Cybernightlife Founder's Journal

What's Next
It has been quite a while since I did anything with this LiveJournal blog. First, I upgraded both the desktop and the laptop to the Fedora 9 distribution. The Gateway desktop has been replaced with a Dell Dimension 4600 with 512MB of RAM and a 2.4Ghz Pentium 4 processor.

Second, I have converted the website to XHTML 1.1 standards with formatting through a set of CSS 2.1 stylesheets. The photo galleries are intact.

I have started reimplementing the actual content with minimal XHTML, and have been implementing PDF files for articles. To create the content, I have used Kile (KDE frontend to LaTeX) and LyX for documents that are mostly text. XHTML is still used for photo galleries implemented for this website.

For complex PDF documents, I use Scribus and OpenOffice.org outputting to PDF. For each document posted in Coffee, Jazz and Commentary, there is a link for you to download the source files used when the PDF version was created. This follows in the spirit of Creative Commons when it comes to sharing of information. There goes another chair in Steve Ballmer's office. :-)

Speaking of Microsoft, the company launched a series of advertisements that attack Apple Computer's "Hello, I'm a Mac, and I am a PC" advertisements. These are rather interesting advertisements that show everyday people doing everyday things. Fortunately, Linux was not attacked here.

...and how about that new slogan: "Life without walls."

Wait a minute: Aren't windows built into walls?

Restructuring and Creative Commons
I have resturctured the main website to link to all of my web properties. In addition, I have placed the entire project under a Creative Commons Share-Alike Attribution US License.

This means that I have essentially "copylefted" the entire Cybernightlife project. Anyone can use any material I post to any of my web properties as long as whoever uses the material attributes such material and recognizes that I have created the original material.

In addition, any material that is derived from my materials must also be distributed under a similar Creative Commons license.

Aside from that, I have combined all index pages into the main page on the website.

New Blogging Tool
I am now using ScribeFire to publish to the Cybernightlife Founder's Journal. This tool came with the Mandriva 2008 distribution, and it makes it really easy to add entries to the blog without having to log into LiveJournal to post.

YouTube Favorites
Recently, I have started placing more "nightlife" into Cybernightlife in the form of selected YouTube videos on the Cybernightlife Video Archive. I try to keep this as clean as possible. Be warned that some material may not be age appropriate. There is one example of this in the list of my favorites. The video I am talking about is a prank call to QVC, but bluntly describes (and pokes fun at) what some people actually do with their computers.

I also have videos from two of my favorite game shows: Whammy! the All New Press Your Luck, and Match Game.

Though no one is supposed to place television shows on YouTube, the samples contained in the Video Archive are a needle in a haystack compared to the volumes of television clips that are found on YouTube. Among these, I have explored the YouTube archive for game show funny monents, and there is no shortage of such videos.

Of course Match Game, particularly in the 1970s and the 1980s has been inherently funny given how the game is played. Obviously, the fill in the blank questions presented got funnier over the years, and the numerous panelists entertained us...and let's not forget Gene Rayburn and subsequent hosts that kept the show going well into the 1990s.

This is one game show that I would like to see come back into production.

Radio and Television Beyond YouTube
The current version of MEPIS (7.0) provides links to websites containing video archives, streaming audio, and radio stations that stream online.

This past two weeks, I have used Firefox to explore radio and television North of the Border, specifically www.cbc.ca, and I have found programming to be much better than anything that I could watch or listen to locally. There is literally something for everyone here. With programming like that, who needs FM radio.

With the Logitech X-240 sound system (2.1 arrangement) connected to my Gateway machine with a Sound Blaster Live! Value Edition card (EMU10K chip-based), Listening to programs from anywhere in the world never sounded better.

Musical Starstreams comes in rather nicely, both on FM radio, and streaming live. Amarok provided some good channels to listen to through Shoutcast...and then, I came across the CBC links provided with the MEPIS distribution.

As I am writing this, I am listening to Canadian jazz on CBC Radio 2 through the Totem player embedded in a Firefox window. Totem was configured to use the Xine engine for playback. With CBC Radio 2, combined with my existing music collection on CD, cassette and vinyl, Jamendo, the local jazz station, and the listings provided with Amarok, this should be more than enough music for my tastes.

As for television and non-music programming, there is plenty of humor to go around, some of it in the radio and television personalities, and some of it in shows designated as comedy. Much of the humor there is the type of humor that I provide on the Cybernightlife project. Nevertheless, I really enjoy the programming there.

