Technology Bytes

Allright!

We’ve been in Daylight Saving Time all summer, so now it’s time to autumn back. Isn’t that the saying? Spring Forward, Autumn back? Huh. Either way, Daylight Saving Time, an annoyance to many in the world of IT, is nearly at an end.

Aside from the fact that it attempts to address a problem that no longer exists, my main issue with Daylight Saving Time is this: Spring Forward and Fall Back aren’t really relevant in a Southern state with two seasons: summer and not summer. We need a nemonic that’s much more applicable to our own seasonal situation. Maybe “Early Summer Forward, Late Summer Back?” That could probably use some more work… I’ll try to have something before it’s time to Early Summer forward again in twenty ten.

If any of our listeners mysteriously gained an hour last weekend, no matter how short lived, chances are you were checking out a digital clock that was produced prior to 2005, which is when the new dates for the United States Daylight Saving Time were announced. So who’s actually in control of Daylight Saving Time, or DST, as it is commonly known?

Well, in 1883, the U.S. railroads were the first to adopt time zones, so that national railroad schedules could be published. Until that point, most localities had been setting their own time. It took nearly 35 years for a Federal Law to be passed mandating that DST be observed nationwide. Apparently, we don’t like the government’s hands in our pockets, regardless of whether they’re after our watch or our wallet, because it only took only a single year for that piece of legislation to be repealed, thus leaving the observance of DST to the discretion of the local politicians.

DST Ownership was given to the only federal regulatory agency in existence at that time, the Interstate Commerce Commission. For the next 50 yeasrs, World War II was the only period in which the nation could pull it together on a unified start and end date for Daylight Saving Time.

In 1966, Congress passed the Uniform Time Act, which standardized the start and end dates of DST, but left it up to the individual states as to whether or not to observe DST at all.

In 1972, things got even murkier with an amendment that allowed states with two time zones to make separate selections in each. Thus, Indiana has can have up to four different times on the populace’s wrists at any given moment.

Things stayed pretty much the same until 2005, when congress decided to muck with the start and end dates of DST again, this time in the name of saving energy. Those changes took effect in 2007, making life difficult for millions of date and time keeping devices manufactured prior to 2005. Since no one had changed the standard in fifty some odd years, manufacturers felt safe in hard coding the dates into the devices across the nation.

Problems with the new DST dates also cropped up in many operating systems. But, unlike embedded devices, those were easily repaired with software patches that happened automagically for most users. I’d be curious to see if anyone has studied the cost in IT time and labor and mapped it agaist the supposed energy savings that this was designed to bring about.

In any case, it boils down to this: You’ve got an entire extra hour this weekend in which to geek out.

Of course, if you’re streaming from Hawaii, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, or the Virgin Islands, none of this is applicable to you.

The official time to change your time is 2:00 AM this Sunday Morning. Hit www.time.gov to synch up with the atomic clock and to get more information about why we do the things we do, temporally speaking.

We’re just a couple days away from the kickoff of Oni-Con, Houston’s anime festival slash convention, taking place on the West side of Houston at the Houston Marriott Westchase on Briar Park Drive.

One of the cooler and somewhat more accessible parts of any competent con, is the cosplay contest. This is where con goers dress up as their favorite anime character, then get anything from a single pose to a short skit to show off their hard work. Oni-con’s upping their cosplay game by holding the Hallows Eve Cosplay contest, taking place the night of the 31st.

In addition to this, a slew of special guests, vendors, games, and goodies will all populate the hotel through the 1st. Hit www.oni-con.com for details, directions and registration info.

That’s it for this break from pleading for pledges, and that’s that for BarretTime.

Barrett and phliKtid inadvertently showed up at the studio wearing the same mechanic style shirt. Ironically, phliKtid’s truck was experiencing problems with the fuel line which lead to this comical photo.

Great discussion tonight ranging from net neutrality to the new releases from Apple and the release of Microsoft Windows 7.

Technology Bytes Podcast for Oct. 14th, 2009 [ 1:59:22 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Allright. Something to go check out AFTER we’re off the air:

The Independent Film Channel is midway through it’s Monty Python-athon. In what is probably a nod to the troop’s birthday, the channel is running several hours of Python fare each night, including episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, interviews, and most (if not all) of their movies. Python fans already possessing their own personal Python library may not need to run to the DVR right now, but this is a great chance for the noobs to indoctrinate themselves in Python fare.

