Practical Technology

for practical people.

September 10, 2012
by sjvn01
0 comments

Open source the vote

Want to do your part in the upcoming U.S. presidential elections? There’s an open-source app. For that.

The Democratic party has released a Ruby on Rails open-source program, Voter Registration that enables you to deploy a Web application that enables U.S. citizens to register to vote. There is also a version that you can simply embed on your site, which is branded for the Obama/Biden campaign. The open-source version is unbranded so there’s nothing on it that even a Tea Party member could object to.

To deploy the open-source version, your Web site will need to have Ruby 1.9.3 installed and the the RubyGem “bundler” installed. RubyGem is the Ruby package manager.

Open source the vote. More >

September 10, 2012
by sjvn01
0 comments

Losing the ‘Personal’ in ‘Personal Computing’

I got involved in computers just in time for the revolution. It was the 1970s, and we were moving from centrally managed computers to PCs. For the next 40 years, users had an unprecedented level of choice, which put the “personal” in “personal computing.” Today, that revolution is being pushed back.

I don’t want to overstate the case. In some organizations, users never moved from the terminal/server model, and even if you had a PC, there was always some vendor lock-in. If you bought a Mac, you used Apple’s operating system. You had more options with a Windows PC, but they were limited.

Through all those years, though, no matter what sort of PC you bought, you could always modify it to meet your changing needs. All you needed were expansion slots and a bit of know-how. It was easy to upgrade to a more powerful graphics card, add more memory or switch out to a bigger hard drive.

The first sign that things were changing came with the arrival of sealed-unit smartphones and, a bit later, tablets. Upgradability just doesn’t exist in the tablet world. With a tablet, what you see is what you get, and there’s no way to give yourself more down the road.

Losing the ‘Personal’ in ‘Personal Computing.’ More >

September 9, 2012
by sjvn01
0 comments

The Five best things coming in Ubuntu 12.10 Linux

Ubuntu is one of the most popular Linux distributions around and the next version, 12.10 aka Quantal Quetzal, has just gone beta. Here’s what looking to to be the new Ubuntu‘s best features so far.

5) Unity Previews

In the Ubuntu Unity desktop, when you get a file, you get a lens that automatically open the file in the appropriate application. So, for instance, if you click on a document file, LibreOffice will open it, if you click on an image, Shotwell, will pop it open for you and so on.

What’s new and improved in Ubuntu 12.10 is that you can now right click on files. Besides the usual more detailed information for the file from doing this that you get from most operating systems, you get a ”Preview Pane” for its content type. For instance if you right click a song in Unity’s Dash display, you the album artwork and music player controls. This is a handy little feature.

The Five best things coming in Ubuntu 12.10 Linux. More >

September 7, 2012
by sjvn01
0 comments

Five things Desktop Linux has to do to beat Windows 8

In 2007, thanks to netbooks and Vista, Linux briefly exploded onto the desktop.  Microsoft soon realized they were losing the low-end laptop market and they brought XP back from the dead and practically gave it away to original equipment manufacturers (OEM)s. It worked. Linux’s popularity receded.  In 2012, Microsoft is once more bringing out a dog of a desktop operating system, Windows 8, so desktop Linux will once more get a chance to shine… if it can.

Linux is more than good enough on the desktop. Just ask Google, which used its own Ubuntu-spin, Goobuntu, not just for its engineering desktops but for everyone’s PCs.

While much of the reason why Linux hasn’t gone much of anywhere on the desktop has been because of Microsoft’s iron-grip on OEMs and anti-Linux FUD, Linux hasn’t helped itself much either. So what can Linux do to be as competitive as the Mac with Windows?

Five things Desktop Linux has to do to beat Windows 8. More >

September 6, 2012
by sjvn01
0 comments

Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD will give Apple’s iPad fits

I love my Nexus 7. It’s replaced my Apple iPad for daily use. But, at 7-inch display, people who want a full-sized tablet don’t  like it as much as I do. For them, the new Amazon Kindle Fire HD with its 8.9-inch display, 16GBs of storage, and a price of only $299 may just hit their sweet spot

Don’t think for a minute that the Kindle Fire HD is just for home-users. True, it’s got lots of consumerish features such as FreeTime, so your kids won’t spend all day on the tablet; Dolby speakers for music and movies; X-Ray for Movies, which will let you get film info from IMDB while you’re watching a film; and so on. That’s all nice, but it was the business features that caught my eye.

This new top-of-the-line Kindle comes with Microsoft Exchange support and out of the box can sync e-mail, contacts and calendars with Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo. As I was watching this I couldn’t help thinking that is what RIM’s Blackberry PlayBook should have been… and wasn’t. Maybe the forthcoming 4 LTE PlayBook can be competitive, but the Nexus 7 and the Kindle Fire HD have raised the bar.

Amazon’s Kindle Fire HD will give Apple’s iPad fits. More >

September 5, 2012
by sjvn01
0 comments

OpenSUSE 12.2 Linux finally arrives

OpenSUSE, SUSE‘s community Linux, may not be as sexy as Fedora, Mint, or Ubuntu, but it’s still a strong, popular Linux for both servers and desktops and it’s good to see the latest version finally arrive after months of delay.

First due on July 11th, openSUSE didn’t make its release date because, frankly, it wasn’t ready for prime time. OpenSUSE release manager Stephen “Coolo” Kulow said in June, “our development project, is still far too unstable. Things have improved.

Andreas Jaeger, openSUSE’s program manager told ServerWatch‘s Sean Michael Kerner that the openSUSE developers had” concentrated on stabilizing the release.” The resulting Linux distribution may not always have the latest software, such as the newest editions of Firefox and KDE, but it should be very stable. Rock-solid reliability and performance have long been openSUSE hallmarks.

OpenSUSE 12.2 Linux finally arrives. More >