American's need to grow up, really.

America, grow up.  Last week, President Obama was on the Late Show with Jay Leno.  In an article at Newsday.com they covered the statement that the President made about himself in regards to the Special Olympics.  There seemed to be such an outcry that the President needed to make an official apology and even call the Director of the Special Olympics directly.

I really am disappointed that now in the 21st century the President who in a moment of honesty and humility is condemned for making a reference that any one of us would have made at the water cooler, speaking with our friends.  Anyone who is not the parent or participant of the Special Olympics would make the same comment without a second thought and not fear being stoned for having said it.




Are we as a nation so hypersensitive that casual conversation is potentially a huge political offense?  If we berate the President for having said something in a human moment, you must expect the reaction...that he will not do that anymore.  I don't think, that even the parent of a handicapped child, could in good concience think for one moment that what the President said was in any way an attack on the Special Olympics.  He was being critical of himself in the comment if you pay attention.  I just wish that we would pay attention to the value of that candid moment of our nation's leader and take away from it, that he is human, and humble. 

If you wish the reward of a President who will no longer share with you the side of himself that you would most like to know about, please, just bite his head off one more time for something so trivial as a comment that normally would not be given a second thought.

Just grow up. 

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CafeNinja

P.S. Sorry for the political comment post.  When I saw this, it made me want to vomit, and I had to say my two cents worth.

New command line fu

Ok,  I've been a command line junkie for a little while.  I just got a recent injection of new toys for my command line experience.  Some are new, some are old but recently discovered and some are just plain fun.  Let me show you how I've done a little mix-and-match session and had a grand old time with things. 

So, let's just give the list of tools and the links to where I learned of them (in order to give props).  The first would be screen, then this screen profile thing I heard about on Lottalinuxlinks podcast.  Simply put screen is a simulated tab browsing experience over a single ssh session.  Then I add to the mix terminator, this program I met during the last year and honestly don't remember where I heard about this one first.  Then the Ubuntu super package bsd-games.  This is quite a bit older, but now with the screen experience I don't feel like I'm wasting my single good session to have a moment of bliss.

Implementation of these tools offer some really cool results.  Today, my normal startup consists of opening terminator, splitting it vertically.  Since mutt+mailcap over an "ssh -X host" will launch a supporting graphical viewer application exporting the X session over the ssh tunnel, I use one of the splits dedicated for my mail (it also is visible for new incoming mail that way).  Then I use the other vertical split to connect to the same server where I have a screen session always running. That screen session has my persistent irc connection, a shell with my ssh key loaded by adding the commands "ssh-agent $SHELL" followed by "ssh-add" so that my ssh-key pass is cached for the session.  Now I have a few extra screen "windows" sitting at a bash prompt ready for any file management, text file edits/writes or general purpose.

Here is a screenshot of what my primary workspace looks like when I'm doing my command line fu:



The trick to all of these tools isn't that they are there, or there is THE way for them to work together, it has been and always will be more important how you put them together to make them work the best for you.  By the way, you can tell your a command line junkie when it's easier for you to teach a windows user to use mutt than it is to figure out the setting in Thunderbird to deactivate an email account without deleting it.  Man, I've been migrating this way for so long now that even the general windows support questions are becoming a challenge for me just because I don't use them often enough myself.

Geek on!

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CafeNinja

Crazy about Little Brother

So, I've read Cory Doctorow's book "Little Brother".  I have so many things to say about this book and author that this post may seem like a rant.  Please, if you are discouraged by rants, avert your eyes.  This post will be long, wordy and passionate.

First about the author.  Cory Doctorow is a very creative cat.  This guy is all over and has had the experience to have some authority of the subject of the book.  I only want to say that while I was reading the book, my first idea was "who is this guy".  After Google and I had a chat about him, I kept reading with a new found respect and perspective of the person who wrote the words.  Highest accolades, for Mr. Doctorow.  I'll leave it at those understated words since anything more would just sound like I was kissing butt, which I'm not.  And in the effort to save a few bits, I'm going to refer to Mr. Doctorow as Cory for the rest of this article.

