Running shoe hall of fame

Here they are. Each of these shoes have about 550 Km on them. They've done their jobs well, kept my legs and joints well cushioned and now they are retired.

Poor design?

I ran into something using Microsoft Office 2010 that Microsoft should probably take note of. Take a look at this:

This is the ribbon bar in Office 2010. I've captured the top-left corner of two windows. That's Excel 2010 at the back and Word 2010 in front. Next to the "W" there's an icon of a diskette. That's the Save button. Clicking on this icon automatically saves the file.

Note the icon next to the Save icon, an arrow curving to the left. That's the Undo button. This button undo's, or removes, all the changes you've done since your last save.

So here's what happened. After carefully preparing a table, with data in it, making sure that everything was perfect, I swung my mouse over to that button to click it. But I accidentally hit the one next to it, a few pixels off, and my beautiful table was gone.

Fortunately, the one to the right of that, the icon with the arrow curved towards the right, is the Redo button and it lit up. So, I clicked on it and got my table back.

It seems to me that these two buttons, the Save and the Undo buttons, are too close together.

Oh, one last thing, you can customise this bar to remove the Undo button... oops!

Winter running. It's about the clothes baby!

Sunday December 12th. The eve of my son's sixteenth birthday, myself recently turned forty-six. The temperature outside is dropping, fast and the forecast is for a deep freeze. Not just a cooler-than-normal day, but a plunge. A huge swell of cool air is heading towards Ontario, a gift from the mid-west, clarifying the air in it's path and leaving a wake of polished, numb stillness.

I can hear the wind howling outside, the entire house seems to be shaking, the rafters creaking, reminds me of that scene from the movie Twister. The scene where the father at the start of the movie secures his family in the bunker only to be sucked outside by the cyclone.

I peek outside the window and I can see that the snow is drifting in. The trees are waving wildly, leaves blowing everywhere, the asphalt from the road glistening with wetness.

I'm worried that I won't be able to do my celebratory run. Since I can't be with my son on his birthday, at least I should run, in honour of this day. My happy birthday greeting. But I know how treacherous winter running is. It's not the cold, it's the frozen, slippery side walk. Doesn't matter how gingerly you step, a micro degree where your centre of gravity is shifted mere micrometres could be hazardous. And I know what that is. I've fallen in slick weather before. It happens really quickly. At first you're moving very cautiously, staring intently at the ground in front of you, watching for black areas which could indicate the presence of ice. You're even tentative on snow since there could be a slippery layer under it. But you keep moving on cautiously and you gain confidence. And it's at that point when you're no longer concentrating that it happens. All the while you've been congratulating yourself on how well you're doing. The run's going well and there was no need to be scared. It happens quickly and there's no proper way to behave when you have no legs under you. Flailing, or flapping your arms in an attempt to stay upright won't help. You're not a bird. It doesn't take a second, but you remember every movement later, as though in slow motion.

They tell you to fall naturally. I've never understood what that meant. There's no way to fall naturally. Falling is an unnatural thing. Fighting the fall and stiffening will only make the consequences worse. But it's like a gag effect when something foreign reaches the back of your throat. Or a sneeze when you're nose is tickled. You can't help it. So you will flap your hands and inevitably land very hard on the ground. When I fell, I landed on my back. My left arm tried to break the fall by reaching down, but my elbow connected the concrete pavement at a spot devoid of ice sparing that side of me from smashing down. My head wasn't so lucky. I hit the pavement with the back of my head and I think it bounced up and then down again. For a moment, my vision disappeared and in the blackness I saw stars. Twinkling stars which faded as my vision returned. It was very early that morning and the sun was rising, so the sky was blue with cumulus clouds dotted here and there. There wasn't a single sound at all and I was deaf to the world. But soon, my hearing returned. It was like the audience had realised that the show was over and tentatively, one by one, the applause starts. I could now hear the wind, the traffic and my breathing. I got up slowly listening and feeling my movement. I seemed OK. There was a tear in the left elbow of my jacket where I'd landed hard, and at the back of my head the start of a bump. I felt the back of my head pressing gently trying to feel if I'd broken anything. I don't know what I was looking for. A fracture? I walked a couple of paces and then slowly returned to a jog. I was still ten minutes, or so, away from my home and walking wasn't an option. Walking would take close to half an hour.

That was then. It was a bad day, really cold. I'd run most of the worst, iciest stretches very carefully. Some parts were walked since there was no way to control my body over a sheet of ice. I remember that even though it was close to minus thirty Celsius, I really didn't feel cold. It's not that I was preoccupied with the ice, but I wore the right clothes, not heavy winter garb, but a runners, thin, thermal, breathing running top with a wind breaker.

And so, as I contemplated if I'd run on my son's birthday, I knew that the answer would be a resounding yes. Only the forces of Armageddon would stop this run. A snowstorm coupled with an alien invasion might also stop me from going out, but not the cold. I was lucky that morning. I got up to minus twenty-six with wind chill. The side-walks were slick but enough dense snow cover to give a good running surface. It wasn't difficult. I wore three layers on top. A very thin thermal running under-shirt, good for wicking sweat away from the body. A second light thermal shirt for comfort and finally a wind breaker. I had my sub thirty below running pants. On my head I wore my running mask that covers my neck but on top of that, to cover my skull, I wore a running skull cap. I had on some warm running gloves. I've heard that in this kind of weather, mittens are better, but I've never had the time to buy any. In any case, I'd be outside for an hour and fifteen minutes, and the gloves would hold out.

And the run proceeded very well. The finish home was absolutely fantastic with my body getting stronger at each step.

Happy birthday son! May you live see a thousand suns and your life touch those around you as you've touched mine.

More on writing

I once wrote something here, rambling on and on about why we write. And back then, there was a seed of something. I had something to say, on the tip of my tongue, and it kept rolling about in my head, but just wouldn't come out in words on the paper.

Most people carry on this conversation in their heads, constantly analysing what's going on. Thinking always, not stopping. Even when asked, "what are you thinking about?" most of us would often reply, "nothing," even though, there's stuff in there. It's private, to some extent, but mostly, you think that it's noise. Ambient, background, continuous noise. Elevator music.

But when we write, we think we must have a story to tell. Something important that the world should know and that we have to structure it properly, and present it so that it's legible, and comprehensive. We prepare for our writing much like we prepare for a business presentation, or write a paper for school, or put together a business plan, or fill out a loan application form. Not necessarily enjoyable work, necessary work, but tedious.

But it's easy when friends get together and sit around, have a few drinks, laugh and just let the conversation happen. One person starts with a story which then reminds another of something else that happened. The jokes flow easily. People laugh, they argue and the speed of the diction is furious. There's no real planning, only some careful thinking that happens almost naturally. Without forethought. It's not as though you're planning each section in your head and then presenting it in logical order. No. You're using your own voice and just saying what's in your mind. All the while, watching the faces of your audience to make sure that they're getting what you're talking about and correcting yourself, on the go. Your natural voice shapes your words. The sound of your voice adding flavour to story, including your body language and your actions. Waving your hands. Pointing here and there. Pausing, for effect and digestion. Sometimes looking from face to face to face. And then, as often happens, someone jumps in. Like a car that cuts you off on the highway, you swerve and try to get back in front again. Depending on how aggressive the driver of the new voice in this conversation is, you might never take the lead in that story.

That's how easy it is. We all participate, whether we want to or not.

But when we write, it's very different. We don't have that audience in front of us to look into their faces and judge their reaction. We only have that voice in our heads urging us on to put into writing those thoughts in our heads. If you can, you can build that story, not planning ahead, not anticipating, but letting it happen. What does that mean? It's almost like you're part of the audience in your head. Like everyone else, you're watching the play waiting, almost with baited breath, to see what's going to happen next. And so you put yourself into those perplexing situations, you're uncomfortable, you try to wiggle your way out, but can't. If you did, that would be fantasy and as even you wouldn't believe that it's that easy to get away, neither will your audience.

That person in your head isn't judging you. They want you to talk. They want to read what you have to say, but with honesty. They want you to go and do your research if you can't find a way to explain it. They don't want anything contrived or made up. They are looking for the real deal.

And, they're also looking for it in your voice. That everyday voice that you use when you're speaking to people, at work, in school, in public, to that audience, to your family and to yourself. The same respectful, caring voice is the only one that they would like to hear. Because when you speak, when everyone is waiting to hear what you're going to say next, you always think carefully, and speak well.