Two shows that I like are Royal Canadian Air Farce (http://www.airfarce.com), Canada's equivalent to Saturday Night Live, and a show called "This Hour Has 22 Minutes" (http://www.cbc.ca/22minutes), the title of the show being humorous in itself. Of course, The Red Green Show is available, and I watch that on a local public television station (http://www.wycc.org).

For the CBC site, I can select from which any major Canadian city where to listen to the live feeds from. My preference is Winnipeg as that city is on the same time zone as Chicago and northwest Indiana where I live, hence making it easier to follow the published radio and television guides.

Next thing I will be working on is the first podcast. The podcast and the new Wiki are two steps I have taken to bring the Cybernightlife project to Web 2.0.

Current Mood: relaxed

One Week on YouTube
So far, the wi-fi connection on my laptop has enabled me to explore the world of Web 2.0.

My first stop, YouTube.

It is amazing how diverse the content of a video sharing site can be. There are clips of Richard Stallman performing his classic "Free Software Song", along with videos of the same song performed by other groups.

Then there were "music videos", demos, and everything else that pertainins to the subject of Linux.

Being a railfan (train buff), naturally, I searched the YouTube database for trains.

There are more railroad videos on YouTube than DVDs you can buy from the major railroad publications. I have contributed one of my railroad videos to YouTube. There is a page on the Gallery section with a link to the video.

This is the week the annual Chicago Auto Show (now celebrating its centennial) and so I entered "auto show" into the search engine.

Just about anything and everything that can happen at an auto show can be found in at least one video clip. By anything, I mean from the professionally produced video clip, to bloopers, to outright silliness.

Given the state of our economy, and the current state of the auto industry in the US, it is no surprise that this year's auto show is a mess.

Last night, I watched the WGN-TV presentation of the show, and one segment of the program showed an exhibit about doing pilates in your car. (Try explaining THAT to your auto insurance agent in an accident report.)

To show you what else goes on at these shows, go to YouTube.com, then type in the words "auto show " followed by your favorite auto manufacturer, or other topic, then see what results you get.

For example, the keywords "auto show jeep toronto" brings results of things that happened at the Toronto Auto Show. The following are examples of a presenter gone wild...and I do mean WILD: (cut and paste into Firefox to view)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERFMQD4yfX8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YhBZjtU99o
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_dtfuWyKGE

I posted a comment on the third. Listen to the presenter in each of these, and you will see what I mean. Other comments about the videos provide more humor to the situation here.

The point of all of this is to show you the kinds of things you can find on YouTube.

Current Mood: excited

Bringing Cybernightlife to the Next Level
This past month, I have acquired a second hand Compaq Armada E700 laptop. The machine is a Pentium III running at 500Mhz, has a USB 1.x port, 18GB hard drive, and a DVD-ROM drive. This may seem underpowered compared to the Gateway desktop, but it does what I want it to do.

I have installed Mandriva 2008 and it runs beautifully on the machine. Next, I purchased a Linksys (Cisco) Compact-G USB wi-fi adapter, and this is what I am now using for wireless access through public hotspots.

Next, I have setup an account at MyPodcast.com. This allows me to now produce podcasts to complement the commentary sections. This is the first step into taking the Cybernightlife to the next level.

Best Sellers in Retail This Year
This year, digital photo frames and digital cameras have been the hot sellers for this retail season. In the chain where I work, iPod accessories, that is from portable stereos to alarm clocks where you can dock your iPod have also been good sellers, too. The keychain photo album has got to be the next big thing when it comes to portable gadgets.

From a Linux perspective, the keychain drives are NOT USB mass storage devices. Instead, the keychain albums have a proprietary file transfer protocol of which is only supplied with a proprietary (Windows only) software package, usually available on a mini CD-ROM, or downloadable from the manufacturer's website.

Digital photo frames, however, can be used with Linux. On the Cybernightlife project, I have a page that tells you how to connect a picture frame with built-in memory to a Linux machine.

Some digital photo frames do not need to be connected to a Linux machine to be used. They rely on either a memory card or USB keychain drive for reading of digital images, hence making these devices inherently Linux compatible. All you need is a digital camera and/or a Linux-compatible card writer, or a USB keychain drive that works with Linux.