Second, the book.  Ok, so the book was released in digital format free to download.  This is the first big shift in the concepts of selling books.  I could just imagine in my head some stuffy boardroom where stuffy men called publishers would hear the words of the author, that he wanted to give away free digital copies of the book, where he would quickly be escorted from the room.  But it turns out that Cory was SO right on.  I mean to say that I downloaded it, I read it.  I liked it so much that I felt it would be a great have for my two boys 15 and 9 in the coming years.  So I bought it.  Yes, I had a free digital copy and had already read it, still I purchased a dead-tree version of the book.  Cory, thanks for proving them all wrong on this point.  That giving a copy for free doesn't mean you won't sell books.

Third, the content.  I, like Cory, am of the generation that were raised in the final decades of the cold war era while living in North America.  Which means we were both in school when the book 1984 by George Orwell would have been shoved down our throats for about 3 years of our education.  I remember that when they were making us read this book in the United States, they were really pushing the simile of Big Brother to the communist USSR of old.  I also remember at the time that the Orwell novel did not impress me nearly as much as it probably should have.  Cory's story is a thousand time better.  It is also spoken in the voice of the participate rather than someone recording the events from the 3rd person.  I was touched by Cory's book, really touched in a way that hasn't happened for a long time.

Fourth, the after.  Ok, I know what Cory wrote was fiction.  There was a lot of true stuff, but a healthy dose of fiction too.  I personally think that some of his fictional ideas in this book are worth seriously looking into.  I admire his creativeness with the concepts of the unreal stuff he made in the book.  But I think they are noteworthy and quite honestly quite possible to do.  I am not sure how, but Cory's book has inspired me to at least have the motivation of trying to work on my first open source project.  I really don't want to get into huge descriptions since that might ruin the book if you haven't read it.  But if Cory is guilty of nothing else, he is guilty of inspiring another member of his generation to possibly create, organize or at the very least dream of doing something.  Causes as they are have not been the forte' of our generation.  That was what "hippies" did for nukes and equal rights.  I really think that Cory may have identified the single cause of our generation that can get me excited.

Cory, thanks for your work, this book is great.  I'll also be happy to now join whatever "Cory Doctorow fanboy" club or status board is required to show that I am a full paid-up member.

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CafeNinja

Jaunty is coming

With the impending arrival of the latest version of the Ubuntu zoo, Jaunty Jackalope has an anticipated release date of April, 2009.  I've only had a chance to look at one of the very first alpha verisons in the first weeks of December 2008.  I didn't then, nor do I want to now offer any kind of a review since that very early alpha would have been still mostly Intrepid under the hood.  They really hadn't had a chance to make any difference.

I'm going to be blazing all of my systems with the first jaunty beta that I hear is reasonably stable.  I may only wait for upgrade of my netbooks.  I have a full Interpid install there and I would like to be sure that the transition there will go smoothly.  But, since I noticed that almost none of my other systems in the house are running the same versions of Ubuntu, I'm going to take the time to make the house "pure" and do clean installs accross the board with exception of my mac.

I hope to have all the systems installed before the end of the beta period so that I can participate with feedback and any bug reports.  I realize that as a non-coder in the linux community that my "product" as contribution to the community does not come in the form of improved code.  I have taken it upon myself to work harder at those things which I am capable of doing.  That is to triage bug reports on Launchpad, run beta versions of software and submit bugs so they may be fixed.  I'm also doing the very silly task of offering even just plain old feedback to the teams/developers who support my favorite applciations.

I think as the open source community grows and we have more and more software projects each year that the unsung heros of our time (the community developer) may not get much notice.  I know he is usually commended by his peers and he has the emotional satisfaction of the software he created that supports hundreds or thousands of users.  I just wanted to take this moment in my personal space to salute those people.  They all deserve a big round of applause, a pat on the back and a big "atta' boy".  All of you have my respect and my personal thanks for making your contribution to the community that I and my family consider ourselves a part of.

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CafeNinja

Information Overload

I know we've all experienced this, come back from a week vacation unplugged and all of your inboxes are full and RSS feeds are jammed full. The consensus that I've read from all of the GTD sites basically tell you to start eating less information, congregate them all in one place and if you get over your head in things you don't need but rather want that you should just mark as read all of your personal feeds and just pay attention to the work stuff until you are caught up.

I've developed a personal technique that lets me process important things for work timely during the times that I'm caught up and then mixes "info" notifications from work and personal feeds. This allows me to catch up on everything and/or keep up with priorites built in. Let me oversimplify what I mean and see if you get it.

