GeekLimit

Here in Chicago, there are magnetic sensors in the interstates surrounding the Chicagoland area.  I saw a special on TV once showing the central system, it was pretty cool.  The sensors report in to a central machine, and update a display every 2 seconds or so to show traffic flow.  By knowing how many vehicles travel through a given set of checkpoints over a given amount of time, they can estimate average speed, and assume that slow traffic (like 30 mph) means a traffic jam.

Originally meant for emergency crews, this information has been used to give real-time traffic reports to the public.  The best site I’ve seen that uses this info (at least in Chicago) is the one over at gcmtravel.com.  I like it, because not only are you able to look up traffic conditions, but you can look up historical traffic statistics.  This doesn;t sound like much, until you realize that if you look at the data, you can save (and I do) over 15-20 minutes in the car by shifting your departure time as little as 5 minutes.  This is accomplished by timing your travel so you’re not in the congested sections of highway when they traditionally have problems.

The problem in the past has been that I’ve had to look up directions, then go look up traffic.  Not anymore!  Google maps now offers the same color-coded type of traffic information that I’m used to, and it looks like it’s a great value-add for the Maps service.

Suggestions:

• change the travel times based on traffic conditions (might do this already, but I can’t tell)
• suggest other departure times to minimize exposure to historical traffic hotspots (this might be in a special pop-out or something…  “Commute planner” or whatever…)

All in all, great job, maps team.  Yet another example of the success of a value-added feature that rivals the value of an entirely new service, all while leveraging an existing product/user base.

CC photo by Douglas – westbound

Back on January 24, I commented on the new interface of Google Image Search, and how it was more difficult to use for what I (and apperently, many others) use it for. Google has heard the comments, and has returned Google Image Search back to the original format.

A big thanks to the Image Search crew over at Big G for listening to the user community! That’s something that still can’t be taken for granted, and it’s nice to see that responsiveness.

I still can’t help but wonder why they just don’t give the user the option of having the display they prefer. They’ve got the design for both…offer both? I prefer the old one, but I’m sure some people like the “clean” look.

So one of my New Years resolutions was to learn Ruby, and make a website in Rails. Actually, I’ve challenged myself to make a new site every 2 months in 2007. I’m not doing too well for Jan-Feb, but I’ve made my first website project my class final for the Database Design grad class I’m taking. The class ends at the end of Feb, so I guess I’m going to have to be on time!

I’m using Ubuntu Edgy Eft (6.10) and have no prior knowledge of Ruby or Rails. I figured I’d post here and let all you other want-to-be-ruby/rails developers how to get started, based on my experience on what hasn’t worked in my last 2 weeks of learning Ruby and Rails.

There’s a lot of tutorials out there, and most of them are difficult to understand. Unfortunately, genius programmers sometimes have a difficult time explaining complex subjects in human-ese. So here’s my attempt to point you in the right direction:

1. Get Ruby installed. If you’re on Windows, go grab the installer. If you’re on Linux or OSX, you can throw a command or two at the terminal:

• Linux: sudo apt-get install ruby irb rdoc
• Mac (MacPorts): port install ruby

2. OK, so we have Ruby and we have Rails, time to jump in, right?  Not exactly.  Ruby takes Object Oriented Programming to the extreme, so you’d better be very, very familiar with the ideas of OOP, Classes, Objects, Inheritance, and so on.  If you’r not, keep reading Wikipedia until you are.  You might want to look into data types (string, integer) and other concepts like arrays.

Ruby isn’t hard, the concepts behond Ruby are hard.  If you’re a CS or IS major, you probably has a semester or two to figure this stuff out, but I found it a good reminder just to read through the Wikipedia article on OOP anyway, Ruby is severely into objectification.  (even an integer, like “1″ is considered an object – yeah, I know…like I said…crazy objectification)

3. OK, so now we’re ready to get started.  The best tutorial I found, and the only one that seemed to clearly describe Ruby from the ground up is Learn Ruby on Rails: the Ultimate Beginner’s Tutorial by Patrick Lenz.  It just came out about a week ago, and just in time.  Read through it.  Slowly.  Do the examples in your own Ruby shell.  (for me, I got in the Ruby shell by typing ‘irb’ on Ubuntu’s command line).  Do the examples along with the tutorial.  Did I mention the examples?

If you have previously programmed in C/C++, Java, Perl, PHP or Python, you might want to have a look at how Ruby compares to those languages to get a better understanding of why (or why not) you might want to switch over.

4. Alrighty, so now we’re all official Ruby Newbies.  Where to go from here?  I mean the examples in the tutorial were good, but the tutorial definitely didn’t tell us everything you can do to a text string, for example.  And what about all the weird stuff you can do to an array? Well, Ruby comes with a manual, and the download over at ruby-doc.org has a bunch of other great stuff too.  The manual is for version 1.4, but it still will serve you well.

