Want more Free / Open Source Software in Your Work Life?

If so, you should read my series (part I published today) entitled Being a Free/Open Source Software Catalyst : Part I.

My plan is to cover as much of the social components of this situation as possible. I have a lot of experiences in this arena to share. Stay tuned!
-=FeriCyde=-

Time for Linux on the Door Stop

I've written my first editorial for 2011 and Posted it on LXer.com.

It's basically a decade in review piece, and it talks very much about how Linux has not taken over the Desktop -- and that it doesn't really matter any more, because in many ways, Linux has arrived.

Enjoy!
-=FeriCyde=-

Obama back speaking to the kids!

Looks like Obama is back speaking to the school children in the US, likely in an attempt to force them into his socialist point of view. Well, that, or possibly our president simply would like to do something leadership oriented, and speak to the kids in our country, and encourage them to do their best.

Being the positive kind of guy I am, I'm pretty certain it's the latter. The former opinion was how it was being cast at about 6:30 or so this morning when I surfed past the anchors at Fox news as they told the story.

But honestly, I have a link to a letter to the editor from last years speech that sums up the situation much more clearly.

Quoting:

" Let's thank Bennett and others who had the ability to foresee Obama's school speech "as an attempt at political indoctrination of the youth ... similar to the Hitler youth movement or the Soviet Union." And let's appreciate that they took action so that the threat was averted. "

Before you get your panties in a bunch over this, bear in mind that the above text is sarcasm, and nearly a year old.

If you read it closely you'll see that the author is none other than my old man. Now you know the source of my sarcasm as well.

Dad, I love you man.
-=FeriCyde=-

How to report an unauthorized call to the FTC ...

First, if you have not done so, you should register your phone number in the "Do Not Call" national database. Kind of sad that we have to worry about such things, but lately there have been a lot of scams running that (besides soaking up valuable cell phone minutes) are potentially quite expensive and damaging.

One involves someone saying they will sell you an extended warranty for your car. I've comically accepted the calls before for entertainment value (and to understand the scam a bit). Honestly, if someone calls saying your warranty is just about to expire a lot of things should set off alarm bells. Some of my favorite responses: "This is great timing! The transmission just went out in my 1954 DeSoto! Can I buy coverage to get it fixed?" Better: "I have a 2000 Hudson Hornet... You can insure that? Awesome!" The scams are well documented and the primary offending company was recently shut down. Hopefully the people executing the scam are doing jail time now.

Another scam involves someone from "Cardholder services." I've had a few of these end recently rather abruptly -- before I could say the phrase "Please take me off your list." The more generic the call -- the more likely it's a scam. Cardholder services to what card? What interest rate range are they talking about. Do they even know who they are calling (let me answer there -- no, they're doing robo-calling through a range of telephone numbers hoping to hit a live body).

In all cases, reporting these things to the FTC is a good idea. Here's the web site:

https://complaints.donotcall.gov/complaint/complaintcheck.aspx?panel=2

You'll find a link on there to also register your phone number in the do not call database.

Do your civic duty -- if you get a call like this, report the idiots and help the FTC shut them down. And if you're not pressed for time, it doesn't hurt to waste a little bit of their time (the scammers) in the process.
-=FeriCyde=-

Android Fragmentation

Disclaimer: I'm a long-time users and enthusiast when it comes to Linux -- and I own a Motorola droid.

Recently, there have been a few articles that talk of something called Fragmentation in regards to the Google android operating system. These articles talk about developer-centric problems and the general lack of stability as compared to other operating systems, such as Win Mobile and Apple's operating system for the iPhone.

This is my humble opinion: none of this crap matters to anyone but developers and technical journalists. The Android is for the most part, from what I see, unstoppable. It has recently taken the mobile operating system space by storm, spawning multiple products from multiple vendors.

It will continue to do so, despite any kind of stupid fear, uncertainty or doubt. Here are the reasons why:

1. Android phones work acceptably for the vast majority of smart phone users.
2. Unlike the strategic mistake that Apple made -- the Google android operating system is available from a host of carriers.
3. Unlike Apple, the android store is far more open to developers.
4. The operating system and the underlying development components are transparent. They are truly open in most respects compared to Apple.

Sure, developing for a moving target of device capabilities, APIs and "fragmented" operating system versions is going to suck. Sure, the interface is no where near as smooth and polished as Apple's. Sure sure sure, lot's of things compared to other proprietary vendors.

At the end of the day, the decisions that Apple made will continue to make their product the Cadillac of phones. The Droid will be the Chevy.

And the real reason it will continue to sell will be obvious to the end users: Most times, all you need is a Chevy.

