Technology Bytes

“….a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: nonhitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, washcloth, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet-weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.”

I think that most of you will recognize that passage from the late author Douglas Adams, creator of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series of works. Douglas Adams passed on May 11, 2001, and on Tuesday, May 25th, people around the world will honor the author by taking their towel with them wherever the day may take them. If you want to find some fellow hitchhikers to revel with or get some more history on the event, you can surf to www.towelday.org.

And if you’re plugged into the Internet right now, chances are extremely good that your data is traveling through an Ethernet cable along some point of its journey. Ethernet, the thought child of Robert Metcalfe, will have been around 37 years as of this Saturday, May 22nd.

Ethernet has enjoyed nearly two decades of supremacy as the de facto way to connect computers together in a home or office. It wasn’t until the recent widespread adoption of wireless technologies that the Ethernet cable started becoming an afterthought in people’s laptop bags and backpacks.

I’m curious as to how many of us in the studio could actually produce an Ethernet cable from their laptop bags right now… Anyone?

Most people are wireless these days, and since Kaveh Kanes closed, I know of no coffee shop in Houston where I can show up with a 20 foot Ethernet cable and expect to get connectivity. Of the two, Wireless is actually the more venerable technology, though, with Ethernet borrowing some of its tricks from one of the very first wireless networks that was created to connect several University of Hawaii computers together in 1970.

This network, the aptly named Alohanet, used amateur radio to link nodes together. Using one frequency to transmit and another to receive, a machine receiving data would immediately re-transmit that data back the origin machine, thus introducing the ability to detect and correct errors during transmission. Aloha also tackled the issue of collision detection, a condition when two computers try to talk at the same time, by just dropping both transmissions and simply trying again. Transfer speeds on Alohanet maxed out the Data Terminal Equipments built-in baud rate of 80 words per minute. That’s Teletype speed for you old timers…

Another networking technology was coming on very strong in the 70s that may have displaced Ethernet if not for one single flaw. IBM’s token ring technology overcame the problem of collisions by using a 3-byte token that was virtually passed between computers connected in a ring pattern. Only the computer in possession of the token was allowed to talk, or transmit data, while all other remained quiet. This ruled out the possibility of data collision. Token Ring speeds kept up with Ethernet speeds, with IBMs 16 MB/s Token Ring technology being introduced in 1989, eventually becoming the IEEE standard for token ring networks. Both Apollo Computer and Proteon offered other proprietary token schemes in the 80s. And though IBM did beat out those companies, it was Token Ring’s large plastic connectors and thick IBM Type 1 cabling that kept it from overtaking Ethernet. Token Ring speeds eventually hit 100MB/s, but would never see the multi-Gigabit Ethernet speeds realized today.

Early Ethernet cabling looked a lot like the coaxial cable that used to bring cable television into homes before satellite hit the scene. Now, Ethernet cabling takes the form of 4 twisted pairs of wire sheathed in a plastic coating. The end connectors are known as RJ-45 connectors, a larger version of what you still find on the ends of phone cabling, which is known as RJ-11.

So happy 37, Ethernet!

That’s exactly the half-way-point of this season’s sizzle and that’s that for BarretTime.

The Alley Theater has been kind enough to offer all geeks a discount on tickets to their production of Intelligence-Slave, a new play by Kenneth Lin. Here’s a PDF with all the necessary info.

It’s fund raising time again, so there’s no avoiding tuning into talk that expresses the cost of a KPFT membership in equivalent units of other stuff. Like a cup of coffee. Whether is was the five-cents-a-day fare that Sally Struthers spoke of before the age of Star Bucks or the proverbial four dollar frappachino, that calculation is rarely omitted from fund raising efforts. Possibly because it’s easy math…and nearly everyone in the geekosphere can relate to caffeine.

And you certainly wouldn’t want to have to figure out what a KPFT Basic Membership would cost you in terms of terabytes transferred to Amazon’s Simple Storage Solution if you had to do it by hand, would you? Especially if they’re computing megabytes as a powers of two rather than the mega-means-one-thousand bytes methodology that is extremely popular with hard drive manufacturers.

No, you would want, maybe even *need*, a calculator.

Blaise Pascal is generally credited with inventing the digital calculator. And by digital, I mean a technology that uses discrete values rather electronic. I have seen some misinformed folk on the ‘net under the impression that Blaise was typing out 55378008 to elicit giggles from friends. That is simply not the case. Blaise’s calculator, known as the Pascaline, was a collection of eight movable dials, each one representing a power of ten. So as the first dial representing the numbers zero through nine would make one full revolution, it would move the second wheel, representing the tens, one click.

This was actually an improvement on the Slide Rule, which was invented in 1622 by William Oughtred. Early-day slide rules came in both rectangular *and* circular models. An engineer with a slide rule is his pocket is probably a pretty old engineer; an engineer with a circular slide rule is ancient.

In 1820, the Arithmometer came on the scene. It was the first commercially successful mechanical calculator.

In 1886, the Comptometer became the first successful key-driven adding machine.