We write because we care. We write because if we don't we feel miserable. We write because it fulfils us. We write because when we write we hear our own voice and that voice calms and soothes us.

Difficult people

The absolute nerve! One can only wonder what goes on in that mass of tissue masquerading as a brain. Some people have short term memory, really short term. They forget what they were thinking about a few minutes ago. But many of us know what we were thinking, much less doing, but hope that nobody else does.

So often we are told to be careful not to burn bridges because you might never know when you'll need to turn around and head back the same way. In some rare cases, the bridge you burnt will be rebuilt by someone else. You'll be fortunate enough to head back that way, either voluntarily or forced by by mitigating circumstances, and find that someone has rebuilt the bridge.

But enough of the bickering and complaining already! Count your blessings

Language of obfuscation

I was thinking about teaching and learning. About simplification and abstraction. About how some disciplines, probably some people, create barriers to knowledge. Some people are born teachers. They are able to simplify and explain. To break things down without dumbing them down.

We understand things differently. We need to see things for ourselves to make sense of them. A particular text book doesn't fit the bill for everyone. That's why there are so many books on the same topic. Browse any book store and on their shelves, you'll see different versions of the same topic. Explained this way, or that way.

We take things in through our eyes and ears mainly. Our sense of smell and touch isn't used in this knowledge based world which handicaps the motor minded people. Those who absorb better when they see action. Movement. Books are great, but they also don't satisfy the visually minded or the aurally minded, those who learn best by visualising or hearing. With books, words, the visually minded person has to close their eyes and picture the subject. It can be difficult if the subject is mathematics. For those who learn best by hearing, attending a lecture and sitting back while listening, or buying the audio version of the book sometimes helps.

But in this day of information and technology, it's sad to note that educators aren't taking the art of teaching more seriously. Those who write believe that since they are subject matter experts they automatically qualify to teach the subject. Moreover, they feel that those who are not subject matter experts have no right to espouse what they know about the topic. Some experts in their fields are great educators. But there are few of those. Bjarne Stroustroup, the father of the computer programming language C++ is one of those. Not only did he invent the programming language, but he wrote the seminal book on it. He's a great teacher. The authors of the book The C Programming Language also fall into this category. The first edition of that book was only 228 pages long and not only covered the entire programming language but it was full of practise exercises. The authors, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, understood very clearly that in order to learn computer programming you had to write computer programs. The more computer programs you wrote, the more you understood the programming language and the better the programmer you became. They applied the principles of learning a foreign language to computer languages. I loved reading that book and still try some of the exercises.

But there are literally thousands, hundreds of thousands, of books on computer languages, a great many of which are terribly written in a boring long hand, obfuscated with jargon which is tersely explained in a fleetingly by the way manner. There are some disciplines that have totally given up trying to teach. For example, Architecture. For the most part, there's an assumption that the Architecture student, by tedious repetition, voluminous production of work will eventually get it. The words used in lectures subliminally affect the consciousness to produce images which can then be manipulated in the mind of the student and turned into structure. The form magically appears. When asked to explain how the form appeared, words are then used to wrap around the image in a matter of fact way. Have you ever heard Architects speaking and trying to explain their process? It's laughable. A friend of mine, former student in Architecture like me, once explained it to me in terms of ego. The discipline is full of them and survival depends on you being as abstract as possible. As though you're a magician with secrets that mere mortals can only wish they understood but which will forever lie beyond their reach.

Teachers, educators, instructors, tutors, those with knowledge, often believe that the inability of the student, the apprentice, the learner, that the problem lies with the person and not the instruction. That the inability of the student to digest the material lies in the students genetic disposition to stupidity. They just don't get it. You see a lot of this in the face of teachers during parent teacher night as the elementary school teacher explains why your child isn't progressing as fast as the other children. There's a subtle message behind this that your dummy genes have somehow infected your child and therefore your own inability to progress in life has afflicted your offspring. The simplicity of the theory of relativity is something that most human beings on this planet don't understand, but even that high school elementary teacher behaves as though it's the most natural thing in the world and that they invented it. E=MC-squared. So what?

With this bombardment of information throughout those formative years, children, and adults, develop a fear of difficult, or seemingly difficult subjects. Even if we end up in our fields of expertise, our focus narrows into singular tunnel vision obscuring our ability to be open-minded, broad-minded and effective lifelong learners. For those of us that end up moving up the scales in life, each rung has it's barriers to entry. Many of them having been manufactured by those who are unable to explain how they got there in the first place. There are tons of management seminars, self-help workshops, leadership conventions, motivation and team-building exercises that will fail for the majority of the attendees simply because the craft has not been abstracted enough for each person to personalise it. Make it their own. Take ownership of it.

And that perhaps is the key to learning. Seeing it for yourself. It is the only way to see. It is the only way to achieve and it may not necessarily jive with the way others see things. Even concepts that are supposedly scientific and unarguable. Without leeway. Here's a good example. Kekule, who discovered and explained the structure of the Benzene molecule is said to have been dreaming. And in his dream, of snakes, one of them grabbed onto its own tail. That image, of the snake grabbing its tail, led him to the discovery of the Benzene molecule which is a ring structure. Whether the story is true is immaterial. The important thing is that I remember this and I haven't studied high school chemistry in over twenty-five years. The image alone stuck in my mind. Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA, a double-helix of amino acid pairs. We're all made of the same building block!

Isn't that fascinating in and of itself. That a couple of molecules differentiate us from some animals, and even among ourselves, these molecular differences lead to large physical differences.

The work that I'm engaged in crosses a number of disciplines, many of which hold very little interest. But the environment does have its different components each vying for some relevance in the overall discipline. As a result, each unit, faction, silo creates within itself an identity and brings with it the baggage of self importance. With self importance, terminology and codecs appear. A theory of practise. A way of doing things. Alchemy to the outsider, but practised with religious importance shrouded in mystery. Meetings are held of grave importance, pads whipped out, documents created. The wheels of progress forging forward, unabated, uninterrupted, yet obscured. The largest part of the problem is making sense of how all the components fit together. Some people don't care, or worry, about the grand scheme, as long as their component seems to be intact. Some people can function quite capably with the knowledge that all they have to do is attach the widget marked with a "+B" to the widget marked with a "B+" and that everything else will take care of itself.

Some of us become dysfunctional in that environment. The need to grasp the terrain from the upper stratosphere becomes of seminal importance or we become catatonic. Unable to function because the meaning isn't clear. The purpose is unknown and so the value or worth of the task becomes futile. And when this happens, the ability to comprehend to learn is diminished. And when those with knowledge are unable to teach, and get annoyed because they're surrounded by idiots then more oil is poured onto the burning problem and all that happens is that it exacerbates.

The next series of blogs will explore this problem further. Mostly so that I, as a former teacher, understand what it is my craft was about, but I also have this deep belief that by teaching others, you, yourself, benefit greatly from the exchange. You clarify what you know if you can take it and give it to someone else.

Ever watch people at an art gallery? They stand there in front of an abstract piece, in awe. They recapitulate the artists intent and agonise over the mess. They walk away, self-satisfied, hesitantly assured, marginally confident that they have witnessed something. They'd do better by going into a dark room and praying.

90K done!

It appears that I've already surpassed the 90K mark in my weekly training. I measured the "10K" route and found it to be closer to 11K. If that's the case, then my morning 10K's are actually morning 11K's. Which means, 55K from Monday to Friday.

So, on that 20K + 17K weekend, for that week, I ran 55K + 37K. That's 92K baby!

Here's my 11K morning (5:30am) running route.

90K almost there....

I'm almost back there. This past week, I ran 90K. 10K every day from Monday to Friday. A 20K run on Saturday and a 17K run on Sunday. Starting in September, 70 weeks were a regular diet, but the legs are getting stronger, the Achilles tendon isn't hurting any more and finally broke 80K sometime in mid-November with two good 15K runs on Saturday and Sunday one weekend.

For the past few months, since mid-September, I haven't run on two days. It's been a diet of 10K's every morning at 5:30am. I've now pushed that time back. I'm getting up at 5:00am, out of the door by 5:30am so that I can be back in the house in time to get ready for work. The 5:00am wake-up time has forced me to crash by 10:00pm at night. Those midnight and 1:00am sleep times are gone. Except, for the weekends. I can afford to head out at 8:00am.

I've discovered that it's all about tea! That's right. A cup of black tea, no milk, cooled with some water and no hydration is really required for about an hour. In fact, the 20K run was done without additional hydration during the run. The tea is a miracle drink. I believe it's raising my lactic threshold, keeping the muscles from tightening up early and allowing me to go longer. The colder weather in the fall is also helping so I'm not burning up, sweating to keep cool. The sweat is just exertion.