On the issue of keychain drives, the drives with the U3 technology will work with Linux, but ONLY IF you do not password protect your data under Windows. If you use a U3 enabled keychain drive on a digital photo frame, be sure that your images are not stored in the password protected portion of that keychain drive, or your digital photo frame will not work.

Fedora 8 and OpenSUSE 10.3: May the best distro win.
So far, I have not yet received the OpenSUSE 10.3 DVD. But it still has the rest of this week to get here. In the mean time, the Fedora Project has released version 8 of its distribution. The DVD includes Eclipse, KDevelop, Digikam 0.9.2, GIMP 2.4 (yes, a completely new version of the image processing package), and F-Spot 0.4.0, as well as Gnome 2.20 and KDE 3.5.7.

Why Fedora? First, my first Linux experience was back in December 1998, when I converted an AcerFrame 500 machine (a 486DX-66 machine) from a server running Netware 3.x to a workstation running Red Hat Linux 5.0.

When I store music on the hard drive, I would rather use the Ogg Vorbis format, which takes up less space than the standard MP3 equivalents. Ogg Vorbis format does not implement restrictions on where music can be played, nor does it tie a specific music file to a particular music player.

Fortunately, AVI files from my Vivicam 3310 (this digital camera can take 1.3MP JPEG images as well as AVI movies) will play on Fedora without downloading any proprietary codecs.

What I want to do here is to install both distributions on the Gateway machine, and may the best distribution win.

As for retail...

**************** RETAIL CUSTOMER REPORT, November 13, 2007 ***********************

A customer asked where a particular roasting oven was when I was standing right in front of the bulkstack where the roaster ovens were.

We have digital picture frames on a fixture placed between the children's shoes and the men's socks. The fixture was part of a setup for the current holiday season. Numerous customers could not find the digital picture frames even when I brought the customer to the fixture. This is because there were numerous musical instruments bulkstacked between the fixture and the aisle. This bulkstack was a part of the planogram for the setup.

OpenSuSE 10.3 is on order
This past month has been great for retail. I am happy to say that there is nothing to report for this month when it comes to retail humor.

I have placed an order for the OpenSUSE 10.3 DVD-ROM from the Gearhart and Yeagar Company (http://www.getlinuxfast.com), and a KDE based CD-ROM from OSDisc.com. Let us see which distribution arrives at the Cybernightlife office quicker.

I am looking forward to installing the OpenSUSE 10.3 distribution. This distribution is very much an updated version of 10.2. However, there is a new green desktop, and a kernel that can actually utilize the newest hardware as well as legacy hardware such as my Gateway 700.

Hard drive technology has advanced to the point where we now have SATA, or Serial-ATA disks, as well as PATA, or parallel ATA disks. I have also learned that EIDE, or Enhanced IDE technology now referred to as Parallel ATA technology. Seagate uses the term PATA while Western Digital and Maxtor use the term EIDE to refer to the technology of their hard drives.

This means that PATA and EIDE are interchangable as far as terms and technology are concerned.

As a result, distributions that use Linux kernels 2.6.20 and later such as Ubuntu 7.04, Fedora 7, and OpenSUSE 10.3 now designate the first hard drive (PATA/EIDE) as /dev/sda rather than /dev/hda. All hard drives are now handled as SCSI disks the same as card readers, CD/DVD burners, and other USB mass storage devices. The libata system library now incorporated into the kernel makes it possible for Linux to handle both PATA/EIDE and SATA disks.

Slackware, however, makes an exception to this rule. The default Slackware kernel in version 12 unfortunately hangs when the kernel autodetects a USB2 controller card in your system. This is not acceptable as most modern systems contain a USB2 controller of some sort.

One of the things I like about OpenSUSE is that everything works as expected, every time. I am looking forward to receiving the OpenSUSE DVD-ROM, and am excited about the changeover.

In the past, I have relied on purchasing monthly issues of Linux Format, Linux Pro Magazine, Linux User and Developer and other Linux magazines for the DVD-ROMs containing distributions.

With the British pound now being equivalent to $2.00 USD, the cost of these magazines has been rising to the point where I need to cut back. The good news is that Linux Pro Magazine is distributed from Lawrence, Kansas, and that magazine contains full distributions on DVD-ROM.

I also found out that I can simply order the DVD-ROMs I need from an online distributor rather than waiting for the distribution to come out in a magazine, and do it at a much less cost than waiting for the magazine to come out.

With the holiday season coming up, I am going to need the savings to purchase holiday gifts.