In 1878, W.T. Odhner introduced the Odhner Arithmometer that improved on the earlier device with the addition of a pinwheel engine.

And in 1893, The “Millionare” calculator was introduced. It was the first in its class to perform direct multiplication. Snopes neither confirmed nor denied that these early calculators were, in fact, covered with gold.

Other cool calculated names? The Arithmaurel in 1842 and the curtly name Curta. The Curta was the first miniature calculator that could be held in one hand. And while it was introduced to the world in 1948, it was developed under peculiar circumstances in 1938.

These circumstances included Nazi’s bunkered away in underground salt mines, forcing a Mr. Curt Herzstark (Spoiler Alert: the Curta) to work on a small, black metal cylinder, no bigger than the palm of his hand.

If you want to know more, you can Go Googling or you can check out the story re-enacted by real live people on the Neuhaus stage of the Alley Theater.

They’ll be putting on Kenneth Lin’s play, Intelligence-Slave, which centers around Curt, his work on the world’s first miniature four function calculator and his dealings with the nasty Nazi’s that designated him an intelligence slave during the second World War.

The play runs from May 23 through June 20th here in Houston at the Alley Theater. It’s actually the play’s world premier, otherwise I would rattle off some reviews for you. You hear that, bloggers? This is brand new territory…

Another spoiler alert? You can spell Sieg Heil using the same upside-down technique on any pocket calculator with an LCD disply. Actually, I’m not entirely sure that’s in the play; I’ve only read the first act. I do know that the cast has spent some time with an actual Curta device so they would be able to more accurately operate the prop-Curta on stage.

For details on the play and performance times, hit www.alleytheatre.org. (Either spelling of theater works with that…)

A warning: The play is recommended for mature audiences due to “language and subject matter”. I’m assuming this mature subject matter is the math behind 9’s Compliment, not the Nazis. Nine’s Compliment is the notion that you can perform subtraction operations by adding the radix compliment, or in our own decimal system, the Nine’s compliment of a number.

If you want some Allied Action, you’ll have to search out Hugh Whitemore’s play, Breaking the Code, which centers around Alan Turing and his efforts to break the German Enigma code at Bletchley Park during World War II. The play was adapted for television in 1996 by the BBC and was re-broadcast in the US by PBS, so there’s a good chance you can find it.

While that’s not certainly not it for this calculated cry for currency, that that’s for BarretTime.

Allright. I’m sticking with the TV theme of the night. I don’t know how many of you are familiar with the skit from Sesame Street with Lefty the Salesman trying to sell the Golden AN. The plan went something like, “Take the Golden AN, put it in the tan van. Give it to Dan, who takes it to Fran.” He can’t quite keep the order together, so he audibly tries to work it out. Which would have been fine had a police officer named Stan not been passing within earshot. Stan gives him “ten days in the can for stealing the Golden AN.” The skit ends with Lefty saying “I should have ran!”

If you’re old enough to remember that skit, you may, from time to time, have issues with the myriad of ANs that exist in the world of computers today. From WANs to MANs to LANs and even CANs, PANs and HANs, it seems like there’s a new Lefty at every elecronics show trying to move yet another AN. So how do you keep them all straight? To help you out, we’ll borrow a bit from Grover’s Near and Far skit. I don’t know if Jay Lee has a Grover in addition to his Kermit, but the skit entails Grover running into the foreground of the television frame, shouting NEAR, running to the background, shouting FAR. That’s pretty much it. For our own AN tour, we’ll start with Far and work our way up to Near.

The universal bulding block in this excercise is the AN, which stands for Area Network. The network is the medium used to connect any number devices or users to other devices and/or users. So really, all you have to do is learn and understand the first letter of each Area Network acronym. It’s not like I’m asking you to memorize CCMP. Anyone want to take a guess at that? CCMP? It’s my latest acronym.

Counter Mode with Cipher Block Chaining Message Authentication Code Protocol aka the new 802.11i encryption protocol that does away with parts of WEP and WPA.

*You* don’t have to memorize that. All you have to do is remember ‘Area Network’ and make an educated guess at the first letter.

So, starting with farthest out, we’ve got the WAN or Wide Area Network. If you have a hardware router or wireless access point at home, chances are it has a WAN port on the back that you connect to whatever device provides your broadband. And that’s what a WAN is, a large network designed to cover very large distances. Several routing protocols exist to make this happen, with TCP/IP (or Transmission Control Protocol slash Internet Protocol) being the most widely known. So when you see WAN, think Internet, and plug things in accordingly.

A little closer to home we have the LAN. This is the Local Area Network that interconnects all the computers in your home or all of the computers in a small office. Most home broadband routers, firewalls, and Wireless Access Points will have a LAN port on the back. Some have several. If the WAN port faces the Internet, then the LAN side faces the computers on your side of the device. Most LANs use a certain class of TCP/IP address that isn’t routable on the WAN. These IP addresses usually start with a 192, 172 or 10. And if you remove the wires, you’ve got a WLAN, or Wireless Local Area Network. So that’s your one hard AN acronym. Technically, you can have up to 254 hosts on a LAN. If you want to go beyond that, say, in a large office environment, you have to look back to the WAN or decide to go MAN.