Those of us in the Free/Open Source community will wax onward about why people should choose freedom over tyranny and all that important stuff that's right -- and I wish that these things mattered to a lot of people. Sadly, most people haven't a clue. At the end of the day, Apple will still have a huge market share -- but over time, I'm willing to bet that Linux (Android) will take a large or similar percentage.

More carriers, a good product, more choices, less cost. It's a simple equation. It reminds one of the bad choices Apple made in the 1980's to single-source their own hardware and sue the crap out of anyone that tried to establish anything close to a competing hardware platform. I'm not saying that mobile devices will be exactly the same as that territory -- the devices are replaced much faster and cost far less. But it sure is similar.

Fragmentation though? No one on the receiving end will really care all that much. The market physics pretty much dictate the outcome -- Android will march on, more or less unstoppably, regardless of any kind of FUD around the platform.

Because, most times, at the end of the day, you just need a decent phone that works at a reasonable price. Android definitely delivers that.
-=FeriCyde=-

Google Goggles

Rocks!

I was sitting down chatting with my Aunt and Uncle over the weekend and they were asking about features of the Android phone I'm using -- and I had recently loaded google goggles -- and hadn't tried it.

Sitting in front of me is a picture on the wall. My Aunt says something like "That picture is so old, it probably won't recognize it."

Well, conversely, that's not exactly the case -- stuff that's been around a lot, it did really well on. It instantly recognized (and brought up several links related to) a Norman Rockwell painting on a nearby calendar. It recognized a DVD I had brought over to watch with them. It was darn impressive, actually.

If you have a 'droid -- you need to try this thing. It's supposed to someday recognize plants from their leaves, and is supposed to recognize bar-code (it failed, unfortunately, at that task ever time I tried it).

Entertaining at least! Give it a whirl:
Google Goggles
-=FeriCyde=-

My Letter to my Congressman May 10, 2010

It's that time!

Time to Write Your Congressman!

Dear Mr. Boccieri,

Please fight to strongly regulate (or eliminate banking usage of) derivatives -- basically my view of the banking industry of today is that they want this form of legalized gambling so they can continue their reign as American Royalty.

Without solid regulation we're going to be back where we were in 2008 -- I've been reading about some people saying things like "we don't need to regulate, we just need to let these institutions fail. Hey -- I'm all for that, but I know that when the time comes, without some solid regulation and change, whomever is on stick flying the plane of Congress that day will very likely do what's been done in the past.

I see the bankers lobbying Congress like crazy (it's in the news today). Of course they are -- they get all of the rewards of taking risk with none of the accountability.

Please do the responsible thing here -- regulate these overpaid non-capitalist leeches while the opportunity presents itself. End corporate banking welfare. Make them accountable for the incredible damage they've done to our economy. The lack of sympathy for America is illustrated by the incredible bonuses they gave themselves this year -- basically fiddling while our country burned.

End American Royalty -- be a part of strong derivative regulatory change. Restore some sanity to the financial markets. Make banking a less risky venture for the health of America. Add some kind of regulation that ends the role of our government in bailing out these idiots when they fail to do their job (managing risk is part of the role of a financial institution, and clearly that's where they failed).

Thanks for Listening,
--Paul Ferris

Hardware for the Holidays

It started with my disgust of Xandros on Lisa's netbook...

Basically, I bought Lisa a netbook a while back and although it's capable, honestly the OS was a smouldering pile of crud for the most part. The touchpad stopped working properly, it was slow and likely someone else would have given it up for dead. Digging around a bit, it looked to be a no-brainer to put Ubuntu remix on the thing, so I set about making it happen. Seriously 30 minutes into the experiment it became obvious that the folks at ASUS are either asleep at the wheel, need their heads examined or are taking payola from Redmond. Why? Because Ubuntu remix on this netbook feels more polished and stable than any out of the box OS experience I've had to date.

And Lisa is happy so I'm happy with it. I've been able to throw a lot of extra hardware configuration at it with literally no issues. i-Pod nano [x] Check. Canon MP620 (network, wireless, no less ;) [x] Check. Digital camera [x], Scanning over the network [x] -- some of the configuration took place while she was using the darn thing (apt-get is so nice over ssh). Xandros was almost completely out of disk space. It's running at about 70% space right now and happy as a clam.

The old Kodak DC215

While looking for a memory card I stumbled across an old digital camera I had in a drawer from 1999 (my old LinuxToday days). Hmmmm. Will it blend? ,I thought, mischievously. The Kodak DC215 was dead thanks to it being dropped and the battery tray getting slightly damaged. It was a pretty decent camera in its day, though. And I just couldn't bear something with such sentimental value being tossed out when it might make a really sweet web-cam. Soooo...