So as I write this, it's past midnight. I did a 20K run today, Saturday (Dec 4) and tomorrow, hoping that I'm out of the door by 10:00am, I'll run a nice slow 17K. That's a good week. I don't know when I'll be able to do those two back-to-back 20K's and crack the 90K mark.

I'm also doing a very good stretch after the run. Especially the calf muscles. Stretch and limber them up. Also stretching those abductor muscles on the upper inner leg. The hamstrings are getting stretched at the same time. Some time back I got a painful sciatica nerve problem. I suspect this was from sitting at the job. At that time, I did some ultrasound physiotherapy which helped get rid of the problem at that time, but there's not much stretching that can be done back there. Just have to watch out to make sure the nerves aren't compressed too much for too long. Sitting down for more than 30 minutes is probably a bad thing.

The routine for the rest of the week will be similar. 10K's daily and finish off with two 17's. I might try for another 20K before taking off for Nairobi. Don't know if I'll get to run much at home, but I might switch up to cycling to keep the toning.

Fixing a 4th Generation iPod Shuffle that's shorted out

I read this tip on how to fix an iPod shuffle, the small 4th-Generation one, that's shorted out, and it worked for me so I thought I'd post the solution.

This model of iPod shuffle has a terrible design. The headphone jack doubles as the charger and so is prone to shorting out if a little moisture gets into the jack. A search on Google for "iPod shuffle sweat shorting" returns a ton of hits with people complaining on how their iPods died after only a few months. The main problem is that a lot of people use this device when exercising. Sweat then runs down the headphone cable and into the jack shorting out the battery. With other mp3 players, this doesn't happen since the charger isn't built into the jack. It's normally built as a separate docking jack or a simple USB connection.

In my case it wasn't sweat. It was rain water. Normally if it's raining and I run outside, I wrap my mp3 player in plastic wrap. I didn't and some moisture ran into the headphone jack. I heard crackling in my ears and just thought that the jack was getting loose. I tried switching it on-and-off, unplugging and plugging in the jack and soon the device was dead. Thinking the battery had died, I plugged it into the charger and the charge light didn't come on at all. After some searching on Google, I found out why.

Solution:

• Immerse the iPod in rubbing alcohol for about a day. This will displace the water from the inside of the iPod and since alcohol evaporates easily, it will dry out later faster.
• Put the iPod in a container with rice for a couple of days. Rice will absorb the moisture.

That's it! A simple solution but very effective.

If the iPod has shorted and destroyed some of the internal components, then this won't work, however, since the device is dead, it doesn't hurt to try this solution to see if it will work before you dispose of it.

Good luck

Where's technology taking us?

I've come to the realisation that even with all the technology that surrounds us, we still do things, still think, still behave as though we were in the pen and paper world. Instead of picking up a pen and carefully jotting things down, we're sitting in front of a keyboard and typing.

This has its problems. With spell checkers, we aren't careful any longer. We write and squiggly lines appear where our mistakes are. With the right-click of the mouse, or even without our involvement, the computer's intelligence fixes our mistakes. It suggests grammar where it's poorly written. Our handwriting is shot.

Like TV robs us of the ability to think, the computer does the same thing. We may think that we're being very productive, multi-tasking, writing ten different documents at the same time, switching unconsciously from one to the other, getting work done, but it seems that we're no further ahead than our great grand parents were when they had to painstakingly write out each letter, thinking ahead since there was no backspace key.

The Internet has made things doubly bad. I remember walking through the library at the McDonald Harrington building at McGill University. Sometimes it would take a few days to find the information that I needed, searching through catalogues, wading through pages and pages to eke out a morsel of information. Then working on that paper with a dictionary close by and a thesaurus not too far as well. It was a teacher at Waterloo, Mr. Kiyo Azumi, in Philosophy 101 that taught me how to use a thesaurus and he didn't use the dictionary styled one. It was a Roget's thesaurus. Cumbersome yet effective in what it taught me. Not just the ability to find a word, but how to think about the message and in trying different terms, try to narrow down on what I was actually trying to say.

I don't use a physical thesaurus these days, but I still refer to one on-line. I struggle with English on most days, but I respect the pain that I went through, leaving my apartment late in the evening because I had to get to the library to find something. I couldn't turn on my computer, search the web or e-mail a friend.

Not to say that there's anything wrong with the computer, per-se. I spend an inordinate amount of time on-line, after all, I work in that industry, but I miss the relaxed slower pace brought on by writing things slowly, one word at a time, sometimes taking days to form a thought.

Business at the speed of thought wrote Bill Gates. I've never read the book, but I intend to one day. I think it, then it happens. Just like that. Rules are meant to be broken. In this world of the thousand things, there is no wrong. There is not right also, just shades of things.

Our physical bodies were not made to sit in front of a terminal for the better part of the day. There's a reason why working with our hands is so satisfying. For me, a runner, the physical exertion of a long run stresses the muscles, the joints, the lungs but is ultimately very good for the body. The work of our hands is priceless. We're fascinated by the things we can make. The paintings we render. Even in technology, the visual appeal of Apple products is due to the manufacturing process. Cars are engineered. Our living spaces appeal not only to the eyes or the mind, but our hands, sense of smell, and our ears.

Slowing down is very hard to do in this world of a thousand things. Our to-do lists behave like festering virus. Growing uncontrollably eating up precious time. Things never seem to move off the list, they climb up and down in a never ending struggle to finally reach the top and launch off the list. But they never do. More things rain down from the skies, occupying the top rungs, pushing everything else down and dooming them to life sentences on the never ending list.

With all the advances of technology, we've done a lot. It's now possible to borrow books from the public library on your reader device while flying ten thousand feet above the earth. Better still, you can talk to loved ones half-way around the planet in real time. Right now, that is. You sit at home, inundated by a thousand television station channels to watch absorbing five to ten seconds of each as you click rapidly from one story to another. From one disaster to another. From one country to another. It's all about speed and possibilities. The art of the possible, not the enjoyable or do-able.

So now we can claim that we've seen more of the world than our ancestors ever dreamed they would. Columbus wasn't an adventurer, more ten year olds have seen more in this world than he ever did. These kids may not have left their living rooms, but they have definitely seen them in their minds. And that's where they go to most of the time. They visit places in their minds, on the screen, but not physically. Walking takes time, clicking a button a mere second.

And so the question, dear reader, is; has this new technology of the computer, the Internet, this digital era, having replaced some of the things you were doing, such as picking up a pen and writing to a dear friend, or walking a block to experience the chaos outside, or lying quietly in a dark room, eyes closed, mind floating between what's immediate and urgent, and what doesn't count as life, feeling the dark, has this new technology improved you and your life.

Take out that to-do list and wipe it clean. Read it once, and those items that are really old, remove them permanently.

The New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

I cannot begin to say how absolutely impressed with Eckhart Tolle's book, A New Earth Awakening to Your Life's Purpose.

Normally I don't read any self-help, spiritual-type, new-age books. It's like church. Kinda preachy. George Carlin, in one of his shows once asked why people read self-help books? In that skit, he was actually making fun of the term self-help. Because, if you're reading a book by someone else, it isn't actually self-help. Someone else, the writer, is helping you. Self-help comes from within. He also questioned why people need motivation. And for the longest time, I also asked that question.

Most self-help seems to be common sense. I believe that most people have a sense of what is right and what should be done. Nobody needs to tell you that hard work is superior to laziness. That getting up early in the morning and working on your goals makes them far more attainable than just sitting down and dreaming about them. No one needs to be reminded that exercise is good for the mind. That eating right is healthy for you. That excesses in life are dangerous. That words are hurtful and that murder is bad. Nobody needs these instructions. They're hard wired.

But even as we sit and think these things, it seems difficult for the majority to follow. It's not the what that's difficult to comprehend, it's the how!

And it was Eckhart's book that turned me on to a new way of thinking about life's purpose. We've all heard it before. To shed past wrongs and not to live in the past. That the future is unknown and cannot be controlled. But for me, the realisation, the real truth about what it meant to live in the present moment came home with this book. I won't try to write a summary of the book here, you have to read it yourself, but here are some of the things I personally got from it.

