New Life for Old Computers? – Xubuntu

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Wired has an article this morning about Google’s Chrome OS, a downloadable operating system that runs especially well on netbooks, and takes advantage of an always-on internet connection. (You can still work offline using Google Gears, the browser extension that caches things like GMail, and allows you to sync back up when you connect again). And, oh yes, under the covers, Chrome OS is (yet) another version of Linux.

For something a little more conventional, and that is available now, how about Xubuntu, a version of Ubuntu Linux that uses a “low-footprint” windows manager, to create a graphical user interface that works acceptably on older, slower computers?

Xubuntu retains many of the virtues of its parent, Ubuntu, while providing snappy performance on an older machine.

Xubuntu provides the usual tool kit. If you use a browser-based eMail system (gMail, Horde, RoundCube,) you can access it easily from within FireFox. For word-processing Xubuntu includes AbiWord, a Word clone which will save in a host of different file formats including the typical Word .doc and .docx formats. For a spreadsheet they include Gnumeric, which is a pretty good Excel clone. Both AbiWord and Gnumeric have virtually all of the functionality of pre-2007 versions of the Microsoft Office applications. Both of these seem to work well within tight memory constraints.

I’m trying to convince my education clients that Xubuntu is a viable way to get some additional life out of some of their older machines. The scenario has happened a couple times now… something has gone wrong with the original Windows installation, i.e. the boot record, or the registry has gotten messed up, or the hard drive has failed completely. In any case, a reformat of the hard disk is required. The problem is the cost; by reformatting the hard disk, installing the base version of the original Windows that was on the machine (which is definitely obsolete….Windows 2000, Windows ME or Windows NT,), then installing all the hardware drivers for the network card, sound card, and video that are peculiar to the machine, and then tracking down all of the applications….well, this all will take 3 or more hours. Say, $300 or so. Even then, having gotten it back up and running we’ve spent that amount on a 5-8 year old machine that is essentially obsolete. So, the Xubuntu solution is attractive… if the hard drive still works, you can go back to a working machine in about 15 minutes of a mostly automated installation.

I dunno….look at the screen shot…. it looks close enough for me.

Odds and Sods – Templates, Michael Jackson, Sarah Palin

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The Odds and Sods get odder every day.

Templates for Mac Pages

A quick search on Google for Avery 5163 templates landed me at this page on B3n’s Mac blog which has a pointer to a host of free label templates in various formats. Even though Mac Pages isn’t represented, a template for Microsoft Word worked fine.

Wolfram Alpha

This computational search engine will automatically calculate the nutritional values of your breakfast. So, for example here’s my granola: This creates the following chart:

Cal Thomas & Sarah Palin

Now, here is a column which has something everyone can hate from either extreme of the political spectrum.

If Palin is to have a future in national politics (assuming she wants one) there are several steps she must take. First, she needs a complete makeover. The big media will never admit they were wrong in their judgments, but they might write stories about the “new Sarah Palin.” She should hit the books and learn as much as she can about the modern world, history and court cases. She should read newspapers so that when future interviewers hit her with questions, she can dazzle them like a “Jeopardy” champion.

The only guy who isn’t falling all over himself for Michael Jackson

Like the United States, Michael Jackson was spectacularly bankrupt, reportedly in the range of $800-million, which is rather a lot for an individual. Had he lived on a few more years, he might have qualified for his own TARP program — another piece of expensive dead-weight down in the economy’s bilges — since it is our established policy now to throw immense sums of so-called “money” at gigantic failing enterprises (while millions of ordinary citizens wash overboard, without so much as a life-preserver).

This from James Howard Kuntsler.

In this morning’s paper, someone said Jackson was “our Diana”.

Tech Friday: The Forgotten Art of Scripting

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Well, maybe it hasn’t been been forgotten by everybody, but it has been a long time since I looked at scripting, which might be considered another name for “accessible programming for casual users”.

In the beginning was the shell script.. any of several flavors of command line languages that manipulated UNIX operating system shells. These included component programs with funny names like AWK, and SED that allowed the manipulation of data and (especially) text files. And they all still work and and are used. I’m personally fond of grep, which is a sort of search engine on steroids available on any UNIX variant (like the Mac OS X)

Then there was the DOS batch file, which appeared in the earliest versions of DOS and has been carried up through all versions of Windows with the availability of the Windows Scripting Host. It has now has morphed into the PowerShell… but you can still write and execute a simple batch file if you want. Great stuff for network administrators.

Then there is JavaScript, which has nothing to do with Java, used for calculations and manipulations of web pages. I wrote my TimeCard web page program in JavaScript; and it works, and it it is fast, but working with the language was kind of a mess.

