Category: Technical

VoIP used to boast its clarity and noise-free signals. Now, there is a new feature for some VoIP systems (such as Microsoft Response Point) to promote, Comfort Noise. I found this particular quirk when looking at some D-Link VoIP network products and noticed it was listed as a feature. At some point when cell phone reception is nearly perfect, will we begin to see Sprint offer “Comfort Drops” on their network, so that the user does not loose touch with reality?
I am not sure how I feel about this. I like the clarity and noise-free environment of my TW digital telephone service, why would I want to add noise to it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comfort_noise

Google recently released a new “Task List” feature for their mobile customers. It is a very nice feature, better than anything I have written for GITI, but it does not easily snap into my existing application without special API coding.
My complaint with Google on this is very simple, the way in which they promote this tool in their blog post announcing it. The article is simple and direct in its task, comparing their Task List on an iPhone to paper. They make many assuptions that are simply not true, 1. you will always have signal, 2. your iPhone will have battery past lunch, 3. Everyone carries a giant phone/PDA/MP3 player/paperweight/pocket blender. These are the limiting factors including their own admission in the article that you can not fold an iPhone.
The “limitations” of paper they list can also be true of an iPhone. The limited availability of the iPhone in this case may be the battery power in short supply, or any variety of weird things that Apple decides to push to the device. Contraty to popular belief, if you leave your iPhone in one pair of pants, it does not follow you to the next pair of pants (however, you might still have access to your tasks from GMail). For difficult to organize, that applies more digitially than it does to paper. There is limited space for physical paper, so eventually you go crazy and find a shreader. In the electronic paper space, you can add things to lists and let messages and things pile up infinitely.
Paper has its advantages, including, you can easily stick a post-it note on anything, and you can add a post-it note of tasks to someone else’s desk (or coffee cup) and have them see them along with their own, otherwise, in the electronic world, you have to either hack their Google account and add it (not considered ethical in the western world) or send them an email begging them to add the tasks. Some people do not respond well to being begged to add things to a task list, but a bright canary page is a friendly request for attention.
Anyway, Nice feature Google, but next time, don’t put down the 5000 year old technology that has served society well before your creation.

My network is primarily a Microsoft Active Directory domain, with a majority of clients being member systems. An Ubuntu Linux system does not, in its default state, fit in to that network. Using a tool called Likewise Open I was very easily able to add my Ubuntu system to the Windows domain. Once the tool was installed, to login as a domain user it is just as simple as logging in with domain syntax (DOMAIN\user). That is where the expected behavior seems to end. The thing is merely an authentication tool, which would be nice in a fleet of computers running Linux. It prevents the need for having to create users on every system. A few things I really hoped would be there were not. I would have liked for my specified “HOME” path on the domain to have been followed for the Linux machine, but it was not, nor was it even mounted anywhere in the file system.
My experiment with authenticating to AD on Ubuntu was pleasant enough, but I am going to have to work more with it if I ever want to have a seemless network across all of my platforms. I suspect that if I am able to pass a logon script to my Linux machines that I may be able to resolve my issues with things not being mounted and the experience not being exactly transparent.

During the Summer 2008 semester I was intruced to an email client at UNC called Pine, a very simple, shell email client. In playing with Ubuntu I have found its modern counterpart, Alpine. It is a really simple email client that runs in the Linux/Unix shell. My only problem with it is that it is not multi-account friendly, since it only ackowledges one root INBOX. I really should not find this text based utility easier to use than something like Thunderbird, but for me it is.

I have been running Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) for several days now, and I am mostly happy with it. I am finding a lot of things to be faster under this OS, including anything written in Java or C# (such as my Linux replacement for WLW, BloGTK). I thought for certain that I would be running Wine (WINdows Emulation environment) after a few days, but so far I have not needed it. Almost any software I need I can usually open Synaptic and grab fairly easily. My X-Window issue has been resolved, it was apparently a problem with the window manager running on the system I was connecting with (as well as me not knowing about “gnome-session”). I am finding it much more useful to connect to individual applications than to an entire desktop. I also think that X is a little sluggish. I will be giving VNC a try fairly soon.
I am really enjoying Linux for a variety of reasons, one of the biggest is Microsoft’s attempts at taking my shell away from me. Some power users like being able to interact directly with an operating system, and not be restricted to UI tools.
Less than a week on Ubuntu, so I can’t say this is a permenant change of OS (since Windows XP is just a reboot away), but it is a very nice change of pace which is allowing me to think about operating system design as well as the overall end user experience a little differently.

Two days ago I decided to install Ubuntu 8.10 on my laptop. The installation was difficult to complete due to a flaw in my Dell laptop’s “thermal management” functions, but otherwise, it was smooth. Once in the OS, I had some minor issues with getting my wireless network card driver to install, but the drivers were available on the CD, even if not installed by default. At present everything is functioning well.
I really like the Gnome UI on Ubuntu, and I feel that the interface is quite intuitive. The best part about running Ubuntu so far is that like all modern versions of Linux, there is a package manager, which makes installing software really simple. No more hunting for the latest version of the software to install from many websites, just go down the list and select what you want to install, then apply and watch the package manager install your selections for you.
I originally thought that since I run a Windows network, in a domain environment, that I would have issues with communicating with the other systems, especially given that I had problems with Samba before on other Linux installs. Ubuntu seems to work well with Windows networks right from the start. The only thing I truly miss from Windows at the moment is Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer, for blogging. I am presently using a tool called Drivel, which works nice, but is certainly not as complex as Live Writer (I suppose I will just run that from Windows 7 on the desktop).
So far, Ubuntu seems very comfortable and a nice change of pace from Windows (#1 reason to switch to Linux, Windows XP is becoming boring).

In an email this evening my literature instructor asked me what my plans were for my portal… at first I had to remind myself which site I had identified as potentially becoming a portal, and then I remembered, the curtis.kularski.net project. I honestly do not know what I plan to do with it completely. There are so many aspects of me, and I would like to incorporate them all, but I am a very complex person. It is programmatically difficult for me to implement Site Engine in the way I want at this point. Another problem I am facing is the concept of the “groups” of people. Those groups are becoming less diverse as I become more comfortable with myself in general. I no longer fear people knowing a lot about me, so really my world gets broken up into: public, friends, family (biological), and academic. In some ways my academic life could safely cross into the same category as “friends” for access level, but that might present too much of a “too much information moment”.

The portal idea is becoming more feasible however, as my art prepares to enter its own special virtual gallery. The portal, the gallery, and the blogs… that is my world, and its a small world after all.

Borrowed from: http://www.uncfsu.edu/itts/networking/passwords.htm#6

How long does my 14 character password with uppercase, lowercase, numbers and symbols take?

I have narrowed my side column on the blog. This results in a wider place for my actual entries. I will also be soon removing some useless junk from the side column.

I have had a few programming classes now and it seems as though programmers are being trained to program for failure rather than success. One of the features of modern programming languages is exception handling. While this is a nice feature, because users do stupid things and we don’t always need an application to crash just because we might have a typoed letter in a box where we are only expecting numbers, it sets the wrong focus on programming. We don’t write code to “run” anymore, we write it to “try”, and then we catch anything that could go wrong. This is nice functionally speaking, but perhaps this is something that should be a little deeper in the language itself. It would be nice if a first-year programming student didn’t have to consider whether or not the user of his second program (first is always “Hello World” and output only) will return data that his variable won’t accept. In most languages, if you give bad data, the application will crash unconditionally, wouldn’t it be cool if programs could just naturally throw a generic type error and give the user a second chance?