[Fri Mar 30 12:14:36 EDT 2012]

Well, the same friend I was referring to yesterday also needed some help today to restart the GNOME panel without logging out of the GNOME session. I don't know what happened to prompt the question, but I suppose he somehow mangled the panel by adding some options or changing its preferences. In any case, it is relatively easy to solve. All you need to do is find the PID (process ID) for gnome-panel and send it the kill signal:

$ ps auxw | grep gnome-panel
jortega   2332  0.0  1.2  50260 25932 ?        S    09:12   0:05 gnome-panel
jortega   3934  0.0  0.0   3304   760 pts/17   S+   11:17   0:00 grep gnome-panel

$ kill -9 2332

The process is restarted automatically by GNOME. {link to this entry}

[Thu Mar 29 14:09:01 CDT 2012]

A good friend who runs either Fedora or RHEL just told me that he ran into the following error when installing updates:

Error: Package: libavcodec53-0.10-54.el6.x86_64 (atrpms)
           Requires: libvpx.so.1()(64bit)
 You could try using --skip-broken to work around the problem
 You could try running: rpm -Va --nofiles --nodigest

I haven't run either distribution in years. I switched to Ubuntu when it was first released, then to Debian. However, in case anyone needs help with this very same problem, here is the solution. It seemed to work just fine for my friend. The root of the problem, as it tends to be in cases like this, is self-inflicted. In this case, a third-party repo is causing the error. {link to this entry}

[Wed Mar 14 18:48:01 CDT 2012]

Well, well, well. What do we have here? A nice Geek vs. Hipster infographic. Enjoy.

From: BecomeCareer.com

{link to this entry}

[Sun Mar 11 11:37:53 CDT 2012]

About a couple of months ago, I was discussing with my oldest son the most probable trends that we'll see coming up in future technology, and we both agreed that both convergence and mobility are clearly set to be the two most important trends. Why bother carrying around a variety of devices (latop, cell phone, MP3 player...) when there is already a single device (the smartphone) that can be used for the very same purposes? As a matter of fact, we can also watch movies and even read books on our smartphone, and all of it is with us at all times, wherever we go, and for a fraction of the price. It's the win-win situation that consumers love.

However, during that very same conversation I had with my son, we also identified a niche that the current solutions had not managed to fill in yet: smartphones are too small and we are willing to put up with it when we are on the go, but not so much if we are at home. In other words, there are times when we miss a larger screen and a keyboard that makes it easier to type. We even discussed that it would be nice to combine the mobility of the smartphone with the comfort of a monitor and larger keyboard, perhaps even a mouse. Well, enter the padfone (main page on Asus' website here). Check it out. It's a smartphone, a tablet and a netbook, all in once. Here is a video:

It certainly looks like a game changer to me. {link to this entry}