The present moment is really about being here now. The Brama Kumaris, which I also heard about recently, teach a spirituality that focusses on self. That things outside your control aren't worth worrying about. And that the only control you have is your attitude to a particular situation. It's a parallel, and powerful, concept when added to the notion of the present moment. In thinking about the present moment, Eckhart Tolle writes about consciously paying attention to the things that are happening right now. The conflict that exists, mentally and spiritually, is that we don't want to be here right now. There seems to be some other place, better than here, that we'd rather be.

This conflict, Tolle ascribes to the Ego.

The ego is that part of self that enjoys conflict, that feeds on external stimuli, that has an insatiable appetite to consume in order to feel self worth. The ego doesn't live in the present moment but lives in the past and the future. While living in the past, the ego continually focusses on the mistakes that have happened and the problems that have occurred because of them. The ego reinforces the image that the problems we are facing today are caused by the errors and poor judgements we made in the past. According to the ego, the reason why the present moment isn't good is because we have done all these wrong things. The ego then tries to justify that the future will be better if we act a certain way. The ego promises that we should focus on moving into the future, forget about the present moment and ensure a pleasant future by consuming.

But the simple fact, known universally, is that the past is unchangeable and that the future, while planned, is uncertain. You cannot go back to your youth and undo those errors and you don't have a crystal ball to predict your future condition. Even if you did have a crystal ball, that future isn't here now and so the choice to sit and wait for it doesn't seem to make sense.

Eckhart writes a lot about the ego. To quote him, "the ego equates having with being." There's the idea that I am what I have. I'm successful because I have a certain lifestyle and own certain things. Or, I'm successful because I look a certain way and have an education. And so the ego drives the need to constantly be in that mode of consumption. Always looking for the next thing to acquire. The development of the ego starts at an early age when you identify yourself with your name. I am Andrew. You then move on to learning the word mine. As a child you're given toys and the collection of these toys, your toys, become the source of your happiness. As you acquire more and more in life, your sense of enjoyment comes from the things that you have. The more you have, the happier you are. So it seems.

The Brahma Kumaris also talk about this. External stimuli taking control of our emotions. If your friend isn't happy, that also makes you sad so you try to make your friend happy in order for you to be happy. If the weather is bad, your mood sinks. If you're stuck in traffic, you also don't feel right. And the only control you have is your reaction to the external stimuli. You have absolutely no control over the weather or traffic. But you can control your attitude towards them.

Getting back to Tolle, there is an answer to dealing with the ego and it's in his book. It's a good read, well structured that presents a simple lesson in a little over three-hundred pages. however, a summary of the content won't be enough. Each page builds with examples to try and define what this present moment really is. How to stay focussed in what is happening right now and not engage with the constant turmoil that's caused by waiting for events to happen.

It's a journey. Wayne Dyer who wrote the book "Change your Thoughts, Change your Life" also alludes to this. Although Wayne studied the Dao de Jing, there are numerous lessons there about focussing on the do-able, the things that can be achieved right now.

Lastly, the book, A New Earth Awakening to Your Life's Purpose, addresses the how part of achieving this. I believe that this is the single most important feature, or message, of this book. Eckhart, himself, admits to sinking to the lowest point of depression where he contemplated taking his own life and what he did to get out of that. Focussing your mind on the achievable now, the attainable now, your immediate environment now, your feelings now, your abilities now, your task at hand now and obtaining a sense of fulfilment from the things that are happening now, whether it be grocery shopping, cleaning the house, taking the kids out, talking on the phone, reading a book, ironing your clothes, having a shower, working at your job is the key. This separates you from the ego which wants to keep you from the present moment.

Misquoting Jesus

In 2005, Bart D. Ehrman wrote a best seller book titled, "Misquoting Jesus The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why." Definitely the best book that I've read on the subject of the origin of the New Testament (NT) Bible since I've always taken it for granted that there was a consensus among the experts regarding the origin. I thought that the debate was centred around interpretation.

Bart Ehrman begins by astonishing me with the fact that some of the oldest manuscripts are close to 400 years after the death of Jesus. There are some within, say, 100 years, but there are problems with copies made from them.

In any case, after finding out that the writers of the New Testament were not witnesses of Jesus' life, but witnesses of witnesses, Ehrman then goes on to explain how copies of these manuscripts were made before the invention of the printing press (in the 1450's). Back in the early second, third and fourth centuries where there was no such thing as copyright law. What happened is that a letter would be written, say by Paul, and sent to a church with instructions that it be read to all the followers and then passed on to the next church in the chain. However, someone at the church, wanting to keep a copy, would find a literate member and ask them to make a copy. Later, towards the fourth century, professional scribes would fill in the place of these lay person scribes and copy jobs improved.

But in the early copy days the scribe copying text would sometimes, inadvertently, change the text. Changes by omission or even poor spelling. Other changes were more notorious. Changes to text by actually changing the words because the meaning was difficult. An effort to simplify in some cases and in others changes to align more with the beliefs of the scribe and the church they attended.

Ehrman's claims are that there are more discrepancies among the thousand of manuscripts than they are words in the New Testament. Estimates are in the hundreds of thousands.

Having described the process of copying, the illiteracy rate during that period of time, he then moves on to a layman's description of text criticism. The process by which theologians use to arrive at original text when faced with a barrage of manuscripts. The process is complex but he does a great job to give an appreciation on the struggle that theologians face when reconciling differences to arrive at an original text. However, even though for some of the major theological points there is a general agreement among experts, there's still disagreement among textual critics.

The book was wonderfully received and climbed to New York's best seller list. Obviously, the subject was digestible by non-theologians who took it well. The more hard core theologians took the book as deceptive and not presenting the truth in a scholarly, or responsible, manner. Most of the hard core critics claim that the conclusions don't match the arguments presented and that Ehrman had an agenda in presenting his case. A well spoken academic who writes well and can reach the general public, most of the pounding came from the more vocal and theologians. A good discussion can be found here:

http://benwitherington.blogspot.com/2006/03/misanalyzing-text-criticism-bart.html

It's a healthy debate but one that begs a number of questions. For example, nobody disagrees the information presented by Ehrman is common knowledge among the theological community. The fact that everybody knows about these textual problems comes only as a surprise to the layman. And even though the religion has only been around for just less than two thousand years, it's quite amazing that those charged with spreading it and gathering more people into the flock haven't been so open.

It's reminiscent of the secrecy and drama surrounding a lot of activities that the church does. Dan Brown's very popular book, The DaVinci Code, wasn't the first in a line of books to criticise the church. In fact Dan Brown was sued, unsuccessfully, by the authors of the book, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh for plagiarism. Dan Ehrman also spent some energy rebuking Dan Brown, not only in writing, but also at a University lecture series. So it seems that the church is a hot topic.

But what I was trying to say is that the mystery shrouding the church is not new. In the past it was mainly illiteracy that stopped a lot of the questioning. Then the power of the church exceeded that of the state. The church was the state. People were tortured in the name of religion, and not just Christianity. But the hierarchy of the church's autocracy and the increasing levels of bureaucracy with ever increasing layers of complexity have distanced the church's members from their God. I'm surprised that I never bothered questioning the origins of the Bible more since I had no knowledge that there was so much disagreement amongst the ranks. The mere fact that there are so many splinter groups professing differing interpretations of the text should be enough to raise more than an eyebrow.

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Happy New Year dear readers and welcome to 2009!

Seems like it was only yesterday we were worried about Y2K and concerned that computers worldwide would stop working leading to a global meltdown. Like Bernie Mac one said on stage, "People everywhere were scared shit-less, running around buying up all the water and sardines..." We'll miss Bernie.

But he was right. There were a bunch of people who benefited greatly from that scare. Mainly consultants who made businesses feel that they needed to get their houses in order before a major meltdown. Business owners got scared and coughed up the cash. Cash to review the problem. Cash to recommend fixed. And in many cases, do nothing.

Eight years have gone by and we've even fixed another problem that would have occured in 2038 -- known aptly as the Year 2038 problem. This is slowly being fixed by moving away from 32-bit computing to 64-bit computing. In short, the clock of a 32-bit computer which stores the time as a 32-bit integer (whole number) will run out of bits in 2038. A 64-bit integer is much, much larger so it won't run out of bits for a very, very long time.

The computer world has changed drastically. We're now seriously implementing virtual operating environments. Hardware virtualisation is the concept of software mimicking hardware. Because you have this software virtualisation layer, implementing and moving around software systems is easier to manage. Microsoft has become a huge player in the Internet space as well as building it's own virtual software system. It's Internet Explorer browser is by far the most popular browser on the planet despite many claims that it's the most flawed. What does this tell you? That software doesn't have to be perfect to sell. It only has to work most of the time. This is why all companies have IT departments. To manage the flaws.