It turns out that Graham Crawford's SDK for the DC210 series cameras is still available. It's last update was in 2005, built for Red Hat back in the day. I needed a serial cable for the camera. Googling around a bit, I found a pin-out -- and a matching cable that probably came with the camera. So I had a serial cable, the software, and a broken battery tray. I needed a power supply. I have a drawer where I toss old out-dated power supplies ... found a matching cable for the lug on the camera, and the power-supply for a Netgear hub was close (7.5 volts -- hey, that's near 7 volts, right ;). So, some electrical tape, the cable, a Dell PC running Ubuntu -- we're all set. 30 minutes later I'm taking photo's with a shell script.

The photo's are available via serial (albeit a bit slow). It would be nice if I could pull them off the SD card directly from the Canon network printer -- it's one of the few devices I own that still has a Compact Flash (CF) reader. Is it possible? Turns out that you can use:

$ smbclient -I [IP address of Printer] /foo/canon_memory/ " "

And the "foo" above could be anything, for what it's worth. I'm mainly interested in the utilitarian value here of being able to have a nice, easy spot place in the house where the photo cards can be plugged in and the data sucked down to the central photo repository (where they're backed up, cataloged, etc).

Broken Digital Picture Frame

It's over 2 years old, and as far as comparing to the latest digital picture frames, pretty lame. On the balance side of the equation, though, we're not (Lisa and I) heavy digital picture frame users ;)

The pictures from our latest camera simply would not load on the thing. -- for one, it has a brain the size of a walnut, so the 8 mega-pixel shots were only going to load, one at a time, sometime in 2011 -- for the first one. That is, if it could read the Jpeg file format, which for some strange reason, it couldn't. I located the factory PDF manual for the thing, and it was about as clear and concise as raw enigma machine data. So I did what any decent hacker would do -- I started looking at the difference between the Jpegs from the old camera (the one from 1999) and the new ones. It turns out to be something missing in the EXIF data, a part of the Jpeg file format. If this sounds like something you've never heard of, my guess is that you're not into digital media much. I know I wish I could forget what I've learned about it all, because it took some digging around to discover all of the nasty stuff you can do to Jpegs to make them behave.

The digital picture frame isn't huge and has a really lame display -- like about 6x4 inches with an over-square rez of something like 900x250 (yes, it's really that bad). Meaning that 320x240 would look just fine on thing. The down side is that this kind of resolution is really pretty pathetic and it's not likely to win over anyone who is looking at the pictures for detail. On the plus side, however are the following facts:

  1. We're not looking at the frame for the quality of the pixels -- just for sentiment.
  2. It has a brain the size of a walnut; 320x240 images load very quickly.
  3. With the rez of the frame, 320x240 looks about as good as anything else, anyway.
  4. You can cram quite a bit of 320x240-sized, compressed Jpegs on a 2Gig SD card.
  5. My eyesight isn't all that great up close anyway ;)

Sooo, off to the races -- could I find a way to?:

  1. Shrink our catalog of photos easily.
  2. Fake out the EXIF header such that the frame would read it.
  3. Not interfere with the normal operation of the SD card otherwise.

And the answer is, of course, with Linux, just about anything is possible. The key operating lines of a script (which ran for about 3 hours total on about 1/3 of our catalog of digital pictures) are:

        [ $DEBUG -gt 0 ] && echo From $J to $DIRNEW/$FILENEW
        /usr/bin/convert $J -resize x240 $DIRNEW/$FILENEW
        [ $DEBUG -gt 0 ] && /bin/ls -l $DIRNEW/$FILENEW
        /usr/bin/jpegtopnm $DIRNEW/$FILENEW > $P1
        /usr/bin/pnmtojpeg $P1 -exif=$EXIF > $DIRNEW/$FILENEW
        [ $DEBUG -gt 0 ] && /bin/ls -l $DIRNEW/$FILENEW

The EXIF header being inserted in the pnmtojpeg line above is completely bogus. It's not even the right resolution -- the digital picture frame simply doesn't care (Lisa's iPod nano is a different story, by the way -- it worked for all of the pictures taken landscape). The pictures ended up tiny -- 2500 pictures taking up a whopping 80 Megabytes -- literally pennies on the dollar, space-wise. This means that I can simply put the script in the root directory of the flash card and make it execute upon insertion on her netbook. Imake a directory called "DFRAME" next to the "DCIM" directory, and clone files into there. Works like a charm. I'm fairly certain that I can simply pull an EXIF header with the right proportions to fix the script so her iPod nano can show them properly.

Through all of this, the joy of having an operating system that behaves (and can run software from literally a decade ago) is something to behold.

Happy Hardware for the holidays!
-=FeriCyde=-

Flight of the Penguin, er, Phoenix

Dear Diary --It's been too long...

