So we use kubuntu at work to build some of our linux-based software at my new job – which is kinda awesome cuz I love working with *nix-based environments (unix, linux, bsd, mac OSX, etc) for a lot of really nerdy reasons. This is also cool because I use the big brother of the kubuntu distribution – Ubuntu – at home for all my linux PCs (my DVR server and the media PC hooked to the TV).

But one of the down sides to linux is that occasionally you get weird problems on upgrades or installs – and being that I jumped the gun ahead of our gurus in updating to the recent 12.10 update to (K)Ubuntu, I of course ran into one.

I had an issue where on login I got a bunch of error messages about my audio device being missing as well as my network interfaces, and then when I tried to run the update manager it would open and show updates, but not let me install them. When I clicked “Install” it would just sit there and spin the busy indicator and grey out the background.

Well, I chased this around for a while with no meaningful error messages to go off of, and eventually I stumbled upon what might be causing it. There are some packages that are needed for the window manager (the thing that draws the windows and the taskbar and what-not) to be able to pass messages around, and at least one – probably both of the packages I’m about to mention – seemed to have gotten out of whack somehow.

So the trick to fixing it was simple – reinstall the packages for dbus, and policykit. So in ubuntu or kubuntu hop onto the command line and type:

apt-get install --reinstall dbus
apt-get install --reinstall policykit-1


And that seemed to fix it for me. Hope if you have a similar problem that this fixes it for you without all the searching around the internet.

You may have heard some of these questions (some from me) or thought of them yourself:

• Why does only the iPhone have visual voicemail?
• If I can make calls for free using skype from one computer to another why can’t my phone automatically know if I’m calling a computer and switch to that when wifi is available? (if the phone has wifi built into it)
• Why is instant messaging free, but texting costs money when they are essentially the same thing except on a computer instead of a phone?
• Why don’t my facebook notes comments sync automatically or easily to my professional/non-facebook blogs comments and vice-versa?
• Google voice seems awesome, but why doesn’t it integrate better into my phone, and why hasn’t my carrier done something like that before (or at least integrated it into the phones)?
• What is going to replace email? It was invented in the ’70’s and hasn’t changed much since then. Why haven’t we thought up better ways to communicate yet?

Maybe I’m weird, but I actually think about these questions a lot. These questions plague me more and more as Google is routinely blowing my mind with awesome products like Google Voice, and Google Wave (especially Wave).

It seems to me that for a while we have been on the cusp of a paradigm shift in how we communicate. I know there have been lots of major shifts and new shiny things out that expand how we communicate or consume information, and for some that has been paradigm shifting. But for some people like me, it feels as if there is a lack of cohesion and depth to these products.

For example:
I email and chat with people using gmail (Wave is going to combine that with document sharing, and some other neat stuff, go check out the video on their page if you want to see a demo)
I leave public status messages / funny or quipy site links on twitter, which get sucked into facebook. Comments on facebook don’t get posted to twitter though, and replies in twitter don’t turn into comments.
I text and call people with my phone. Soon Google might transcribe that for me automatically.
I can IM people on my phone now, and even get messages while I’m not in that program (yay push notifications – I envy the palm Pre users for their native ability to run an actual IM app in the background). But I can’t interleave that with my texting unless I’m on a palm pre.
I post blog posts on my blog which get sucked up into facebook and livejournal (which is not as straight-forward as it should be to set up IMO). But, no comments or replies sync between sites.
All of these different sites and devices have different log ins, different ways of handling what is basically a flow of information to and from me from and to other people.

Why don’t we have a way of integrating these together?

There are lots of reasons why, and I have lots of opinions on the subject, but rather than bitching or pondering how the system has failed I’m interested in possibilities.

So, here is what I’d be interested in:

