VanJohnson.com

Sometimes it’s the simple things that amaze people and leave them thinking you are some type of computer genius. My daughters have grown up with computers, and I mean hardcore. Their first computer was a SUSE Linux machine; they’ve worked on Windows and OS X boxes and they know their way around them all. At 10 years old, they’ve taken over the IT tech support duties for my wife. Next, I am going to install a phone line in their room so other family members can call them when they need help. What I am trying to say is, their Dad’s vast knowledge of computers doesn’t impress them. Whenever I think I’m showing them something new and cool on the computer, they have an attitude of “huh, I just didn’t know how to do it, now I do and its not that cool”.

I myself get kind of like that too, I am pretty hardcore geek and bells and whistles on computers don’t really impress me. I typically look at things on a much deeper level. That’s why when I read an article sometime back called “Having fun with the SAY command in your Terminal” I thought to myself, “Cute” and filed it away in the back of my mind thinking I will never have a use for that command.

The SAY command on OS X is a Speech Synthesis Manager. If you own an OS X machine, open a terminal window and type “man say” (minus the quotes) for more information, or just type “say Hello. do you want to play a game” and start having fun with it.

One day, one of my daughters and I were having somewhat of a disagreement on if it was more important for her to clean her room or finish watching TV; guess which side I was on. As privileges started to get stripped away, right after “no more pool time” but before “no more Playstation3 time”, she stomps off into her room. Knowing she wasn’t in her room doing what was asked of her, and knowing I was probably too mad myself to try to talk to her, I sat at my laptop tapping the space bar. Then it dawned on me; I fired up a terminal session on my Ubuntu laptop and made a ssh connection to my daughter’s computer in her room and proceeded to test out that SAY command. It went something like this;

say Why are you so mad

I hear a deep synthetic voice mumble come from behind my daughters’ door followed by a somewhat confused sounding voice of a little girl.

say Didnt your dad ask you to clean your room? I like a clean room

Some more little girl mumbles. Is she arguing with the computer now?

say Your dad is probably the smartest man I know, and may be the smartest man on earth, you should listen to him

OK, that last one might have been too much and may have tipped her off. I hear her door open and she yells, “I don’t know how you are doing that but you better show me”

Anyways, SSH with SAY and you can have all sorts of fun with co-workers, family, and friends. Further more they will think you are truly 1337.

My wife has been preaching to me for awhile to establish an ‘ICE‘ number on my cell phone. ICE stands for In Case of Emergency. This is a standard that emergency response units like police, paramedics, and fire have been working on promoting. The idea is, if you are ever in a situation where you are not responsive and require help, your cell phone will be checked for this ICE number and it will be called. Ideally, the person who you have listed as your ICE contact will know enough about you to help with any treatment and assistance you might need.

Cell phones have become so much more than just phones anymore, they are our cameras, how we check emails, chat, manage our calendars, keep track of our friends’ phone numbers, and I’ve even “Twitted” once or twice from my cell phone. It’s very easy for me to leave the house and forget my wallet, but rare for me to forget my cellphone nowadays.

I personally have my ICE number so it is displayed on my screen when you look at it but if you don’t have that functionality or just don’t care to have an ICE number displayed on you phone, then it is recommend you make an entry in your address book under, you guessed it, ‘I’ and make the entry ICE. It’s simple and extremely helpful if ever needed.

I’ve actually got a friend who has taken this to another level and has published an iPhone application that brings a lot more than just an ICE contact to your phone. If you are lucky enough to own an iPhone, please check out Polka’s iPhone Emergency Card for sale in the iTunes App store. You can read more about the application on Polka’s Blog.

I posted my first question on Linkedin Q&A service and I have to say the speed and quality of the replies are wonderful. So the question went like this;

Is a closed source solution with good APIs a better approach than an Open Source solution?

I went on to explain;
Would you rank a “closed source” solution with a great set of easy to use APIs on the same level as a good Open Source solution?

So for example, lets say your company needed a blog. You could go and download any number of Open Source blogs and customize it to your companies needs, or you might spend money on a proprietary blog system that forces you to do things a certain way, or would you rather a closed source (still a proprietary) solution that “out of the box” had you do things a certain way but also offered APIs that allowed you to build you own interface or feed your blog to another solution?