Why bother?

The later versions of the Tandberg Codian Multipoint Control Unit (MCU) for videoconferencing includes an XML-RPC interface to allow programmers to interact with the box without going through the provided web interface. The latter, by the way, is actually quite good. Our idea is to figure out the basic sub-set of functionality that we usually use 90% of the time, and build a custom interface for that 90%.

XML-RPC is, (it appears) to be a languishing standard for having one machine issue calls to another machine, and allow the second machine to execute commands. The reason I call this “apparently languishing” is that Google searches for XML-RPC turn up documents mostly from the early part of the decade. Also, there are few good tutorials on how to get things to work… right now I’m winging it using an (excellent) free client for the Mac which sends XML-RPC commands to the target box from a Mac workstation. Still, XML-RPC is what our box expects to receive…and for the moment at least, that’s what it will get. Once we’ve figured out what to send…we’ll figure out how to send it, ultimately using any scripting language that will work, but starting with AppleScript, which is native to OS X and which comes with an editor and dictionary built in.

Odds and Sods

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“The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the pieces.” Glen Prickett senior vice president of Conservation International quoted in Thomas Friedman’s book The World is Flat.

Delicious Monster has developed a personal inventory program that works with bar codes. You can inventory your books and CDs using the iMac’s camera.

The Lean Startup, blog and workshops, has a ton of information about using a lean engineering methodology for product development.

Apple has released version 4 of the Safari web browser. Two nice features are a cover-flow interface which works like the Finder or iTunes to flip through the browser history, and a sort of marquee that shows a customizable set of pages based on pages most frequently visited. Lifehacker has a work-around to allow you to add pages of your own choosing.

I like the update. It crashes every so often, though.

Interesting take on libraries from Don Lancaster:

Many of the fundamental premises of what a
library once was now border on the ludicrous…

  • That information is scarce.
  • That info is only available at a special place.
  • That only one copy of info is available.
  • That a specialist is needed for info loan.
  • That info is only available during restricted hours.
  • That control freaks should be in charge of anything ever.

If libraries are to survive, they will have to totally rethink
what they are and what services they are going to offer
to which people in what manner.

He expands this in a full discussion of soon-to-be obsolete technologies.

Still I actually bought a book yesterday. In a store. (!)

But what I really want is one of these.

Single Payer Health Care – Sen. Bernie Sanders

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In our morning paper there was an article about Bernie Sanders who has introduced legislation in the senate to establish a real single payer health care plan. This is not the watered down version promulgated by Obama and Senator Bauckus who are discouraging participation of single-payer advocates in the debate about revamping health care. I sent him a note.

Dear Senator Sanders:

Hi…. I was delighted to see coverage of your single-payer health care initiative this morning in the Free Press. I only hope that you’ll be able to convince your colleagues that have been corrupted by the insurance companies campaign contributions.

I don’t think this issue takes on the urgency that it might since all members of Congress are covered by a single payer government provided health care plan. Hey….all we want is what you guys have!

I’ve lived both in Canada (single payer), and German (hybrid single payer+employer system) and both systems were far superior to what ordinary Americans are able to get even in Burlington with Fletcher Allen and a high-deductible CIGNA policy obtained through the Chamber of Commerce.

The amount of energy and frustration to say nothing of the dollar cost that we personally invest in attempting to manage our personal health care is just crazy. And we are the “lucky” ones with health insurance, and good hospitals and doctors.

Thanks for your advocacy on this issue. It should be at the top of the everyone’s list.

— ——

I still like reading our printed paper. For one thing, it doesn’t provide ad-links to colon cleansing products. In fact the Gannett web site which hosts the paper (it is a Gannett paper) is a disaster.

High School: Visit to Another World

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I’ve been working with our local software developers’ trade group to create a “virtual tech academy”; creating content for an online learning platform which can be deployed over the internet to rural schools throughout our state. The target is a replacement course for our antiquated one-course “computer science” requirement that is written into our state education standards for high-school students. The current requirement is heavy on Microsoft Office-type skills, and doesn’t begin to explain the depth and reach of computer science and IT that we want to convey to students.

