Who programmed the ENIAC – the first general-purpose computer?

Just came across a very interesting fact about ENIAC (the first general-purpose electronic computer): The ENIAC was programmed by six people … and all of them were women! Yes, you heard that right. All women.

The ENIAC, the world’s first computer, was invented to calculate ballistics trajectories during World War II – a task that until then had been done by hand by a group of 80 female mathematicians. The six women who were chosen to make the ENIAC work toiled six-day weeks during the war, inventing the field of programming as they worked.

That, I must say, is quite a surprising fact (for me at least), especially since the stereotypical notion of women that is thrown around is that they are not good in mathematics and logic, and thus programming.

Microsoft Manual Deskterity: An Exploration of Simultaneous Pen + Touch Direct Input

Just had a look at this awesome prototype from Microsoft. I am loving what Microsoft is up to these days, researching and developing some great new UIs and interaction mechanisms. Have a look at this Microsoft Manual Deskterity prototype video and you’d love it too!

Pen and touch computing have long-thought to be mutually exclusive methods of human-computer interaction, but as the Microsoft Research project “Manual Deskterity” shows, the two intuitively combined makes for a much powerful input method than each of them might ever be on their own.

If you’re short on time, the real soul of the demo – a custom application for the Microsoft Surface with a special infrared pen – starts at the 1 minute mark and shows off capabilities that either wouldn’t be practical or possible at all by either pen or touch alone. Bear in mind however this is a research project so the application is quite limited in scope.

— I Started Something

I just hope it makes it out of their research labs and into our hands soon.

How to kill a Windows process/task from command-line?

What do you do if the application used to kill other applications itself becomes the problem? I’m talking about the Windows “Task Manager”; it always comes in handy when an application is acting up. But today, the Task Manager itself became the problem and I needed something to shut-it-down (or resort to restarting my laptop)!

So I thought there must be a way to achieve the same from the command-line (and thus, be able to kill Task Manager), and certainly there was – the command taskkill – as I found here. You need to know the rogue program’s name, for example, if Notepad was acting up, you would open the command (DOS) prompt (Start –> Run –> cmd) and enter the following:

taskkill /IM notepad.exe

In Task Manager’s case, I entered:

taskkill /IM taskmgr.exe

Congrats! You are now a more lethal Windows ninja! *haeeyyaaa*