Another huge area is security and wireless networks. Network and application security have become vital for even small businesses. We have read so many stories of stolen laptops with vital, unencrypted, information on them. Personal Computers that were left without adequate password protection. Companies that lost disks. Websites that were compromised and credit card information stolen. Even so, it doesn't seem as though many businesses have taken the hard line and secured the information they hold any differently. For large security companies and governmental organisations (say intelligence agencies and the police) these have always been standard, but some organisations haven't done much other than to add products to their environments. And with the growth of security issues there's been the accompanied growth of security companies and security consultants all selling security products. And then there's the proliferation of wireless access to the Internet and corporate networks. With this new products have also come up. The days of cabling aren't gone yet, however, the attractiveness of wireless communications make security interesting especially since we know that there nothing that is absolutely secure. If it was designed and built by a human being, then there's a way to break it. It might be difficult. It might take a long time. But it's not impossible.

Linux on the desktop has also matured. Not as fast as some of us would have liked to see it, but it has grown from a hobbyists and geeks operating system in the 90's to a corporate, competitive software system today. Companies like Novell, IBM, Sun and Oracle have backed it fully and do a lot of their development on that platform. Tells you a lot about the security of open systems. They work. Part of Linux's success must be the integration that many of the applications have with Microsoft Windows applications. Rather than build something completely different, Linux developers choose to woo Microsoft users by showing them that the learning curve won't be too steep. In addition, Microsoft is slowly, moving a lot of it's protocols to align with Internet and Open standards. They sometimes misbehave, for example when they created their new Office XML document standard, but I suspect that they will align themselves eventually with the Open Source world and eventually with Linux.

Microsoft has also had it's successes. Microsoft Office is without a doubt the most popular business application in use. Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft PowerPoint taking in the largest share. This is Microsoft's biggest money maker. Their Operating System department have also had some success. Windows XP was marginally better than Windows 2000 and somewhere along the road, when businesses wouldn't upgrade, Microsoft compromised, extended the support life of Windows 2000 till everyone got on board with XP. Windows Vista looks like it's going to be a dismal failure, however, if Microsoft is right, it's sales are climbing as adoption slowly begins to take hold. On the server side, without a doubt Windows 2000 server edition and it's upgrade Windows 2003 server edition have been a success. The migration process from Windows NT to Windows 2000 to Windows 2003 was very painless for many business and for some time the three systems could co-exists quite happily. Microsoft has also had success in purchasing companies that compliment it's products. Finance companies (like Great Plains) and E-mail security companies (like Sybari) are now part of the Microsoft family.

There are some companies that we thought were dead, or, confused as to what they were doing. Novell did a complete turn-around and purchased SuSE Linux, a German Linux company. They then hired a lot of SuSE developers to create an enterprise version of SuSE linux. One that could be sold for cash. One that had a tantalising support option and some interesting tools for management. They have also successfully been able to make deals with Sun Microsystem to develop parts of the Sun StarOffice system (Open Office) and make changes to the Spreadsheet application making it more compatible with Microsoft Excel. They are also partnering with Microsoft to bring Microsoft's Silverlight application to Linux, aptly named Moonlight. So even though Novell's Netware product looks like it will never get off the respiratory unit, things aren't looking so bad.

Sun Microsystems has also had a confusing time. God only knows what their plans are and I suspect that the only reason they're still hanging in there is due to their Java platform on which there are billions of code out there, as well as customer loyalty from Solaris and Sparc station users.

So, all in all, it's been an interesting eight years and we look to close off this decade by coasting to 2010. As I write this, the world economy is in recession which means that there will be a lot of chaos as businesses tighten their belts, spending cuts and lay-offs increase. Economists predict that it isn't as bad as we're making it out to be and that the worst is already over. Looking at my savings, I'm praying that they're right.

So Happy New Year readers and hopefully there'll be a lot more entertainment in this year than we endured in the latter half of 2008.

Blogging with ScribeFire

Very interesting way to blog especially if you are looking and commenting on a page. With ScribeFire you can split the Firefox window into separate frames.

This is just a test. I'm going to add an image and see what happens...


That was very cool. The picture was uploaded via blogger's api!

I'll write more about this tool later, once I'm comfortable with it.

Those Amazing Jamaicans!!!!

Unless you've been fast asleep during the month of August, you're probably already well aware of the two Olympians trying to outshine each other in Beijing. Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt. The first week belonged to Phelps. Eight gold medals which included seven world records and an Olympic record. An incredible achievement. The second week belonged to Bolt. As I write this, he's already broken the 100 meters record by running 9.68 seconds and the 200 meters in 19.30 seconds. No wonder they call him lightning bolt.

The American media is calling Phelps the Greatest Olympian Ever. Of course, this has led to an amazing number of debates everywhere. What does the Greatest Olympian Ever mean? Can you even begin to compare a track athlete to a swimmer?

Linux versus Windows

I've always been a Linux advocate but I've never really made any effort to try and convince anyone to use it. Even though I have a passion for it, enjoy the freedom and flexibility it provides I know that others don't share in my joy.

But I recently convinced a friend to try it out. In talking to my friend and trying to get him interested, I actually convinced myself that there are good reasons to see things my way. From being a passive activist I'm now joining the ranks of becoming an evangelist.

Here's my story.

I started using Linux a long way back. I actually fell into technology by accident even though I've always had a passion for it. By education I'm an Architect. However, I've always loved engineering and physics and most definitely computers. I bought my first computer, a Tandy SX 1000, around 1986 or 1987. I had come into sudden wealth and parted with over $2,500 for this purchase. A Radio Shack computer that came with equipped with a twelve-inch monitor (green character display) and a single 360K floppy disk.

The sudden wealth (a whopping $4,000) was an astronomical amount of money to a student on a $550 monthly allowance.

In any case, the Tandy had a disk with the operating system. DOS version 2, I believe. After booting the computer, I could put in my other Tandy disk which had a game and a few small programs - a text editor, a calculator, and a copy of Quick Basic - a programming language. I spent countless hours in front of that screen, slowly gaining proficiency in writing Basic programs that could do meaningless things -- like read files and count all the vowels.

Tinkering with my Tandy wasn't an issue of "getting things done." It was a matter of playing.

It became a serious school tool when I got a copy of AutoCAD and WordPerfect. Now I could get some real work done. Papers were finished in the leasure of my roach-infested apartment in the McGill university ghetto and technical drawings were automated using Lisp - another programming language.

Towards the end of my degree I retired the Tandy to the simpler life of less tasking work, for example the odd Basic program or WordPerfect job. The Tandy had also taught me the importance of being able to type and for that alone I'll be eternally grateful.

My new computer was a clone purchased through the university on a student loan. It was pre-installed with the latest, and then hottest, operating system -- Windows 3.0. I enjoyed using Windows, but I was constantly opening DOS so that I could do strange things with Basic or look for stuff at the command line. I found that Windows actually limited the way I did things which is very strange. One would have thought the opposite would have been true. Having buttons to click on and the ability to open multiple windows at once so that you could "multi-task" should have boosted productivity. Then, as in now, the opportunity to multitask resulted in the sense that work was being done. Whether or not actual work was accomplished remains highly debatable. Those were also the big heady days of bulletin board services. Computers together with the Internet made it easy to collaborate and share ideas and work. The Internet was in it's infancy in the early 90's.

But even back then, in the early to mid-90's, there was sense in the air that there was something else brewing out there. Somewhere around late 1994, now having left Architecture as a profession and focussing on software development, I got hold of a copy of Slackware Linux.

Installing Linux back in the mid-90's was a masochistic experience. Trying it once was enough to turn you away and lead you right back into the arms of Windows. Linux was terribly difficult to install if you didn't have a university degree in computing. What was even worse was trying to make it useful. Even with a graphical interface (which I mainly used to support opening more than one xterm terminal) applications of "business" functionality were few. Nearly everything had to be compiled from source code many of which wouldn't compile cleanly on the first try, unless you were really lucky.

Inevitably the weak dropped back and the brave slogged onwards. With each new Slackware update, more experience was gained, confidence bolstered and with renewed courage I actually began to enjoy the challenges of working with the system. There was no telling when something would break and the application would come crashing to its knees while vomitting an incoherent error. It was Linux that taught me the term "core dump." When an application dropped from the skies Linux users would often ask if it "dumped core?" This was amusingly reminiscent of futuristic space rockets ejecting waste plutonium as they streaked across space and time at speeds greater than light.