Now there’s some gray area surrounding MANs. MANs are Metropolitain Area Networks and can usually be recognized by their exellent personal grooming habits (that’s where the term MANscaping comes from), their fashionable wardrobe and their stylish accessories. Remember: It’s not a purse, it’s a Metropolitain Area Network Bag. Actually, it’s a purse.

Continuing the run into the foreground, we have CANs. CANs or Controller Area Networks, have already been deployed in newer automobiles, in factories and even in some hospitals. These simple network devices replace short runs of wire where wire just won’t do, letting things like the air pressure sensors in your car’s valve stems communicate with your car’s controller, flashing a ‘low air pressure’ warning on the dash. Another application is letting multiple pieces of medical equipment communicate with each other without the need for runs of wires all around the operating table, tripping both doctors and nurses.

HANs or Home Area Networks are definitely the new hotness. This network connects household appliances like washers and dryers to Smart Energy Meters and thermostats that are popping up in parts of Texas. With a HAN, you can easily do things like schedule your washer and dryer to run when energy prices are low. And your appliances will know the current price of electricity because the SmartMeter on the outside of the house makes that information available to the main HAN controller. Giving you the ability to turn on your AC remotely or even pre-heat the oven if you’re on the way home from the store with some frozen fare.

Both Controller Area Networks and Home Area Networks take advantage of low power devices with a very small form factors. The ZigBee standard is one that’s being leveraged more and more these days, due to the small size and the fact that it can run months if not years on a single battery. If you remember WarDriving or using Network Stumbler in the early days of WiFi, know that this is going to be the next version of that. There’s already a Network Stumbler-esque program for the ZigBee standard, which is quickly becoming the defacto standard for HANs and CANs.

And finally, the PAN, or Personal Area Network. BlueTooth is an excellent example of this. PANs let you connect personal devices to other personal devices. For instance, streaming music from your phone to another BlueTooth device, like a pair of wireless headphones. Several of Dwight’s mice would also land in that category, along with any kind of pairing you do between your phone and your laptop or car.

So, you’re now ready to handle anything “AN”, golden or otherwise.

To check out some PAN, HAN and CAN gear in person, come out to this Friday’s Geek Gathering, happening at the Coffee Groundz in Midtown Houston at McGowan between Bagby and Brazos. Things get started at seven and can go quite late. We’ve lined up our own 8-bit DJ for a return performance, along with Brenden Macaluso of Recompute. He’ll be bringing at least one Recomputer, a very green PC that’s made of corrugated cardboard held together with non-toxic white glue. We’ll also have a smattering of Arduino gear and open source hardware. WiFi and electricity are free, but coffee, beer, wine, liquor and food will set you back a dollar or two. All of this happens this Friday starting at seven on the Siete de Mayo.

And while that’s nearly it for the cessation of your Cinco de Mayo, that’s that for BarretTime.

The one certainty of life along the Gulf Coast is that it’s going to be hot this summer. And things start heating up next week with a sizzling sale at Directron’s Bi-Annual Customer Appreciation Day. Directron is a national e-tailer with a storefront here in Houston. In addition to a giving you a free sub and cold drink to keep the temperatures of May at bay, they are bringing out representatives from several tech companies to field questions from the public.

AMD, Asus, Cooler Master, Evercool, Gigabyte, Intel, Microsoft, MSI and SuperMicro to name a few. Not that I would want to incite any friction at this kind of event, but it would definitely be fun to bus in some Linux evangelists to hand out leaflets outside the festivities. Are you listening, LUGs?

All of this goes down on Thursday, May 6th, from 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM at Directron on Harwin Drive.

If you subscribe to the old addage of ‘Where there’s smoke, there’s fire’, then things are heating up over at Apple, too. Let’s ignore the fact that police have executed a possibly illegal search warrant at the home of the journalist who accepted the infamous ‘found iPhone’ from a California college student and go straight to a smokin’ hot new app hitting iPhones around the nation.

So…Apple has approved a game for inclusion into the App Store called “Puff Puff Pass”, a game where up to five players choose a cigarette, a cigar or a pipe, a location (either indoors or out) and a time frame, then puff and pass as many times as they can before the clock runs out. I’d be curious to know exactly when this hit the App Store… It probably wouldn’t be such a big deal if Apple hadn’t previously banned Wi-Fi searching apps, political parody apps, apps that constitute duplicate functionality, third party code translation frameworks, (*cough* Flash *cough*), an LCD buyers guide and a port of Leisure Suit Larry. I’ve still never gotten to play that game and it looks like I never will, at least on the iPhone.

While the water may be a little warm on the Apple side of the pool, the Android half is doing fine. If you’re running Android 2.0 or better, you will soon have yet another web browser to choose from. A pre-alpha build of FireFox is now available for the platform, and though it’s far from optimized, it does bode well for both Android phones and especially the oncoming onslaught of Android powered tablets.