– Something akin to google’s new Wave product as a base, meaning an open protocol designed to track flows of conversations and discussions. Only bring in google voice so it has my call logs and texting history right in the flow of conversations.
– Voice calls have to fundamentally shift from being a perceived as ‘audio’ to being perceived as data and an important part of the flow of the conversation. That means, that a call should be logged into the flow of a conversation. (what conversation – I will get to in a second)
– The ability to record or transcribe calls would need to become a common addition (and probably optional, all conversations could go “off record”). So in a conversation it would either mention that a call was placed, or it would have a recording or a transcription embedded into the overall flow. Same for video chats.
– Open authentication – not facebook connect style, but more openID style. And the ability to associate your phone number(s), email addresses, and tie them across servers would be paramount. This means if you have an account at livejournal, gmail/google, and facebook, you could tell them to synchronize your credentials. This would then have facebook check your listed number against googles, and if googles is different both places would add the different numbers as secondary phones to your account. And, then livejournal would be able to access that and mention that you have a blog in your ‘sites’ profile. Also you could use any address (facebook user name, google email address, livejournal username) to log into any of the services. This is basically an expansion of openID in my mind.
– Complete control over permissions and accessibility of data. Privacy is important and I think facebook gets this mostly right. You need to be able to say “Only people I authorize can see detail X, and unless I give them special permission they can’t see Y, but everyone can see detail Z.”
– With permission, people could add you as a contact and then see whatever information you make available to them, like facebook, only synced across multiple sites (like a few points above mentions). So if I add friend “Bob ABCD” to my phone, and Bob approves me as a friend, my phone would automatically have whatever data he is willing to share with me and has on his profile. (Or alternatively, I could augment it with manually entered data that is stored only in my contacts, not pushed to his profile he shares)
– Contacts already approved and stored in your contact database and associated permissions for contacts need to be non-centrally stored. Meaning if you get a new phone, or decide to switch from yahoo to gmail cuz you like it better, you can just log in and tell it to rebuild your contacts. This information should be stored in a fashion similar to your login credentials, and people could only see your contacts/friends or a subset of them if you give them permission.
– Client / server model would have to be de-centralized. Multiple servers across multiple domains need to be the primary place you go for tracking this information. So if you prefer Yahoo’s interface, no problem just use yahoo. Or if you prefer facebook to manage this, plus all the silly quizzes and memes, use facebook. But it all syncs across boundaries. Meaning your cell phone provider is still the gateway to your cell phone, but not the only keeper of all your history and contact information (and neither is your handset/cell phone)
– Micro blogging / status updates and follow-up comments need to be seen as a conversation, and should span across boundaries of services.
– Blog posts could be the beginning or continuation of a ‘wave’ or thread of a conversation, and comments would be carried across site boundaries.
– A push notification framework would be required, but it would have to have the ability to filter so you only get notifications of things you want (texts/IM, phone calls/audio chat/video chat, emails). Drinking from the firehose is fun for about 2 seconds.
– Hardware agnostic, meaning that the connection you use would be data-based. Not audio based like a cell phone network, which then has a data network laid over it (like texting is).
– Conversations need to be able to take different forms. We need the ability to tag by topic, and sort that, but also by person being communicated with to produce a chat/IM/txt like history only with emails and calls in there as well. But we want to also be able to start off a topic of conversation and just follow where that goes like how gmail threads email chains (again with everything else put in it) A conversation/wave/whatever you want to call it, could also be filtered by type – microblog (twitter/facebook updates), blog, email, chat. But the advantage here is managing it from one location.
– A good standardized codec for voice and video chatting. Something that takes into account the connection someone is on, and device they are using. So on a cell-phone data network you could stream lower quality video, prefer good voice, and use a smaller resolution. But on a PC with a high-speed cable connection it would give you higher quality everything with a bigger resolution.
*Neat idea as an add-on*
– Incoming package notification. Someone shipped you a package, or you are buying something from amazon. It could find that out via you associating address info with your login credentials, and a discovery API for connecting to the UPS/fedex websites.

I do believe we are headed to a place like this with our communication.

And I think much smarter people than me have already been working on some ideas like this for a few years (if google’s continued desire to buy-up innovative companies and create game-changing products is any indicator). And, I think with Apples obvious lack of love for AT&T constantly trying to pigeon-hole the iphone (no data tethering!?!??!) I believe we could see a shift to handset makers building phone/data devices around such a protocol if there were one.

So, does anyone else have a suggestion about something like this, or a way to make it more interesting or useful? Or do you look at my suggestions and wonder what the hell I’m talking about and just wish I would only send this to nerds so it didn’t show up on your facebook/livejournal page? 🙂

To most people computers are about accomplishing a task. Getting from A to B as simply as they can, so to speak. Almost no one reading this really cares much about what file format you are saving that word document in as long as the person you are sending it to can read it. Likewise, you probably don’t care how these web pages get from the server to your computer, you just care that it works.

Some other related scenarios where you only care that it “just works” that I think we take for granted. Fitting pipes together. If you do any plumbing you care that when you buy a 1/4″ tube and a matching elbow that the threads on both match up. Gasoline octane ratings – it is good to know that the gas you put in your car will work no matter what car you have. Batteries – it is nice to be sure that your electronics will work with either Energizer or Duracell as long as they are AA. It is nice to also know that your wall sockets are 110VAC at 60Hz no matter what house or apartment you are in.

