A succinct reply to an article on Slashdot. The gist is that while marketing a new piece of hardware, a marketing professional was asked about the software that powers the device (being Linux). To which he replied: “I don’t like the using the word ‘Linux’ on a radio.”

Is just the mention of the word ‘linux’ that scary? Apparently so.

Seriously, this is not how it works. For a quick anecdote, when people ask me how I have all these rotating workspaces and crazy ass widgets and stuff, I reply ‘Linux’. Most people look blank at this point. Then I say ‘It’s an operating system, like Windows but not’. Usually, still blank looks. Remember, these are people who’ve never installed an OS in their lives, who’s points of comparison between XP and Vista were ‘It’s gone shiny and see-through, look!’, and who don’t know what you mean when you say that their computer is slow because they wanted their printer to work and installed the drivers for it.’Normal’ folks don’t know what Windows is, what Microsoft do, or the difference between a PS/2 port and a TCP port. These things are all irrelevant to them, or at least they think they are. It’s frickin’ marketing, you said it in your own post – people recognise that little wavy window thing, and don’t know that there is an alternative. Unfortunately, people don’t yet recognise Tux, or the Ubuntu blobby thing, or any of the myriad mascots and logos of the FOSS community.When marketing a product, you can say ‘Powered by Windows’ or ‘Intel inside’ and people just recognise the terms, making them feel a bit techy, but have no idea what it actually means. If you say ‘Powered by Linux’ then the majority of people may as well have heard ‘Powered by Snarblax’ – They still have no idea what it means, but this time they know they don’t know what it means, and that makes them feel stupid, and that makes them dislike whatever they associate with that stupid feeling. In conclusion, you, Anonymous Coward, are a moron.

via Slashdot Linux Story | Net Radio Exec Says “Don’t Mention Linux”.

HOWTO Change Gnome Panel Text & Handle Color

Create an empty file called .gtkrc-2.0 in /home

If you already have a .gtkrc-2.0 then just add the code to your existing file.

Paste the following code inside:

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style "panel"
{
   bg[NORMAL]     = "#000000"
   fg[NORMAL]      = "#FFFFFF"
}
widget "PanelWidget" style "panel"
widget "PanelApplet" style "panel"
class "Panel" style "panel"
widget_class "Mail" style "panel"
class "notif" style "panel"
class "Notif" style "panel"
class "Tray" style "panel"
class "tray" style "panel"

bg[NORMAL] is what defines your Gnome panel handles color, simply add the hex code for the color that you require.
- you will probably want it to match the colour of your Gnome panels.

fg[NORMAL] is what defines your Gnome panel text colour, again simply add the hex code for the colour that you require.

Now save the file, logout and back in and you should see the changes take effect.

via HOWTO Change Gnome Panel Text & Handle Colour – Ubuntu Forums.

Instead of logging out and back in you can just kill gnome-panel. It’ll restart automatically:

killall gnome-panel

Now my screen looks like this:

What started as a radio, became a boom-box playing cassettes. Then cassettes gave way to CDs. Recently (as in the past 5 years) I’ve come to love internet radio. For a long time I had an old windows laptop that wouldn’t hold a charge and had to be plugged in serving as the nighttime jukebox.

Unfortunately, I had an idea one day (my wife hates when she hears that) and that idea ultimately destroyed the old laptop. Meh. No problem. I substituted my netbook. Better CPU, more memory and it ran linux!! I was able to script a cron job to turn the machine off (sort of a sleep timer) automatically at different times during the week and on weekends. It worked great!

Eventually, I started just leaving my netbook at home. That made me sad. The little netbook was good at a lot of things. Being stuck as a dumb jukebox seemed like such a waste.

Until now.

I recently came into possession of an old desktop machine that I stripped for parts. One of those parts was a D-Link wireless PCI card.

Last night I installed the wireless card in Pugsley (another low-power, headless linux server that lives in my living room). After screwing around for a while figuring out how to get a wireless connection from the command line, I moved Pugsley to the bedroom and set him up next to my nightstand.

I installed VLC, because I know it can handle streaming audio and will run from the command line. I stopped by .977 and grabbed some streaming addresses for a couple music channels (80′s and Smooth Jazz!) and set up vlc to play the streams from a script. Cool.

