GibbonsR.net

I don’t know where last week went. I had about 10 things to write about, but nothing come of them. I’ve got to get better about at least jotting down my thoughts throughout the day, as I can’t remember anything right now.

I’ve looked at a few software packages. Played with a few other programs, nothing huge. I went to a FWLUG (Fort Worth Linux User Group) meeting on Saturday, It was my first meeting, and a good one, the presenter talked about building your own Live CD. During the presentation there were some down times, and during those time I fixed my AIGLX / GLX issues. Not only did I need the git versions of mesa, drm and ati drivers, I also needed the git version of xserver. Everything works like a charm now. I am back on Compiz-Fusion. I was on Openbox (can’t stand metacity) and I was happy, Openbox with xcompmgr maeks a very nice app. I just missed my expose and scale plugins. Other then that my compiz settings are pretty dry, and my emerald theme just mimics the *Box style with a bit of transparency.

The other cool thing is I was able to score a DEC Alpha while I was there, at no charge. I am pretty stoked about that. I can’t wait to test out VMS (currently installed) for a few minutes before I wipe it and load Gentoo on it. That should provide some interesting discoveries, I can’t wait.

I have also been looking into getting a 3G card for my laptop. It looks like all the Sierra Wireless cards work with linux, they even provide the code for the modules. But with this , my wireless bill goes up another 50 or 60 bucks a month .. great. I’ve been looking at the iPhones, but I have some outstanding issues with their design and Apples and AT&T’s philosophy on how they are running things. One issue is they don’t allow you to tether it to our laptop to use it has a modem. Luckily, you can’t keep a good tech down, and people have found several ways of allowing you to connect to it. Despite Apple’s effort to thwart people from loading 3rd party software on the phone. That might be enough to have me think about getting one!

After all of this, I am leaving for Vacation in 4 days and a wake up. I’m can’t wait, we are going to the Bahamas, Nasau to be exact. It will be good to get away. I am afraid it will be a long week trying to wrap everything up before I leave the country .. which stresses me out just thinking about it. Oh well, heres to a good and short week.

And now I have more proof. Thanks to my dad for passing the link along.

http://www.kevitivity.com/geeksquad.html

Unbelievable. This sort of thing erks me so bad. There are people in the IT business that give all of us a bad name. The ones that understand the issues top to bottom, enjoy what they do, and bend over backwards trying to get people working comfortably on their PC’s. Why would you cut the cables, why? The only reason I can think of is trying to hide what you really did!

I’ve had my own personal issues with Best Buy. I’ve had several instances where personal friends and friends of the family have gone to Best Buy with a “Hard Drive Crash”, and where told all the data is unrecoverable. I end up getting wind of it, and take a quick look only to find out that a quick restore from an XP disk fixed the problem. Or even better where that wouldn’t even work but hooking it up to another Windows box was able to open the drive and view all the files. The most common type of recovering for me is hooking it up to my laptop and pulling off all the data inside Linux. Yep that’s right, using Linux to recover all the lost for a File system failure. There are livecd’s that provide the same functionality.

This is just ridiculous. And yet another reason I boycott Best Buy and refuse to do business with them to the best of my ability.

I’ve looked into this before, but haven’t done nothing about it. I am starting to look back into it a bit more heavily. My only requirements are something that works the I think it should (that’s such a clear term isn’t it) and that it’s open source. If there is a commercial backing to it, even better as I to find something for my company also.

Basically my requirements are pretty open .. pun intended. I’ve started off by trying to define what all I need out of a DAM (Digital Asset Management). I think this is part of my problem, DAM’s are relatively new and there isn’t a lot out there about them. Even the term itself is open to interpretation. Personally I am looking for something that will manage personal photos, business pictures, images, documents, and movies. I am looking for it to support applications / files from not only the open source Gimp, Inkscape, Open Office, etc but also the entire Microsoft Office product line, Adobe’s products, and source files. It doesn’t necessarily have to be able to read these, just be able to handle revisions of each.

I haven’t really look in the commercial world I know Adobe as a product which can do DAM, but what it can all handle, I don’t know. Open source wise I have found a few programs. I have found Alfresco, OpenEdit, and Razuna. Alfresco will do it, but it is built to be more then just a DAM, but designed to handle workflow and processes also, the default interface is very powerful and actually intimidating. I’ve looked into, and believe it is more then I am wanting right now, and it would take a lot of work to get it to a point where I could / want to use it. I am still reading up on Open Edit and Razuna. I am opening to find some more features I want to help narrow things down.

As you might of noticed I name the post Part 1, I plan on this being an on going discussion and letting me get my thoughts out of my head and on to paper.

Do you have any ideas or thoughts about what I should be looking for or at?

Is such a thing possible?

