Technology Bytes

We’re taking a birthday break this week so we can move onto scarier fare.

With things getting cold out, then getting warm, then warm and muggy, then acting like it might get cold, but continuing to be warm and muggy, I’m sure we’re all in the mood for Halloween. You know… if the humidity gets high enough, you can pretend its spooky fog.

If you need a little more help getting into the Halloween spirit than a muggy Houston day may offer, look no further than the Crypticon Houston 2009 Horror Convention taking place October 16th through the 18th.

A number of horror stars and industry folk will be descending upon our city in order to prey upon those curious enough to attend the con. If you do plan to attend, please stay out of the basement, the attic, and any parts of the hall built on a desecrated Indian grave site. You’ll have to do your own record diving at City Hall if you want to determine the spectorally-speaking “safe” locations and to study possible defensive postures should the hall need to withstand an onslaught of zombies.

If all of that seems a little much, you can just relax and catch a movie at the con, however, entering a darkened room is probably on someone’s list of horror no-no’s.

The Houston House of Horror Movie Room will screen a number of movies and trailers during the weekend. Some titles that caught my attention were Spirit Camp, described as “Friday the 13th” meets “Bring it On”, and another flick titled the Quick and the Undead. Both of those are showing Friday night.

Poultrygeist is another fave, but you’ll have to wait until Saturday night for that one. Houston’s own Two Star Symphony will be performing and international favorites such as Adrienne Barbeau, Kristy Swanson, and Courtney Gains, the red headed actor behind Malachi of The Children of the Corn and the creepy pasty guy with red hair in the burbs. I’d like to point out that he’s totally passable for a coder in that movie. He also performed live on stage once with Phish. That can be scary, depending on how you feel about jam bands.
Moving right along… (Which is something Jam Bands have a hard time with…)

Jonathan Breck will also be on hand. Though he’s known for portraying the villaneos daemon The Creeper in the Jeepers Creepers films as well as several other horror offerings, he had a single appearance in a Star Trek: Voyager episode titled “Survial Instinct” in which he plays a dying Borg. If you catch him on a panel or in person at the con, be sure to ignore all of his horror credentials and ask him about that instead. I bet he really really loves that. A lot.

And while we may know what scares Jonathan Breck, you can attend Crypticon Houston to find out what it takes to make you shiver. Because it’s not going to be the weather.

Check out www.crypticonhouston.com for details and directions. You do have to pick up a ticket to attend the event. Since the door prices are a little scary, be sure to check out the website for online registration.

And while there is definitely a horror genre in anime, it’s safe to say that the majority of anime won’t make you scream and run for the door. And if that is your unintended reaction to anime, maybe you just haven’t found the right anime. You can remedy that in a few weeks at Oni-Con, Houston’s own Anime conference taking place Halloween weekend at Marriot Westchase on Briarpark Drive.

There’s a lot going on at this con, and I’ll be sure to cover that next week. In the mean time, hit www.oni-con.com for all your informational needs.

Our one non-con event of the week is The Linux Workshop at HAL-PC which happens every Wednesday night from

This is a group I was actively involved with for a couple of years before I started sitting in here. A number of seasoned Linux gurus are generally on hand to guide the new to Linux crowd to the open source light. If you need a little more Linux hand holding than we can give you on air, this is the group for you. You’re welcome to bring your Linux box or Linux box-to-be if you’ve hit any snags along your Linux journey.

Again, things run from six to eight every Wednesday at HAL-PC, so you’ll be in the car just in time for Technology Bytes next week if you want to swing by and see what these Linux people are up to. www.hal-pc.org
for details and directions to the HAL-PC Headquarters. Not to worry – Linux is not scary.

That’s it for your phantasmagoric four one one and that’s that for BarretTime.

Allright – More and more birthdays on BarretTime tonight. The first birthday goes out to some very classic technology. And in keeping with our three week tradition, we’ll lead it off with a hint.

What is black and white and red all over?

You may have had to regress back to second grade to recall the normalTime answer to that riddle: the newspaper. The BarretTime answer to that riddle is the bar code, which was issued a patent on October 7th, 1952. Originally developed to help track the nations rail cars, the patent didn’t really become valuable until bar codes were used to automate grocery store checkout systems.

A bar code is an optical representation of data that is readable by machines via a bar code scanner, or in the case of the “gPhone”, through software that analyzes images captured by the phone’s camera.

