Month: January 2007

Posted on by — 5 Comments

Do you dance with the Crazy Frog?

Are you familiar with The Annoying Thing? If not, you should watch the Crazy Frog Axel F video (2m 51s). Noah fell in love with this video a year ago and played it over and over and over. He’d get his boogie on and bounce, smile huge and laugh! Turns out The Annoying Thing has been highly marketed. There are music cds. There are all sizes of stuffed animals and animatronics. There are karoke microphones and radios. There are games and pencils and books. This Crazy Frog is a crazy phenomena.

In 1997, 17-year-old Swede Daniel Malmedahl recorded himself impersonating the sounds produced by internal combustion engines. …
In late-2000, Malmedahl’s fellow Swede Erik Wernquist encountered the sound effect and was inspired to create the 3D animation “The Annoying Thing” to accompany it. …
In 2004, the Germany based Jamba! group (ultimately owned by VeriSign) licensed the animation and sound for distribution as a mobile phone ringtone. …
[Source]

As a parent, toys with noise become evil. Acid leaking batteries abound and are hidden away for years in unsuspecting places. A burning desire for a simple wooden toy or anything that does not have an on/off switch develops and such toys become legend and things of myth. Even puzzles and books squawk, squeak, and talk to you now. Much to my wife’s chagrin, I like to walk through the toy store and simultaneously set off as many as possible of those obnoxious dolls with the tags that plead "try me now!" Nothing brings more pleasure than seeing an whole aisle of bouncing, gibbering furballs. Secretly I know that some parent will thank me when it goes silent just a little sooner than it would have otherwise. What you as a parent may not know, and I only found out a few days ago, is that those toys are (rather could be) operating in "demo" mode and that if you look near the battery compartment under the fur, you may find a switch that really turns the toy on for more fun, longer and varied annoying noises.

I can see my kids producing a video like these guys! There are some tasteless people out there in those comments. Online people should seriously follow the rule of "if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all."

Posted on by — 3 Comments

Dual Booting Windows and Linux

Quick lesson learned while installing Edubuntu: If you install Edubuntu then Windows, Windows will eat the boot manager and Linux will not boot. Use these steps:

  1. Partition your drive for Windows, Linux and boot mgr/swap. I personally divided the bulk of the harddrive evenly with an ext3 partition and an ntfs partition. The remaining space (roughly 1.5mb) I left for the Linux installer to play with.
  2. Install Windows into the ntfs partition. Doing this first will give the Linux installer the ability to see that Windows exists and it will do two things. One, it will add a link to the desktop to allow browsing of the Windows partition from Edubuntu, and two, it will add Windows into the grub boot manager.
  3. Install Edubuntu making sure to not format the ntfs partition (manually edit the partition table when it gives you the chance!) and you are done!
Posted on by — 8 Comments

Kill a programmer – ask them a question

A little disclaimer. My wife is going to take this personally and make it about her. But it’s not about her. Or the kids. It’s about the cat that constantly tries to crawl onto my keyboard. It’s about the incessant phone calls from nasty people. It’s about my mind that wants to wander to finishing projects on the house. It is about emails and computer glitches (right now my linux server doesn’t see the network..that’s an interruption). Client emergencies and angry instant messages. Angst. Yes. It is also about the thuds on the floor. The crying. Little people learning through physics, ye ol’ school of hard knocks. It’s about life’s necessary appointments and cooking dinner. Flooded bathrooms and washing machines.

All that said, a good friend of mine use to keep a piece of paper taped to the wall of his cubicle. It read:

No success at work can compensate for failure in the home.

That said, if I fail at work, I cannot provide for my family. There must be a balance. I will continue to bound up the stairs when I hear a thud following by a painful scream. I will drop everything to answer my wife’s whims. But I must keep a balance whereby work is not hindered. The cat is on notice though. Keep watching the video to see if it continues to land on all fours as I cat-apult it from my desk.

For years I have tried to explain, without success, to various non-programmers that a small interruption costs me 15 minutes of time. "But it will only take a second of your time." That second might be for a phone call, an office joke, move the laundry from the washer to the dryer, a technical question on a non-related project…the topic does not really matter, the interruption is the problem.

Logan Koester of Skin Deep writes about Overcoming Coder’s Block with some excellent advice and references none other than Joel on Software with Just a 60 second distraction can cost a programmer 15 minutes. Once again, I connect with Joel Spolsky very well! If you have a programmer in your life as his/her employer, spouse, or friend, please read this article; it’s the last paragraphs that are important.

