[Mon Aug 22 17:41:15 CEST 2011]

I was recently trying to view Jon Stewart's videos online using my Debian laptop and didn't manage to get the Shockwave Flash plugin to work. After a few seconds of confusion, I realized that chances are I needed to upgrade to the latest version of the plugin. But how do you do this on Debian? I did a quick search and found the answer on the page from the Debian Wiki dedicated to the FlashPlayer:

# update-flashplugin-nonfree --install

However, as far as I could see, all that command did was to download the file "install_flash_player_10_linux.tar.gz" to my hard drive. I still had to manually gunzip it and untar it as root, then grab the "libflashplayer.so" file and replace all instances of said file in my own home directory. I tend to run a version of Firefox that is newer than what comes bundled with whichever distro I happen to run at the time. So, in this case, I had to copy the file to the location where I had one of Firefox's nightly builds. That did the trick. From that moment on, I had no issue watching Jon Stewart's videos. {link to this story}

[Mon Aug 22 12:00:46 CEST 2011]

I read on ZDNet that the Red Hat CEO has stated that Web 2.0 companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon owe it all to Linux:

Google and Facebook owe their success largely to Linux —not the technology per se, but to the cheap innovation and mass collaboration it enables, Red Hat's CEO says.

Yes, free, as in freedom, but also free as in free beer, said Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat.

Had it ot been for the no cost software, open licensing and mass collaboration, all business models enabled by Linux and open source, none of the top Web 2.0 companies —including the cloud crowd— would have been able to lift off, scale and run their businesses.

Sure, it may sound cocky, but I think he is right. None of these companies would have been able to afford paying for the software licenses to run something like Microsoft Windows or Sun Solaris when they were starting. Heck, chances are they cannot even afford them now, when they have finally matured as a business. They just need way too many servers in their data warehouses to be able to afford paying for the licenses. On the other hand, betting like they did on Linux and open source, not only don't they have to pay those licenses, but they also have a legion of volunteers fixing the problems with the operating system and main daemons that, to them, are nothing but infrastructure. It just makes business sense. {link to this story}

[Mon Aug 22 11:55:15 CEST 2011]

Thinking about configuring things to automatically import your tweets into Facebook? The Whine Seller publishes a tutorial on how to import your Twitter into your Facebook status that works just fine. I gave it a try a few days ago and had no problems at all. However, I must admit I ended up disabling the feature again shorty thereafter. The 140 characters limitation in Twitter are sort of a pain if you are posting to Facebook, where the threshold is set much higher. Why limit myself in such a way when there is no need to do it? {link to this story}

[Mon Aug 22 11:49:16 CEST 2011]

I was recently working on a personal photography project where I wanted to use black and white, instead of colors. Now, since I had already taken the pictures in color, I had to convert them to black and white and thought that GIMP might help there. Sure enough. It was quite easy to accomplish. Just follow this tutorial explaining how to convert color images to black and white. In my case, I used the grayscale procedure for most of the pictures. {link to this story}

[Fri Aug 19 12:42:56 CEST 2011]

Isn't it amazing how fast things change? Not so many years ago, making computers was supposed to have a bright future and it was in. Now, everyone and their grandma is trying to get rid of the division that makes computers. IBM already did it sometime ago. Today we read that HP has decided to kill the tablets and is seriously considering to spin off its own PC division:

HP's Personal Systems Group, which sells PCs, tablets and smartphones, has the company's lowest profit margin although it accounted for nearly a third of HP's overall revenues in 2010. PC sales —particularly consumer products— tend to fluctuate more than business solutions and services as they are more sensitive to seasonal buying trends and economic trends, said Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT.

"By spinning off PCs, HP could effectively isolate potentially volatile financial numbers and their effect on its more stable, higher-margin businesses," King said.

HP is following in the footsteps of IBM, which spun off its PC business to Lenovo in 2005 to focus on the higher-margin software and services business. HP may also feel pressure from Apple, which has released highly profitable consumer products such as smartphones and tablets. Apple's tablets have hurt PC shipments, a market that HP dominates as the world's largest PC vendor.

HP is cutting its losses in the smartphone and tablet market quite speedily: it unveiled its TouchPad tablet and new smartphones with much fanfare only in February.

If that doesn't tell you how fast things happen in the high-tech market, waht does? They released the products in February and, less than a year later, they are already killing them off and announcing that they will spin-off the whole PC division! I suppose I could be included among those people who bought an iPad and a couple of cheap netbooks rather than spending the money on a new PC. As a matter of fact, we have no PC at home anymore. We all run iPad, netbooks, laptops or smartphones. Mobile devices have won the game, at least for the time being. Who knows what things will be like in just two years? {link to this story}