And if we continue to peer through the tablet Looking Glass, we can see things heating up between users of the HP tablet and those of the iPad. Apparently, there’s some contention in the world of tablet users as to which is best, with lines often being drawn along business Use Cases. Apple could potentially wipe the Slate clean with updates allowing the iPad to be more business-y, much like they tried to do with the iPhone in 2008.

I don’t know: trying to blend the world of business with the world of entertainment may not go so well. Of course I would like a single device akin to Captain Picard’s Ready Room briefing tablet to use at both work and home, but “Business Up Front, Party in the Back” may only produce the digital equivalent of a mullet. I think that Apple should stick to the home experience while HP carves out a place in the business world. Whatever may transpire in the tablet arena, there’s certainly no end to the flames spewing from both camps.

And here at home, we have five Fridays in the month of April, meaning that we are experiencing a bit of a drought as far as user group get-togethers go. In fact, attendees of our Geek Gathering will have gone a full five weeks since having a chance to level their D&D characters, knit a summer scarf, or lay down dark digital tracks from the DJ booth. DJ table. That’s coming up Friday, May 7th, but for now, that’s it for this puff-puff-passing of my Apple angst and that’s that for BarretTime.

Allright. I’m back among the living after my human body hosted a pretty nasty virus for the better part of a week. If I had had some sort of robotic telepresence in the studio last Wednesday, I would have informed you that the first National Robotics Week took place April 10th through the 18th. There were a number of events across the country, with a notable robotics meetup in Dallas along with a number of Robot Block Parties across the nation. The goal of Robotics week is to raise awareness about how robotics technology impacts society and to inspire students of all ages to pursue careers in robotics and other science, technology, engineering and math-related fields. www.nationalroboticsweek.org for a redux on the 10th through the 18th or to look ahead to the second National Robotics Week, taking place in 2011.

And to get you started off on the right foot, tread, track, or whatever your current means of motility may be, the HAL-PC Robotics SIG is meeting this Saturday, April 24th, at one in the afternoon at the HAL-PC headquarters. 4543 Post Oak Place Drive is where you’ll want to be to start building your robot army.

In addition to helping Houstonians welcome our new robotic overlords, HAL-PC offers a vast support network for pretty much whichever area of personal computing that interests you. And if things like Ubuntu, Slackware, Debian, Mint, or even the very word ‘distro’ excite you, then you’ll want to be at the second of two monthly meetings of the Houston Linux Users Group, aka the Linux SIG. The group meets this Saturday at two in the afternoon at the same location as the Robotics SIG. Just follow the fleeing humans upstream to SIG Room C.

For a complete listing of Special Interest Group activities, surf to www.hal-pc.org.

On a side note, the long awaited first beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 was made available for download earlier today. The Enterprise Linux 6 Beta aims to blur the lines between virtual, physical and cloud computing in order to address the shifts taking place in the modern IT environment. Available for the Intel 386, AMD and Intel 64 bit processors, the System z and IBMs Power platforms, ISO’s are available at www.redhat.com/rhel/beta.

Remember, Linux is a great alternative to getting mired down in the ever contentious Mac vs PC war. And if you’re feeling uber enough to shun Linux, there’s always the BSDs: derivatives of the Berkeley Software Distribution derivative of Unix, of which FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD are kings. Really, the only way to win a discussion about which Operating System is the best is not to get into a discussion about which Operating System is best in the first place.

On the North side of town, Alex Dumestre will be giving a two hour presentation on the use of PaintShop Pro X3, including its Organization and Express Lab capabilities. He’ll also touch on creating slide shows using ProShow Gold, getting the finished product on DVD, Blu-Ray or even the Web. The presentation wraps up with a finished slide show of a trip down an Eastern European river. All of this takes place under the umbrella of the 1960 PC Users Group this Thursday from seven to nine PM. Hit www.1960pcug.org for details and directions.

And tomorrow is Earth Day. This one is special not only because the Earth is still currently controlled by humans, but because tomorrow marks the 40th anniversary of the Holiday. To honor this occasion, the Contractor Recycling Partnership has organized the second annual Electronics Waste (or E-waste) collection event to be held on April 24 at Space Center Houston. The event is free and open to the public from 8 a.m. to noon. TVs and white goods (such as washing machines, microwaves and dryers) will not be permitted at this event, but all other computer-related electronics will be accepted. I would assume that they’ll be recycling the non-fleshy bits of cyborgs, too, so if you’ve got some parts from the old Cyberdine T-850 Series that you can’t seem to melt down, this is your chance to get rid of them. That’s right – let the good folks at the Johnson Space Center drain the last bit of life out of those glowing red eyes for you… No muss, no fuss.

That’s it for this week’s robo-rendezvous and that’s that for BarretTime.

Spring has sprung and new life abounds. Unfortunately, not all of this new life is cute and cuddly. While the bunnies hopping along the bayou are harmless enough, the dust bunnies that grow inside your desktop computer can insulate electrical components and disrupt airflow within the case, significantly increasing the operating temperature of your system.