The long thin lines that adorned Google’s search page today are the classic 1 dimensional barcode. There are several types in existance. I spent several weeks on a project working with 2 of 7. Unfortunately, that’s another One-D bar code, not a hot relation of Star Trek’s 7 of 9.

The small package shipping industry, which are carriers like UPS, FedEx and the USPS, all leverage barcodes, but had the problem of the bar coded labels getting damaged in transit. With one dimensional bar codes, like the ones found on the back of a can of soup or a box of cereal… Hang on, I’m forgetting my audience. Let me back that up. With one dimensional bar codes, like the ones found on a box of pocky or on the side of a pizza delivery box, if the right, or rather, wrong, piece of bar code label gets damaged, you lose the data.

This was a very real issue for the shipping companies, because if a bar code becomes damaged in transit, the package attached to it would have to be handled by hand, upping the cost of moving the package from point A to point B.

The answer to this problem was 2D barcodes that can store more data per square inch of bar code and where as much as 75% of a barcode can destroyed without losing any data. One example of this type of bar code is MaxiCode, a public domain 2-D bar code originally developed by UPS but now available for anyone’s use.

And while smart-phone based bar code readers are nice, they’re still pretty slow and can be unreliable, especially under less than perfect picture taking circumstances. The old-school way to go is to use a laser based bar code scanner that simply sits between your keyoard and your computer. These can be found pretty cheaply. Radio Shack was even giving away a cheapy laser based scanner for a while with the hopes that you’d use it to scan contextual barcodes in newsprint and ads that would then take you to web pages with info about the products or stories associated with the barcodes. It was called the CueCat and they can still be found running around ebay for not too much.

Printing barcodes is as easy as installing a font these days, letting you use this venerable technology in projects around the home on the cheap.

The site www.ostatic.com ran a great piece on open source bar code packages currently available, positioning you to put barcodes on things ’till the toner runs out.

You could label your DVD collection, organize your book collection into a library, or track assets with it in a small office environment. The more geeky could could also label their miniature collecible fantasy figurines or their cats. You’d probably want to barcode the cats’ collars, not the actual cats. I don’t want to generate any angry calls to the station from the SPCA or the coalition of cat ladies for suggesting that any harm come to any cat.

Personally, I use bar codes at the office to help track assets like laptops and desktops and I use them at home to label all the jars containing my bonsai kitten collection.

So, along the lines of Internet oddities, Jay Maynard, aka Tron Guy, who has Texas ties, is getting a Web Redemption Thursday night on a show called Tosh.0. The show is a 30 minute spot where a guy offers up running commentary on video clips snipped from the web. I think it’s hillarious, but your mileage may vary. Googling Tosh.0 will turn up the details on where to catch Mr. Maynard in all of his glowing glory.

A little detour there with Bonsai Kittens and Tron Guy, but it leads us into our next birthday. While references to cubed kitties and adults in costumes may garner a knowing glance from gathered geeks, nothing has the power to unite a group of socially shy people more than our next BDay.

If you’re already aware that “strange women lyin’ in ponds distributin’ swords is no basis for a system of government!” and that “Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony!” then you may already be aware that Monday saw a true geek staple turn 40 years old. On October 5, 1969, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin and Graham Chapman took to the airwaves as the first episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus was sent out to the British populace.

45 episodes in all were created, with several full length films, including And Now For Something Completely Different in 1971, Monthy Python and the Holy Grail in ’75, Monty Python’s Life of Brian in ’79, Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl in 1982, and Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life in 1983.

In the 40 years that the Pythons have been around, a number of namesakes have cropped up.

The Python Programming language was named after the troupe. If you peruse the source code, you’ll find it sprinkled with numerous Python quotes and references.

Each member of the troup has had an asteroid named after them, which is cool. But not as cool as a several million year old giant snake being named after you. An Australian palaeontologist gave a gigantic fossilized snake he discovered in 1985 the taxinomic name, Montypython-oides river-slei-ghensis.

If you can’t rattle off at least one Monty Python quote either out loud or on IRC, then know that we’re silently taunting you right now. You have a handful of weeks to memorize something python before the next Geek Gathering hits. And if you can’t deliver a solid quote at the next geek gathering, we shall taunt you a second time.

That’s it for this pause for python and that’s that for BarretTime.

