I’ve picked up small books over the past couple of years…always with the best intentions of reading through them. They typically have some type of historical/motivational slant to them. I started thumbing through one of them and became obsessed.
This book has got to be one of the most visceral fictional books i’ve ever read. I won’t ruin the the story line, so much as touch on the premise. Imagine being alive but being robbed of all your senses. No legs, arms, hands, smells, tastes. Locked in your own thoughts barely being able to distinguish if you are awake or dreaming.
Freedom, liberty, country, all words and when framed and put in perspective next to what life really is the absurdity of any war strikes right at the heart.
This is a powerful thought provoking anti-war novel and I would highly recommend it to everyone.
As of late I’ve been consumed by work, but in the few moments of down time I’ve found two relatively new addictions on the internet…
lifehacker.com
Basically this blog posts articles about how to intergrate technology into your everyday life to make yourself more productive. Among the coolest things I’ve found on this site is a link to mint.com. Security concerns aside, I took the plunge and it is freakin’ cool. I’ve come to not use any technology if it doesn’t do something for me that I wouldn’t want to do myself, and in this case its balance my check book and give me a clear picture of my finances across all my accounts and credit cards.
This site has turned me into a customer service fiend. I came to the realization, i would estimate at over 2 years ago, that if you ever have an issue that requires a call to a customer service rep, be it for a cell phone bill, or other account issue you must have had some bad karma coming to you. A call to a comcast service rep is a pain in the ass I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. This site documents egregiously bad customer service incidents as well as puts an ever brightening spot light on corporate Americas “screw the consumer” attitudes.
A little over a month ago I installed Ubuntu Linux ‘s Edgy Eft on my production workstation. I use this machine pretty much all day everyday. I’m a network admin/help desk/server admin IT guy and this machine needs to perform or I can’t do my job.
After a few obstacles, I wouldnt even call them obstacles so much as normal desktop set up routines, I had PDF’s displaying fine, printers printing,e-mails mailing, and file shares sharing. My box integrated into our windows network like a duck to water. The terminal services client let me interface with my servers just like the client in XP and with a little “apt magic” I had wine set up and it was quite content to run the windows ultra-vnc client we use to manage all our remote desktops when a user calls in with an issue.
After feeling very confident that I could do all that I could do in XP in my shiny new OS with a whirling 3D desktop, although some may argue sucks productivity actually aids in keeping me alert during monotonous trouble shooting calls from the field, I had to reset a domain password. I had to reboot to windows. First time in about 2 weeks.
I figured I’d do a little googling for linux active directory tools, then I kept digging and seeing if I could find LDAP tools that would work. No such luck. I was tied to “active directory users & computers”. So I set up 1 of the spare PC’s we have laying around and just leave ADUC running on it and it actually increased the ease of completeing tasks in AD as that admin console takes a a year and a day to open up…but thats another story.
More updates to come….perhaps a top 10 useful apps to know once you switch over.
One of Mirosofts Windows Vista’s most touted “features”, is the upgraded user interface. The newest incarnation of Microsofts OS ultilizes graphics cards that are in most recent consumer computers to off-load some of the processing of desktop effects onto the GPU. As a result you get flashy effects on the desktop and transparent windows. Pretty to look at but not to functional. What if you could get all of the same eye-candy and even more for free? You can. Composite desktop managers allow linux distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, or SuSe to generate the same effects as Microsoft’s new OS.
Back in January I got a new workstation at my office. By all comparable standards its was quite a beefy system, and it finally had a graphics card capable of rendering 3D-effects. I did a little reading and got myself up to speed on beryl and compiz. Two free and open source composite desktop managers. Now my linux install could have all the eye candy of vista….minus the activation, price tag, and headaches that go along with the newly minted OS. Although there were a few things that needed to be sacrificed. Namely it wasn’t a walk in the park to get up and running. I had to manually edit multiple config files and tweak a few settings, but the hand holding provided by the numerous wiki’s on the net made it relatively easy for anyone that can install Linux in the first place…
The installation of the proprietary NVIDIA graphics drivers is a far cry from when I attempted it back in 2001 as a freshmen in college. With the addition of addition apt-repositories to Ubuntu and a few “sudo apt-get” commands I had all the packages and drivers I needed installed to get the graphics goodness going.
As with everything that I’ve experienced with open source over the last 6 years, time will make the install even easier. When I installed my first distro (Red Hat 7.2) I had to get tutoring from the CS majors down the hall on the basic ins-and outs of running linux. With a robust community trying to spread this amazingly cool work to as many people as they can, the time until, as I call it, “Mom & Dad could do it”, is approaching very quickly.
The out of the box experience of beryl is fantastic. With a few tweaks jaw-droppingly pretty. My video is of only one of my monitors in my dual monitor setup…the machine had a few problems trying to render a video file in real-time at twice the native resolution of a DVD so I scaled it back a little. From the quick demo in the video beryl has all the eye-candy of vista AND OS X. It also contains a multitude of effects that I leave turned off during regular use because although they are pretty they suck system resources and get annoying after you see your window explode or burn up after about the 20th time. Those effects can be seen in the video below….Enjoy and go give it a try