Now to schedule the music. I knew I wanted to have Pugsley start the music at 9:00pm every night (jazz during the week, 80′s on weekends) and shut the music down in the mornings (4:00am during the week, 11:00am on weekends)

First I created a cron job from the root shell to stop the music. That was an easy ‘killall’ command:

# Nighttime music
00 04 * * 1-5 killall vlc
00 11 * * 0,6 killall vlc

Then I wrote the cron job to start the music (depending on the day) from my user shell (VLC doesn’t like being started by root):

# Turn on Night Music (every night @ 9:00pm)
# Friday & Saturday
00 21 * * 5-6 /home/chuck/scripts/80s.sh
# Sunday Thru Thursday
00 21 * * 0-4 /home/chuck/scripts/jazz.sh

Now I just needed to write the scripts to play the music. While the script is an easy one liner, the real trick was specifying a dummy interface to VLC. Without an interface (such as the terminal) VLC will die with an error. So calling it from within a cron job won’t work.

Googling around I found this forum entry

So I wrote my scripts:
80s.sh:

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#!/bin/sh
vlc --volume 30 -I dummy http://www.977music.com/tunein/web/80s.asx

and jazz.sh:

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#!/bin/sh
vlc --volume 30 -I dummy http://www.977music.com/tunein/web/smoothjazz.asx

So now, every weeknight, the computer starts up some smooth jazz and and shuts it down before my alarm goes off for work. Every weekend, it serenades us with 80′s music and shuts it down the next morning before noon! Plus, I got my netbook back! Awesome.

Now, to get some sleep.

So I was given another friends’ computer to fix. They were having overheating issues, which was easily deduced to a blocked fan. Nonetheless, when I turned it on I was greeted with the same issues that so many have not taken care of.

It was still on XP Service Pack 1.

What this meant was I was stuck doing the upgrades. I really don’t mind, but it made me think a bit about how people look at and use their computers. How they say their “Computer Stupid” and don’t know all the technical jargon I spew.

I hate that term – “Computer Stupid”.

from Geek News Central

I also hate that term. Another phrase that pisses me off is

…the computer must know it’s you

I hear that one when the reported problem doesn’t appear when I show up to look at it. As if the computer was aware of my presence and decided to behave.

Listen people. It’s not that hard.

Once upon a time it took a degree just to look at a computer let alone get it to do your bidding. But much like the evolution of the automobile, it’s quickly becoming evident that you don’t have to know how to build one just to drive one… er, use one.

Much like putting gas in your car and changing the oil, your computer needs maintenance. Also, like your car, the computer is usually pretty good at telling you what is needed and when.

Do this the next time you see a message on your screen: read it. You’d be surprised at how often you can solve a simple problem by reading what the computer is telling you. I blame the internet – specifically Internet Explorer – for the proliferation of pop-up messages. Spend any time at all online and you’ll easily train yourself to click anything just to make the message go away. I understand. But pay attention to what your computer is telling you.

Apply your updates and do your backups… Read that error message.

What if you still don’t understand it?

Now you can call me.

MP-BIOS Bug boot screen

So here we are happily humming along with linux powering our day-to-day needs when all the sudden yesterday *BAM* the MP-BIOS Bug rears it’s ugly head.

What the hell is an MP-BIOS Bug? I don’t know either, but I spent a lot of time yesterday reading about ways to get around it.

The most common solution (and the one that worked for me) was this: (pulled from a post on Ubuntu’s forums)

I have no idea why it’s happening, but I had the exact same error, and here’s how I fixed it:

At the grub boot screen, use your arrow keys to highlight “kernel /boot/linuz-2.6.15-25-386 root=/dev/sda3 ro quiet splash” (your exact paths and numbers might be a little dfferent). Then type ‘e’ to edit the boot options; you will be taken to another screen. Append ‘noapic’ to the end of the boot options, and hit enter. Then just type ‘b’ to boot. [Your machine] should then boot normally.

So now the machine is back up, but I had to turn off APIC. I’m not sure I’m totally comfortable with my machine not using it’s APIC! What the hell is an APIC?

Y’know, this is the kind of problem I came to expect from windows.

But, then again – at least I didn’t have to reinstall the operating system.

So does anybody have a clue what’s going on here? I assume this error cropped up after an update. I’m hoping it’ll go away after another update. But from what I’ve read this bug has been around for a long time.

“One reason programmers dislike meetings so much is that they’re on a different type of schedule from other people. Meetings cost them more.”

I’ve been spending some time recently trying to convince people to leave me alone.

I’m not a recluse, I’m a programmer.

I get depressed watching entire days slide by knowing that I’ve accomplished nothing. Well… nothing on my schedule. I accomplish plenty of things on other people’s calendars, but I just can’t seem to find the time to dedicate to the projects that I take the time to plan.

It turns out that my calendar is broken.