(I guess that would rank dust bunnies somewhere between actual bunnies and those of the Monty Python persuasion, which await you all with nasty, big, pointy teeth. The thing to remember is this: Keep clear of any cave entrances guarding sacred treasures, and the killer bunnies will keep clear of you.)

So, leaving the cave for the computer: electronic circuitry works most reliably at low temperatures. Higher temperatures can degrade and wear out any heat sensitive materials used in the electronic components, and fluctuations in temperature will stress many more components, causing them to expand and contract, wreaking havoc on the myriad of interconnects found on every circuit board in your PC.

Even more nefarious is something known as ‘metal migration’. This is especially prevalent in areas where high temperatures are combined with high humidity. I personally don’t know any place like that, do you, Houston?

Metal migration occurs when metal whiskers or dendrites grow from the conducting lines of a circuit board. With lines being spaced closer together in today’s devices, shorts between lines can occur, causing component failure and the untimely demise of your PC.

While there’s no immediate cure for metal migration, you can combat dust bunnies with some carefully aimed bursts from a can of compressed air. Don’t make the mistake of blowing any visible dust on external fans inside the case; you’ll need to muster up the courage to open your computer’s case for this job.

Before you crack your desktop’s case, you’ll first want to unplug everything, paying close attention to what went where. Opening your computer case can require anything from the simple press a tab to performing a certain series of knocks and bumps that would just as soon grant you passage to Diagon Alley as it would open your case. When in doubt, get online and search for the instructions on opening the case to your particular model of PC. Trust me: three minutes of Googling is roughly equivalent to ten minutes spent super-gluing broken bezels and tabs back into place…

Be careful not to unseat anything or tug on any wires that would loosen something. Actually, this is a good time to take a look inside your computer and try to identify all the major parts. Again, a quick search for ‘schematic’ and the model of your PC should turn up what you’re looking for. Of course, you don’t want to do this from the computer you’ve got opened up. If you don’t have a second computer around, print them out for handy reference before open the PC.

If you have pets or smokers in close proximity to the PC, you may even want to take the PC outside for this, as smoke and pet hair act like dust bunny steroids. Who knows, you may have a bunny who can bat .400 in there…

Aside from removing any obvious animal life from the PC, you’ll want to make sure that both the fan over your PC’s processor and it’s power supply are clean. If the situation is really bad, you can brush debris off the fan blades, away from the processor or power supply. After that, you’ll want to blow them out with your can of compressed air. Since it’s possible to damage your fan by spinning the blades too quickly as you apply the compressed air, keep them in place with the end of a plastic disposable pen, cotton swab, or something similarly non-conductive.

Blow off any exposed circuit boards, taking care not to get too close to the boards with the air, as pressurized air has been known to dislodge shoddily affixed chips and components. If there are any coffee or soda stains in the base of your PC, first, count yourself very lucky that you still have a running PC, and second, get a slightly damp cloth to scrub them away.

You can also inspect components to make sure that everything is properly seated, or plugged in securely where its supposed to be plugged in. The schematic for your PC will help out with this. If you do need to physically touch any components inside the PC, make sure to touch something metal on the case first, to discharge any static electricity that may have built up on your person. Once everything has been dusted and it looks like a new PC on the inside again, its time to put everything back together and power it up.

If something came loose during your dusting, an error message will generally display on the BIOS screen or you may hear a series of beeps before its even able to get that far. Opening your case again and checking to make sure that everything is properly seated will generally fix the issue.

And if that doesn’t do it, you can just call it quits and head to Austin this weekend for Texas Linux Fest 2010. Happening this Saturday, April 10th, at the Marchesa Hall and Theater, the Texas Linux Fest is a one day event bringing Linux visionaries and gurus together with Linux enthusiasts from across the state of Texas and beyond. Jon “maddog” Hall will be on hand throughout the con, as will a number of notable guests, speaking on things like monitoring large scale Linux systems with OpenNMS, the Drizzle Database, Security Enhanced Linux for Mere Mortals, Ubuntu on the Arm processor and even a talk on Unicode. If you’re on Mac or Linux and you’ve ever noticed the
diamond-question-marks in place of oddly accented characters, this talk is for you.

I’ll be in attendance, so be sure to say ‘Hi’ if you head that way. Hit
www.texaslinuxfest.org for a schedule of panels, directions to the venue and details on registration (which they have made extremely reasonable for those who may be on an open source software style budget).

That’s it for this dust-bunny death-match and that’s that for BarretTime.

The Texas Linux Fest is coming up in just a few weeks. Happening Saturday, April 10th, at the Marchesa Event Center in Austin, Texas, the Fest aims to be the first state-wide, community-run conference for Linux and Open Source Software enthusiasts. Jon ‘maddog’ Hall will be on hand, along with a number of other notable Linux speakers. Talks and Panels cover topics such as Apache Cassandra, building your own Mail Cloud, Drizzle, OpenNMS, Security Enhanced Linux, and the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud.

Admission is inexpensive and both enthusiast and supporter level tickets may be purchased, depending on your particular economic situation.