After an aborted attempt to have my local high-school pilot the project, we were fortunate to find a more rural union high school willing to be our host. The development team consisted a CS professor from a local college, and a teacher and a librarian/media teacher from the school. They have been working on this throughout the year. 
The school has an enrollment of 4250 students, 94% white with 6% African-American, Asian or Hispanic. Median household income is $68973 almost 20K over the median income for the state. However, 9% of the students qualify for reduced/free lunches. Ninety students receive English as a second language services, and they speak over 30 different languages. 
Today I was invited to sit in on the final class which was devoted to ethics and computing. This is the first time I’ve been in a high school class in years. The class, taught in a seminar style with only 9 students went well. The students were very engaged. There were several interesting ideas thrown around. 
Cell phones and social applications like Twitter and Facebook allow students to stay connected in almost real-time to friends and family. Some of the older people in the room (ahem) described how going off to college cut off communication between a college freshman and their family in the days when long-distance phone calls were expensive, and a single land-line phone might be shared by an entire floor or dorm wing. Our college professor theorizes that new college roommates don’t really get to know each other for a semester or longer, because they are tethered electronically to their high-school friends and family. I recall I tried to call my parents once a week or so, but we kept our conversations short. I transferred my “life” and loyalties to my college environment within a matter of weeks, and developed several life-long friends during the first month or two at college. 
I asked whether students felt they had adequate access to computers at the school and they said that they did. We held our class in a well-equipped computer lab, and there are several clusters and labs throughout the school. 
When we asked how students would like to have their own laptop, like in Maine, I was surprised to find that they were less than enthusiastic. They were worried the machines would be underpowered. (“old Macbooks….”). They were worried about breakage and theft. The librarian/media person said that maintaining laptops is a nightmare during a project where they were loaning out laptops from the library. 
We asked about the digital divide. They all had computers and internet access at home. In a survey of the ninety incoming freshman, roughly 85 did have DSL or cable  (and a computer at home to use). Of the five others some had computers but no access (too far away for a connection), and two had no computer at home. 
They all agreed that they could not do their homework without access to the Internet. Their teachers provided alternatives and time for work during the school day for those students who didn’t have access at home. 
They love Twitter… but they think is “stupid”, and expect that they’ll be bored with it shortly if they aren’t already. 
They don’t want to give up their textbooks (!) Even though they have electronic access to many of the course materials online, several still said they appreciated having a textbook, “especially for math”.  Kindles haven’t made it here yet. 
I couldn’t help peeking…. the school uses Novell Zenworks as a desktop management tool. They use Moodle which interested us, because we’re looking to roll out versions of the courses that we develop on a platform which is based on Moodle. 

Odds and Sods

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New Honda Insight

Who knew that a car review could actually be funny? Too bad it is about the hybrid Honda Insight 2.0. I actually owned a 2001 Insight for about three weeks, but found it to be so tiny that I thought it wouldn’t be at all practical.  Exchanged it for the now “classic” Prius (sedan, not the egg) from 2003, and I’m hoping the Prius will last forever. I did walk around a new Insight parked in a lot last weekend, and marveled at the size (large and Prius-like) and the Ford-like slatted chrome grill. And the current version of the Accord looks like a Saturn.  What happened at the Honda styling studio?      

ATA Conference

I should probably have more to say about the American Telemedicine Association Conference that I attended earlier this month, but my participation was somewhat clouded by the fact that I was suffering from über-jet lag and a stomach bug throughout. I found the venue, Las Vegas, weird and distracting. I spent most of two days at the conference itself. Comparing it with the previous year in Seattle, it seemed more subdued, perhaps we’re all taking a breather in the down economy. Perhaps the most interesting thing was a thorough demo of the Intel Health-Guide device. This is now deployed in pilot projects. My own presentation, with video clips, went over well with our audience of perhaps fifty or so. Other presenters with whom I appeared showed frightening projections of alzheimer cases, child abuse, and situations of multiple co-morbidities (a fancy way of saying that a patient suffers from several major diseases at once). This reminded me of the current economic collapse as people prognosticated five years ago that the sub-prime lending was going to have a ripple effect throughout the American economy with effects that nobody would possible believe, like the bankruptcy of one or even two of the major auto companies. Well, health care in the U.S. is in the same position. In both cases, sub-prime lending, and employee-based health care, the consequences are (would have been) entirely avoidable, but people and government have to recognize when a business model has become unsustainable and have to have the fortitude to effect radical changes to that model.

Adobe Forms

With grants.gov and many federal agencies, Adobe PDF files rule. After experimenting with some intermediate ideas like PureEdge forms, which require a downloaded application, and which is restricted to the Windows platform, NIH, at least, has settled on a combination of javascript forms and Adobe forms and PDFs for assembling complex grant applications of  30-50 components.  Our state government has not caught up, and I found myself translating some Microsoft Word documents (not even Word forms) into Adobe forms and the process has gone pretty smoothly.  There are all sorts of good things to this evolution to PDFs, and the Adobe Acrobat and Reader programs should be high on the approved tools list for any kind of workflow that requires forms. 