As me and my Wife are planning for a house, one of the real facts about credit cards hit me, variable interest rate. I had a credit card holding my debt from my college years sitting there I was making about twice the minimum payment and had never been late. One day I notice my interest rate sky rocketed .. I was a bit shock and when I called for an explanation they didn’t have one besides, we just decided to do it. I’ve been with the company for over 3 years, I was pissed

So now we are working on budget, one that will by off the debt I’ve been ignoring. What sucks is we have gotten away from credit cards completely about 1 1/2 years ago, but never focused on paying them off. Now we need to and doing so will defiantly help us out in the long run. It is just going to be a long bumpy road until then.

We’ve created a budget, and we were realistic with it, we left in money for a dinner every now and again, for this or that. But we have cut out are cleaning lady, we are going to cut back on our satellite subscription, along with other things we can think of down the road. Hopefully in 6 months time I will be able to report back with favourable conditions.

I finally left the fglrx closed sourced drivers and loaded up the ati drivers from the git repo. These code in git includes the ability for 3d acceleration for the r500 chips. I have an x1300 in my laptop, which I believe is a r515. So naturally I my curiosity won and I had to give them a go.

I found Phoronix post detailing how to install ati on gentoo, Ended up only unmasking the git ebuilds for the packages listed in the 2nd or 3rd post. I didn’t install the x11-drm packages b/c I am now running 2.6.26 kernel which includes these. Install was quick, and after the reboot I found my first problem, Compiz wouldn’t run .. shit. I disabled compiz from running at startup and just used plain metacity, and everything seems to work, 2d works just find and was pretty snappy. So this was a good port. I checked dmesg, and found drm was loaded just fine. I then checked glxinfo and found that I didn’t have direct rendering.

After playing around some more I found a out something very weird. 3D rendering did work, but only once, after it ran the first time, it will fail to work again. I can run glxinfo once and see Directing Rendering: Yes, or I can run glxgears just once. But after that I can’t an error about not being about to find rgb glx visual’s. Exact errors from glxinfo and glxgears are as follow

% glxinfo
name of display: :0.0
Error: couldn't find RGB GLX visual

visual x bf lv rg d st colorbuffer ax dp st accumbuffer ms cav
id dep cl sp sz l ci b ro r g b a bf th cl r g b a ns b eat
----------------------------------------------------------------------
0x23 24 tc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x24 24 tc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x25 24 tc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x26 24 tc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x27 24 tc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x28 24 tc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x29 24 tc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x2a 24 tc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x2b 24 dc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x2c 24 dc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x2d 24 dc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x2e 24 dc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x2f 24 dc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x30 24 dc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x31 24 dc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x32 24 dc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None
0x64 32 tc 1 0 0 c . . 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 None

% glxgears
Error: couldn't get an RGB, Double-buffered visual

So it seems I got a bit more work to do, I might be needing a few more packages that are considered “stable” in gentoo yet

This topic has been spoken on a lot, a quick google search shows that this topic has brought up as far back as 2003 when The Inquirer wrote Is Google the next Microsoft?. A buddy of mine in the industry sent me a more recent article by RedmondMag Google, the next Microsoft and ask for my thoughts on the issue. I will start off by saying, this isn’t a black and white questions and/or answer. This is a very hot topic, not in because everyone is talking about it, but because of what it means. Both to corporate users, end users and the technology community.

There is no doubt Microsoft is a monopoly, even after going through the courts over the issue, they are still a monopoly and flex their muscle when they want to. Over the years though, Microsoft has position it self as a company for the corporate world. That is how they got their start, and that is where they continue to focus, offering steep discounts for the more you purchase, which every retailer does. What this allows is for Windows and Office to be forced on the employees, which learn to use it and get comfortable with it and then look for the same solution when they go buy a personal PC. That is all fine, as that has been done for years and years. But times are changing and Microsoft is not. They have continued to ignore the end user and ignore the technical community that is also such a deep part of Microsoft’s success.

Google on the other hand is the opposite, they focus on the end user, they focus on the technical communities they have given them the power they have. They give back to the open source products which drive the backbone of their products. They provide innovative software and tools to GTD (get things done). They do all of these for free for the end-user, but charge the corporations who want to build their software repository off of these Google Services. Free is a very loose term, we are still paying for it, we are paying for it not via our hard earned cash, but instead in our information. We give up our browsing habits and the information we store in their applications. But, the free software and services isn’t the only thing we get in return. We also get ads, the wonderful world of ads. What is different about the google ads, they aren’t intrusive as most and they are relevant to you and what you are looking for. So while Ads have a negative stigma around them, these are actually benefical has they open your eyes to products and deals you didn’t know about. Not just random ones, but relevant to what you like.

This is the biggest difference from Microsoft and Google, their focus on the client is completely different. Google is for improving the end user experience and for providing rich services. Microsoft can provide rich services, but loses focus of the client.

Now don’t get me wrong, Google is becoming if not already, a monopoly. This difference being they haven’t showed any bad faith. Microsoft has tarnished it’s name and ruined it’s trust in the eyes of many, and that will take a long time to get back. Google hasn’t lost this yet, and they should be aware of this and learn from Microsoft. Keep the good will, keep the trust, and you will succeed.