And getting back to our birthday tradition, this week marks the 125th anniversary of the International Meridian Conference which decided that the Prime Meridian would run through the United Kingdom and that Greenwich would sit at a Longitude of zero degrees, zero minutes and zero seconds. At the time, over 70% of the world’s shipping charts keyed off Greenwich as the initial meridian, so it was a natural fit. This was also the conference that shot down Sir Stanford Flemming’s idea of having a single world time. Contrary to popular belief, while the idea of cutting up the world into timezones was introduced, it wasn’t actually voted on at this conference. We fall back an hour on November first, so take my advice and mark your calendars now.

Now, I don’t know if anyone took my advice last week on attending the Linux Workshop that wrapped up an hour or so ago, but if you didn’t: not to fear. The workshop happens every Wednesday evening from six to eight at the Houston Area League of PC Users Headquarters, aka HAL-PC HQ. It’s situated oh-so-conveniently close to Microcenter, for those of you who navigate by way of circuit board dispensaries. You’re welcome to bring both questions and hardware to the workshop, but if you are bringing your desktop box rather than a laptop, be sure to bring all the necessary cords and a keyboard and mouse, as generally just the monitors are supplied in the lab. So that’s everything except the monitor.

If you want some more info on the workshop, surf to www.hal-pc.org and check out the SIG Calendar.

Crypticon happened last weekend, and with both Oni-Con and Halloween right around the corner, costumes may be on your mind. If you have enough time, cardboard and paint, you can create some pretty impressive anime fare. This is an especially good choice because of the double-duty the costume can put in at both Oni-Con and at other activities (door to door or otherwise) you may attend over the Halloween weekend.

With enough *luminescent* paint and a willingness to slather it all over your body, you could be Marie Curie. Or is that too soon to be funny?

OK, with enough *blue* paint and a willingness to slather it all over your body, you could be the Blue Screen of Death.

And don’t gloss over found costumes; you’d be surprised what kind of geekery you can pull off with an old pair of jeans and a black t-shirt. For instance, if you’ve got an old pair of 501’s, a black mock-turtleneck and an iPhone, Fake Steve Jobs is a costume possibility for you.

If you have the ability to talk in a very monotone voice about very mundane things, then the scientist Neils Bohr should be at the top of your list. It’s kind of a stretch, but we’re on a budget here. Luckily, having to repeatedly explain your costume will give you plenty of opportunity to get Bohring part down cold.

If you can meet the aforementioned requirements for Neils and you happen to be exceptionally hairy to boot, then maybe this is the year you break with tradition, leave the Hobbit costume in storage, and don the monotone to become Neil’s brother, Harald Bohr. For all of our science school dropouts, that would make you a Harry Bohr.

Access to a wheel chair and a speech synthesizer? Stephen Hawking.

A blue dress shirt, khaki slacks and a small spray bottle to keep the sweat stains fresh? Steve Ballmer.

Something with which to cover your face and a command of all things BSD? Our own phliKtid.

A laser, a head band and a shark fin? You get the idea.

You’ve got nine or ten days to get something together before the Oni-Con anime convention that kicks off Friday, October 30th at the Houston Marriot Westchase. The con will bring in voice actors, animators and script writers from anime such as Desert Punk, Samurai 7, Speed Grapher, Burst Angel, Full Metal Alchemist and One Piece. I’ll give you some time to get your costume together before breaking down the highlights of the con next week.

For now, hit www.oni-con.com for details and directions and costume inspiration.

That’s it for your secret to becoming a costume contender and that’s that for BarretTime.

We’re taking a birthday break this week so we can move onto scarier fare.

With things getting cold out, then getting warm, then warm and muggy, then acting like it might get cold, but continuing to be warm and muggy, I’m sure we’re all in the mood for Halloween. You know… if the humidity gets high enough, you can pretend its spooky fog.

If you need a little more help getting into the Halloween spirit than a muggy Houston day may offer, look no further than the Crypticon Houston 2009 Horror Convention taking place October 16th through the 18th.