Good luck!

Have fun getting started and playing with Ruby, I’ll be posting my experiences as I go along.

In a windows environment, you automatically get connected to your H: drive (or sometimes Z:) when you log in.  For people using Ubuntu, this doesn’t happen natively.  Here’s how to restore this functionality:

First, make sure you are able to resolve server names via WINS.  If you can’t, you might as well do that now… it makes operating on a windows network a lot easier.

OK, give the Terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) this command:

sudo apt-get install samba smbfs

Now go ahead and make a folder called ‘H-drive’ or whatever.  Just don’t use spaces.  I chose to make it in my home directory.  You can use the FIle Manager, or just type in:

sudo mkdir /home/<username>/H-drive

(so mine was ’sudo mkdir /home/technocrat/H-drive’)

Now type in:

sudo gedit /etc/fstab

We’re going to tell Ubuntu to connect your server folder to the folder you just made.  Copy these two lines to the end of the file, and change as neccessary.  If you don’t know what server your stuff is on, or what the share name is, ask your administrator.

# mount H drive as a folder in home dir
//<servername>/<sharename> /home/<username>/H-drive cifs exec,credentials=/etc/cifspw 0 0

(Where servername/sharename is your network folder, and /home/username/H-drive is where you made the folder on your system.)

We’ve told Ubuntu to get the proper username and password from a file at /etc/cifspw.  That file doesn’t exust yet, so let’s make it.  Enter this at the console:

sudo gedit /etc/cifspw

and enter this in the file:

username=(your windows network username)
password=(your windows network password)

Save and close.  Now give this to the console to lock down the security on that file:

sudo chmod 600 /etc/cifspw

And then kick off the mount process you you can try it out:

sudo mount -a

You should be able to navigate to your H-drive folder by clicking Places > Desktop and going to Home/(username)/H-drive.  You should see your stuff there!

modified from starkos 

If you’ve got a widescreen (WXGA) laptop or LCD, you’ll want to fix the resolution.  The Ubuntu logo should be a circle, not an oval.  Leaving the default resolution *will* give you more than a few headaches over the course of the day.  Luckily, it’s simple to fix.  Open up the Terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and type this in:

sudo apt-get install 915resolution

(if it can’t find it, you need to type this in and remove the “#” from in front of all the addresses that are listed at the end of each paragraph, save and close)

sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list 

restart the machine.  When you get back to the login page, you’ll notice the logo is round…no more headaches!

This is an easy one in Ubuntu, but since I have a gmail account, and my work has Google Apps for your Domain, I found it extremely helpful. Here’s how to tie both of these accounts into Gaim via the Jabber protocol. Alright!

While you’re at it, Skype has an install for just about any distro, so head on over and pick up Skype too!

You can easily make these two applications automatically sign in when you log on.  Click System > Preferences > Sessions.  Click the ‘Startup Programs’ tab.  Click ‘add’, type the word ‘gaim’ (no quotes) and click OK.  Now click ‘add’ and type the word ’skype’ (no quotes) and click OK.  Click ‘close’ and you’re done!

Ubuntu 6.10 natively doesn’t handle connections to WPA-encrypted wireless networks too well. In fact, I wasn’t impressed with the way Edgy handles connecting to any network, for that matter.

For someone who is used to the ‘Network Connections’ folder in Windows, networking in Ubuntu isn’t fun. I worked on trying to connect to my home wireless network for about 90 minutes before I found the right combination of settings on Google that let me get online with WPA, and made it easy to manage multiple networks. For anyone who needs to admin several networks, this is a mandatory feature that Edgy doesn’t natively have.

Here’s how to get a very easy-to-use networking utility in Edgy:

• Connect to the internet via the RJ45 (ethernet) port with a wire. Make sure you can get to Google, etc.
• Click Applications > Accessories > Terminal (don’t get scared)
• type the following and hit enter
  • sudo apt-get
• enter your password and hit enter
• now copy and paste the following block into the terminal window and hit enter. (Note: if it says it can’t find the packages, type in ’sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list’, remove the “#” from the addresses at the end of each paragraph, save and close)
  • sudo apt-get install wpasupplicant
    sudo apt-get install network-manager-gnome network-manager
    sudo gedit /etc/network/interfaces
    (press enter to make the last one go)
• a file is now open. get rid of anything that doesn’t have ‘lo’ in it. Save and close.
• Enter this into the Terminal:
  • sudo gedit /etc/default/wpasupplicant

  a file is now open. Type in:

  • ENABLED=0
• Save and close.
• Paste this block into the Terminal. The machine will restart. Don’t forget to come back!
  • sudo touch /etc/default/wpasupplicant
    sudo reboot
    (press enter)

OK, so now you’ve got two icons in the top bar, one is the old ‘two monitors’, and the new ‘bars’ icon. Right-click the ‘two monitors’ one and remove it, you won’t need it. Now left-click the bars and configure your networks!

modified from DebianAdmin

Also,  if you’re a network or server administrator, and you want to use the machine names to remote into servers, you’ll notice it doesn’t work in Ubuntu.  WINS isn’t enabled by default.  Luckily, it’s simple to fix. Open up the Terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and type this in:

sudo gedit /etc/nsswitch.conf

Where it says ‘hosts: files dns’, add “wins” on, so it says ‘hosts: files dns wins’.  Save and close.