As many know, I am a huge Open Source advocate, but I am a bit different then most. I do not want to see Microsoft’s demise. I do not want to see Microsoft to become 100% open source. I do want to see Microsoft become a responsible corporate citizen. Not just “Business” corporation, but technical. I want to see them give back from the places they started and from the projects they use. (I’m pointing their Network stack here). Release the knowledge and you will see Microsoft flourish.

Yeah, so … Don’t leave your laptop power adapter at work over a 3 day weekend. It sucks. Especially when it would of taken me two hours to pick it up. I opted to go without it for the weekend. It was a long weekend http://gibbonsr.net/rsc/smilies/icon_smile.gif” alt=”:)” class=”middle” />

There is no doubt that both of these topics are on the top of the discussion boards. They have been proven to save energy and most of the time cut costs. But you know a topic has reach stardom when ‘big’ time news and blog sources right about it, but the 3 page article doesn’t even make a single point.

http://www.itwire.com/content/view/19485/1154/1/2/

It goes in a complete circle, and after reading it I walking away learning nothing. Not be enlightened, and felling great disappointment. The article title “Will hypervisors make Ubuntu and other Linux operating systems obsolete?” sounds like it would be a great article. But it isn’t. It is filled full of buzzwords to generate traffic.

What worries me, is the same most have said and seen, IT is becoming political. This article is a prime example. There is no point, they ask a question, give a single word answer, but don’t explain it. It is blog spam. On most sites (like mine) this might not matter, but on a company / news site, we should be expected/given/demand more.

What shows even more they are going after buzz words, is they taking about Linux failing. How it “might” not make it. They don’t talk about windows failing as an OS if Hypervisors take over. What else is funny, they don’t even mention the fact the Virtual Machines still need an OS to run … kind of ironic. Bah, this article has pissed me off and wasted enough of my time

We should be demanding more out of our news sources, both Online and Off

So most people are talking about the rise of Firefox, and the market share it is capturing. But one thing people are failing to mention is the market that these stats are taking from. If I take one of my own communities (granted very small) which focuses on open source on laptops then you would find Linux OS 42% and Windows at 55% (amazing how even an Linux driven content still has a majority of Windows OS as it user hits in the past month). You will find Firefox at 61%, IE at 22%, Opera at 7% and Mozilla at 6.5%. While the OS scale isn’t what I expected, the browser market is about right (especially when considering the inflated Windows OS numbers).

Now, that was a tech market, lets move to the business market. Again I work for a Project Management training and consulting firm. I am registering Windows at 96%, Macs at 3% and Linux at .5%. This is about on target with other publishing authorities. For the regard, other OS’es registered are SunOS, PalmOS (my cell :/), iPhone and SymbianOS (the CEO’s cell). Pretty interesting. Now, for the kicker the browser market share. While seeing IE at 77%, Mozilla at 20%, Safari at 2% and Opera at 1% doesn’t shock me too much, what does it the versioning within the two biggest, IE and Firefox.

The majority of our Internet users are using IE 6.0, making up 50% of IE traffic. That is nearly 40% of our site’s visitors. Just under the other 50% is IE 7.0, which the other .5 percent being IE 5 and IE 8. Come on, are you kidding me. Their are still companies that haven’t moved to IE 7 yet. I understand not doing it the first year. But seriously. IE 7 makes a world of difference, for both the end user and the web developers. In my eyes, this is just unacceptable. If you have a corporate web site or app that requires IE 6, then you need to get on the move and get it updated to dump IE 6.

Firefox is moving along nicely. Considering it has only been released for a few weeks now. We are registering 30% of our users running Firefox 3.0. I am showing just over 1% using 1.5, with the rest of the FF users running some version 2.0. This is about what I expected. I am expecting by end of year to have FF 3.0 be over 75%. Unless they push FF 3.0 updates over their automatic update, then I expect that number to be closer to 90%. But as far as a web programming perspective, this isn’t as big as a deal, because FF 2.0 follows the specs set forth by HTML and CSS pretty closely, as does IE 7. The reasons for end users to upgrade remain the same, better security.

The last spec I thought was interesting, and have seen reported elsewhere is screen resolution and colors, these are very important. 98% of our users use a resolution of 1024×768 or higher, which 35% using exactly 1024×768, only 2% use 800×600. Which is great when desining a site, the extra width planning for 1024 verus 600 is awesome. Screen colors actually suprised me a bit. I would expect 32bit color to be over 95%, but it isn’t. it is just under 90%. 24 bit at 3% and 16 bit at 6%. Interesting.

I am not going to do any grand finale conclusion, as those are mostly crocs of shit anyways. What I am going to leave you with is the numbers and let you draw your on conclusions. These numbers don’t tell you how much better any one product is compared to another or better adoption of one to the other. Just the stats over a month.

So, it’s only a proof on concept I did in about 15 minutes before going to be, but I thought I would go ahead and show it off. Please critic.

Or you can Download the XCF and play with it yourself.

The 92.1 Image came from Neo on Flickr and the Tux logo com from wikinews

EDIT :: Some have ask in other places what 92.1 KTFW is, they is a local Country Radio station. http://countrylegends921.com/