The point here is that everything except the Word document scenario works because there are agreed upon standards that these things are based on. There are a couple of “standards groups” (which sometimes ends up being legislation) out there that certify a written specification and declare it a standard for many different things, and then corporations and businesses agree to make their products to meet this standard. And this increases competition within that market segment, but it also increases overall revenue because we as customers know that we are getting something that will do what it is advertised to do (you can see how this is especially important with gasoline), so we aren’t afraid to purchase these products for fear of not being able to replace batteries or fix plumbing.

Which is why creating standards is an important step in the process of maturation of any market segment, but it is not a step to be taken lightly.

Today, we are all trading things around the web, and to some degree we have let the market sort things out for us. But in some ways the market has decided that public standards would be best for all parties involved as a sector was growing up. VGA and DVI based monitor connectors, MPEG1/2/4 for downloading videos and watching DVDs, TCP/IP for communication over networks and IEEE 802.11 for wireless LAN’s so you can surf the web on your couch are just a few small examples.

These are standards that take the best approach at forward thinking as they can, and as the example of the MPEG show us are also willing to adapt to the changing technology around it. With these standards to support and ease development efforts new innovative technology pops up around them in the form of software and hardware. (The iPod video, as well as the archos jukebox plays forms of the MPEG4 based standardized video for example)

Where there is not a standard there is confusion. Some examples include phone chargers and data cables for phones. If phone companies standardized their phone chargers so that Nokia’s worked with Motorola’s which worked with LG, which worked with etc, etc don’t you think it would be a lot better situation for everyone? We could all charge our phones at eachother’s houses, and eachother’s cars, and our old stuff would always work with our new stuff. They would be cheaper and probably come with little neat features like a retractable cord, or a better power monitor light to indicate the phone is charging…the possibilities are endless. But because the market is vendor locked, it stagnates and prices are fixed to ensure the right margins are achieved when buying a new phone.

But the major area I believe is in need of innovation is in the area of document file formats. Mostly the average person doesn’t care, but a guy like me looks at Word 95, 97, 2000, XP, 2003 and doesn’t see much improvement between them but I do notice that word 97 can’t open a word 2003 file. I notice this because I help people fix their computer problems, and some people (cough*Dad’s Old Church*cough) are still using word 97.

So, a guy like me, who is trying to fix someones computer, or help someone open a file that a different person sent them in Word ’97 is extremely frustrated by something like this because it doesn’t “Just work”

A standardized, open to the public, way of saving a document of formatted text and layout would cure this. Something that was flexible enough to grow and be extended as the market demanded, but explained and detailed well enough that a new start-up or open source software project could implement it into its own software.

This is possible, and that is exactly what a bunch of companies set out to do. Because they felt that people who can’t afford to pony up the cash for MS Office (students for example) shouldn’t be kept from opening and editing files from other people (such as teachers). This should be especially true for the government where everyone should be able to see what they are creating. And a standard means that there is will always be a way to open those files, because in the future after this has died, there is a public record of the standard so it could always be re-implemented.

PDF is a standard that was opened up by Adobe a while ago. Their product still remains as the best high-end PDF creator and reader. But the competitive marketspace for products in the $50 to $200 range has become much more interesting and the small businesses, EDU’s, and non-profits who used to pirate Adobe acrobat to meet their needs now have affordable (and free open-source) alternatives. Because of this, many progressive states have put PDF on the approved list of formats to distribute forms in, while Word is not.

Recently MS realized the jeopardy they are in, especially in government situations, after a head IT guy for Massachusetts declared that MS was out because it isolated poorer people, libraries, and edu’s from opening state documents. There was a big fight, MS threw money around, and that guy got fired. But it scared them since the OASIS alliance’s ODF (Open Document Format) is already an approved international standard (ISO) which means it is acceptable under Massachusetts proposed requirements.

So, Microsoft went so far as to try to get their standard Office 2007 file format standardized with a separate standards body. Most of the technical community welcomed this move cautiously in the sense that Microsoft would no longer be the only ones who could open their office files without a lot of reverse engineering. But many said it was a poor standard.

Here is Jeremy Allison’s take on this subject. He is one of the lead designers / software engineers who wrote the code for Linux to be able to talk to and join windows file-sharing networks and windows NT domains. And Google agrees with his opinion.