Allright. I mentioned last week that we had some more birthdays coming up.

Our first birthday is for something that caused quite a stir about a decade ago. You come in contact with it every time you touch an ATM or use a credit card. Guesses? Well, it was fifty years ago that Rear Admiral Grace Hopper saw her idea that computer programs could be written in a human readable language like English, rather than the zeros and ones of machine code, manifest itself in CoBOL. That’s CoBOL, the computer language, not Cobalt, the element. CoBOL stands for Common Business Oriented Language and is all about moving data in and out of ledgers, balance sheets, and cash flow statements. The name was selected at a committee meeting on September 18, 1959.

Micro Focus, the world’s leading provider of CoBOL development products, recently did a study in Australia that showed that people still use CoBOL at least ten times throughout the course of an average working day. Only eighteen percent of those surveyed had ever heard of CoBOL. CoBOL would have probably stayed behind the scenes if not for the Y2K scare. The issue here was that in 1959, computer storage was expensive and the change to the next century was a long way off. After all, if we were all zipping around in flying cars and jet packs, surely we wouldn’t still be using this language in 2009, right? Right?

D’oh!

With over two hundred and fifty billion lines of CoBOL in production, there are still a number of CoBOL programmers out there. I know that I took the last CoBOL class that the University of Houston gave in 1995 or 96, and some of my classmates went on to work on the Y2K problem here, then found work in poorer countries that couldn’t afford to update their non-Y2K compliant code until the premium on programmers went down on January 2nd, 2000.

With all the extra post-apocalyptic time these CoBOL programmers had on their hands, they were able to extend the CoBOL standard to include support for object oriented styles of programming, resulting in the COBOL 2002 Standard. It would have been funner if they had just called it CoBOL Oh Two.

Anyway, the next birthday belongs to the offspring of Ken Thompson, who was a programmer at AT&T subsidary Bell Laboratories in the summer of ’69. When his wife and young son departed for a month in August of 1969, he did what any young man in the summer of love did. He spent it in front of a keyboard and knocked out the Unix operating system. So while that’s not quite what every other guy was doing that summer, it still landed him an offspring that has gone on to spawn hundreds of little starnix operating systems all over the world. Unix didn’t really begin to take hold until it was ported to the PDP-11 minicomputer, a more powerful piece of metal than its previous home, the PDP-7.

Thompson soon teamed up with Dennis Ritchie, and, I’m going to steal a quote from ComputerWorld because they kinda nailed it with this:

“Thompson and Ritchie were the consummate “hackers,” when that word referred to someone who combined uncommon creativity, brute force intelligence and midnight oil to solve software problems that others barely knew existed.”

OK. So that’s the definition of a hacker. Crackers are different. If you’re good with accents, you can tell the difference.

I don’t know if there are any local geek birthdays coming up in Houston this month, but if you’re a geek and you have an October birthday, be sure to come out to the October Geek Gathering where the cast and crew of Technology Bytes will let you buy yourself a drink for your birthday, provided you’re of age. While the drink may cost you, Wifi connections to the web and general tech snarkyness are free for those celebrating a birthday this month or any other.

To gather with your fellow geeks, you’ll want to head to The Coffee Groundz at 2503 Bagby at McGowan this Friday, October 2nd. Parking is pretty open at seven, when people first start to show up, and gets a little more crowded after eight. There’s plenty of street parking, just make sure you don’t do it in front of the Coffee Groundz on McGowan, as they tend to tow. Just ask in IRC. Geek Gatherings are a place for people like us to get together to share news, ideas, stories, or sometimes just space, within comfortable reach of food, caffeiene, wifi and a solid assortment of adult beverages.

Laptops and gadgets are welcome, but not required. I’ll bring along some different incarnations of the Arduino for those who want to get their hands dirty with physical computing. I don’t know if Jay has messed around with his Arduino kit yet, Jay, but you could always bring it along in case anyone wanted to see what one looks like before its born.

Check our website, www.geekradio.com for details and directions to October’s Geek Gathering, as well as for some great pics of last month’s event.

If I get lucky with UPS, I may have an oscilloscope kit on hand that we can help bring into the world… Even if it doesn’t, I’ll still try to find an excuse to mix molten metal with general geekery, pending any applicable fire codes. I guess we’ll see this Friday.

Either way, that’s it for the birth of a language that just won’t die and that’s that for BarretTime.