Current Mood: excited

I am starting a new e-Book of retail humor
Using LyX, and other tools, I have started on a new electronic book called [i]Scientific Retail Theory and its Applications[/i]. This would be a humor document written using Donald Knuth's TeX typesetting language with the LaTeX macro package instead of OpenOffice.org. I am setting this document in a format similar to a textbook for a college mathematics course.

Why? Some see retail work as easy. The fact is that working in retail is anything but! In fact, it helps to have a mathematics background and a sense of humor to succeed in retail. It is hard work, but it all pays off in the end. The scheduling is not bad either. It allows me to not only work in retail, but to also continue on the Cybernightlife project, and to do pro-bono IT consulting, and to enjoy freelance photography as well.

The retail industry has given me some non-Linux material to include in the Cybernightlife project.

Retail Humor Report, Issue 1
Starting with this entry, the Cybernightlife Founder's Journal will feature bits and pieces of retail humor called the Retail Humor Report.

Here is a bit of background:

When I am not working on the Cybernightlife project, system administration, or pro-bono IT consulting, I am working in my second career in retail.

You really need to have a sense of humor if you want to survive in retail, as you never know what kind of customers you are going to be serving.

I do know from my own observations: First, 90 percent of customers really appreciate what we associates do in our stores. Second, 90 percent of the grief we get is from the ten percent that do not appreciate what we do. This just goes to show that having a mathematics background can take you anywhere. In fact, there are times when I wish I had spent more time in retail.

The Retail Humor Report presents briefs of the funny and sometimes bizarre things that happen where I work.

...and now the first issue:

* RETAIL CUSTOMER REPORT for the week of September 23-29, 2007 *

9/25: A customer wanted to know the price of a pair of shoes was when the display and its electronic tag already was showing the correct price at the fixture where the customer was standing. I tried to point out to the customer that what is shown in the tag (with the correct shoe display) is the price that you pay at the register.

9/26: A pair of shoes the customer wanted was not on sale according to the electronic tag. The customer asked if that pair of shoes was on sale. Enough said.

9/26: Another customer called the shoe department directly using the store's automated answering system, and then asked to speak to the store manager. The customer then hung up. (O.K., so what was that about?)

9/26: I waited on a customer in the housewares department. The customer wanted to know if we had any more of the Hamilton Beach convection oven. (This model can cook two 12-inch pizzas at the same time.) I told him that I would look in the back.

Man, was I ever glad I went to look in the back. Everything went OK, except:

The customer had B.O.!!!

(Someone get him a stick of deodorant, please!)

About Posting Comments
As much as I hate to do this, I must inform anyone posting comments to this site to:

1. Make sure the comment relates to the content of the Cybernightlife project and its related websites.
2. NO SPAMMING!!! Any spam found on this or any of my forums or blogs WILL BE DELETED upon discovery.
3. Inappropriate material, such as material that violates the terms of service for this or any blog or forum WILL BE DELETED IMMEDIATELY upon discovery. I have no tolerance for such material being posted here or anywhere else.

The Cybernightlife project is a family-friendly website, and I intend to keep it that way.

Thanks for your cooperation.

Solaris 10 support coming soon
Two things have happened. openSuSE is here to stay in the Cybernightlife project.

We should be able to choose what operating system or software we want to run on our machines. Freedom of choice is one of the things the Cybernightlife project has always been about. I chose openSuSE because everything simply WORKS like it is supposed to.

While I may support the Free Software Foundation's principles, I also have a need to be able to interact with the world outside of open source software.

How many people at FSF have iPods? I have a second generation Nano, which currently does NOT support Rockbox nor iPodLinux, and hence will not support OGG Vorbis or FLAC audio. openSuSE, Solaris, MEPIS, and Mandriva support the common audio formats without problems.

Now, how many of you remember IACT, or the International Alliance for Compatible Technology? We supported both commercial AND open source software solutions, just so our freedom of access and freedom of choice to technology are preserved.

openSuSE and Solaris follow in this principle.

Speaking of Solaris, I have obtained a copy of Solaris 10, and am currently testing the product on my Deskpro EP series. Among tests are the ability to port certain Linux products such as the driver packages for HP's all-in-one devices, and the martian_modem package for Lucent modems. If this can be done, I shall move Solaris 10, to create a dual-boot (Solaris/openSuSE) system for the Gateway machine. If not, then Solaris 10 will stay on the Deskpro.

