Reality Me

Category: Technology

All things geeky.

  • Oh no! No energy!

    I’ve been neglecting my family and household duties in the name of work. Household repairs such as rehanging Sarah’s shelf that Evan pulled down upon himself have been left ignored. Yesterday I made great progress on cleaning up the driveway and cleaning up the garage. Today I am going to work on Sarah’s room. But alas! My Ryobi cordless power tool 18v batteries won’t charge! Today may be all about dissecting battery packs, testing cells, and combining two battery packs into one. Wait a minute. What are these tools with cords hanging out of the handles? They look like they just might plug into extension cords and wall outlets!

  • Go green! Give your old iPhone to someone.

    All the cool kids are upgrading to the newest iPhone. I remember the day I purchased my gold Motorola RAZR v3xx. Ah! I was ahead of the game with the newest and slickest cellphone on the block. That’s the phone I’m still using. So as you excitedly unbox that new iPhone and relegate your old iPhone to the back of your desk drawer, think about how your e-waste could help free someone from the confines of WAP and instead help them join the hordes enslaved to JOBs. Give me your old iPhone! I mean, find someone in need of an upgrade and let your e-waste become e-useful.

  • activeCollab IRC support on Efnet and Freenode

    Sort of. I’ve opened an #activecollab channel on IRC’s Efnet (and Freenode) in hopes some real-time community support will develop for people interested in customizing activeCollab‘s project management and collaboration tool. I won’t promise to always be there nor to have useful information, but perhaps if a group of us form we can generate answers faster than the forums.

  • When should you buy a new computer?

    Occasionally somebody will ask me for my expert advice and question, "when should I buy a new computer?" My answer is often to discuss the benefits of a new machine, and how in many cases it is cheaper to replace rather than repair and upgrade, but ultimately my answer is a question, "is the machine doing what you need it to do?" If the answer is yes, then don’t buy a new computer.

    I just turned on my Windows 98 machine. Yes. Windows 98…first edition not second edition. Why? Because GIMP frustrates me and my copy of Adobe Photoshop 5.5 still produces great imagery for much of my work. See, this machine still does what I need it to do. So, I have no need to upgrade this 11 year old box.

    Update: I’ve been introduced to GIMPshop. Feels like a crutch but I may have to try it anyway.

  • I’m in print!

    Some of my digital words seem to have leaked into today’s newspaper! Go to Knoxnews and read Teach cell phones, don’t ban them. Comments are open on Knoxnews or commentary can be added at the School Matters website.

  • Proud Coder’s Moment

    I was doing a little debugging and popped into some code completely written by me to discover this gem:

    if(1===3){ //REMOVE IN FUTURE
    } //REMOVE IN FUTURE

    And yes, that is the complete code segment with nothing edited out. Yup! I’ll take credit for that patentable beauty!

  • Drowning Out the Decibels with Noise

    My house is noisier than yours. I know this because I think OSHA would require hearing protection in this place.

    Our house it has a crowd
    There’s always something happening
    And it’s usually quite loud
    [Source]

    I have some wonderful noise canceling headphones but they don’t completely isolate me from the noise. That is, until I decided to pump some white noise through them! http://simplynoise.com/ has some downloadable white noise clips. You can down 30 seconds of white, pink and brown noise that you play in a continuous loop. You can also download a one hour thunderstorm! This works so well I thought I was home alone!

  • Left mouse button becomes right mouse button

    Not long ago, I took a computer that was passed onto us, reformatted it, installed a fresh copy of Windows XP, and passed a shiny "new to her" computer onto Cathy. It was faster than her old computer and should have been completely problem free. It was for awhile but it’s developed an odd behavior. Every now and then, the operating system will appear to hang. For instance, this morning her menubar was visible, and I could move the mouse, but clicking on anything did nothing. I could not bring an application to focus. I had Computer Management open to the event log and left clicking on one of the event viewer items, instead of opening the item, showed the context menu (normally seen by right clicking). But unlike right clicking, once the context menu was open, clicking an item in the context menu such as "open log file…" simply closed the log file. The machine has been thoroughly scrubbed of malware, spyware and viruses. All software is updated with the exception of not yet installing Internet Explorer 8. The way I regained control of the machine was to close an open Skype chat window.

    The slow downs seem to correspond to this error in the event viewer (\Device\Harddisk1\D refers to the Seagate external USB Freeagent drive):
    An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk1\D during a paging operation.

    This is bizarre.

  • I don’t think people know how to use the Internet

    I was just looking at my stats today. They are fairly unremarkable as usual. 9 people today used a search engine to find Reality Me by searching for "naked women" and 3 people used a search engine to find Reality Me by searching for "naked females cutting tree chainsaw" for a total of 12 people mistakenly thinking this is good place for finding naked pictures of women. Somehow, of these 12 people, 14* actually ended up at 32 naked women with chainsaws which is a textual, not pictorial, post simply linking to a art piece with 5 women composited into looking like 32 women are wearing only boots and hardhats while cutting up a fallen pine tree. Here’s why I think people don’t know how to use the Internet: Of those 14 people, only 2 actually clicked through to the picture. So here’s my conclusion: a large number of people think using the Internet consists of doing a Google search and clicking on the link Google gives you and never going any deeper. So, if that is true, how should our web design/site presentation change? This seems to imply that typical hyperlinks don’t make sense to common users.