Here’s the simple algebra. Let’s say (as the evidence seems to suggest) that if we interrupt a programmer, even for a minute, we’re really blowing away 15 minutes of productivity. For this example, lets put two programmers, Jeff and Mutt, in open cubicles next to each other in a standard Dilbert veal-fattening farm. Mutt can’t remember the name of the Unicode version of the strcpy function. He could look it up, which takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which takes 15 seconds. Since he’s sitting right next to Jeff, he asks Jeff. Jeff gets distracted and loses 15 minutes of productivity (to save Mutt 15 seconds).

Now let’s move them into separate offices with walls and doors. Now when Mutt can’t remember the name of that function, he could look it up, which still takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which now takes 45 seconds and involves standing up (not an easy task given the average physical fitness of programmers!). So he looks it up. So now Mutt loses 30 seconds of productivity, but we save 15 minutes for Jeff.

[Source]

Every programmer has their magic equation for creative productivity. For instance, I need a warm beverage in hand, my day has to begin early, an uncluttered work environment, a computer that moves as fast as I do, minimal white noise, and a well defined goal.

Posted on by — 6 Comments

Blogger – the gateway to WordPress

Blogger with its minimal barrier to entering the world of self-publishing helps people understand the pleasures of blogging. Then it frustrates us with service outages, bad customer service, and the inability to backup data and years of work. Then we discover there is a world of highly configurable, open source content management systems freely available. We learn about a wiki and that they too abound in open source but wikis serve a different a purpose than CMS.

A wiki (IPA: [ˈwɪ.kiː] or [ˈwiː.kiː] [1]) is a website that allows the visitors themselves to easily add, remove, and otherwise edit and change some available content, sometimes without the need for registration. This ease of interaction and operation makes a wiki an effective tool for mass collaborative authoring. …

WikiWikiWeb was the first such software to be called a wiki. Ward Cunningham started developing WikiWikiWeb in 1994 and installed it on Internet domain c2.com on March 25, 1995. It was named by Cunningham, who remembered a Honolulu International Airport counter employee telling him to take the so-called “Wiki Wiki” Chance RT-52 shuttle bus line that runs between the airport’s terminals. According to Cunningham, “I chose wiki-wiki as an alliterative substitute for ‘quick’ and thereby avoided naming this stuff quick-web.” “Wiki Wiki” is a reduplication of “wiki”, a Hawaiian-language word for fast. The word wiki is a shorter form of wiki wiki (weekie, weekie). The word is sometimes interpreted as the backronym for “what I know is”, which describes the knowledge contribution, storage, and the exchange function.

[Source]

A content management system (CMS) is a computer software system used to assist its users in the process of content management. A CMS facilitates the organization, control, and publication of a large body of documents and other content, such as images and multimedia resources. A CMS often facilitates the collaborative creation of documents. A web content management system is a content management system with additional features to ease the tasks required to publish web content to websites.

[Source]

I am a WordPress fan. WordPress has a shared solution similar to Blogger at WordPress.com and provides an open source solution at WordPress.org. The open source solution will give you more control but you will need to have a place to put your website which means paying for some hosting (which is cheap these days!).

On January 2nd I mentioned that Latte Man moved to WordPress. I should have also mentioned that Newscoma has moved to WordPress! Update your marks. Find Newscoma at http://newscoma.com/. Jon is still trying to get Katie to make the move away from Blogger.

There are other solutions. For great examples of Drupal installations, look at any of Tim’s sites. Anghus suggests that we take a look at Joomla.

Btw, if you are a programmer writing CMS systems, like I do, then this link to compare wysiwyg editors will be invaluable to you. I personally almost always end up with Xinha.

Posted on by — 3 Comments

Linux is easy

Edubuntu is really impressing me! The installation was easier than Windows. The interface is pretty. The pre-installed applications are fun and intriguing; some, like the movie editor, I want to use before passing the machine onto Noah. What impressed me the most is that after the installation I rebooted and it immediately prompted me that updates were available; exactly as Windows would have done! I expected that Linux was going to be an administrative nightmare. I was wrong!