New Direction
I have relaunched the Cybernightlife project with a new URL:

http://cybernightlife.50webs.com

and redid the entire layout. The focus of the Project has changed. First, Linux in general has become so easy to install, administer and use, many pages I had in the old version were outdated, and no longer needed.

Second, I am planning to focus more on Linux as a platform for digital photography.

I have setup a profile on JPG Magazine's website (http://www.jpgmag.com) and have submitted a photograph as my first contribution. Whether this photograph gets published or not has yet to be seen.

JPG Magazine is a magazine for photographers, and created by photographers. In fact, the magazine is actually created from an online community, not unlike forums for Linux users.

Here is a chance for me to bring thirty years of photographic experience as a hobbyist to the Web in a big way.

Current Mood: accomplished

Novell and Microsoft: An Offer Novell Couldn't Refuse
On November 2, 2006, Novell entered into an agreement with Microsoft Corporation to the displeasure of much of the Linux community (and open source community in general). This agreement allegedly ensures that developers and users of software for Novell SuSE family of Linux distributions will not be faced with patent infringement suits from Microsoft. The agreement also alleges integration of products from both companies.

While the latter may be true, and such integration (of commercial with open source software) is one of the concepts that is supported with the Cybernightlife project, (and from what I heard, is also supported by Linus Torvalds himself), the agreement with Microsoft leaves an unsettling feeling.

Remember a great product from the 1990s called OS/2? Remember when Bill Gates said that "OS/2 was the platform for the '90s"? We all know what happened there.

IBM officially pulled OS/2 from the product line at the end of last year (2005). What makes Linux different is that Linux is not commercial software, and though Linus Torvalds owns the trademark to the name Linux, the product itself is not owned by anyone.

On November 17, 2006, more than two weeks after the agreement was signed, Steve Ballmer, the current CEO of Microsoft, made comments that confirmed what many of us in the open source community had suspected. Mr. Ballmer is claiming that Linux uses Microsoft's "intellectual property".

First of all, anyone who knows the history of Microsoft's business practices, and/or who is familiar with the Antitrust case of 1998, will recognize this as another typical Microsoft claim.

Second, SCO attempted such a claim against IBM in its Billion Dollar suit, and ended up losing much of the case due to lack of merit and its ability to prove its case.

This situation is no different. In fact, I am not bashing Microsoft as a company (I have to admit they really have some great products), I am constructively criticizing Mr. Ballmer's behavior and attitude regarding such affairs, including the recent purchase of YouTube by Google.

Some people would say that Microsoft should never be trusted. In the 1950s through the 1970s, people have said the same about IBM, especially when that company faced its antitrust matters. The IBM of today is not the same as the IBM of last century.

New Focus for Cybernightlife
It has been quite a while since I last posted to this blog. First, the Deskpro machine is now a secondary workstation and file server in the internal network.

That 266Mhz Celeron has been replaced with a Gateway 700S LTD, equipped with a Pentium 4 running at 1.8Ghz (a big jump from 266Mhz), a nVidia GeForce2 MX 400 video board, a Gateway FPD1510 flat panel monitor, and a 160GB hard drive. The Deskpro currently has the original (an ATI Mach64 3D) video card, the Dell P780 monitor, and a 20GB hard drive.

The Deskpro is now running Fedora Core 5, and the newer Gateway is running Novell SuSE 10.1.

One issue I had was deciding which distribution I want running on the Gateway machine.

After experimentation with Ubuntu 6.06, SuSE 10.1 and Fedora Core 5, I settled on the current configuration.

First, SuSE 10.1 comes with a smorgasboard of multimedia applications, something that has not changed since Novell bought out SuSE Gbmh, office applications (OpenOffice.org, Abiword, KOffice and TextMaker/PlanMaker all in one distribution), graphics software, and software development tools (Mono, Sun Java, Gambas, and GCC in one distribution).

Leave it to Novell to pack most everything you need in one distribution, at the same time making it easier to deploy and administer Linux workstations.

Fedora Core 5 is relatively easy to deploy also...if you are used to the Red Hat way of doing things. Fedora is faster than SuSE, but support for multimedia is sorely lacking, unless you are willing to install the necessary libraries to support multimedia formats used by hardware players such as the Apple iPods, and the RCA Lyra series players.

In fact, there is not one hardware media player that supports the Ogg Vorbis or FLAC formats for audio playback.

Fortunately, Fedora Core supports playback of AVI files through the Totem movie player.