Slackware toughened up and the creator, Patrick Volkerding, continued to simplify the installation process. To install Slackware you still needed an intimate knowledge of your computer. You needed to know the model of your network device or your video hardware. Back then you couldn't simply stick the CD in the drive click on the "setup" button and walk away for a latte. The X Windows graphical interface was crude and grainy. Not polished and smooth like Apple or even Windows. Life was really tough but things were improving slowly.

By the late 90's I was still using Windows as my primary computer both at home and at work. I had a spare computer for "playing" with Linux. Slackware was my primary Linux distribution even though I dabbled with Red Hat's distribution occasionally. Red Hat's package management feature was extremely attractive. Adding and removing software was easy using Red Hat Linux. All you needed to do was find the right packages on the Internet. In Slackware Linux everything had to be compiled but that was not a real issue. The compilation process was so simple that in many cases the software created from a source code compile ran much faster and smoother than the pre-compiled versions that you could download.

In addition to the fact that you could download software in source code, customise it and then build it, using Linux you could also modify the actual operating system by compiling the kernel. The kernel is the central component of most computer systems. The go-between application programs and system resources like memory, the CPU and other devices. Most modern operating systems provide a generic kernel with plug-and-play modules for the different components inside a computer. The generic Linux kernel supports every common hardware device under the sun but because you have access to the source code you now have the additional power of building a customised kernel.

Building a customised kernel is easier than it sounds. In fact it's a simple process of selecting options from a menu and then issueing the build command -- make! The trick lies in being able to identify accurately the hardware and any devices that are inside your computer. It's not enough to know that you have an Ethernet network card. You need to know that it's a 3-Com card or an Intel card with a Broadcom chipset. Why would anyone build a custom kernel? The simple answer is so that you can optimise performance. A smaller kernel with only the support for the devices you need should run faster while consuming fewer system resources.

By the late 90's I was building customised kernels for my Slackware systems out of bordom and curiosity. Back then it was necessary. A smaller kernel did make a difference on those slower processors and memory was as precious as gold. If your computer had only 64 MB of memory, then using every single megabyte efficiently was the difference between productivity and irritation. The smaller the kernel the more memory available for application programs. The more memory available for games. The more efficient the kernel, the faster it took the computer to start. If the kernel had the device drivers built into it then the relationship between the devices and the software applications was much more intimate. But times have changed. Nowadays the hassle of building a kernel is a last resort option. Only an esoteric problem involving exotic hardware would force anyone to go down that path. Computer resources are not as precious as they used to be. Todays computers have tons of memory and storage that the effort in tweaking and fine tuning is truly wasted. The adage is true. If your software is slow and sluggish, buy a better computer.

As hardware got faster in leaps and bounds. Smaller processors doing much more work. Multiple cores on a single chip. Increased cheaper memory. Huge disk drives making storage a commodity. Graphics cards that could handle three-dimensional algorithms with smooth output. Programmers got lazy. Bloat code became the main feature of the late 90's and 2000's. Since the hardware could do so much, why try to optimise the software. Make the software huge and bloated and let the hardware worry about the speed. It's almost like aeronautical engineers saying, "let's not worry about the weight of the plane, we'll just make bigger engines and use more jet fuel!"

I've gone from 8 MHz processors to over 3 GHz today. That's over a four-hundred percent improvement in just the speed of the processor. From 640 K memory to 4 GB another astounding six-thousand percent leap. But I don't think that software speed has improved that much. Programmers back then were frugal and nit picky. They used system resources like a desert traveller would hoard water. Every drop counted. Making things smaller, tigheter, faster was the mantra of the day. The hardware people definitely understood this and it's visible in hardware designs today. things are smaller and compact. My iPod shuffle is an amazing piece of technology.

So how did it grow from a hobbyists project to the successful operating system that it is today?

Linux was invented by Linus Torvalds. Sometime in 1991, Linus posted a message on the newsgroup comp.os.minux. The message read:

[Quote]
Hello everybody out there using minix

I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.
[/Quote]

He was obviously wrong. This free operating system has grown to become a huge success.

Strangely enough there are some comparisons with the success that Linux is having to the success found by Microsoft through it's sale of DOS. Microsoft's original partnership with IBM was to provide the Basic programming language for their personal computers. In fact in 1980 Microsoft didn't have an operating system and they'd suggested to IBM executives that they take a look at CP/M (Control Program for Microcomputers) written by Gary Kidall. The story is that IBM couldn't arrange a meeting with Gary Kidall so they went back to Bill Gates and gave him the contract to write the new operating system. The rest, as they say, is history. Bill Gates purchased rights to another operating system (QDOS - Quick and Dirty Operating System) from Seattle Computer Products for $50,000. Microsoft kept the deal with IBM a secret from Tim Patterson, the head of Seattle Computer Products, and went on to develop MS-DOS. Microsoft was further able to convince IBM to let them retain the rights to sell MS-DOS separately from IBM Personal Computers.

So you can make the loose analogy that Microsoft, starting from humble roots, with hobbyist type operating systems has developed and matured a product that is the market leader today. In much the same way Linus started an operating system which has matured and is no longer a hobbyists toy.

There's a huge difference in approach between Microsoft's success and Linux's. On the one hand, Bill Gates would not have built MS-DOS if IBM wasn't willing to pay for it. However Linus built Linux for free in order to learn. Linus was curious and he had a desire to improve minix and wasn't interested in getting paid for it. Bill Gates has continued to improve DOS and it's successor Windows by closely guarding the source code. The intellectual property of Windows belongs to Microsoft Corporation and it's development is done by a handful (though a rather large and competent one) of people. The Linux source code is open for anyone in the world to look at and modify. It took Windows a long time to mature. It's taken Linux a relatively short amount of time. Without financial backing and the support of paid engineering the success of this operating system is simply amazing.

The Linux of today is a competent, stable and functional written work. It encompasses the best in software development authored by the best brains in the industry. It's certainly true that Microsoft has a depth of engineering talent that is enviable, but rumour has it that a lot of those people are closet Linux users. There's something about Linux that draws the computer geek out from their hiding place. Like a strong harvarti to a mouse. Many global companies that resisted the call to support Linux are now advertising on their web sites. IBM contributes greatly to Linux development. Not only financially but also engineers and technical support. Novell, once a powerhouse in the network operating system space has aquired a German Linux distribution, SuSE, and turned it into their primary operating system offering in favour over Netware, their flagship product. They even have a roadmap encouraging their existing Netware clients to switch over to SuSE. Sun Microsystems, Oracle Corporation, Nokia and so on. The list is a who's who in the technology business.

The playing field is no longer about the favourite team at home in front of a capacity crowd that's mainly composed of their relatives. Some of their uncles and cousins are now suiting up for the opponents. Linux is showing that it can play forward just as well as it can handle defence.

But there are real differences between the two operating systems unlike the reasons why someone would buy a Honda over a Toyota. The differences are obvious to those, like me, who have been in both the Microsoft Windows space and the Linux space for a long time. I continue to work with Microsoft Windows at the company where I'm employed, but my primary computer there is a Linux computer. There would little need to use Windows if I wasn't employed. It's not because I don't want to pay for software, on the contrary, I do pay for some of the applications that I use, even though I don't have to. This is perhaps part of the philosophical difference between Linux and Windows. Windows was started as a commercial venture from the beginning. It's roots are based on cash flow and balance sheets. The momentum of development is driven by the opportunity to increase the bank balance at the end of the day. Linux was started as an idea. An idea to see if something could be improved for free through worldwide collaboration. Linux people were curious about whether or not we could do this, or if we could do that. It's no wonder that even today the "free" software market is so large. Linus Torvalds is not the only one who had the desire to play and invent "for the fun of it," but he has inspired so many to take up his challenge and jump into the sandbox with him.