Hit www.texaslinuxfest.org for a list of talks and a link to the registration page.

This coming Tuesday, the 1960 PC Users Group will be holding their monthly general meeting in conjunction with the monthly meeting of their Digital Photography SIG.

The general meetings are generally short and are generally used to recognize visitors, make announcements, and give attendees a little social time, complete with refreshments, before the start of the meeting. Six thirty to get your blood sugar up and seven o’clock to level up your intelligence. The Digital Photography presentation immediately follows. April’s speaker will be Don Townzen, who, over a period of three years, travelled the state of Texas to photograph all 254 of the state’s court houses. He’ll be sharing these pictures along with bits of Texas history and folklore, with his photographic traveling partner, Pat. Your digital photography questions will be answered, too. All of this happens Tuesday, April 6th. Hit www.1960pcug.org for details and directions. The Digital Photography SIG has been posting past presentations in PDF format to their SIG page, so be sure to take advantage of that resource if you’re just starting to get up to speed with digital photography.

And tomorrow morning, you’ll want to surf sites like Slashdot.org and ThinkGeek.com with an air of suspicion, as it will be April 1st, aka April Fool’s Day. Since the dawn of the Internet, there have been those who would deceive on this day, in mostly clever and harmless ways. Rather than try to pull the digital wool over your eyes tonight, I’d rather revisit some of the better pranks from April first’s past.

Last year, YouTube allowed users to turn videos upside down by including flip=1 in the GET string of the video’s URL, turning several unaware users’ worlds upside down. That may have looked just about right to users of Google in Austrailia, who may have been temporarily enticed be the gBall, a football containing a GPS and motion sensing system used to monitor the location, force, and torque of each kick. 2009 was also the year that the UK’s Guardian stated that they would be killing their print version and going to a Twitter-only format.

In 2008, the Aussies are back at it with a claim that the new Google search tool could search into the future. YouTube also made a notable showing by RickRolling all of their featured videos that day. The Weather Underground stated that psychic research had proven the connection between hurricanes and global warming, which could have extended some credibility to a BBC video produced by Terry Jones, in which the film maker discovers a breed of flying penguin that migrates to the rain forest when things become a little less than pleasant in their wintery summer homes.

In 2007, Think Geek dropped a few new products on the market, such as the Wii Helmet and the 8-bit tie. In Their defense, Think Geek did eventually bring a real, live, 8-bit tie to market which is now available the other 355 days of the year. Google.com offered up free in-home wireless broadband, and hideapod.com offered up the ultimate iPod anti-theft device… by hiding it in a Zune. (Zing!) And having apparently missed the fallout from the bonsai kittens, or perhaps paying very close attention, the site tattooyourtoddler.com caught some flack from a few child protection organizations who had failed to check their calendars. This was also the year of the virtual tin foil hat, as it was introduced as an in-game item by Blizzard in the World of Warcraft.

In Aught-Six, the Fair Use Day.com team announced that they had joined the ranks of the RIAA, Fidofinder.com offered up a one million dollar reward for a lost dog, and iwantoneofthose.com featured a tiny device that would allow you to download your brain’s memory onto a 2GB USB flash drive. Surfers who bought that probably could have gotten away with the 500MB model.

In 2005, Google released Google Gulp, allowing you to quench your thirst for knowledge. The Auto-Drink feature and the fact that it was low in carbs were two strong selling points. Our own Chron.com was among the first to pick up prank that Maxim magazine would feature the Bush twins on the front cover, clad in lingerie, in what would appear to be the aftermath of a pillow fight. And in a one-two-punch combo on the Bush clan, SpaceDaily.com announced that Bush had canceled the Space Shuttle program.

And all the way back in 1998, an issue of the New Mexicans for Science and Reason newsletter contained an article claiming that the Alabama state legislature had voted to change the mathematical constant pi from 3.14159… to the ‘Biblical’ value of 3.0. The newsletter soon made its way onto the web, resulting in hundreds of letters to the Alabama legislature demanding they repeal the bogus bill.

The site aprilfoolsdayontheweb.com has a pretty good compendium of April First web shennanigans dating back to 2004. They’ll also be tracking tomorrow’s 2010 fare in near real time, so rather than circularly surfing sites, just use them as your single prank portal.

And if you’re not already in the habit of doing so, tomorrow is an excellent day to start locking your desktop when you leave for a coffee break, lest you fall prey to a local prank at the hands of co-workers.

And finally, Friday, April 2nd, is the date of the April Installment of the monthly Geek Gathering. That’s no joke, though tales of the previous day’s antics won’t be turned away. We’ll be carting out an epic amount of Arduino gear in the hopes that we’ll have enough room next door to let people get the hands dirty with physical computing. If you have any of your own projects you’d like to show off or if you’d just like to work on something in the presence of kindred souls, then we invite you come on over and set up shop. The Coffee Groundz is located between Brazos and Bagby on McGowan in Midtown Houston. WiFi and geeky camradery are free, but coffee, beer, spirits, gelato and food will set you back a few bucks. Things get started around seven and are buzzing until the last geek isn’t. Which is always after ten. So join Jay Lee and the rest of the crew of Technology Bytes to get in on the action, be it digital or something made with some 100 gram heavy worsted Merino wool. Knitting reference for the win!

