Bert Garcia^2.0

Without much fanfare, Debian 7.0 ‘Wheezy’ was released on May the 4th be with you.

Linux continues to be the step-child of the tech industry, powering the web in relative anonymity, while the darlings of Wall Street, like Apple and Facebook, continue to dominate the headlines.

You’d think that we couldn’t live without an iPhone and a Facebook presence, I do quite fine thanks for asking, but I don’t know what I’d do without my Debian GNU/Linux operating system. ‘Wheezy’ the penguin seems only fitting for the 7.0 release.

Some time in the next few days I’ll do the apt-get dist-upgrade dance on my computers and virtual machines. I want to monitor the Debian support forums looking for any gotchas before I take the plunge. I’m pretty psyched that Wheezy has reached stable status, an old geek like myself has little to get excited about nowadays, I don’t do fads, I just do.

When the road looks rough ahead
And you’re miles and miles from your nice warm bed
You just remember what your old pal said
Boy, you’ve got a friend in me

When President Obama came on last night and said to the nation that “All in all this has been a tough week…”, you could see us all put down our smartphones and let go of our mouses.

What ultimately will come out of this week was that we turned the page on where we get our news from. We can confidently say that the cable box is no longer needed, it has been replaced by millions of citizen reporters utilizing the latest technological gadgets.

From April 18, 2013, at approximately 5 p.m. EST, to April 19th, around 8:45 p.m., I was glued to my computer screen, not the high definition television in the living room. With my trusty Firefox browser, I had two small windows open streaming local Boston stations WHDH and WCVB. On my main browser window, I had a tab open to a USTREAM channel where a local Bostonian was video recording his police scanner for all the world to hear, and another tab open to the subreddit BostonBombing. While reading the pertinent threads on Reddit, you can imagine the number of additional tabs my browser had opened, multitasking at it’s finest.

The Boston manhunt will go down as a triumph for law enforcement and for crowd sourced news gathering. Here’s a Google doc of all the Reddit update threads compiled of the manhunt from the campus of M.I.T. to the town of Watertown. As you read the timeline, you’ll come across updates that later on down the line are reported to have been wrong, just like leads may turn out to be a dead end in a regular law enforcement case.

How can CNN compete with the likes of Reddit? Well to put it simply, they can’t and they shouldn’t, cause they’re ill equipped. I liken CNN to a lone sniper waiting patiently for the killshot order to come through his earpiece, while Reddit is a group of motivated individuals equipped with automatic AR-15’s aiming at their intended target. Last night, when the police approached suspect #2 hiding out in the boat, you could hear hundreds of rounds being fired at said boat. Did they all make their mark?

Just lay your head back on the ground
And let your hair fall all around me
Offer up your best defense
But this is the end
This is the end of the innocence

When you don’t want to hear any spoilers in a heavily connected world.

The Formula 1 season started last week in Australia, and I stayed up till 3 AM EST to watch the live event but fell asleep halfway through. This week’s live telecast in Malaysia started at 4 AM EST, so I decided to watch the re-broadcast of the event at 3 PM EST.

What to do if I don’t want to hear who’s won the race?

• Don’t turn on the television till 3 PM:
  Every news and sports channel now has scrolling tickers along the bottom of the screen showing the latest headlines. Duct tape along the bottom of the TV comes to mind.

• Don’t surf the web on my computer:
  Forget about visiting Reddit or making the mistake of doing a search on Google for Formula 1. Oh those helpful engineers at Google, they think of everything.

• Don’t look at my smartphone:
  Those in-the-know news gathering apps, they become a hindrance real quick when you don’t really care to know.

• Fast forward a number of years:
  Open up the Net connected refrigerator and a sultry voice informs you that you’re out of milk and congrats to Sebastian Vettel for winning the Malaysian Grand Prix. Drats!!!

I’d sit alone and watch your light
My only friend through teenage nights
And everything I had to know
I heard it on my radio

30 years of keyboarding and mousing. Green screens to GUI environments. SSP to DOS, Windows and Linux. RPG to Basic, Pascal, C, Perl and PHP. Heavy technical manuals to Google. Netscape to Mozilla. Dumb terminals to personal computers and tablets. Punch cards and 8 inch diskettes to USB thumb drives. 10MB to Terabyte hard drives. 640K ought to be enough. All nighters to repetitive stress injuries. Drag and drop to carpal tunnel syndrome. Folding tables to ergonomic desks. Hard plastic chairs to Herman Millers. Cubicles to home offices.

