

Based on policies that can be administrator defined, you can control how the Linux kernel treats access to low-level system constructs, such as file system IO access, outside of the rather two-dimensional Unix style DACL implementation used by Linux file systems. It also allows for processes running as root to be filtered by the Kernel, based on the SELinux policies, from interacting with the system in a negative fashion. So if a process running as root is compromised, it is still subject to the SELinux policies applied to that process, which are enforced at the Kernel level. This potentially prevents the compromised process from modifying key kernel data structures (by filtering SCI calls) or modifying system or configuration files.

About the only thing I would warn anyone installing RedHat ES4 (or FC3) about is that enabling SELinux during install can lead to some frustraiting issues if you don’t know what to watch out for. A good example would be when I enabled Winbind for authentication against my AD and due to SELinux, Winbind was prevented from writing out a new log file. Easy enough to fix, but at first I didn’t even realize that Winbind was subject to a RedHat default SELinux policy (this is what got me looking into SELinux about a month ago).

For more info on SELinux take a look at http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-4-Manual/selinux-guide/

Later on…