Dave's Tech Blog
A Third Eye on Technology

Not so long ago I was given a scanner/printer from a client of mine who had no use for it (thanks Fred).  I don’t have much use for a scanner so I gave it to my mom.  After getting it to work for her I showed her how to use the built-in scanner import utility included with Windows XP to scan things.  With it she scanned off a bunch of photos from old albums, most of which were filled with pictures of me and my siblings from when we were kids.  You get a sense of going back in time, you remember things you’ve forgotten, by viewing photographs that are as old as you are.  Wanna know what I looked like when I was a baby?  Well here you go!

Guess what.  I still have that exact teddy bear.  It was a gift from my dad… I believe for my first birthday (I’ll have to double-check that factoid).  Here it is sitting on top of my PC:

Now… there were of course a lot of other neat pictures of me as a child in that collection.  Like this striking photo that I didn’t know anything about until a few weeks ago:

It was taken by a local newspaper photographer… I can’t remember exactly why at the moment but it was just after I was born in the good old days of 1982.  My mother still has the original news paper clipping with caption that used this photo… I’ll have to get a copy of that sometime.

Then there are the cute action shots:

Reading Garfield

Fixing The TV

Jammin’

Breaking Child Labor Laws (And Makin’ Bank!)

There are too many pictures to show.  No, I don’t feel like posting the one of me sitting on Santa’s lap while wearing a boy scout uniform (I’m not making this up either).  As funny looking as it is, I can’t help but look at it and think to myself, “Wow, look at all that brainwashing in action!”  Bottom line is, this was an AWESOME Christmas gift!  Thanks mom!

I started using Ubuntu heavily about 3 years ago and I’ve been using the default interface known as GNOME.  Lacking an expansion of the technical differences, here’s a picture of what GNOME looks like:

I’m not going to go into the technical differences.  All I want to say is that I liked this interface because it felt like a good blend of the interface between what you find in a default Windows install (a task bar on the bottom used for switching between open applications/show the desktop/house the trashcan).  It also had an upper task bar that reminds me of the classic Mac OS (upper panel with application/places/system menus/clock/sound controls, both panels are completely customizable).  But there’s another interface called KDE, which is more like Windows than GNOME or Mac OS.  Here’s a screenshot I just took from my laptop after installing the kubuntu-desktop package (Click to see full size):

It’s something very nice to play with and try out if you have some free time.  (EDIT:  Don’t try this on a production machine.  Do it on a machine that you can tinker with in case something goes wrong). If you’re runing GNOME right now and you’d like to try this out, do this following:

1.  Click Applications>Accessories>Terminal

2.  Type:

• sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop

After it’s finished, log off.

When the login screen appears, click on the “Options” button in the lower left and then click “Change Session”.  Here you’ll be shown a list of the different “Front End” (Interfaces, such as KDE, GNOME and others) that you can use with Ubuntu.  KDE should be in the list.  Select it, and then click OK.

Proceed to login with your username and password.  It will then ask you if you want to make KDE the default, or if you want to just use it once for now, and revert back to GNOME at the next login.

If you’ve never used KDE on your PC before, it will take some time to load all the way to the desktop on the very first run.  I believe it sets up all the menus and shortcuts for all the installed software.  If you log off and log back into KDE, all the logins (and the  splash screen) will load a lot faster

I’m experimenting with this interface just for fun and to become acquainted with it.  I’m not going to criticize it, although there are tiny things about it that I don’t like.  That happens to everybody who tries a new GUI.  But other than the minor things, I’m liking it a LOT.

Someone I work with has this Santa on their office door:

Being as I work 12 hour shifts there and have a lot of free time on my hands… I thought I’d make a little modification:

I got an email today from an IT recruiter asking if I might be interested in either one of a couple of field tech positions. Both involved doing work on home PCs for people who had purchased extended warranty/service plans from retailers (Staples/Office Depot was mentioned). It sounded innocent enough.  The job descriptions were pretty good and all, but one major detail remained unknown: What does it pay?

So I shot a quick reply back from my phone: “What’s the pay range?”