I’ve complained numerous times that I need blocks of uninterrupted time to accomplish things. I’ve pointed out how a phone call or a random drive-by (personal requests for my time) can totally kill my productivity.

It turns out that I’m right.

“…programmers and writers… generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.

When you’re operating on the [programmer's] schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in.”

One option is to insist on chunks of time during the week in which I must be left alone. All calls go to voice mail and visitors are stopped at the door. Productivity would soar!

Another option is to just do mediocre work. Accept the dozens of interruptions each day and do just enough to get to the end of the day.

I can’t do that though. I love my job..

I just wish I’d be left alone long enough to do it.

Quotes from: Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule, By Paul Graham

Well, I’ve decided that I want to have a place to bitch about the trials and tribulations of running Creepy Cleveland.

I *do* have a category on Creepy Cleveland named ‘Announcements’ that I use for news and non-haunted-type posts, but I suspect that CC visitors probably don’t appreciate me rambling about converting the blog from .asp to .php or transferring from one host to another.

So I’ve decide to bore my readers here with that kind of blather. (Shouldn’t be too hard, considering the three people that read this with any regularity just skip the posts marked ‘tech’ anyway – Hi Carrie, Dad and Joe!)

So anyway… let’s get on with the show shall we?

Here’s what’s bugging me about Creepy Cleveland now:

1. Once upon a time I set up TwitterFeed to feed my CC posts to Twitter. It still works, but I have no idea what login/password I used to setup the account. And TwitterFeed is no help.
2. I keep all my CC email in a separate gmail account with one of those random generated passwords (for ultimate security!). It’s so secure that even I can’t remember it, causing me to have look up the password any time I want to check my email.
3. I just recently moved CC to a new blog engine with way more flexibilty and features! I’m fixing broken links and pulling old content from my hard drive to republish. (OK – not a problem – I’m just really busy)
4. I keep all my CC linkroll bookmarks in delicious and I hate what delicious has become. Plus it’s *another password* to remember when posting content.
5. I’ve recently created an Adsense account to see if I can maybe make at least enough money to pay for the hosting plan. I also take great pains to hide/kill ads in all my browsers. Conflict of interest? Yep.

I guess that’s it for now. None of the above is really a big problem. I really love running Creepy Cleveland and enjoy the challenges of trying to make a popular, readable site. I’ve gotten some positive recognition for it and hardly any criticism (and I get invited places!)

In my mind – it’s totally worth it.

I’m just glad I have a place to complain about it now.

Yesterday I converted Creepy Cleveland from Blogger to WordPress.

I’m hoping most people won’t notice any difference (apart from the cool makeover), but I’m excited about the WordPress plugins I get to try out on a blog that actually gets some traffic. (Nobody reads this blog, remember?)

Of course, this blog has been a wordpress blog for nearly a year and I’ve got a couple private blogs hosted on my home and work servers (I came up with that idea after Google Notebook went under – you wouldn’t believe what a great idea that turned out to be)

WordPress is famous for their 5-minute install and hundreds of user-contributed plugins.

Oh, and it’s linux-based (of course – well, technically, if you’ve got MySQL and PHP – you’re fine) and it’s free.

Show some love.

I installed a LAMP stack and moved my web development stuff over to the new box.

Then I set up a bunch of disorganised CRON jobs to back-up all my files.

I installed SAMBA and set about connecting to our Windows Server.

Then I found instructions online about how to connect to a Novell server, so I created a bunch of mount points and wrote a couple scripts to access our Novell server.

doesn't look like much, does it?

Shortly thereafter, I wrote some new scripts to do some routine nightly file maintenance between our Novell network and our Windows network.

I had an old legacy MS Access application that was giving me fits and I wanted to upsize it to something a bit more robust – so I ported it into MySQL.

Then I wrote a web front end for it.

Then I had an idea to create a corporate help-desk application that would allow users to fill out a form online and submit work requests to our department.  Simple, but effective.

One day we were overrun with viruses (annoyances, actually) that our current corporate anti-virus wasn’t aware of yet.  So I installed Avast Antivirus on the linux box and spent a couple weeks cleaning up flash drives, memory cards and external media of all sorts until the corporate AV got updated with the new virus signatures.

Most recently,  I’ve embarked on another we-based front-end to a older application.  Sticking it on the web will save tons of money on paper alone.

While modifying my cron jobs to backup the most recent project files, I began to remember this machine’s humble beginnings.  Destined for the trash heap, linux breathed new life into an old machine and turned it into a little workhorse.

Eventually, I’m going to need to move my files onto a larger, more secure machine, but I think I’ll keep this little baby around long after that.