A number of horror stars and industry folk will be descending upon our city in order to prey upon those curious enough to attend the con. If you do plan to attend, please stay out of the basement, the attic, and any parts of the hall built on a desecrated Indian grave site. You’ll have to do your own record diving at City Hall if you want to determine the spectorally-speaking “safe” locations and to study possible defensive postures should the hall need to withstand an onslaught of zombies.

If all of that seems a little much, you can just relax and catch a movie at the con, however, entering a darkened room is probably on someone’s list of horror no-no’s.

The Houston House of Horror Movie Room will screen a number of movies and trailers during the weekend. Some titles that caught my attention were Spirit Camp, described as “Friday the 13th” meets “Bring it On”, and another flick titled the Quick and the Undead. Both of those are showing Friday night.

Poultrygeist is another fave, but you’ll have to wait until Saturday night for that one. Houston’s own Two Star Symphony will be performing and international favorites such as Adrienne Barbeau, Kristy Swanson, and Courtney Gains, the red headed actor behind Malachi of The Children of the Corn and the creepy pasty guy with red hair in the burbs. I’d like to point out that he’s totally passable for a coder in that movie. He also performed live on stage once with Phish. That can be scary, depending on how you feel about jam bands.
Moving right along… (Which is something Jam Bands have a hard time with…)

Jonathan Breck will also be on hand. Though he’s known for portraying the villaneos daemon The Creeper in the Jeepers Creepers films as well as several other horror offerings, he had a single appearance in a Star Trek: Voyager episode titled “Survial Instinct” in which he plays a dying Borg. If you catch him on a panel or in person at the con, be sure to ignore all of his horror credentials and ask him about that instead. I bet he really really loves that. A lot.

And while we may know what scares Jonathan Breck, you can attend Crypticon Houston to find out what it takes to make you shiver. Because it’s not going to be the weather.

Check out www.crypticonhouston.com for details and directions. You do have to pick up a ticket to attend the event. Since the door prices are a little scary, be sure to check out the website for online registration.

And while there is definitely a horror genre in anime, it’s safe to say that the majority of anime won’t make you scream and run for the door. And if that is your unintended reaction to anime, maybe you just haven’t found the right anime. You can remedy that in a few weeks at Oni-Con, Houston’s own Anime conference taking place Halloween weekend at Marriot Westchase on Briarpark Drive.

There’s a lot going on at this con, and I’ll be sure to cover that next week. In the mean time, hit www.oni-con.com for all your informational needs.

Our one non-con event of the week is The Linux Workshop at HAL-PC which happens every Wednesday night from

This is a group I was actively involved with for a couple of years before I started sitting in here. A number of seasoned Linux gurus are generally on hand to guide the new to Linux crowd to the open source light. If you need a little more Linux hand holding than we can give you on air, this is the group for you. You’re welcome to bring your Linux box or Linux box-to-be if you’ve hit any snags along your Linux journey.

Again, things run from six to eight every Wednesday at HAL-PC, so you’ll be in the car just in time for Technology Bytes next week if you want to swing by and see what these Linux people are up to. www.hal-pc.org
for details and directions to the HAL-PC Headquarters. Not to worry – Linux is not scary.

That’s it for your phantasmagoric four one one and that’s that for BarretTime.

Allright – More and more birthdays on BarretTime tonight. The first birthday goes out to some very classic technology. And in keeping with our three week tradition, we’ll lead it off with a hint.

What is black and white and red all over?

You may have had to regress back to second grade to recall the normalTime answer to that riddle: the newspaper. The BarretTime answer to that riddle is the bar code, which was issued a patent on October 7th, 1952. Originally developed to help track the nations rail cars, the patent didn’t really become valuable until bar codes were used to automate grocery store checkout systems.

A bar code is an optical representation of data that is readable by machines via a bar code scanner, or in the case of the “gPhone”, through software that analyzes images captured by the phone’s camera.

The long thin lines that adorned Google’s search page today are the classic 1 dimensional barcode. There are several types in existance. I spent several weeks on a project working with 2 of 7. Unfortunately, that’s another One-D bar code, not a hot relation of Star Trek’s 7 of 9.