That’s it for your 4/1 411 and that’s that for BarretTime.

First off, today is Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science. www.findingada.com for details on the day and the lady.

This weekend, Houston’s George R. Brown will be home to Comicpalooza. In its third year, the con has been re-invented as a multi-format convention celebrating not just comics, but also sci-fi and fantasy, horror, steam punk, New Media, movies, film, and gaming of all types. www.comicpalooza.com for details and registration information.

Also, the Texas Linux Fest is coming up in just a few weeks. Happening Saturday, April 10th, at the Marchesa Event Center in Austin, Texas, the Fest aims to be the first state-wide, community-run conference for Linux and Open Source Software enthusiasts. I don’t know how LinuCon from a few years back would factor into that, but this is definitely the first state-wide Linux conference to open with a musical morning keynote.

Delivered by Joe “Zonker” Brockmeier, ‘A Musical Guide to the Future of Linux: Reprise’ will take a look at where the Linux community is, where its going, and maybe where it should be going next. Along the way, Zonker plans to show you that Open Source has more in common with popular music than you might think.

Talks and Panels cover topics such as Apache Cassandra, building your own Mail Cloud, Drizzle (the database, no relation to Snoop Dogg, yet), OpenNMS, Security Enhanced Linux, and the Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud.

For all of the developers out there, you should probably pencil in the talk being presented by Janet Swisher and David Cramer entitled, ‘Benefiting from the Skills of Non-programmers’. If you just muttered ‘what skills’ under your breath, then you should probably go ahead and ink that in.

And it wouldn’t be a Linux festival without talks of installing the OS on things other than your garden variety IBM clone. ‘Linux on the PowerPC’ and ‘Ubuntu on ARM’ are two talks that fill that niche. If you want to develop for mobile platforms but don’t want to deal with the lock-down of the iPhone App Store or the awesomeness, I mean, well, you’re going to have to Google for a con of the Android platform because I’m still in love with my Nexus One, so long as Google is legally allowed to call it that. The point is that if you want to run Linux on your older Apple or Ubuntu on your ARM-powered mobile device, these talks have you covered. By the way, I mean ARM powered as in products powered with the ARM chip, not your own arms, as would be the case with our hand-crank radio of fundraisers past.

ARM is a 32-bit reduced instruction set computer, which is commonly known by the acronym RISC. The chip started out life as the Acorn RISC Machine, but underwent a name change to the Advanced RISC Machine.

In 2007, 98% of the more than one billion mobile phones sold used at least one ARM processor. Today, products like the Acer n300, the Amazon Kindle2, several of the Dell Latitude e-Series laptops and the Microsoft Zune HD all use ARM technology. So Ubuntu getting into ARM is certainly big as far as freeing the next generations of mobile devices.

So getting back to all things Linuxy, Linux Legendary Jon “maddog” Hall will be on hand at the Texas Linux Fest to talk about Project Caua, a project aimed at making it possible for people to make a living as a Systems Administrator or Entrepreneur using Free and Open Source Software and Hardware.

Randal Schwartz will be wrapping things up with a talk titled, ‘Free Software: A Look Back, a Look Ahead’ in wich he’ll be recounting some of his experiences with the history of free software, including why it works, how to contribute, and how to make money with it.

It will cost you some money to attend, but both enthusiast and supporter tickets may be purchased, depending on your particular economic situation and dedication to the scene. The supporter ticket also comes with a bag for schwag and a t-shirt. Other than that, they badges are identical.

Hit www.texaslinuxfest.org for a list of talks and links to the registration page. Again, that’s Saturday April 10th.

A little closer to home is the second of two presentations by the Houston Linux Users Group aka the Linux SIG at HAL-PC. Things get going at two in the afternoon at the HAL-PC Headquarters and are generally wrapped by four. Hit www.hal-pc.org for directions, then follow the link for viewing the complete SIG and Class Calendar. While you’re there, you can check out other Special Interest Group goings-on, such as the Robotics Lab that meets at 1:00 that same Saturday, or the Linux Workshop, which meets every Wednesday night at six PM at that same location. Aside from the Geek Gathering, I know of no other groups that invite you to bring your Linux problems in hardware form, along with you to a meet-up. But these guys encourage it. Just make sure to bring all the appropriate power cords, keyboards and mice. Really, everything but the monitor. And they’ll have you in the car in time to catch us, hopefully with less Linux questions than you started with.

I mentioned Project Caua earlier. The group has some fairly lofty goals that include creating millions of high tech jobs in the private sector, saving huge amounts of electricity from desktop computers, creating environmentally sound computing, making computers easier to use, and bridging the Digital Divide by creating a free wireless mesh bubble over areas of high population.