Most everybody I’ve ever gotten a job offer from or who have posted job listings state in clear print what the job is going to pay, usually like this: “Pay rate is $11 ~ $14 an hour, based upon experience,” or, “Pay is exactly $17 an hour, 8 hours a day for 3 days only.”  So you can at least get a ball park idea of what you will get if you pursue the offer.

His reply back to me: “Can you give me a call or do you have a number I can reach you at.”

This set a red flag off. For one,  his original email to me said he found my website… apparently he overlooked the phone number that’s plastered all over it (if not the entire site). Two: He didn’t answer my question.  What’s wrong with putting a pay rate down in written reply? From where I’m siting there is a lot wrong with not making this clear from the beginning. An email (printed text in general) can be honored of as part of the contract agreement.  It could even be used against them in court of they didn’t hold to a promise made or high-balled their offer to entice me.  But an unrecorded phone call? Who knows what kind of BS they’d throw at me. I could just imagine it: “Yes the pay will probably be X dollars. But it’s not even up to me so we’ll have to wait and see.  We need you to submit your background check/W-9 paperwork first.”

After giving it some thought I decided to not call, but reply: “I appreciate your interest, but must respectfully decline. I am quite busy with other contracts as well as my own freelance work and feel that there would be a potential conflict of interest down the road. I am also suspicious about ********’s policy of not quoting pay ranges in writing.”

I’m pretty sure it was the right thing to do.  There is a good chance that the job they wanted to offer me came,  not with hourly based compensation, but salary based compensation.  Salary (in my observations) seems to end up being unfair to most people.  You often end up working more than you had expected to work and get little if any extra thanks for your efforts.  And if you complain about it management will likely tell you its your problem to deal with, not theirs (which wouldn’t be their reply if you were paid by the hour).

It would be different if this job involved fixing PCs in an office environment, where usage policies were enforced and virus frequency reduced.  But salary pay to fix an unlimited number of home PCs that are who knows how many miles away and infected with who knows what?  I doubt I’d end up getting a fair break.  I’m glad I turned this offer down.

Cisco, the most famous manufacturer of enterprise and consumer networking devices, has been known to use source code from open-source projects like Linux and other related software to run on their hardware.  Using free software for commercial gain is not against the law.  What is against the law is ignoring the GPL (GNU Public License) which states that you must publish any changes or modifications you make to the source code if you’re going to continue using it for commercial purposes.  In other words, you can’t take code that is more or less owned by the public, modify it, and then lock those modifications away from public sight and say that the code is now your own unique, proprietary creation.  Cisco has been accused of doing this since 2004, but now the Free Software Foundation has had enough.  The FSF has never sought any sort of royalties or money from Cisco for using open-source software (it would be impossible to do that).  What they want is for them to abide by the GPL and keep their source code public.

You can read a little more about Cisco’s incompetent and/or deliberately obstructive behavior here.

As much as it would probably sooth the stiffness in my neck and shoulders from doing busy work inventorying computer equipment today, I’m going to try to not turn this into a sarcastic sounding slam against Microsoft… although they damn well deserve it.

I’ll just keep this very short.  Internet Explorer has once again dropped the ball in the realm of Internet security and it’s something that’s been present for over 48 hours already.  You can read about the problem via BBC’s website by clicking here.

The article states in bold letters at the top, “Security experts recommend switching to a rival browser until the problem is fixed.”  Need a rival web browser?  Download Firefox at www.firefox.com.  It’s free, faster and much more secure than Internet Explorer ever will be.  Seriously.  Why is it more secure, you ask?  Because it’s open-source, just like Linux.  But again… don’t wanna turn this into a “Microsoft sucks” bashing post.