I'm in full-blown Phoenix mode. For those of you who wish to understand what I mean here(Reference Wikipedia):

A phoenix is a mythical bird with a colorful plumage and a tail of gold and scarlet (or purple, blue, and green according to some legends). It has a 500 to 1,000 year life-cycle, near the end of which it builds itself a nest of twigs that then ignites; both nest and bird burn fiercely and are reduced to ashes, from which a new, young phoenix or phoenix egg arises, reborn anew to live again. The new phoenix is destined to live as long as its old self. In some stories, the new phoenix embalms the ashes of its old self in an egg made of myrrh and deposits it in the Egyptian city of Heliopolis (sun city in Greek). It is said that the bird's tears contain healing abilities of pureness, and their cry is that of a beautiful song.

I'm starting a new practice around what I've done in business for the past decade or so: Changing culture and embracing Free / Open Source Software. I'm also doing a bit of recruiting and sales. This is a natural extension and progression but in many ways it's a re-birth. I'll be blogging more about Free Software (big surprise) in the near future.

My thoughts have been consumed lately on all of the things that consume a startup -- my time has been sucked into a large void in some respects, but that doesn't excuse my blogging absence (it just explains it).

In my new role I'm truly getting to know the movers and shakers in the Free/Open Source (FOSS) space. It's a wonderful re-engagement, because I was far more connected in 1999 than I have been in 2009 (that is, lately). The happy surprise for me is that, unlike 1999, the world is happily embracing FOSS -- it's all over the place now. It would be laughable for people to ask questions like "Is Linux ready for the enterprise?"

I'm sharing some of my findings from the perspective of a sales person -- I'm getting to do that kind of duty now. I get to talk to a lot of people that are pondering the FOSS question.

The question is now turned the opposite direction -- the real question is "Is your enterprise ready for Linux?" There are still some hold-outs, in other words, that still see heavy value in proprietary infrastructure. A lot of these companies are now looking at FOSS with a far more serious gaze. The money is driving the activity, unfortunately.

The "Free" in Free Software is still about the cash for these companies -- and that's a crying shame. It's sad, because it's not about the cash at the end of the day (although a serious bundle is often on the table when these choices are made). Rather, it's about liberating the IT of your company -- it's about having real choices, flexibility and freedom as it pertains to using the technological underpinnings of your business solution.

My Phoenix is an intentional "burn-down" of the old Paul Ferris. I'm far from done on the technology side, by the way -- my time has been spent doing architecture and development for the past couple of weeks, so it's not like I'm going to ever shake that ability. The bird that is rising is one of new ventures, planning and entrepreneurship -- very exciting stuff.

For those friends who've been asking -- thanks for the gentle prodding. I'll write more often and you posted.
-=FeriCyde=-

Linux on Netbooks

You'd have to be living under a rock to not have heard about the current "netbook" craze. Basically, there is not really solid definition (in my not so humble opinion) of what a netbook truly is -- my definition is this: A laptop that has superior battery life, reduced features and that is so small and convenient that it fits in your purse (if you're of the proper gender to be carrying one, or if you're purse/gender agnostic -- don't get me started on this topic).

Anyway, I bought one for my wife recently -- running Linux, of course.

Now, there's been a lot of misinformation about Linux on desktops/laptops and netbooks. It's too hard to use, it's not familiar -- it's not Windows -- people return them at a higher rate than Windows.

But, not according to Dell, it seems. There are many reasons that this is news. Dell is the quintessential user computing device vendor. They have a well recognized brand and off and on, have courted Linux on the desktop. Linux has a lower acquisition cost for a hardware vendor -- and on a $300 computing device, there isn't a lot of margin.

Barring all of that strategic schpew -- the fact is, my wife uses an Ubuntu laptop and seems to have taken to the netbook with a minimum of fuss. I use her viewpoint as an indicator of sorts. She doesn't hold much back in terms of criticism -- if it sucks I'm going to hear about it in short order. She's not a technology lightweight -- she uses facebook, email and web browsing as good or at a higher competency than all but my tightest technological contacts -- but she's not a programmer or IT type.

In short, if she can take to a Linux device without a lot of training on my part, I assume that the general public should have few to little issue.

And this describes her experience -- the Ubuntu laptop has been a terrific device, and she's used it for a couple of years now without issue. The netbook has a simplified interface, in comparison. It's an SD-based device (no hard drive) and so far so good, it has worked well.

I've always been skeptical of the claims that people can't use Linux as a network computing platform. My own experiences with my family (Mom and Dad use Linux these days as well) tell me that the market is fragmenting. I won't get into all of the technical reasons why Linux on the desktop is a good thing -- I could, and I've done so many times in the past -- all I'm going to say is that I'm happy to see that it's not hard to acquire a device running Linux these days.
-=FeriCyde=-