First off, we have a couple of birthdays in the house this month. That’s Hizzy or hiz-ouse for Dwight.

H.G. Wells 143rd birthday hit earlier this week, and may have slipped under the radar of many an Internet user if not for Google’s doodle’s the last few weeks.

If you haven’t had to search for anything on the web lately or if you’re one of those “bing people”, then you may not have noticed the recent outbreak of crop circle activity and alien abductions on the main Google search page.

In addition to arranging an alien abduction of the second O’s in the Google searcg page’s main drawing or doodle, as they’re officially known, Google sent out a Twitter containing a string of numbers that, when swapped for letters in the English alphabet, stated, “All your O are belong to us.”

Which is the perfect segueue into our second birthday of the month, the 1989 side-scrolling Japanese arcade game, Zero Wing. The original release date is a little fuzzy, though many speculate that it was earlier this month. What we know for sure is that the PC Engine port of that game was released on September 18th. I’m taking a little license with the original birthday. Google did it first, though, so it must be OK.

Someone else turned 50 this year, though I’ll save that for next week’s BarretTime. A hint is that they have more lines of code in financial institutions that just about anyone else, and they caused quite a scare a little under a decade ago.

So, with that said, this Saturday, September 23rd, plays host to the 2009 Houston Tech Fest at the University of Houston.

What is a Tech Fest?

First off, it’s by and for the community.

TechFest’s are about the community at large. They are meant to be a place for developers and IT Professionals to come and learn from their peers. Topics are always based on community interest and never determined by anyone other than the community. It’s also always free for attendees. The organizers understand that many times people can’t leave work for a day or two to attend training or even seminars. The beauty of the TechFest is that they always occur on weekends.

Another Tenent? TechFest uses community developed material.

The success of TechFest is that it is based on community content. All content that is delivered is original. All presentation content must be
provided (including the presenter’s code and any slide decks). The organizers state that, “If you have content you don’t want to share or provide to attendees then the TechFest is not the place for you.”

Now, this sounds a lot like a code camp. What’s the differece, you ask?

A Code Camp is strictly focused on the Developer where our TechFest is all about Technology, any technology. This doesn’t mean that there won’t be a lot of talks aimed at the code slinging masses. It just means that if you can’t crank out a Hello World in CoBOL, there’s no need to worry.

Surf to www.houstontechfest.com to see the specific goings on of the day and be sure to register if you plan to attend.

Also this Saturday, the Houston Linux Users Group is having the second of their two monthy meetings at the HAL-PC Headquarters, located ever so conveniently close to Microcenter on the West side of the 610 loop. The presentation starts at two, with things wrapping up at four. I’ve never attended anything short of a good presentation at this groups meetings, and have always taken something away from it.

Hit www.hal-pc.org for details and directions.

That’s it for this month’s Birthday Bash and that’s that for BarretTime.

This Saturday, September 19th, the Houston Area Apple Users Group will host a talk by Apple’s Dreaux St. Marie on OS Ten dot Six, aka Snow Leopard. This month’s meeting will be held at the Bellaire Civic Center, located at 7008 South Rice Avenue in Bellaire, Texas.

Special Interest Group Meetings run from nine AM to two PM, with a break at eleven for the main presentation.

One SIG name worth mentioning is the Green Apples SIG for new Macintosh users who have switched from another Operating System or who have never used a computer before. Hit www.haaug.org for details and directions.

And not this weekend, but the next, is the Houston TechFest at the University of Houston. TechFest is more of a tech conference than a tech show. Meaning that if you attend in hopes that booth babes will be showing off the hottest new tech gear, you’re setting yourself up for some serious disappointment. The point of this event is to confer with other people in the tech industry. So unless you find automated builds and continious integration sexy, this may not be the show for you.
If you do fancy those things, there’s plenty more where that comes from. There will be Test Driven Development, Practical Inversion of Control and a track called Making Productivity a Priority from President to Peon. If any of this floats your boat, you’ll want to head over to www.houstontechfest.com for details and registration information. (Registration is free, by the way.)

The Houston TechFest takes place on Saturday, September 26th at the University Center at the University of Houston. Registration and check-in starts at eight am, with the keynote taking place at nine.

And if you’re a Houston Web Developer or Designer, then there’s a meetup for you, too. The Houston Web Design Meetup Group will be getting together for the fourty eighth time this coming Tuesday,

September 22nd. The group devotes itself to all thing web. Interactive activities with a good chance to learn and participate are halmarks of the groups’s meetings.