10 FOR X = 1 to 30
20 PRINT "Bert's been computing for "; X;
30 IF X = 1 THEN PRINT " year" ELSE PRINT " years"
40 NEXT X

Sometimes the lights all shining on me
Other times I can barely see
Lately it occurs to me
What a long strange trip it’s been

DreamHost moves me to a shiny new server in Ashburn, Virginia.

When I found out that DreamHost had web servers in Virginia, I immediately shot off an email to support. I informed them that since I resided in North Carolina, I would be most interested in moving my websites to their new East Coast data center.

That same day, my websites were moved from California to Virginia. I am now on a shiny new Debian Squeeze server, which has dual Opteron Quad Core processors, 32GB of memory, and my /home directory has 3.56 terabytes of elbow room. My websites are very responsive, it’s like I’m running them off my own internal server.

DreamHost has had it’s share of growing pains, yes we’ve had downtime here and there, but their support department keeps me a loyal customer. It’s not easy keeping hardware humming away and software behaving, I should know, I used to host my own websites for many years. Should one day I get a fat pipe into my house, I’m talking to you Time Warner, I’ll move my websites in-house again, till then DreamHost has my business.

Come on, come on down, sweet Virginia
Come on, honey child, I beg of you
Come on, come on down, you got it in ya
You got to scrape that shine right off your shoes

Jelly Bean makes its way to my Nook Color tablet.

With a new boot animation, as seen at left, my Nook Color has a new lease on life.

Yesterday morning, I prepared an SD card running CM10 nightly using instructions on the XDA forums.

After running CM10 all day, I decided it was time to flash the internal EMMC using instructions on the XDA forums.

This morning, I updated from cm-10-20121210-NIGHTLY to cm-10-20121211-NIGHTLY with the new automated update mechanism in the CyanogeMod settings screen.

No more lengthy instructions to follow to keep the Nook up to date, it’s like I’m running Debian on the tablet.

Jelly Bean feels like a tablet OS, unlike Gingerbread which felt like I was running a phone OS. Using the internal EMMC to hold Android and whatever apps I may install, leaves the SD card slot free for a 16GB Lexar I had in stock.

As for apps, I’ll need to install much less than before because Jelly Bean feels more complete. The web browser is great, as is the email and calendar apps, and of course whatever tweaks CyanogenMod has made like the new file manager.

Open Source, you gotta love it.

Jelly Bean, Jelly Bean
Well that’s the name we picked for you
And it fits you to a T

DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) was established by Sony in 2003 to define guidelines for the sharing of music, photos and videos between consumer devices.

After weeks of trying most every software option on a Windows 7 PC, we settled on Wild Media Server to share our digital world with a PS3, a Samsung LED TV and a myriad of other devices around the house.

A short list of the software we tested were Serviio, PS3 Media Server and Windows 7 Media Player. Wild Media Server came out on top for just plain working great and not sucking up CPU cycles on the server.

The Sony PS3 is the main interface to our media, coupled with WMS, it’s a very fast thumbnail browsing experience. There is no lag in displaying folders of media, pictures pop on screen, music plays flawlessly and videos render beautifully.

There are so many options in Wild Media Server that I’ve barely scratched the surface in the last few weeks. From parental controls to the defining of how a particular media folder is sorted and displayed, you have full control of the experience.

What I have left to do is convert some videos from phones and pocket cameras that we’ve had over the years. Some of these videos are not recognized by the PS3 and they have to be transcoded by WMS before being served out. I’d just rather convert them using Freemake to native MP4 and not chew up extra CPU cycles when viewing old home movies.

Tonight it’s goin’ digital, digital
Digital, digital, it’s goin’ digital
Everybody know me when I walk up in the club

Mozilla released Firefox 15.0 today.

Seems like only yesterday that I was writing about version 4.0 being released. Here we are a year and a half later and the version number is already at 15, busy developers these Mozilla people are.

This whole rapid release cycle is very confusing, and all done to keep pace with Google’s Chrome browser.

Chrome may be an excellent web browser and is gaining a wide audience, but I painstakingly removed it from my system a while ago. I don’t care for applications that need to run start-up routines or kick off Windows services, and Google has a habit of doing both.