Here are a couple of the great replies I got back:

Having access to the source code is fantastic, since it gives you a great way to - in theory - take matters into your own hands and diagnose any issue, and extend with any feature, you so wish. If you’re in a large corporate environment and you need to build in a custom extension to make it acceptable to your users (eg. integrate with your company’s proprietary SSO solution) then this can be invaluable.

I think most times the decision will come down to supporting the application and overall cost. Sometimes bigger business needs to have an expert to call when things go south. In smaller businesses, sometimes you wing it.

Each solution has its place. You just have to make that decision in the best interests of your business and your goals.

Its not a question of open or closed and its definitely not a question of Hosted versus SaaS. Its about whether the solution is component based, tailored, scalable and replaceable.
For instance if you opt for a closed solution with really great APIs - that works so long as everything you need to do has been anticipated by the API provider. Unless you use a standardized api (like open-social) or an api that is so dominant that the market provides good adapters to standards (like Facebook ) you will always be dependent upon the development and deployment plan of the closed system you’ve selected.

I think you actually answered the question yourself, Eric. In my experience, the answer to this always comes down to the two main points you mentioned. Do you NEED the flexibility of an OSS solution? If you have the resources, and the need for true customization, then OSS is always a great option.

Regarding patches and security, a well maintained OSS project with an active community and a wide install base is generally going to be ahead of the curve when it comes to bug fixes, etc.

You can see the question hosted here

I think it goes without saying that I am a huge supporter of Open Source but believe it or not I am also a big fan of Bill Gates. You’ve got to respect what he did for the industry and what he does for the world through his charities. The guy is a geek’s version of Michael Jordon. I don’t agree with everything the man does obviously but I think the guy has a great mind and he will be missed in the computer industry when he finally moves on.

Anyways, I enjoy watching Bill Gates talk but I kind of caught something interesting in this last interview I was watching.

Here is a link to the interview:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7462156.stm

At about 1.45 Bill talks about how finding the source code for an operating system took him and Paul Allen to the next level on tinkering. I thought to myself how fortunate we were that he had that oppurtunity to look at and study an operating systems source code. It would have been a real shame if the ability to look at source code was deprived from Bill Gates. I wonder how many great thinkers Linux has or will inspire by offering them a similar opportunity.

Firefox 3 browser, 3 millions plus downloads worldwide and growing. Wonder what its like being the only dude in Eritrea to have downloaded it. That guy (or gal lets be fair) deserves a some Firefox swag.

http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/

It’s amazing to me that I still stumble across sites like this. Especially “real” sites from “real” companies. This is a media company none the less. The funny thing is, running Internet Explore under Windows is one of the last combinations I actually use. Even under Windows, Firefox is my default browser. The show I was trying to check out was called “The IT Crowd”. Seeing how I live in the US and don’t get “Channle4″ chances are the only way I am going to see it is to stream it. Now the reality is I can easily move to one of my Windows boxes or even fire up my virtual Vista desktop on my current desktop but I am not going to do that out of general principal. Sorry Channel4.

Just a short little rant.

http://www.channel4.com/

Just found this funny, check out “Cancer Test” is near the end of the clip. I hate it when my doctor doe this to me. You would think being 3 years in remission I would have learned this trick by now.

This is taking Online Roll Playing to the next level allowing you to play a character playing a character in a game. I think it might be time to start playing games online.

‘Warcraft’ Sequel Lets Gamers Play A Character Playing ‘Warcraft’

Been a big fan and user of OpenID for sometime now. What is OpenID you might ask, well if you don’t know then you can read about it on their site.

Anyways, I was IM’ing with a good friend of mine and I just mentioned I saw a plug in for it. He asked me to install it on his blog and I did, then installed it on mine, and it was so easy I accidentally installed it on another blog I run. Within 15minutes I had OpenID installed, enabled, and configured on three blogs.

So go and get your OpenID now, I recommend MyOpenID but there are plenty of providers out there, and then you too can log into the world (un)known blog which is VanJohnson.com.

Will we have Sony to blame when computers become self-aware and start taking over the earth? I came across a news story today that leads me to think, “Yeah, maybe.”

Military Supercomputer Sets Record

Here is the piece that caught my attention.

“The Roadrunner is based on a radical design that includes 12,960 chips that are an improved version of an I.B.M. Cell microprocessor, a parallel processing chip originally created for Sony’s PlayStation 3 video-game machine. The Sony chips are used as accelerators, or turbochargers, for portions of calculations.”

Check out the full story on The New York Times Website