The small package shipping industry, which are carriers like UPS, FedEx and the USPS, all leverage barcodes, but had the problem of the bar coded labels getting damaged in transit. With one dimensional bar codes, like the ones found on the back of a can of soup or a box of cereal… Hang on, I’m forgetting my audience. Let me back that up. With one dimensional bar codes, like the ones found on a box of pocky or on the side of a pizza delivery box, if the right, or rather, wrong, piece of bar code label gets damaged, you lose the data.

This was a very real issue for the shipping companies, because if a bar code becomes damaged in transit, the package attached to it would have to be handled by hand, upping the cost of moving the package from point A to point B.

The answer to this problem was 2D barcodes that can store more data per square inch of bar code and where as much as 75% of a barcode can destroyed without losing any data. One example of this type of bar code is MaxiCode, a public domain 2-D bar code originally developed by UPS but now available for anyone’s use.

And while smart-phone based bar code readers are nice, they’re still pretty slow and can be unreliable, especially under less than perfect picture taking circumstances. The old-school way to go is to use a laser based bar code scanner that simply sits between your keyoard and your computer. These can be found pretty cheaply. Radio Shack was even giving away a cheapy laser based scanner for a while with the hopes that you’d use it to scan contextual barcodes in newsprint and ads that would then take you to web pages with info about the products or stories associated with the barcodes. It was called the CueCat and they can still be found running around ebay for not too much.

Printing barcodes is as easy as installing a font these days, letting you use this venerable technology in projects around the home on the cheap.

The site www.ostatic.com ran a great piece on open source bar code packages currently available, positioning you to put barcodes on things ’till the toner runs out.

You could label your DVD collection, organize your book collection into a library, or track assets with it in a small office environment. The more geeky could could also label their miniature collecible fantasy figurines or their cats. You’d probably want to barcode the cats’ collars, not the actual cats. I don’t want to generate any angry calls to the station from the SPCA or the coalition of cat ladies for suggesting that any harm come to any cat.

Personally, I use bar codes at the office to help track assets like laptops and desktops and I use them at home to label all the jars containing my bonsai kitten collection.

So, along the lines of Internet oddities, Jay Maynard, aka Tron Guy, who has Texas ties, is getting a Web Redemption Thursday night on a show called Tosh.0. The show is a 30 minute spot where a guy offers up running commentary on video clips snipped from the web. I think it’s hillarious, but your mileage may vary. Googling Tosh.0 will turn up the details on where to catch Mr. Maynard in all of his glowing glory.

A little detour there with Bonsai Kittens and Tron Guy, but it leads us into our next birthday. While references to cubed kitties and adults in costumes may garner a knowing glance from gathered geeks, nothing has the power to unite a group of socially shy people more than our next BDay.

If you’re already aware that “strange women lyin’ in ponds distributin’ swords is no basis for a system of government!” and that “Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony!” then you may already be aware that Monday saw a true geek staple turn 40 years old. On October 5, 1969, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin and Graham Chapman took to the airwaves as the first episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus was sent out to the British populace.

45 episodes in all were created, with several full length films, including And Now For Something Completely Different in 1971, Monthy Python and the Holy Grail in ’75, Monty Python’s Life of Brian in ’79, Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl in 1982, and Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life in 1983.

In the 40 years that the Pythons have been around, a number of namesakes have cropped up.

The Python Programming language was named after the troupe. If you peruse the source code, you’ll find it sprinkled with numerous Python quotes and references.

Each member of the troup has had an asteroid named after them, which is cool. But not as cool as a several million year old giant snake being named after you. An Australian palaeontologist gave a gigantic fossilized snake he discovered in 1985 the taxinomic name, Montypython-oides river-slei-ghensis.

If you can’t rattle off at least one Monty Python quote either out loud or on IRC, then know that we’re silently taunting you right now. You have a handful of weeks to memorize something python before the next Geek Gathering hits. And if you can’t deliver a solid quote at the next geek gathering, we shall taunt you a second time.

That’s it for this pause for python and that’s that for BarretTime.

Allright. I mentioned last week that we had some more birthdays coming up.