Tech Friday: Video-The Right Tool For The Job

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Two Stories: 

I

I’ve been participating in a entrepreneur boot camp of sorts which requires us to create slide show presentations to introduce our company. Because the leader is using an older Dell laptop with Microsoft Office 2003 installed, we are required to create these presentations to run on PowerPoint 2003 on her laptop. After the presentations have been created, our team was asked to record a voice-over to accompany these slides. This was recorded using Audacity on a Windows machine using a Samson condenser microphone with a USB interface. We did it in a couple of takes, and listened to the playback. All seemed well, although the team expressed some trepidation at attempting to synchronize the playback of the audio with the individual slides, a finicky process which would take some hours.  So the question is, why not use the sound recording function in PowerPoint 2007, (Windows) or Keynote ’09 (Mac)? 

II

We’ve been engaged in a study comparing a 15 week exercise program delivered in three “modes”, 1.) a live class at the ‘Y’, 2.) an interactive version delivered over the internet using multi-point two-way videoconferencing, and 3.) a DVD version of the program.  As part of our telemedicine project we had a contractor create a version of our program for delivery on DVD. We shot great footage with professional audio, lighting, and camera work. The footage was edited to create a 15 week version of our program.  Once the raw edits were created, we sent them off to a DVD guru who used one of those $1,200 authoring programs to put it together.  The result was OK, but non-intuitive. The users of the DVD basically hated it and several dropped out of the study.  
Now, a year has past and the study subjects who participated in the live session and those who took the interactive tele-version of the program want to have a DVD version of the program as a reference so that they can continue their exercise. We decided to provide them with a free DVD, using clips recorded from the telemedicine session. I combined these using iMovie ’09 and the result is better than the original professional DVD. (!)  I subsequently bought David Pogue’s Missing Manual book on iMovie and iDVD and am looking forward to re-doing our original DVD as well as create some promotional material for sharing on the web.  
Now, video editing isn’t my favorite pastime, but it is certainly no worse than grant-writing, and if the results are near-professional, then why not take advantage of what has really become a disruptive technology? 
On the other hand, here is an example of Eva Sollberger’s Stuck in Vermont video blog. Eva is a one-person video production company. She shoots, edits and publishes. This particular episode is about 6-8th graders creating their own news show.  It sure beats Channel 5 eyewitness news. 
 

Top 50 Healthcare 2.0 Blogs

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RNCentral has posted a list of the 50 (fifty!) Healthcare 2.0 blogs, where Healthcare 2.0 is loosely defined as the transformation of health care delivery from a top-down process ordained by physicians, hospitals, and insurance companies, to a shared process involving patients, with  large dose of IT (electronic medical records, telemedicine, patient social networking) added in.  

Cloud Computing Redux

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A year or so ago I railed against the cloud. Or rather, I railed against the paid cloud. Notwithstanding the fact that even then I was already paying for the cloud.

The subject came up during the Freedom To Connect conference. We were sitting around having lunch, several pretty hard-core networking types and somebody was grousing about cloud computing. “It’s not secure!” “It’s slow!” “What if you’re not connected to the Internet?”, (this at a conference of which the entire point was being connected all the time at ultra-high speed). But, I’m Cloud-Boy.

web site hosted at my ISP
eMail hosted at my ISP
virtual disk iDisk hosted at MobileMe
project management BaseCamp
time cards Harvest
Calendar Google Calendar
RSS reader Google Reader
word processing Google Docs (occasionally)
invoicing QuickBooks via eMail

Then there are the mandatory online applications when dealing with the federal government:

  • Employee withholding and tax payments
  • Applying for federal grants at Grants.Gov
  • NIH Commons for managing those grants once you’ve got them.
  • Electronic Funds System for drawing down funds.

Unfortunately, our state of Vermont is far behind… they actually require paper for virtually every step of the grant application and management function. Hmm….I wonder if you can file for a gay marriage license online?

I guess the point is that you’d be nuts not to take advantage of some hosted applications, and even if you are dead set against the cloud, you might be using something in the cloud and barely realizing it.

As usual, the MobileMe suite of applications from Apple have a little extra. Theoretically at least, you can sync your Safari links, and dashboard applications. (I still can’t get the dashboard apps quite right). The iDisk is effective in that it essentially mirrors one or more folders that are present on a particular machine, my desktop iMac for example, and replicates that disk to one or more other machines. (can work for Windows too…although I haven’t tried it. ) The neat thing about the iDisk though is that there is still a local copy of the folders on each machine. This unloads many of the objections to Cloud Computing…the notion that if you aren’t connected, you don’t have access to your files. True disk transfer happens at “FTP” speeds, so sometimes it takes awhile to sync with the cloud.