It took a long time to get the commercial world to see advantages in free and open source software. Nowadays that debate is largely over. We've proved that complex systems can be built through large distributed teamwork. The debate against it only echoes in the checkered blue halls of a certain company based in Redmond, Washington. The fact that they're taking notice is a good thing. They've noticed it enough to even have a Microsoft Linux division. I kid you not. The publicised purpose of the Microsoft Linux division is to allow for better interoperability with Linux systems. They claim that they just want to play fair but we all know that they want to be let into the sandbox. For more information check out: http://port25.technet.com/

Microsoft Windows is closed source code. Microsoft Windows has built-in complexities mainly due to how it's been historically developed. It's a behemoth of a product that often suffers from strange ailments. Software programs take on the personalities of inmates in an insane asylum deprived of food. One minute you're productively working, like a 40-piece orchestra your word processor wraps text around images provided by your camera while the web browser dashes back and forth from the Internet bringing you news, entertainment and other subliminal messages. Suddenly the violin section begin to bash each other using their bows. The clarinets also get upset and stop working. The conductor (also known as the operating system) throws his wand in the air and walks off the stage to get a coffee. Days like these are expected when using Windows and when they happen you calmly wait for the stage to clear, tell everybody to "take five" and come back when they're feeling better. You included.

It would be untrue to claim that Linux is not immune to some of these ailments. I've brought Linux to its knees more than once. But there's a major difference. When I'm using Linux, I'm rarely scared of pressing buttons as though they might explode. With Windows, each action is tantamount to walking across a mine field. You never know when you might get blown up. For the most part, when a Linux application stops misbehaving, you shut it down and send it to the corner. That application won't be allowed to play with the others till it learns how to behave.

There used to be an overwhelmingly larger number of Windows applications to the number of Linux applications. The argument against Linux used to be that it can't do "this" or it can't do "that." For the most part, that argument is now old and tired. Most businesses can run their financial applications, document processing and graphics applications, payroll systems, messaging and web programs in Linux. In fact, a great many of these applications were built for Linux and are more mature in Linux. Since applications proliferate for both Windows and Linux it's now easier to evaluate the operating system based on the merits of what an operating system is supposed to do. That is to provide a fair playing ground, to manage resources effectively, to allow the user to interact easily and as intuitively as possible with the machine. A lot of the interaction is governed by the devices that are provided. A keyboard is a keyboard and it doesn't matter which operating system you choose. So is a mouse. However the user interface semantics can either ease or hinder your computing experience. For the most part, Linux graphical applications have taken their cue from their Windows counterparts. Partly in an effort to make the transition from Windows to Linux transparent, but also because the user interaface components are universal. Like cars provide steering wheels, seat belts, speedometers, trunks, gas (or petrol) tanks, the graphical components of software have developed across operating systems based on the objective of usability. It's no wonder graphical interfaces look alike.

For myself, I've discovered that I can do anything in Linux that I can do in Windows. More importantly, I have a lot more fun in Linux than I do in Windows. I enjoy the fact that the system bares its guts to me allowing me to see what it's doing and in turn experiment without fear. Unlike Windows, when you remove things you don't like, they trully leave and don't hang around in ethereal space waiting for the tunnel with the light at the end to appear.

Linux has bent over backwards to make itself integrate in networks of all types. If your business uses a Windows network, Linux computers can authenticate with Windows, browse Windows shares and provide Windows-type services. Only lately has Windows started to behave more Unix/Linux-like. For exchanging documents with my Microsoft Office colleagues I use Open Office (http://www.openoffice.org/). It can save Microsoft Office native documents. In Linux creating PDF files is free so there's no problem actually exchanging PDF documents with Microsoft Windows users. For art and graphics work my two favourite software applications are The Gimp (http://www.gimp.org/) and Inkscape (http://www.inkscape.org/). All these applications are available for Windows and work well in that environment too. The Linux advantage is one of cost and robustness.

In conclusion, Linux is a viable system for use at home and for business. I think that it's a far superior system to Microsoft Windows for ease of use, ease of configuration, networkability, robustness, immunity to attack and technical support.

Ubuntu Issues

Ubuntu has a bug with dates set before 1970. The system will boot fine and you'll get to the gdm login screen, but when you type in your username and password, then press enter, you'll be left with a brown screen.

The fix is simple. Simply set the right date.

Once you get to the brown screen, press CTRL+ALT+F1. This will take you to a terminal. Once at the terminal, log in normally with your username and password. Just as you did in gdm.

Type the command: date to check the system date.

To set the date, you can type in something like the following:

date -s "Mon May 12 13:12:00 EST 2008"

This sets the date to Monday May, 12^th at 1:12 PM in the correct time zone.

Ubuntu Linux

The Latest release of the Linux distribution Ubuntu was released officially on April 4^th, 2008. This version has been long anticipated. In my estimation, possibly since version 6.06, the previous version which promised long-term-support, a.k.a., LTS. LTS, according to Canonical, the company that markets and supports Ubuntu, simply means that you'll get support for at least five years on the server side and three on the desktop.

Ubuntu release cycles are every six months. The numbering (or versioning) method is quite interesting. The version is based on the year and month that the upgrade is officially released. The very first Ubuntu version was released in October, 2004. Therefore, the very first Ubuntu is versioned 4.10. The single digit year comes first, followed by a two digit month. The second one came on time, six months later in April, 2005. It's version number was 5.04. And so on.

Another interesting tidbit is the product name, or code name, assigned to each new version. The first Ubuntu (4.10) was code named Warty Warthog. The next one was Hoary Hedgehog. I just love it. Ubuntu users even use these names in discussing the product. Take a brief visit to the support pages of Ubuntu and you'll read sentences like, "...I'm trying to upgrade from Gutsy to Hardy and...," or, "... is it possible to use the same NIC drivers in Hardy that are supported in Feisty?"

Most vendors normally have code names, mainly used by the developers, for their products. Even stiff-upper-lipped Microsoft. Windows 95 was code-named Detroit. Windows 2000 didn't have a code name, but service pack 1 was called Asteroid. Windows XP - Whistler. Windows Vista - Longhorn.

I definitely prefer the creativity of Ubuntu names.

What makes Ubuntu really exciting for me is the fact that it's really trying hard to bridge a gap between commercial (and that might not be the right word) products and the Open Source world. When you pay for something, you expect it to work. The vendors supposedly put a lot of time polishing the product. Making it easy to install and use. Full of features, robust and supported when things ultimately go wrong. In the early days, Linux distributions required a lot of knowledge on how computers work. Installing Linux was an introduction to a computer science course. Over time, the user-friendliness of Linux has matured. Linux, especially Ubuntu, is comparable to Microsoft Windows in ease of installation. Ubuntu's not alone. Red Hat Enterprise, Fedora, SuSE Linux and Linspire are a few that come to mind immediately. When installing these products, it's no longer necessary to have an intimate knowledge of your hardware as was the case before.

But Linux distributions go further than Microsoft Windows when it comes to putting together a computer system. When you install Windows, all you get is a multimedia player (Windows Media Player), a couple of featureless text editors (notepad and wordpad), a rudimentary painting program (Microsoft Paint) and a few distractions such as games and system tools. From a users perspective, there's not much you can do yet. You need to spend a little bit more money. Purchase a full featured graphics program for editing those photos. A comprehensive office suite that includes spreadsheets (for those accountants), presentation packages and perhaps a better word processor that includes spell checking and complex formatting.

When you install a Linux distribution, you get a wealth of applications that make you immediately productive. The Gimp, for image manipulation, Open Office for business documents, sophisticated DVD tools, Internet applications and much more. With Ubuntu, you also get a system, second to none, for adding new software and keeping the system up to date. Even the task of moving from one version of the operating system to the next one is a simple upgrade using the same tool. That would be like updating Microsoft Windows XP to Vista by a simple visit to the Microsoft Update site. Unlikely.

I'm writing this on a Dell Latitude D620 notebook computer. It has 4GB of RAM and a 100GB disk. The wireless card has a broadcom chipset. The video card is an nVidia GForce 7300.

The laptop was purchased in March 2007 and as soon as Feisty Fawn (Ubuntu 7.04) was released it was relieved of the burden of Windows XP. I was never able to get the wireless networking part stabilised. Even though I used the ndiswrapper package, almost foolproof when it comes to Windows-only driver devices, the card was detected, would work, but was very unstable. Every other part of the system was excellent. I used Envy to install the nVidia video driver.

Six months later when Gutsy Gibbon (Ubuntu 7.10) was released I upgraded the system online. Keeping the same Windows XP drivers and the ndiswrapper package, wireless networking was absolutely stable. I could connect seamlessly from network to network with the excellent Network Manager application.

Upgrading Ubuntu has always been easy. Other than wireless connectivity, and sometimes problems with video and some USB devices, everything seems to work without additional effort. This was not the case in the early days of Linux since most hardware vendors really concentrated on providing support for Microsoft. In any case, this last upgrade (Gutsy 7.10 to Hardy Heron 8.04) wasn't very pleasant. Here's how it went.

