caseyjenks.com

Been a while since my last update, but I’ve been extremely busy. I wrote my term paper for Comp 2 back senior year of highschool on the missile defense system. Pretty damn cool stuff if you ask me.

By Jim Wolf

WASHINGTON, July 12 (Reuters) - The U.S. military said it had successfully tested Wednesday a missile-shield component built by Lockheed Martin Corp. (LMT.N: Quote, Profile, Research) to shoot down a ballistic missile in the last minute or so of its flight.

The so-called Terminal High Altitude Area Defense weapon system, or THAAD, “exceeded its objectives” in the long-planned test by shooting down a non-separating Hera target missile at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, Lockheed said in a statement.

THAAD, which is still being developed, is to be part of a layered shield meant to defend against short- to intermediate-range ballistic missiles of the type fired by North Korea a week ago.

“Initial indications are that all planned flight test objectives were achieved,” the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency said.

Richard Lehner, an agency spokesman, said earlier the test had been planned for a long time, by implication not directly related to North Korea’s July 5 launch of at least seven missiles, including a longer-range Taepodong 2 missile.

This marked the third successful THAAD developmental flight test since such testing resumed in November 2005. The remaining flight test is verifying the system’s capabilities at “increasingly difficult levels,” the Missile Defense Agency said.”

Link

Vista didn’t last but about 12 hours on my PC. I’ve already reformatted back to XP. What the hell, my computer needed a fresh reinstall anyways.
Pros:
The Aero interface is awesome.
The sidebar and dockable widgets are pretty cool.
Cons:
Not enough driver support.
Half the software I installed, or tried to install, wouldn’t install or froze on boot.
Annoying User Account Control popups that came up all the time when trying to do simple tasks like deleting a shortcut on the desktop. There needs to be a way to disable this in the final release.
Still a little slow and unoptimized.

I’m sure Vista will be a great product once it’s finalized, just make sure you have a fairly new PC with 1 GB+ of RAM.

http://tracker.bittorrent.com/torrents/vista/Windows%20Vista%20Beta%202%20Public%20Release.torrent

You’ll need a bit torrent program such as Azureus to download it.

“A Better Web Experience

Firefox 1.5 has an intuitive interface and blocks viruses, spyware, and popup ads. It delivers Web pages faster than ever. And it’s easy to install and import your favorites. Packed with useful features like tabbed browsing, Live Bookmarks, and an integrated Search bar, Firefox will change the way you experience the Web, for the better.”

 

GetFirefox.com

“Even so, we were able to determine that not even AMD’s top-of-the-line Athlon FX-62 CPU running at 3.0 GHz could clearly best the pre-release model of the Core 2 Duo (2.66 GHz Conroe) processor we tested. This comparison didn’t even use the top-of-the-line Conroe processor, which Intel plans to introduce soon.”

Full Article - Tom’s hardware

Tom’s Hardware takes a long look at the next version of windows.

“Microsoft’s new Vista is surprisingly entertaining. The new look of the operating system is good, and lets it outshine its Linux and Mac OS competitors. One notices repeatedly while working with this software that Microsoft scoped out its competition very carefully.”

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/05/31/windows_vista/

check it out.

Full Article Here

Taken from useit.com.

F for fast. That’s how users read your precious content. In a few seconds, their eyes move at amazing speeds across your website’s words in a pattern that’s very different from what you learned in school.

In our new eyetracking study, we recorded how 232 users looked at thousands of Web pages. We found that users’ main reading behavior was fairly consistent across many different sites and tasks. This dominant reading pattern looks somewhat like an F and has the following three components:

• Users first read in a horizontal movement, usually across the upper part of the content area. This initial element forms the F’s top bar.
• Next, users move down the page a bit and then read across in a second horizontal movement that typically covers a shorter area than the previous movement. This additional element forms the F’s lower bar.
• Finally, users scan the content’s left side in a vertical movement. Sometimes this is a fairly slow and systematic scan that appears as a solid stripe on an eyetracking heatmap. Other times users move faster, creating a spottier heatmap. This last element forms the F’s stem.

Implications of the F Pattern

• Users won’t read your text thoroughly in a word-by-word manner. Exhaustive reading is rare, especially when prospective customers are conducting their initial research to compile a shortlist of vendors. Yes, some people will read more, but most won’t.
• The first two paragraphs must state the most important information. There’s some hope that users will actually read this material, though they’ll probably read more of the first paragraph than the second.
• Start subheads, paragraphs, and bullet points with information-carrying words that users will notice when scanning down the left side of your content in the final stem of their F-behavior. They’ll read the third word on a line much less often than the first two words.

This is what I’ve been up to today.

“I call three-mile races ‘The Great Equalizer,’ ” said Price, 46, who was still sporting purplish-black blood blisters on his hand from the 300-mile Everglades Challenge in March. “We won this race last year, and we were impressed with the start (Gardella and Jenks) got. The handle of my paddle came off, then we started closing the gap, but they just hung on and did a great job.”

In fact, Jenks, who won the race last year with younger sister Cheyenne — who missed this year while playing for the FGCU softball team in their first appearance in the NCAA Tournament over the weekend — said he “messed up” when a wide turn toward the finish line made for what founder Vin DePasquale dubbed “one of the closest” finishes in race history.”

Video Here

Full Article

caseyjenks.com is now online! Stay tuned for updates.