They also believe that annoyances of today like viruses, SPAM, making backups and even installing software should all be things of the past. A little less ethereal is the project’s idea to transfer oversea support jobs to unemployed people here in the US. The project believes that there are perfectly capable people who are currently on welfare that just need to be trained to do a job well and given backup support when needed. The underlying technological theme is that all of this can be done with Free and Open Source Software and Hardware. Its out there, its free, we just need to get it in the hands of the people who can benefit from it. That’s a tall order, but you don’t earn the nickname “maddog” by chasing things that are easily caught.

Hit www.projectcaua.org for more information about this group’s lofty goals.

And lastly, we have a Geek Gathering coming up in a little over a week. And while we’ve definitely hiked in a large amount of Arduino gear in meetings past, we’ll be doing doubly so a week from Friday. The Arduino platform revolves around the idea of taking a low power micro-controller, something akin to what would have set on your desktop twenty years ago in terms of power, but no bigger than a stick of chewing gum in terms of size, making it easy to tie in any assortment of electronic inputs and outputs. In the end, Arduino can mean anything from wearable computing to audience-aware art installations. And at April’s Geek Gathering, we can show you the gear that
will allow you to take your first steps into becoming a maker rather than a user. That’s it for getting a Lasso on Linux in the Lone Star State and that’s that for BarretTime.

This Saturday at the Bellaire Civic Center, the Houston Area Apple Users Group will be getting together for their monthly meeting. The Special Interest Groups will be meeting in corporeal form at nine that morning, with the main presentation being delivered via iChat by Peter Cohen, former MacWorld columnist. Peter will be talking about Aperture 3, a digital image editing and organizational package that has features not found in iPhoto. That presentation kicks off at 11:00. For details and directions to the Haaug meeting, surf to www.haaug.org.

If the thought of having a cheap networked file server at home makes you want to dance a jig, then this Saturday’s meeting of the Samba & Network Administration SIG at HAL-PC may be for you. Although there are several ways to share files among networked computers, the SMB/CIFS protocol is still king, if only for its ubiquity and ease of use. And if you’ve got an old PC and a few spare drives lying around, you can take advantage of SAMBA, a suite of programs for Linux and Unix that lets you host files cheaply and reliably from less than blazingly fast hardware. Samba turns 18 this year, and its latest 3.5.1 release hit the net a little less than a week ago. *You* should hit www.hal-pc.org for more info on this SIG as well as a full listing of their monthly events.

And today *is* St. Patrick’s Day. In addition to owing the Irish a debt for Celtic Music, Guinness and the animal series of books from O’Reilly and Associates, we should also give a nod to some early Irish geeks.

George Boole, 1815 to 1854, while technically an Englishman, was the first Professor of Mathematics at Queens College, Cork. While there, he developed his system of Boolean Algebra, which is one of the cornerstones of computer science today. ‘Bool’ or Boolean still exists in almost every typed programming language I am aware of. Actually, a bit of trivia for IRC would be “which modern computer programming language still in use today does *NOT* have a Boolean variable type?”

William Parsons, the Third Earl of Rosse, who also had the misfortune to be born English but soon found home in Ireland at Birr Castle, where, in 1885, he proceeded to build what was the largest telescope in the world at that time. The scope’s 72 inch mirror allowed Parsons to glimpse, for the first time, the spiral shapes of several galaxies.

(With a name like Parsons, I was hoping for something compiler related…)

John Tyndall, with a birthplace of County Carlow for the win, was a prominent Irish scientist who did pioneering work on the motion of glaciers, sound and radiant heat. He was also the first to offer a scientific explanation for “Why is the sky blue?” with explanations as to how light scatters in the atmosphere. He was also the first to explain how gasses in the atmosphere trap heat and keep the Earth warm. I wonder if Al Gore knows that the Irish discovered global warming. And lastly, he invented the ‘Light Pipe’ which later led to the development of fiber optics. So the Irish are taking the Internet back from Gore, too. Hopefully he has a green beer to drown his sorrows in this evening…

William Thompson. This is another one of those whose names you’ll know without knowing. So… William Thompson? Anyone? Maybe if I give out his Handle – Lord Kelvin aka First Baron Kelvin. So do we give the Irish credit for first use of a nick or handle? Possibly. Lord Kelvin introduced the absolute scale of temperature which starts at absolute zero, or zero degrees Kelvin. He was also closely involved with laying the first successful transatlantic telegraph cable under the sea between Ireland and Newfoundland in 1866.

Ernest Walton, Ireland’s only Science Nobel Laureate, helped build the first successful particle accelerator with John Cockroft at Cambridge, where they disintegrated lithium, or, as it is better known, splitting the atom, in 1931.

John Bell, born in Belfast, was a member of CERN. He’s responsible for the development of a set of equations known as Bell’s Inequalities that are of fundamental importance in quantum physics, and thus quantum computing.

And to make sure we have a lass among the lads, we have Jocelyn Bell Burnell, still living, as far as I know, of the Open University. She discovered Pulsars, or rapidly rotating neutron stars, in 1967, and continues to study them today.

That’s it for this bit of the BlarneyTime and that’s that for BarretTime.