As usual, my system notified me that there was an upgrade available. As in the past, I clicked the "Upgrade" button to start the process. A dialog window jumped to the front of the screen indicating that things were happening. Messages indicating that files were being fetched from the Internet, local settings were being altered and so on flooded the screen. But after a minute or so, everything stopped. The dialog window turned an unhealthy shade of gray and nothing seemed to be happening.

I tried to close it by clicking on the little button in the top-right corner with an "X" on it, but it wouldn't respond. I even launched the handy "xkill" program which normally destroys any Linux window application by clicking on it, but this didn't work. Eventually, I had to open a terminal window, find the program by using the "ps" command and then issue another command to get rid of it.

Oh, another nasty side-effect of this partial upgrade, and the subsequent murder of the frozen dialog window was that my system was left in a state of confusion. For some reason, it now thought that it was in the new version, however, there were still five-hundred programs that needed upgrading. I discovered the reason for this but I won't get into it here. It had to do with the way Ubuntu records the locations where it fetches updates to programs. They're called "repositories" in Ubuntu-speak.

After fixing the side-effect and attempting the upgrade a zillion times, I realised that I may have to, for the very first time, actually upgrade by installing from scratch. I've been so used to upgrading a system "intact," including Microsoft Windows, that the possibility of backing everything up, installing a fresh copy of an operating system, and then having to put everything back, was quite daunting. I had everything installed and configured exactly the way I wanted it and I would have to find all my software and try to remember every single tweak.

So I soldiered on. Jumped onto the Ubuntu forums and asked, no begged, for help. I finally found something that sounded promising. By killing the failed attempt at an upgrade, it was then possible to open a terminal and complete it manually. I know what you're thinking. This sounds very much like hacking, but as a true Linux aficionado, I knew that I wasn't doing anything that the operating system couldn't take. Microsoft Windows people would never dream of doing this. If an upgrade of Windows jammed in the middle, and by the grace of God the system was still usable, the only solution would be to salvage any work on the disk and reformat it.

I proceeded to hijack the installation and it completed six hours later. Fetching all the updated files from the Internet took a very long time. The video resolution was completely off. My screen is able to handle 1440 pixels across by 900 pixels down. The maximum resolution that I was getting was 800 by 600. This was because the video driver that had been installed by the upgrade was the wrong one. Getting a copy of the latest version of Envy (EnvyNG) seemed to install the driver, but still I could not fix the resolution problem. I thought I'd tried everything that I could but I've since learned that there was an additional solution that I could have tried. A solution that seems to be helping others with the same problem.

The wireless card was detected. Miraculously I didn't need to use the ndiswrapper package. I knew this since I had used the live-cd version of the upgrade to test my hardware. What was confusing is that in the live-cd, everything was perfect.

I started upgrading on Friday April 25th at about 10pm. I fought with the upgrade till I discovered the hijack work-around at about 3am at which time I went to sleep and allowed the upgrade to complete. When I woke up to go for my morning run at 7am, the upgrade still wasn't finished. It seemed to have completed sometime between 7am and when I got back at 8am. Between 8am and 10:30am I fought arduously with the video card.

At 10:30am EDT on Saturday April 26th, 2008, the date that will be remembered as the date the Toronto Transit Commission stranded commuters in downtown Toronto, I finally gave up and started backing up the documents on my system in preparation for a clean installation. By 12pm, my backups completed and intact, I bid goodbye to my (crippled) system, inserted the fresh CD of Ubuntu and began to wipe the system.

The entire installation took between forty and fifty minutes to complete. When the CD ejected from the drive and I rebooted into the brand new system, everything was good. The video even looked sharper, clearer than it did in the previous version. A few mouse clicks later, which were necessary to download the proprietary drivers for the wireless card, and I had full wireless connectivity. I pulled the Ethernet cable from the jack behind the laptop and enjoyed an unfettered surfing experience. Oh the joys of being able to move freely about and not worry about cables and other hindrances.

Hardy Heron is a must-have upgrade. I needed to download proprietary drivers also for the nVidia card, this is only because the desktop that I wanted needed full hardware acceleration capabilities of the video card which the Ubuntu provided one.

Hardy Heron installs a beta version of the Firefox web browser. At first I was sceptical about using beta software and wondered why a released version of an operating system would tolerate beta software. But after using it for the entire weekend, Firefox 3 is close to being a production release and feels more stable than it's version 2 parent. Firefox 2 was very unstable and notorious for freezing and destroying every Internet session that you were using.

The fact that Ubuntu provides a live-cd is an excellent method of testing your hardware for compatibility. This used to be the case in the Microsoft Windows world, however, the new version of Vista is extremely demanding on hardware, and even though it might install on a computer that was perfectly happy with Windows XP,

Have a nice day

Have a nice day! Even wikipedia has an article, albeit only one sentence, on it. Why do people say this? The wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Have_a_nice_day) claims that it's typically said by retail employees to customers, after a sale. I've heard it on a million answering machines. "Hello, I'm not here to take your call. Please leave me a message after the beep and I'll return your call as soon as I can. Have a nice day!"

It's a dry, toneless dismissal.

I guess we've all become retail employees. Even when we wish people a nice day, we really don't care whether they do or they don't. If they do, well and good. If they don't, well life sucks and it definitely sucks to be you. Bye bye is much better even though I've read somewhere that it was also used in the past to lull babies to sleep. Good-bye has been tainted by that TV show The Weakest Link. It sounds like an abrupt dismissal. A dry conclusion which would only serve after a terse unfulfilled encounter, like with the boss you don't like.

So is there a way to end a conversation without sounding plastic and distant. Without sounding dismissive, fatigued, bored and ready to split? I would guess that when a conversation has come to it's natural conclusion, all parties having run out of steam, nothing left to say then perhaps saying nothing is OK. But that wouldn't work. The importance of "have a nice day" is so that you can turn around and walk away, or put the phone down knowing that there'll be no additional sounds from the other end. Bye bye means, "I'm going to go now so you can safely stop talking."

I like "bye." It leaves no indication that I'm wishing you a pleasant after-conversation life. Nothing to say that I care about how the rest of your day proceeds. Nothing good, nothing bad. We're done here, let's move on.

So... have a nice day!

Christmas Time

Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house, not a creature was stirring not even a mouse.

The year was 1964 and independence had finally come. December 12th, 1964 we would finally get rid of the British colonialists and have self rule. Meanwhile, south on the continent, racial discrimination would persist for another thirty years!

Etobicoke, Ontario, Canada. Thursday November 29th, 2007. A snowstorm hit southern Ontario. People woke up to find a nice thick three, to four, inch blanket of snow. I remember when I had to shovel. Those days are now behind me. I can now boast that I don't mind the snow.

Wednesday, December 5, 2007. In a crowded mall in Omaha, the Westwood Mall a 19-year old boy went on a shooting spree. Ended up killing eight people, six of them Mall employees and two of them customers. He started shooting in the Von Maur department store. News that has been gathered about him since indicates that he had left his parents home, or been kicked out, had recently split with his girlfriend and also just lost his job.

Last night, December 6, 2007, going home from work on a fairly crowded bus, there was this teenager, ears plugged in, obviously listening to rap music. 50 cent to be exact. It was that song "In da club." Well, oblivious to the fact that there were people all around him he was singing the song, albeit out of tune, and making a point to emphasise the expletives. People kept looking at him and shaking their heads from side to side, but nobody said anything. And it was a white kid to boot. A white kid. Do you know how ridiculous these white kids look trying to act black? And ghetto black at that. I know he didn't feel ashamed, so I felt his shame on his behalf.

So Marion Jones has admitted to taking drugs prior to the 2000 Olympics where she obviously shone. I knew that there was something fishy about her natural abilities. And to tell us that her coach started supplementing her in 1999 with, what she thought was, flaxseed oil. You can almost convince me now that Flo-Jo also wasn't juicing on something. We can't say positively that she wasn't getting assistance of the pharmaceutical persuasion, but it's hard to be so good and make it look so easy like she did in the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Triple gold medal winner. Died at the tender age of 38 of a heart seizure. So it's a good thing that Marion Jones was crying and whining about having lost our trust, but for me, she lost my trust when she was hanging out with C.J. Hunter and then Tim Montgomery (who was also caught juicing). It's funny that track and field sports are now forever tainted. The list of suspected and convicted juicers is long. Ben Johnson, Carl Lewis and Linford Christie have all been tainted. Then there's the current suite of sprinters. We won't name any names, but the times that these guys are running, and continually beating, are too amazing to be true.