This month’s meeting gets started at seven PM. If you attend, you’re invited to bring your laptop, as attendees will getting a chance to work with 960 Grid and Blueprint, two popular CSS frameworks. You can find details on the meetup at meetup.com slash web design dash seven seven.

And finally, there are those that say you have to wake up pretty early in the morning to get a leg up on the crew of Technology Bytes. Well, according to HAL-PC, you just have to wake up early enough to attend the 9:30 AM PC Upgrade and Trouble Shooting SIG at the HAL-PC Headquarters this Friday morning. www.hal-pc.org for details and directions.

That’s it for this week’s wakeup call and that’s that for BarretTime.

It wasn’t too long ago that if you wanted to run a piece of Open Source software, you have to have an open source operating system to go along with it. As a large number of Open Source projects have been ported over to the Microsoft Windows Operating System, this is no longer true… Now all you need is a connection to the internet to the best of what Open Source has to offer in the Windows world.

Perhaps the most widely known open source project outside of the Linux world is Mozilla Firefox, the free web browser, now in version 3.0. www.firefox.com is the address you want to hit to grab a copy today. For those of you using Microsoft Internet Explorer, this would be an alternate choice for web browsers. The coolest thing about Firefox 3 is the awesome bar. Having been using this for a week or so now, I’m not sure if I could go back to typing in the full URL.

Mozilla isn’t just pushing out products for web browsing… With Mozilla Thunderbird, you have a powerful email client, complete with SPAM filtering and a solid interface that is easy to pick up if you’re coming over from Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express.

If you’re looking to make some legal copies of DVDs or CDs, you might want to check out MediaCoder. MediaCoder is a free universal batch media transcoder, which integrates most popular audio and video codecs into an all-in-one solution. If you’ve ever struggled with finding the right codec to rip or play a video, this could be your audio/video swiss army knife.

And if you’re not happy with only ripping audio, but walso ant to try your hand at cutting up tracks or even remixing things, you’ll want to check out Audacity. You can record live audio, convert tapes and records into digital formats, edit ogg vorbis, mp3, wav and aiff sound files, cut, copy, splice and mix sounds together and a ton more.

On the office side of things, you have the aptly named Open Office.Org, the full featured suite of tools for wordprocessing, presentations and spreadsheets. Many of the applications look and feel like their Microsoft Office counterparts, with the added bonus of being able to read and save nearly every office document format known to modern man.

And the last open source application I’ll mention tonight? The Gimp. No, not a large leatherbound servant, but rather a large opensource photo editing package. If you’re familiar with PhotoShop, the Gimp, which stands for the GNU image manipulation program. Much like the plugin market for Photoshop, the gimp also has a number of feature-exanding plugins as well as something called script-fu. Script-fu gives users a way to load scripts into the gimp that will then be accible via the gui interface. These scripts can do anything from removing red-eye to taking normal text and adding effects for the web. Since anyone can write a script, they’re really only limited by the imagination of your fellow gimp-users.

As I said, all of these programs are free and available for Windows. Most of them are also available for OS Ten, though you will have to have an X11 environment installed for things like OpenOffice.org. To get links to all of the windows versions of these, hit www.opensourcewindows.org. In addition to the programs I mentioned, check out the links for handbrake, juice, mplayer, and xchat-2, an irc client. Its also important to note that even though I may say that Firefox is a Microsoft Internet Explorer replacement, I don’t mean that you have to uninstall one to run the other. Every program I mentioned tonight will co-exist peacefully with their non-free counterparts.

So, Once you get your feet wet in the open souce world with free programs on a non-free operating system, you may be ready to take the next step and check out a free operating system such as Linux. While there are a ton of bootable CDs out there that will let you try out linux risk free, you may still need a little bit of hand holding. If this is the case, there are a couple of avenues open to you. If you’ve already got a touch of linux experience, you may want to hit the Houston Linux Users Group meeting that happens this Saturday from two to four in the afternoon. HLUG, as it is called, meets at the HAL-PC Headquarters near San Felipe and 610. You can hit www.hlug.org or www.hal-pc.org for driving directions. While these presentations generally have content for linux newbies and greybeards alike, they do assume a certain familiarity with the OS.