The only application that needs to run anything on start-up on my system is my anti-virus, that’s about the only one I’ll tolerate. For security reasons, avast! can run a service checking for a new definition update in case a threat is found to be making the rounds.

Firefox just introduced silent background updates, again to keep pace with the Chrome, but I don’t see that it needed to use an always running service to make this happen. While running the browser, go check if an update exists. Why couldn’t Google have done the same?

A well behaved application should:
a) Allow me to install it anywhere in my folder structure.
b) Allow me to turn down any extra bundled apps on install.
c) Allow me to turn off any extra features I don’t like after install.
d) Allow me to uninstall everything it just installed on my system.

Google Chrome is not a well behaved application, I just don’t see how it’s gaining popularity. It could render a web page before I’ve even thought of surfing to it, and I’ll still refuse to install it again. Chrome is a virus of an app, installs to your user directory, runs whatever services it likes, and it takes a deep knowledge of Windows to eradicate it from your system.

Five years from now, I’ll be happily running Firefox 147.0 ;)

When the devil came
He was not red
He was chrome

Updated my Nook Color to CyanogenMod 7.2.0.

The Nook Color that I got during the holidays is still running great off the Sandisk 4GB SD card. Plans to put CM7 on the internal eMMC have stayed on the todo list, never can quite find the time.

CM7 version 7.2.0 was released as stable on June 15, 2012. Over the weekend I found the time to update the Nook Color, it turned out to be a rather painless operation.

CM7 version 7.1.0 to 7.2.0 update on SD card:

1. Use Titanium Backup to backup the Nook, as a precaution.
2. Hook the Nook up via USB to the computer and copy off the backup files.
3. Power down the Nook and remove the SD card from it’s slot.
4. Place SD card into computer’s USB port, adapter may be needed.
5. Download cm-7.2.0-encore.zip and rename to update-cm-7.2.0-encore-signed.zip.
6. Copy update-cm-7.2.0-encore-signed.zip to the SD card’s root.
7. Place the the SD card back into the Nook and power it back up.
8. Press the power button, press Reboot, press Recovery, then OK.

That’s it, the Nook Color will reboot and start the update process, which takes but a few minutes. After the update process is complete the Nook will power off, just press the power button and you’re booting into a faster CM7 version 7.2.0.

Where is my love life?
Where can it be?
There must be something wrong with the machinery

The Olympics is about the athletes, not about television ratings.

Having participated in both track and cross country in high school, I was psyched for the start of the track and field events. On Sunday afternoon I was parked in front of my living room’s large screen television awaiting the 100M heats on NBC. Only to find out that I’d have to relegate myself to my home office’s computer to watch Usain Bolt on an online stream. The next day I found out that the 100M final wasn’t broadcast until around 11:00pm EST, way to keep people in their seats for 3 hours watching commercials, I gladly avoided the painful ordeal.

On Monday I went straight to the live track and field online stream and watched with little buffering the events of the day. I bypassed the prime time show for yet another day. Why sit through all those commercials for events I already knew the outcome?

Then on Tuesday the online stream was a stuttering buffering mess. To add insult to injury, there were commercials thrown in after every single heat and high jump and discuss throw and triple jump and you get the picture. 30 seconds of commercials every few minutes, it made the online stream impossible to watch. Last night we watched a movie, the Olympics were not of interest to me and my family anymore.

#NBCFail is a Twitter hashtag that affirms this blog post, I am not alone in feeling that NBC has sacrificed the Olympic spirit for ratings. Sad is the word that comes to mind. I’m deeply saddened for the athletes that busted their asses for years to get in shape only to have their performances held hostage by NBC for the sole purpose of promoting their fall lineup.

In this age of cord cutters, what keeps me from cancelling the cable subscription is because I like watching football on a Sunday afternoon, or catch a golf game, or sit amazed at the Formula 1 drivers speeding around a race course. Yet here we are at the ultimate live sporting event, the Olympics, and NBC wants to screw it all up for us. By the time Rio 2016 rolls around I’ll be ready, the cable subscription will be a thing of the past, I’ll spend my money on a VPN.

The lunatic is in the hall
The lunatics are in my hall
The paper holds their folded faces to the floor
And every day the paper boy brings more