Our first birthday is for something that caused quite a stir about a decade ago. You come in contact with it every time you touch an ATM or use a credit card. Guesses? Well, it was fifty years ago that Rear Admiral Grace Hopper saw her idea that computer programs could be written in a human readable language like English, rather than the zeros and ones of machine code, manifest itself in CoBOL. That’s CoBOL, the computer language, not Cobalt, the element. CoBOL stands for Common Business Oriented Language and is all about moving data in and out of ledgers, balance sheets, and cash flow statements. The name was selected at a committee meeting on September 18, 1959.

Micro Focus, the world’s leading provider of CoBOL development products, recently did a study in Australia that showed that people still use CoBOL at least ten times throughout the course of an average working day. Only eighteen percent of those surveyed had ever heard of CoBOL. CoBOL would have probably stayed behind the scenes if not for the Y2K scare. The issue here was that in 1959, computer storage was expensive and the change to the next century was a long way off. After all, if we were all zipping around in flying cars and jet packs, surely we wouldn’t still be using this language in 2009, right? Right?

D’oh!

With over two hundred and fifty billion lines of CoBOL in production, there are still a number of CoBOL programmers out there. I know that I took the last CoBOL class that the University of Houston gave in 1995 or 96, and some of my classmates went on to work on the Y2K problem here, then found work in poorer countries that couldn’t afford to update their non-Y2K compliant code until the premium on programmers went down on January 2nd, 2000.

With all the extra post-apocalyptic time these CoBOL programmers had on their hands, they were able to extend the CoBOL standard to include support for object oriented styles of programming, resulting in the COBOL 2002 Standard. It would have been funner if they had just called it CoBOL Oh Two.

Anyway, the next birthday belongs to the offspring of Ken Thompson, who was a programmer at AT&T subsidary Bell Laboratories in the summer of ’69. When his wife and young son departed for a month in August of 1969, he did what any young man in the summer of love did. He spent it in front of a keyboard and knocked out the Unix operating system. So while that’s not quite what every other guy was doing that summer, it still landed him an offspring that has gone on to spawn hundreds of little starnix operating systems all over the world. Unix didn’t really begin to take hold until it was ported to the PDP-11 minicomputer, a more powerful piece of metal than its previous home, the PDP-7.

Thompson soon teamed up with Dennis Ritchie, and, I’m going to steal a quote from ComputerWorld because they kinda nailed it with this:

“Thompson and Ritchie were the consummate “hackers,” when that word referred to someone who combined uncommon creativity, brute force intelligence and midnight oil to solve software problems that others barely knew existed.”

OK. So that’s the definition of a hacker. Crackers are different. If you’re good with accents, you can tell the difference.

I don’t know if there are any local geek birthdays coming up in Houston this month, but if you’re a geek and you have an October birthday, be sure to come out to the October Geek Gathering where the cast and crew of Technology Bytes will let you buy yourself a drink for your birthday, provided you’re of age. While the drink may cost you, Wifi connections to the web and general tech snarkyness are free for those celebrating a birthday this month or any other.

To gather with your fellow geeks, you’ll want to head to The Coffee Groundz at 2503 Bagby at McGowan this Friday, October 2nd. Parking is pretty open at seven, when people first start to show up, and gets a little more crowded after eight. There’s plenty of street parking, just make sure you don’t do it in front of the Coffee Groundz on McGowan, as they tend to tow. Just ask in IRC. Geek Gatherings are a place for people like us to get together to share news, ideas, stories, or sometimes just space, within comfortable reach of food, caffeiene, wifi and a solid assortment of adult beverages.

Laptops and gadgets are welcome, but not required. I’ll bring along some different incarnations of the Arduino for those who want to get their hands dirty with physical computing. I don’t know if Jay has messed around with his Arduino kit yet, Jay, but you could always bring it along in case anyone wanted to see what one looks like before its born.

Check our website, www.geekradio.com for details and directions to October’s Geek Gathering, as well as for some great pics of last month’s event.

If I get lucky with UPS, I may have an oscilloscope kit on hand that we can help bring into the world… Even if it doesn’t, I’ll still try to find an excuse to mix molten metal with general geekery, pending any applicable fire codes. I guess we’ll see this Friday.

Either way, that’s it for the birth of a language that just won’t die and that’s that for BarretTime.