    *These numbers are based on the WordPress Stats plugin and not a detailed analysis of the server logs.

  • We try

    We try and sometimes we fail and we try again.

  • Ubuntu Accomplishments – Seesmic Desktop Install

    The machine on which I do most of my work is not terribly robust. My work environment would make a good premise for a Disney movie..you know..old clunker equipment doesn’t look like it should be able to pull through manages to win the race. Anyway, Seesmic Desktop in all it’s glory was dragging this machine down. Everything would work fine but I needed one more reboot than normal throughout the day. On days like today, when the work was too intense, I just couldn’t run Seesmic Desktop (maybe not a bad thing). Now that I’ve successfully installed Seesmic Desktop on Ubuntu, it can run all the time and I can occasionally glance over at the streams to see what’s happening. Installing Seesmic Desktop on Ubuntu was incredibly easy. First install Adobe Air then install Seesmic Desktop:

    1. Open the Terminal
    2. Use wget to download http://airdownload.adobe.com/air/lin/download/1.5/AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
    3. Set the file to be executable: chmod +x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
    4. Run it: sudo ./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
    5. Accept any AIR updates
    6. Use wget to download Seesmic Desktop from http://d.seesmic.com/seesmic/SeesmicDesktop-0.2.1.air
    7. On the Ubuntu desktop, not terminal, look under Applications->Accessories or Applications->Other for Adobe AIR Application Installer and run it
    8. Select SeesmicDesktop-0.2.1.air and the normal Seesmic Desktop installer will run

    That’s it! Frankly, I think Seesmic Desktop is performing much better on Ubuntu than Windows. My only complaint would be that it failed to put a shortcut in the Applications menu.

    Update: I lamented that Seesmic Desktop needed an import/export feature to get userlists and data from one computer to another and @askseesmic responded with a document explaining now to move the xml file with the necessary data. It worked great! The userlists I had organized on Windows now are on Linux. Move the xml file from one machine to the other after backing up the original:

    • Max OS X:
      /Users/<username>/Library/Preferences/com.seesmic.desktop.client.<RANDOM>/Local Store/config/xmlAdapter.xml
    • Windows XP:
      C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\com.seesmic.desktop.client.<RANDOM>\Local Store\config\xmlAdapter.xml
    • Windows Vista & Windows 7:
      C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\com.seesmic.desktop.client.<RANDOM>\Local Store\config\xmlAdapter.xml
    • Ubuntu & most Linux distros:
      /home/<user>/.appdata/com/seesmic.desktop.client.<RANDOM>/Local Store/config/xmlAdapter.xml

    [Source, Seesmic Help Desk, Transferring Settings between Computers – workaround]

  • Ubuntu Accomplishments – Wacom Tablet

    I have two Wacom tablets that I use for my art. My first tablet ever was a Wacom UD-Digitizer II serial tablet. I’m not even sure USB was around back then. This tablet was unbelievable at the time! Felt like I was writing on paper with a real pen or brush. Being able to use an eraser on the computer was remarkable. However, there were certain problems with its size, roughly 5×7, so I bought a Wacom Intuos serial tablet that is more like 12×10 inches. Tablets make computer art fun!

    When I set aside a new machine for a replacement Linux server for my in-house development, I decided to actually use Ubuntu Desktop 8.04 and install Apache-MySQL-PHP on it afterwards. I’ve found myself using the Linux Desktop more and I think I can eventually migrate completely from Windows. Unfortunately, the computer I chose to do this with uses a mechanical mouse instead of an optical mouse. You know, one with the mouse ball that constantly needs cleaning. The mechanical mouse holds me back more than anything else from making the switch. Ergo, I decided to pull the Wacom Digitizer II out of the boneyard and see if I could get it to work. It was surprisingly simple.