Now give the terminal a:

sudo apt-get install winbind

You should be able to connect via machine name now!  I find this a lot easier than asking people to look up their IP address, we name our machines by asset tag, which makes remote administration a snap!

I’ve been testing a dual-boot setup on my home/work laptop for the last week with WinXP and Xubuntu. I have to say, I’ve been enjoying it. Some parts are challenging, but simple searches on Google have given me answers from a very helpful community!

I have had *zero* reason to boot into my WinXP partition this past week. I’ve been able to remote into any machine I’ve needed, Been able to continue using our webmail interface as I like to do, and have been able to tie into our internal IM service with Gaim.

I’m so impressed with this distro that I’ve decided to go 100% Linux. On my 2Ghz/1GB/40Gig HD laptop, I think I have sufficient performance to use the full-blown mainline Ubuntu distro, and am on it full-time now!

It’s a pretty cool feeling to finally be 100% on Linux. I’ve still got over 1300 users and 400 machines I support by myself, so I really need this to work smoothly. I also want to continue doing the same things at home like listening to podcasts, etc.

I’ll be posting my solutions to any issues I run into. The Dell Inspiron 700m has a few little quirks to iron out, it’s working well for all the major stuff.

As I’m sure most have seen, Vista has launched with a less-than-$500-million result.  In my home Chicago, I’ve been hearing about all sorts of midnight store openings with very poor turnout.  There just seems to not be much enthusiasm about it.  But there’s something else that occurred to me this week: Microsoft has just done more for Linux than the community ever could have.  Here’s my reasoning:

Windows XP, for all practical purposes, is the most preferred OS in existence.  Note that I’m not saying superior, it’s just that if you consider third party software, device support, existing hardware, general level of understanding by the population, and existing install base, XP is the ideal operating system, because it created the environment around itself.  It’s been like this forever with software, or even business, for that matter.  Get a product into widespread adoption, and you can basically define the environment around it.  In this sense, XP had it made.  They could easily have kept rolling out service packs, and let people get on with their lives.

Then they threw it away.  Sure, some will move to Vista, simply on the reputation of XP.  But here are a few observations that I think will prove to make the switch much more difficult:

• Read the blogs from this week on Vista.  Device support is horrendous.  Even new computers sporting the ‘ready for vista’ stickers are having issues getting drivers.  That’s a deal-breaker.  You can’t invalidate someone’s investment in their machine’s components.
• The hardware requirements are ridiculous.  Think about it: besides the typical computer-saavy person (think: your parents), what is the average machine out there?  1Ghz, on 512MB of RAM, if you’re lucky?  With onboard video on some Best Buy special from 2004, that came with a free printer and a 17″ CRT?  You think someone’s going to be happy with the performance after spending the cash to upgrade – not to mention that the upgrade EULA is worded in a  way that cancels their XP licensing?  I doubt anyone in this group is going to make the investments needed for Vista to do what they do, which is go on the internet and use a word processor.  Which brings up…
• What does Vista offer these people?  Faster load times, yes, but for half the cash you could quadruple the RAM in some of these people’s machines as well.

So here’s what it comes down to.  All the balls are back in the air, and in the next year or so people will have to start making a decision what their next OS will be.  Check out the problems #1 and 3 listed above, these difficulties sound familiar?  It’s Linux, circa 2002.  And there’s the rub.  Linux has come a long way since then, and it’s breaking into a level of usability that is considered usable by our target group.  Indeed, put someone in front of Ubuntu these days, and they’ll be happy.

So, what, throw away XP?  In a word, sure.  For most people.  If you can get someone in the target group to use Linux and see how usable it is, and get their printer working, it shouldn’t be a problem.  Gaming development dollars will follow wherever the userbase is, just look at the history of the console industry.  Driver development is getting hot as well.

Microsoft has put itself in a position where all of its strengths in XP (in terms of driver support and hardware requirements) are know knocked down to a level where Linux can compete with the new Vista.  They already had the championship belt, but chose to tie one arm back on Vista and send it back into the ring…and the competitors are much stronger than last time.  Sociologically, this is the worst time to do this, as emphasis gets stronger on a daily basis to do what you feel is best for yourself, and deciding not to tie yourself to any limiting arrangements.  We’ve seen this with Firefox.

All in all, things are getting very interesting, and it will be even more interesting to see what happens on the new playing field, which is now as level as it has ever been.