So what about Ubuntu? Ubuntu is a great distribution, too. Ubuntu comes in different variations, with the original being GNOME based. Kubuntu is KDE based, but the base distribution is quite skimpy for a KDE setup. Xubuntu is best for low spec machines. It uses XFCE for a window manager.

Edubuntu is built on the original Ubuntu, but has been designed for use in schools.

All of these are built on a Debian base, and software maintenance is done the Debian way, but with one difference.

Instead of establishing a system administrator account with a password, you use your NORMAL USER password for system administration functions.

With distributions such as SuSE 10.1 and Fedora Core 5 being easy to install, administer and use, I made a decision to refocus the Cybernightlife project from an emphasis on the HOWTOs for system configuration and administration, to an emphasis on HOWTOs for everyday use of Linux, and going into other non-technical areas and how Linux is used there.

Tenth Anniversary
This past holiday season, I have given my Deskpro three changes. First, the Deskpro now has 256MB. Second, I have replaced the current DVD-ROM and CD-RW burners with a single combo drive, removing some of the burden off the power supply.

Third, I have replaced Debian 3.1 with OpenSuSE 10.0.

The reasons for this? First, To upgrade the desktops to WindowMaker 0.92, KDE 3.4 and GNOME 2.12, the three coolest desktop environments I have ever used.

Second, OpenSuSE provides the newest and coolest software packages available. Of course, GIMP is still available, and I have installed the latest Bluefish from source, but I also get amaroK, Banshee (media player), XMMS, digikam, and the newest photo manager, F-Spot.

Third, OpenSuSE provides the Mono development environment. For those of you who are not familiar, Mono is the open source equivalent to Micro$oft's .NET environment, and will work on any desktop OS, i.e. Linux, Windows, and MacOS-X.

Some of you may be wondering, what is OpenSuSE? OpenSuSE is Novell's answer to Red Hat's Fedora project.

Fedora Core 5 should be released this month, and should include many of the features now included in OpenSuSE 10.0. One of the reasons why I upgraded my Deskpro to 256MB is the system requirements for the newest Linux distributions.

I could have stuck with Debian 3.1, but the software there is quite dated, and it does not include HPLIP, which is now my current choice of driver package for use with my Hewlett-Packard PSC1110. (With HPLIP, I know how much ink is left in the ink cartridges.)

This year, the Cybernightlife project will be celebrating its Tenth Anniversary. I know it has been a while since I posted an update. I am currently working on a way to celebrate ten years of serving the open source and non-mainstream computing platforms.

What a better way to celebrate the occasion than to develop the tenth anniversary edition of Cybernightlife on OpenSuSE 10.0.

Linux Pro magazine has been appearing on the shelves at Barnes and Noble in recent months. These magazines include a Linux distribution on DVD-ROM each month and are quite inexpensive. ($10.00 US per issue)

This could be the year that Linux finally makes it onto the desktop. The local Best Buy has the Linspire and SuSE 9.3 Professional distributions in boxed sets available on the shelves. (I shall refer to these as retail versions.) It has been a few years since I have seen a retail version of Linux available in the stores, so that is a good sign.

Second, the Indiana Department of Education is now testing Linspire in select high schools as part of its Indiana Access program. The Linspire-powered systems are being manufactured at Wintergreen Systems in Elkhart and sell for $292 to schools.

Linspire is selling its retail version to schools for $15.00 per license! Compare that to the educational discount for Windows XP Professional.

For those of you who are not familiar, Linspire is a Debian-based distribution built on KDE, and targeted for the home market. The Click-and-Run service provided by Linspire is a subscription service where users can install (apt-get) packages by going to a special URL, selecting packages, and having C-N-R install the packages automatically!

With Windows Vista on the horizon, upgrading to Vista will cost more than just the cost of the software. The costs will be in terms of the number of older systems being disposed simply because they cannot handle Windows Vista's requirements, the number of jobs lost to the cost of upgrading to Vista. In fact the cost of upgrading will be so high, corporate IT departments will actually consider migrating to Linux to cut department costs.

When this happens, Linux will take off and finally make it to desktops.

Robot Finds Kitten
One interesting Zen simulation that came with Debian 3.1 is called "robot finds kitten". This product was written in C by Leonard Richardson back in 1997, and since it is distributed under the General Public License, it is extensible.

The source is currently available at robotfindskitten.org. Several reimplementations of the simulation are available, including a parody.