    Two support documents helped make quick work of getting the tablet functioning. 1) The community documentation for Wacom and 2) The community documentation for Wacom troubleshooting. The first gave me this simple line:

    sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-wacom wacom-tools

    The tablet failed to work. The second explained that I needed to update /usr/bin/dexconf which would then rebuild /etc/X11/xorg.conf with these lines:

    Section "InputDevice"
          Driver "wacom"
          Identifier "stylus"
          Option "Device" "/dev/input/wacom" # USB ONLY?
          # Option "Device" "/dev/ttyS0" # SERIAL ONLY
          Option "Type" "stylus"
          # Option "ForceDevice" "ISDV4" # Tablet PC ONLY
          Option "USB" "on" # USB ONLY
    EndSection

    Section "InputDevice"
          Driver "wacom"
          Identifier "eraser"
          Option "Device" "/dev/input/wacom" # USB ONLY?
          # Option "Device" "/dev/ttyS0" # SERIAL ONLY
          Option "Type" "eraser"
          # Option "ForceDevice" "ISDV4" # Tablet PC ONLY
          Option "USB" "on" # USB ONLY
    EndSection

    Section "InputDevice"
          Driver "wacom"
          Identifier "cursor"
          Option "Device" "/dev/input/wacom" # USB ONLY?
          # Option "Device" "/dev/ttyS0" # SERIAL ONLY
          Option "Type" "cursor"
          # Option "ForceDevice" "ISDV4" # Tablet PC ONLY
          Option "USB" "on" # USB ONLY
    EndSection

    Section "InputDevice"
          Driver "wacom"
          Identifier "pad"
          Option "Device" "/dev/input/wacom" # USB ONLY
          # Option "Device" "/dev/ttyS0" # SERIAL ONLY
          Option "Type" "pad"
          Option "USB" "on" # USB ONLY
    EndSection

    # Uncomment the following section if you you have a TabletPC that supports touch
    # Section "InputDevice"
    # Driver "wacom"
    # Identifier "touch"
    # Option "Device" "/dev/ttyS0" # SERIAL ONLY
    # Option "Device" "/dev/input/wacom" # USB ONLY
    # Option "Type" "touch"
    # Option "ForceDevice" "ISDV4" # Serial Tablet PC ONLY
    # Option "USB" "on" # USB ONLY
    # EndSection

    Naturally I would have to comment out the USB references and uncomment the serial references. Then the serverlayout section had to look like:

    Section "ServerLayout"
          Identifier "Default Layout"
          Screen "Default Screen"
          InputDevice "stylus" "SendCoreEvents"
          InputDevice "eraser" "SendCoreEvents"
          InputDevice "cursor" "SendCoreEvents" # For non-LCD tablets only
          InputDevice "pad" # For       Intuos3/CintiqV5/Graphire4/Bamboo tablets
          # InputDevice "touch" "SendCoreEvents" # Only a few TabletPCs support this type
    EndSection

    I rebooted and nothing happened. I realized /usr/bin/dexconf was a script and ran it. Upon rebooting I was stuck in VGA mode. This was looking like a failed experiment. On a whim I decided to make the changes directly to /etc/X11/xorg.conf and surprisingly, the tablet came to life! GIMP is suddenly fun to use!

  • Rare East Coast rocket launch tonight at 7:35

    Launch currently scheduled for 7:35pm tonight.Launch completed successfully! No sign of it in the sky from Knoxville but live stream was beautiful. Friend in Delaware was able to see the 2nd stage separation.

    NASA is again going to attempt to launch an Air Force Minotaur I rocket carrying the Air Force Research Laboratory’s TacSat-3 satellite, NASA’s PharmaSat microsatellite, and NASA’s CubeSat Technology Demonstration experiments, which includes three four-inch cubed satellites, developed by universities and industry. [Source] The launch will be from the NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. I read that if the skies are clear, the launch will be visible up to 800 miles away (but I could be misinformed). Knoxville is roughly 450 miles as the crow flies. If you don’t want to leave the house, NASA has the most exceptional webcasts available. The Wallops launch is already streaming live. Read more at the Wallops site or follow @NASA_Wallops on Twitter. Be sure to also follow @ATKRocketNews Trina Patterson of ATK who gives additional Twitter commentary on the launch.

  • Your thoughts on embedded WMVs with progress bars

    Let me reach out to the community for a moment. I’m trying to deliver a movie to be played in a web browser. The movie must play in Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8, Firefox and Safari. The movie sits on a LAMP box. The movie is roughly 35MB windows media (WMV). jQuery is available. The challenge: Deliver the movie to the client without the client impatiently clicking the play button repeatedly (elevator syndrome), reloading the page, or giving up and leaving. This implies some sort of progress bar or loading spinner. I can’t seem to get a loader to work to save my life.

    I’ve tried:

    • Various attributes on the object and embed tags
    • Using jQuery plugins like jQuery Media plugin and jMedia
    • Looked into other players and ruled out Flowplayer and SWFObject2
    • Tried getting Ajaxy but the document finishes before the movie completely downloads and the spinner quits too early.
    • I’m testing WVX streaming right now but it’s not looking good.
    • Some other stuff

    The goal is simple: Take a large wmv movie and present a loading indicator until the movie is cached in the user’s browser. This one is giving me a real hard way to go.

  • Information Overload

    Today I’m working on a problem that involves a good deal of research. I love the Internet for the sheer quantity of information available. But today has been like trying to drink from a firehouse and unfortunately most of that volume has been misinformation. My head is throbbing but I love this part of my job. Now if only I can bring this step to a rapid close.