I have a single (yes, single) email rule. I developed this system after Gmail gave me a different way to think about how to process my email. I use an archive folder and the inbox..only. The rule specifies that any email with my email address in To: or CC: get left in the inbox. All other pieces of mail go to the Archive folder. This means that for work, where I receive automated email notifications from almost every system that we have get lumped into one folder. My email applications only give me a visual or audio notification of new email in the Inbox only. That way as the tons of emails spew in during the day they don't distract me from the important things.

I have to confess that even 3 years ago I was sorting email into 40 folders based on who it was from, while this is nice in the moment, it usually prevents most email applications from being able to show a thread or discussion in one continuous flow. I then move Inbox emails to the Archive folder once the final response to the confersation has been sent. This means my inbox is actionable and the stuff in Archive is in fact done.

That way I can interact with people in my workspace, address the important email messages from customers and co-workers in real-time. I then set asside two or three times a day to check both the bulk emails and my RSS fieds. That way my time is utilized for what I need to do when I need to do it. And, the time I set aside for the lower priority bulk is usually not interupted.

I have to say that my way is grossly oversimplified for the purpose of processing hundreds of emails a day. Your case may be different, it may even be paper, but the priority built into the way it arrives at your desk is the important for you to manage your flow. The hardest part of this is when the information comes to you via channels that are beyond your control and that can produce a lot of frustration. Even for folks who receive their information in the same way as I do have a hard time taking the first step to change the way they have been processing that information for ages.

Change is good, it has really helped me in my workflow and the few co-workers I have to have seen what I do are usually impressed and benefit from seeing my method even if they only apply some of these ideas in a very high level method.

Feel free to put your real-world methods in the comments and share how you managed to make digesting all of your information in a more sane way.

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CafeNinja

EEE PC - Intrepid Ibex - resource round-up

So, my confession is that I did not upgrade my eee pc 700 8G just as soon as it was released. I did try out a fresh release of Ubuntu-eee which has the remix interface included and all the drivers "out of the box". I was a bit put off by the interface (not horrible, just not for me) and waiting until I found concise guides for upgrading to 8.10 with as little issue as possible.

I found two links which seemed to sum up everything I needed to do. The first is a howto provided by the ever-excellent Tombunutu blog. This guide is more or less the best method for upgrading to a standard 8.10 install and then changing the kernel to that provided by Array.org which has all the correct modules pre-compiled. Array also follows new kernel releases closely with the correct modifications made so that you don't need to recompile drivers each time you upgrade the systems kernel.

I have to confess that after the straight 8.10 install and updating to the Array kernel I made one fix, listed at Ubuntugeek in an article about Atheros wifi. I followed method 2 and only needed to add ath_pci to the blacklist.

In summary my upgrade looked very much like:

1.) Install 8.10 from usb.
2.) Method 2 of Ubuntugeek for working wireless.
3.) Change to the eee modified kernel from Array.

I know it's not a simple check-box selection + reboot, but I have to say that it's much easier than the process that needed to be done for 8.04. I'm thinking to try the new 9.04 Jaunty as frequently as I can to see if it delivers much of the "out of the box" functionality promised in 8.10.

Best of luck with your EEE upgrade, feel free to post your resources used in the comments. Please also share your success and problems (fail!).

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CafeNinja

An easy blog app! w00t

I have found that one of the most distracting things from posting on this blog is that it isn't as easy to access like twitter or jaiku. I have just discovered a great application for linux that should make posting here as easy as the others.

By ease of access I should say that recently thanks to Dan of Linux Outlaws I've started using Gwibber which works like pidgin for microblogging and now I can reach Jaiku or Twitter just as easy as sending an instant message to my friends from a single application.

In the past I have tried to use flock to post with since it has a great tool for writing blog posts, but I find it too much application to launch and use for spontaneous use.

Enter Gnome-blog a.k.a. gnome-blog-poster. Easy to use, pretty powerful application and it is lightweight and most important it's easy to get to with a simple shortcut on the top panel of my gnome desktop even on my eeepc.

I highly recommend it to anyone trying to upkeep a blog, check out the site to see if your blogging site/software is supported.

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CafeNinja