If you’re a complete noob to linux, you might want to hit up Linux 101 this Tuesday at seven PM at the same location. Linux 101 is put on by the Houston Linux Users Group the first Tuesday of every month at seven PM and is designed to give you a good firm grasp on the obvious. Both the hlug.org and hal-pc.org sites have information on Linux 101.

And, as Jay said, things are looking good for the TechBytes Anniversary party in July at Dean’s credit clothing. This party will take place the second Saturday of July, and will replace the regular first friday geek gathering that would have happened on the 6th. Keep checking the techbytes website for the info; we’ll have it out there as soon as it is finalized.

That’s that for your free software four one one and that’s that for BarretTime.

(Hyperlinked version to follow!)

I was originally going to come up with a list of the top ten techy things that I am thankful for this year, but with the DMCA, my broken oh key and the makings of another exploding battery, I thought I’d go back and borrow from what other people in technology had been thankful for over the years.

In 1899, Charles H. Duell, Commissioner of the U.S. Office of Patents, was thankful that everything that could be invented already had.

In 1927, H.M. Warner of Warner Brothers was thankful that his audiences would never want to hear actors talk.

In 1943, Thomas Watson, the then chairman of IBM, was thankful that there was a world market for maybe five computers.

In 1949, popular mechanics was thankful that computers may one day weigh no more than 1.5 tons.

In 1957, the Prentice Hall editor in charge of business books was thankful that this data processing fad wouldn’t last the year.

In 1981, Bill Gates was thankful that he’d never need more than 640k of memory.

In 1995, Wall Street was thankful for all those new dotcom companies.

In 1999, Nigeria was thankful that Al Gore invented the Internet.

In 2003, SCO’s Darl McBride was thankful that there would be a “day of reckoning” for Red Hat and SuSE.

And today, you might be thankful that that’s it for BarretTime.

Tonight I’d like to give all the listeners who don’t want to hear about the iPhone the finger. Well, a finger primer, that is. We’ll get to why
it’s important in a moment…

For the purpose of this BarretTime, we’ll count the thumb as the first finger. Ours is opposable, though contrary to popular belief, we’re not the only species with this trait. The Bornean Oranguan has them, as do Gorillas, chimpanzees and the lesser apes. The opposable thumb has helped the human species develop more accurate fine motor skills.

The next finger is the index finger, aka the pointer finger, forefinger, digitus secondus or digitus two.

Next up we have the middle finger, the third digit of the human hand. It is also known as the third finger, digitus medius, digitus tertius, or digitus three. In western culture, extending the middle finger is, more often than not, construed as offensive, because, according to wikipedia, it symbolizes a certain part of the male anatomy.

The fourth digit of the human hand is the ring finger.

The names of the ring finger in many languages reflect an ancient belief that it is a magical finger. It is named after magic or rings, or called nameless. In Old English, it was called the Leech Finger. In japanese, kusuri-yubi, or the medicine finger. In German, it’s the Doctor’s finger.

Many cultures avoided the true name of a powerful entity, and referred to this finger indirectly or, as I mentioned before, nameless. This holds true for the Bulgarian, Cantonese, Finnish, Persian and Russian languages.

And lastly, we have the little finger, often called the pinky in American English, from the Dutch word pink, meaning little finger. It is also called the anti-thumb, the fifth finger, the baby finger, or the fourth finger. A pinky promise (also known as a pinky swear) is made when a person wraps one of their pinky fingers around the other person’s pinky and makes a promise. Traditionally, it’s considered binding, the idea being that the person who breaks the promise must cut off his or her pinky finger. In a similar vein, among members of the Japanese yakuza (gangsters), the penalty for various offenses is removal of parts of the little finger (known as yubitsume).

Also in Japan, holding up a pinky while speaking of two people signifies that they are in a relationship. This pinky substitution is considered vulgar and old-fashoned, however, and in some anime scenes is intentionally used to enhance its silliness.

The importance of this is that you now know the difference between your index and ring fingers.

A survey of academics at the University of Bath has found that male scientists typically have a level of the hormone oestrogen as high as their testosterone level.

These hormone levels are more usual in women than men, who normally have higher levels of testosterone.

The study draws on research which suggests that these unusual hormone levels in many male scientists cause the right side of their brains, which governs spatial and analytic skills, to develop more strongly.