Also, on the side, I should mention that I’ve see a LOT of Windows systems get hit with viruses in the last 3 weeks, a good chunk of which have come in from emails on Facebook.  Which isn’t to say that Facebook is bad.  It just doesn’t have much of an effective spam filter or virus scanner built into it.  You would think that after a few people have recieved the same spam from their friend whose computer was compromised, they’d start filtering messages with the same links, the same stupid subject line, and all the rest that comes along with basic social engineering-based viruses.  It’s what Yahoo and Google do.  So to you Facebook/Myspace users out there (and everyone else who doesn’t uses these services), be VERY cautious about clicking on links to websites you’ve never visited to before in email sent to you by a friend.  They may not have actually sent you something.  In fact, it’s possible their account password was phished, changed, and their account used as a lauch pad for spreading the same infection to other people (like you).  So be careful.

I recently rebuilt my PC with all new hardware (new motherboard, CPU, RAM, eventually a big terabyte hard drive, and most importantly a NICE video card).  As a result I’ve been spending more time gaming on my PC.  I more or less quit gaming about 3 years ago after I started using Ubuntu more instead of Windows.  No, I didn’t really hold back on gaming because of Ubuntu (I still had Windows installed and could easily fire it up if I felt like playing), but I stopped because my hardware really sucked.  Not only that but there weren’t really many games on the market that seemed to be worth a damn, so I didn’t have much incentive to spend money on hardware.  Holding off for a few extra years helped me concentrate more on learning a new operating system in the meantime and saved me a lot of money on new hardware.

In short, I think I’ve put about $300 into all the hardware and it’s more than capable of playing Crysis as well as future games based upon the id Tech 5 engine.  The card I purchased is a nVidia 9600GSO with 756MB of video RAM (yes, the card came with that silly door hanger pictured above).  The amount of RAM alone is 3 times more than any card I’ve ever had in the past so I knew I would likely be very satisfied with its capabilities, and I have been VERY satisfied.  The CPU is an AMD X2 (Dual Core) 5600 (2.9 Ghz per core).  After doing some tests (video conversion in particular) the system appears to be just a hair over 4 times faster than my old setup.  I’d write more… but I got some gaming to do.

Edit:  Flurrymail announced on May 31, 2009 that they were ending their support for their J2ME application and will cease allowing users to access their personal email after June 5th.  I’ve not yet discovered a comparable replacement for it, so if you know of one please comments on this post or send me an email.  Thanks!

Not so long ago I wrote a post called Make your dumb cell phone smart with J2ME which showed most of you (depending on the type of phone you have) how to download Java Mobile applications and install them on your phone.  One of the applications I gave a thumbs-up to was called Movamail, which allowed you to check and compose your IMAP/SMTP/POP3 email from your cell phone.  About 3 days ago I noticed that no matter how many times I tried, Movamail would fail to connect to my email address.  I later discovered that their entire website is now dead.  So it would appear that Movamail forgot to pay their electricity bill.

I did some looking around for a replacement app and I’ve found one that I feel very comfortable with and have confidence it will not go under in the same manner that Movamail did.  It’s called Flurrymail.

I found the Flurrymail applications on www.getjar.com, where you’ll find a ton of J2ME mobile applications (most of them are junk but there are a few gems out there).  Flurrymail had received a lot of positive comments, most of which said it was easy to use.  So if you’d like to download it click here.

Now when I first set this thing up it asked me to signup with Flurrymail’s website.  No big deal.  But I will tell you that it’s much easier to do all of this at their website, www.flurrymail.com, instead of through your cell phone.  After I filled out their little signup form, I had trouble logging in.  I was getting a “Either your username or password is incorrect” error messages, and even after I confirmed my username and password with their “I forgot my password” link, it still wouldn’t let me it.  I was about to post a complaint on their support forums, but while waiting for activation from a moderator, I tried to sign in to my new account again a few hours later and it worked.  All I had to do at that point was add my email account to my new Flurry account.  The cool thing about this is that you can add multiple email accounts to your flurry mail so that it’s possible to check multiple in-boxes from your cell phone at the same time.  Not just IMAP/SMTP/POP3 accounts, but also many mainstream web-based email providers like Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, .mac and AOL.