But the thing I like about this is that Microsoft was finally forced to out their standard into the public, so now it is up for debate. The community at large (or representatives from all the countries in the standards body) gets to decide whether it is good enough to be a standard, and if it is worth having two standards out their competing for marketshare. No longer is it determined by Microsoft’s monopolistic manipulation of the market and the consumer. No longer will we be forced to upgrade every couple of years just to share files with eachother. If Microsoft wants to change their file format in word 2010 then they have to have it approved by the standards body all over as a revision to the standard (that is if their standard is even improved)

More eyes on things like this only make it better, give it more competition, and benefits us as the consumer. And in my opinion the more things we get out in the open for other people to review and criticize (and use if you are into open-source like I am) the better.

This is a CD filled with some high quality free software.

http://softwarefor.org/

I can speak for the windows one in saying I use almost half of those programs on a daily basis, and have about 2/3 of them installed on all of my windows machines, and most of the cross-platform ones I have installed on linux as well. Also several others that I’ve been reading about on their website that I’ve never heard of appear to be hidden gems to me that look very useful and very well done.

Check the Questions and Answers section to see the list of software packages on the CD.

The Open CD is also a good project with a similar aim in mind, but I prefer some of the Starving Students CD software in comparable categories (i.e. I prefer uTorrent instead of Azureus for my bittorrent needs)

Now that MythTV works (but alas, it still doesn’t output to my TV, and the HDTV signal is choppy as hell on the P3 1GHz machine), I am thinking beyond it to move my home to the next level.

For a while now I’ve talked about home automation, integrated with the computer network, available from the TV or computer. Something I thought MythTV could be extended to do.

Well, some other people have decided to not extend MythTV, but to build an over-arching program that controls MythTV, Asterisks PBX, some home automation stuff, and a bunch of other neat stuff.

It is called Linux MCE
(More details in this great video discussed here if you are interested)

I’m slowly building parts to work towards this, and here are the details on how.

Did you know Newegg has wishilsts now….how exciting for nerds like me.

Step 1) Get parts for turning current AthlonXP 1800+ machine into a “Core” system for the Linux MCE. The core system does not have to be super beefy if it is not going to run the front-end / video decode. I plan on taking advantage of the parts from Step2, and MythTV’s capability to off-load tasks to other computers for re-encoding video and doing simultaneous recordings.

Parts List for Step 1

Step 2) Get new desktop. I still haven’t decided if this is going to be an Intel or AMD based system. So I’ve spec’d both (I’m still waffling on a couple of things on there, and as always lists like this are subject to change relative to the latest and greatest / price cuts that happen on the market)

Intel Desktop Parts List
AMD Desktop Parts List

Step 3) Upgrade Home Theater stuff. HDTV, receiver, and maybe some new speakers. I don’t like any of the Blue-Ray / HD-DVD stuff yet cuz it is still a stupid format war that I will automatically loose at if I bother to participate. So, I ignore it until the problem goes away and prices drop.

For this I’m planning on something in the 32″ to 47″ LCD (preferably LED back-lit) 1080i or 1080p from Samsung (resolution depends on the prices when I finally have some money for this)

The receiver will probably be Dennon, cuz I like them. Unless something higher-end drops into the realm of affordability.

All these components need to have RS232 or the ability to control over HDMI, because I want the controller to be able to turn things on and off for me with a single remote press (watch the video for LinuxMCE linked above, this feature is pretty sweet)

Step 4) Build Home Theater PC. Focus here is on ability to do two streams of HDTV (I like PIP) but have a very quiet hard drive and fans. Style and ability to go into the stack of media components around the home entertainment center is also important.

Incomplete List of Parts from newegg Need to add a quiet small hard drive (or perhaps a Compact Flash Adapter Instead), a TV Tuner Card, and a case.
The case will most likely be the SilverStone Milo ML02
(Review Here

Step 5) Re-do antennas (or add to my DIY antenna), Cable wiring, network wiring, and buy a distribution amplifier.

Step 6) Rebuild old P3 1Ghz with a quiet Hard Drive and cooling fan for SDtv upstairs / DVD player / security monitor. (No monitor, just a TV output)

Step 7) Plan home security / automation. I’ll start with the Garage Door. It keeps getting left open by all three of us (well, at least Elle and I, since Lauren doesn’t drive right now), and I was thinking it would be great to have a switch in the house, along with an “Open” indicator. Then I’ll add some IP based webcams, and maybe some dimmer switches (can you dim those new florescent bulbs?).

Step 8) Sell house, and start over from scratch 🙂

And there you have it, my next really big multi-year project. I’m just glad I know I can make the mythTV part work going into it.