The study, which has been submitted to the British Journal of Psychology, also found that:

-These hormonal levels may make male scientists less likely to have children.

-Those men with a higher level of oestrogen were more likely than average to have relatives with dyslexia, which may in part be caused by hormonal
levels.

-Women social scientists tended to have higher levels of testosterone, making their brains closer to those of males in general.

The study drew on work in the last few years which established that the levels of oestrogen and testosterone a person has can be seen in the relative length of their index and ring fingers. The ratio of the lengths is set before birth and remains the same throughout life.

The length of fingers is genetically linked to the sex hormones, and a person with an index finger shorter than the ring finger will have had more testosterone while in the womb, and a person with an index finger longer than the ring finger will have had more oestrogen. The difference in the lengths can be small – as little as two or three per cent – but important.

So here is the big broad stroke: If you’re a male and your ring finger is longer than your index finger, you are predisposed to be better at math and spatial relations. IT departments everywhere will slow down tomorrow as they all compare finger lengths…

That’s it for your finger four one one and that’s that for BarretTime.

When I was in The Netherlands a few months ago, I outfitted my 17″ MacBook Pro with a MarWare Protection Pack that consisted of a keyboard cover and a hand rest that adheres to the rather large piece of real estate surrounding the touchpad. While this does wonders to protect my screen from keyboard cuts, the outer shell of my MacBook was still vulnerable to scratches and scrapes.

A few weeks later, Jay Lee threw a box my way with the understanding that I would write a review of its contents. That was the better part of two months ago. Luckily for the folks at Sonnet Technologies, I took my time. The product in question is their newest edition to the MacBook protection line, the 2fit Laptop Sleeve.

The first time I tried to insert my MacBook into the sleeve, it was a *very* tight fit. Given the heft of the 17″ MacBook Pro, I needed some aid from the top of my desk. This left me wondering if the 2fit would do harm than good to the corners of My Precious. The trouble inserting the the MacBook was eclipsed only by the difficulty of getting it back out.

Given my track record with hardware, I knew that it was only a matter of weeks before I earthed the laptop while taking it out of the sleeve. The risk/reward ratio on this product was just too high… I was about to call it quits when I noticed that the grey microfiber fabric went smashingly well with a new courrier bag I had picked up in London on the last leg of my trip to The Hague. The sacrifices we make for style…

Now that I’ve spent some time with the sleeve, it has loosened up considerably. Instead of trying to pull it free of the 2fit’s protective clutches, I now have enough wiggle room to pull the sleeve back onto itself, allowing the MacBook to emerge from its protective cocoon in much the same way a banana emerges from it’s skin. Without the rips in the fabric, of course… The fabric seems to be very durable and somewhat stretchier than I had first thought.

I failed to mention that a screen protector was also in the box, nearly identical to the Marware protector that I was already using (there’s only so much you can do with a fitted keyboard cover that doubles as a microfiber screen cleaner). After having cut the screen of my 15″ TiBook, I was already sold on this product. If you’re not already using something to protect the screen of your Apple laptop, it’s only a matter of time before you can start to see the outline of keys biting into your screen. Don’t make the same mistakes I did…

While I have yet to soil the Sonnet 2fit sleeve, their site does claim that it is machine washable. I’ll amend this review once I toss it into the wash, perhaps including a video of the safer way to holster and remove your weapon of choice.

The Houston ITEC show is happening next week at Reliant Park. On May 16th
and 17th, Houston’s biggest technology expo comes to town, this year
foucsing it’s sights on small and midsize businesses. This year’s show is
actually made of six seperate conferences with 24 sessions covering
technical topics such as networking, wireless technology, security and mobility
along side more ordinary topics like podcast production, blogging for
business and IT infrastructure.

Head over to www.goitec.com for details and registration.

That’s it for this week, but two reminders for the weeks to come.
First, the Houston Linux Users Group will be holding a Data Backup Seminar
at the HAL-PC Saturday, May 26th from 2:00 to 4:00 in the afternoon.
www.hlg.org for more info. And secondly, our own Dwight Silverman will be
talking at the Houston Area Apple Users Group, aka Haag, Saturday May
19th. The event goes from nine am to two pm, though I suspect Dwight will
only be speaking “oficially” at the eleven o’clock hour.
This will be taking place at the Rice University Media
Center. Hit www.haaug.org for more info.

That’s it for your technology fun raiser and that’s that for BarretTime.