Setting up my email from their website proved to be easier than I had anticipated.  All I had to do to configure my IMAP email was enter my server name, username and password and it automatically setup the SMTP settings for sending mail.  It literally took about 30 seconds.  This app rocks the socks off Movamail in speed and reliability.  Movamail would often take a few connection reattempts in order for it to work, but Flurry is very quick and works every time I check my Inbox.  Win!

Many Ubuntu Linux users have Desktop Effects enabled.  (If you don’t have it enabled, click System>Preferences>Appearence>Visual Effects Tab to enable).  This is the window management feature (formally known as Compiz Fusion) that is responsible for creating all that bad ass eye candy that makes Windows and Mac users livid with envy.  You know what I’m talking about.  You’ll be sitting in a classroom with someone who just spent $3000 on a new Vista equipped laptop.  In an attempt to live up to the hype and justify the money they just spent, they flaunt their new laptop as if it were encrusted with platinum and diamonds.  Then they say in a very serious tone, “Watch this.”  As if they were about to cast some sort of medieval hand magic, holding their breath hoping to invoke absolute silence in the rest of the room, they proceed to slowly press the Windows+Tab keys together with their left hand (slightly touching themselves with their right).  At the same time they look at you waiting to see and absorb your initial reaction for the purposes of boosting their self-esteem as their screen does this:

Glancing back at this person basking in the glow of their costly purchase you reply, “Mine does something like that.”  While reaching for your own Ubuntu equipped laptop, they proceed to tap the Tab key while holding the Windows button, thumbing through their 3D Rolodex of running apps in an attempt to grab your attention again.  “You can switch between them like this,” they add, while verging upon self-induced nerdgasm.  In your most professional tone you reply, “Neat.”

Revealing your own laptop, a device that could easily be 4 years old by now, you set it down and turn it on with a semi-placid smile.  They appear to be conflicted with child-like curiosity and clinical anxiety as the boot-splash screen appears.  To sooth the mild nervousness while waiting, they go back to fiddling with their side-bar and grin again while changing the themed appearance of the analog clock.  But once your cost free, open-source Linux OS is up and running, you start to watch their eyes, waiting for that split second their glued stare falters back to your laptop, and that’s when they see this on your screen:

You didn’t even give them any advanced warning.  For a second they’re in a state of denial, but as you start to drag your mouse around to freely rotate that cube, they can’t help but let their hands fall away from their respective peripherals.  Drool almost precipitates as you maximize and minimize windows.  Some vanish with a Star Trek teleporter effect; others in a ball of flames and smoke.  They feel that perhaps they’ve been fooled by a dreadful hoax, like those poor saps who partook in the Mojave experiments.  And then…

So, what’s this about watching Youtube?

Right.  Sorry, got carried away there.  Bloggers call that “filler”.  Without it the post would be about as exciting as milk without the the stawberry syrup…. Moving along:

If you’ve got Compiz running right now try this:

• Hold down the Windows Key (called the SuperButton in Ubuntu)
• Roll the scroll wheel up on your mouse

This will cause you to zoom into wherever your mouse is located. To zoom out, just hold that Super Button down again, and scroll down instead of up.

Now you’re might be thinking, “I see what you’re getting at.  You’re going to show us how to zoom in on our Youtube videos so we can watch them full screen.  Big fat deal!”

Well, no it’s not a big deal.  But something you’ll probably discover and be annoyed by when you try this with Youtube is the fact that the mouse cursor stays on the screen, often right over the middle of the video you’re trying to watch.  So, here’s the other half of this trick:

• After zooming in, press SuperButton + L

This will unlock the cursor from the zoom, allowing you to move it off screen and away from the video you want to watch.  When you’re finished, you just hit Super Button + L again to lock it again, and then Super + Downscroll to zoom back out to normal.

I prefer to do this with Youtube (and other flash-based videos) because often times using their built in “Full-screen” buttons causes the frame rate to get jerky (Windows suffers from the same problem).  But when you zoom into the videos with Compiz, they often playback more smoothly.  Anyway, enjoy your Youtube.

P.S.

If you haven’t heard, Steam is officially coming to Linux!  Hence the epicness of the Black Mesa teaser.