In this text based simulation, you are a "robot", indicated by a white "#". Your task (destiny as it is called in the simulation) is to find a kitten. There are many objects represented by symbols of various colors, one of which is the kitten. You merely touch an object by moving on to it with the arrow keys on your keyboard.

You can also move the robot character using Emacs or Nethack commands. Personally, I prefer to use the standard arrow keys.

If what you touch is not a kitten, you will see a message on the screen indicating what you did find. These messages are extensible by modifying the message.h file in the source code, then recompiling the program.

If you do find the kitten, the simulation ends with the robot and the kitten coming together. Sounds easy enough, right?

The number of objects on the screen can be controlled by configuring the program. The color and character displays vary by the game, otherwise it would be too easy to find the kitten.

The program was originally a DOS game, but has been ported not only to other platforms, both past and present, but the program itself has been written in a number of languages such as Java, JavaScript, and Python.

Since this is a GPL'd program, I plan to customize a version of the game for Cybernightlife, and it too will be distributed under the GPL. Of course, I will have to give it a new name so as not to confuse anyone.

My plan is to create a generic form of the simulation, i.e. _____finds_____ where you fill in the blanks.

The logic is very simple. There is a data structure representing objects on the screen. There are three types of objects, the "robot" character, the "kitten" character, and everything else.

The initialization of the program is to create an array of objects for all characters on the screen. Of course, since this was a DOS game, this was written for an 80 x 24 text mode screen. All characters are assigned random locations on the board. The screen is cleared, and objects are placed on the board.

Then the program goes into a loop. The screen is redrawn, and the program waits for you to press a key on the keyboard. Depending upon which key was pressed, the program determines the next space your character will move to, checking against the array of objects present on the board to see if the robot will move to a space occupied by an object.

If that space contains the robot, nothing happens. If there is an object, that object is checked. If the object is not the kitten, a message corresponding to the object is displayed.

If there is no object on the space, your character is moved to that space.

However, if the kitten is on the space to be occupied by your character, an end sequence is played in the upper right hand corner of your screen. That sequence, of course, is the robot and kitten coming together, hence ending the game.

You can also end the game by pressing the Escape or "Q" key, so the loop checks for those keys, too.

What I like about this game is that it is non-violent, unlike many popular computer games on the market today.

The game may be boring in nature, but it makes a very interesting programming project, especially a new project derived from this project.

Nine more months until the tenth anniversary.
As of this writing, I have yet to prepare for Cybernightlife's tenth anniversary on the Internet.

That's right. It was almost ten years ago, back in July 1996, what is now called Cybernightlife was established as an OS/2 support site.

IBM has officially dropped OS/2 from its product line. I have dropped OS/2 in favor of Linux back in 1998, and never looked back. Of course, I was going to build a OS/2 to Linux migration microsite at the location of the original site (on Yahoo! GeoCities). I am still considering that. I need to gather information on the state of post-IBM OS/2, and if the microsite is worth building.

If anyone is still running OS/2, I need to know whether I should continue OS/2 support, as I have very much dropped OS/2 support altogether.

Linux has evolved, and so has Cybernightlife, but not in the way of many websites whose developers insist that sites be equipped with the latest technologies.

I find that absolute rubbish. Such technologies only require the user to have the latest technology. Who benefits from this? The MARKETERS of technology, and the people who own the proprietary technologies.

As a member of the International Alliance for Compatible Technology, I feel it is my obligation to keep Cybernightlife as free from proprietary technologies as possible.

This means no RealAudio files, no MP3s, nothing specific to any particular web browser, and especially, no Flash and Shockwave files.

I have started implementing material as PDFs, and supplied TeX/LaTeX and other source files for the PDF documents where possible. This means, if your machine is equipped with a PDF reader such as xpdf, kpdf, GNOME PDF Reader, GhostView, or Acrobat Reader, you can download and/or view such pages on Cybernightlife.

The Image Galleries are now expanding. I have just added my railroad photo collection to the RRPictureArchives.net website. This is kept separate from the other digital photos as this collection has a completely different audience.

At the same time, I am attempting to get this audience to consider Linux in their daily computer usage, not only as an alternative to Windows, but to save them thousands of dollars in operating costs.

*** RETAIL CUSTOMER REPORT for the week of September 23-29, 2007 ***

* RETAIL CUSTOMER REPORT for the week of September 23-29, 2007 *