I’ve partition the harddrive so that Edubuntu will take half. Noah will use this as his primary operating system. Linux will be used for his Internet exploration, research and browser games. Linux will be used for his productivity-school reports, video projects, spreadsheets, email and so forth. Linux will be used for education except when the educational software requires Windows. The Windows partition will be used for Windows specific games that have not been ported to Linux. The Windows partition will be used for websites that require Internet Explorer. The Windows partition will be used for educational software that has not been ported for Windows. He will also use it to become familiar with the Microsoft Office Suite although OpenOffice should make him comfortable enough.

I am really tickled with this setup. I am debating doing Sarah’s the same way.

Posted on by — 3 Comments

What’s that smell?

So the bedroom is starting to get a little gamey. I’m thinking a dirty diaper is under the bed or something. Then it occurs me to that I forgot about the squirrels in the woodstove!

Update: That is absolutely the nastiest thing I have had to deal with in a long time. I dug a hole out back then scooped the squirrel from the fire place and, when I dropped it in the hole, maggots poured from its head! Yuck! And yes, I’ll be on the roof with chicken wire shortly.

Posted on by — 9 Comments

We are violating our children’s rights!

Juliet Pain of Wales hates us. She suggests that someone get Dr. Phil to intervene with us quickly.

Perhaps some relative or friend will get Dr Phil intervention for them soon, as they do seem to have become a tad obsessed with documenting their lives, to the point where it looks as if they are living mainly in order to record them… [Source]

I say bring on the doc! He will say we are an incredibly well balanced, well adjusted, happy family.

We have received numerous thank yous and positive comments from Aspie caregivers for being so open about Tommy’s experiences. I don’t think we have ever posted anything embarassing about the children.

I feel sorry for people that do not understand technology and technology trends until after they happen. We are the midst of a publishing revolution. Biographies are being written real-time. I would love to go back and read about my life in, say, 1976. If privacy is your concern, you are barking up the wrong tree. The smart pass on your keychain reveals your whereabouts and personal information. Cameras abound in places that we never think to look. Your very purchases create a record of your existence and your doing. Without much effort, a person’s day can retrospectively be tracked down to minute.

for the most part, it would appear to be a violation of a child’s basic human rights, with reference to privacy, and of The Rights of the Child, with reference to dignity, and which convention has yet to be ratified by the US – not that it needs to be ratified for the right to truly exist (rights do not exist in reality, no), all that would take would be for the parents to discover or uncover some common sense [Source]

Our websites are but a mere glimpse into our whole lives. Our lives are much more full than what the words in these posts imply. There is more drama. There are more tears. There is screaming and fighting. There is undocumented laughter and joy. There are financial hardships and worry. There is life! You live it once, you should live it fully and we do!

I do no injustice to my children through my publishings. They have no loss of dignity. I know that if I have a heart attack and die today, or get hit by a bus tomorrow, my children can return to these publishing and relive our experiences. Through my writings, I leave a legacy.

Dear Juliet Pain, I hope one day we meet and then you can judge me as a person. I would be interested in seeing if your opinion of my family would change.

Posted on by — 1 Comment

Do the children of today need the OS of the future?

So how cruel would it be to give a 10 year old boy a computer with Edubuntu instead of Windows? Would it actually be beneficial to him? I think back to my Atari 400 and the numerous Apple ][es and DOS boxes that I came up on and I played games and created databases and understood the basics. I believe Linux will be influential in their lifes and they should be exposed to numerous significant operating systems. In part, that is why I want the children to have a modern Apple in the house. They need to know that Windows is not the only option and they need to know how to navigate each OS. But is it cruel to give a child a machine that does not play the games his brother’s computer plays?

And yes, I’m thinking dual booting the machine with Edubuntu as the default and Windows as a secondary OS.

Posted on by — Leave a comment

Facing fears – open the email

Due to Christmas, illness, and visitors, I have not looked at my email in a week. I am afraid to open it. My gut tells me that it will take me days to catch up and that it will be litered with angry emails wondering where I have been. Honest answers and no overcommitments is the trick to facing these fears. What is the true source of the fear? Opening the email? No. Reading a disparaging email? Perhaps a little. My feelings do get hurt but that’s not really it. Losing a client? Somewhat. I really don’t need to be losing clients. Letting people down? Definitely. I can’t stand not pleasing everyone. Having to face that perhaps I made bad choices in not forcing myself to type between stomach purges and family needs? Yes! That would admit weakness!

Moving on…