[Thu Apr 26 16:24:00 CDT 2018]

This may sound strange coming from someone who works in the technology field. As a matter of fact, some will consider it even a personal contradiction. Still, others will just see it as mere hypocrisy. Yet, the fact is that I'm not sure I truly share all the excitement about the so-called quantified-self. Yes, I also allowed myself to be gripped by the hype and got my Fitbit Flex at a greatly reduced price through the company I work for. Yes, I also tracked my steps, my sleep, and my regular exercise routines. And sure, I also tracked my meals, my hear rate and a few other things via Samsung Health. It all sounds so great. So cool. So geeky. So trendy. However, after a while, I noticed that I rarely (if ever) bothered to check the overall trends to recognize any patterns. As a matter of fact, none of the tools even offered me that. They just allowed me to see some basic graphs or check old records, but that's about it. No analysis whatsoever. Or, to put it a different way, all this data I was voluntarily keeping track of was truly of little use to me. After all, let's be real. Is it so difficult to know at any given time if I have done enough exercise, if I walked enough, if I ate too much (or the wrong things), if I'm overweight, or if I slept enough? Do I truly, honestly, need a gadget to tell me that? Because, if I do (if we do), I'm afraid I/we have a serious problem. Perhaps we lost touch with ourselves so much that we cannot even answer these very basic questions. So, about three or four months ago, I decided to stop using these tools. Did it make a difference? Am I less healthy? Do I exercise less? Did I gain weight? Well, not truly. It didn't make a difference in that sense. Yet, where it did make a difference is in the sense that I don't feel as if there is something constantly nagging me to record what I ate, what I drank, how much I walked, or my heart rate. In other words, I feel less stressed. Imagine that!

On the other hand, who was I truly keeping track of all this data for? Well, truly, for the vendors who provided me with the gadgets. I bet they do analyze the data, at least as aggregrates (I don't pretend that they are directly controlling or watching me). Obviously, they are "monetizing" that data, as they'd put it. Data that I'm providing for free after I purchased a device and spent sometime (minimal or not) entering information into the apps. It sounds crazy, but that's what I was doing. Yet, it appears to be the most normal thing. As a matter of fact, it's quite mainstream. Heck, it's even "cool", "trendy" and "hip"! {link to this entry}

[Thu Apr 19 17:33:04 CDT 2018]

Someone was asking at work if there is a way to launch xterm specifying at the same time a font size and a command to run. Here it is:

$ xterm -bg white -fg black -fa 'Monospace' -fs 11 -geometry 81x50+622+70 \
-e vim myfile

{link to this entry}

[Thu Apr 19 08:10:40 CDT 2018]

Here is an issue I just ran into while running the sosreport command on RHEL 7.4:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "openerp-client.py", line 105, in 
  File "modules\__init__.pyo", line 23, in 
  File "modules\gui\__init__.pyo", line 22, in 
  File "modules\gui\main.pyo", line 33, in 
  File "rpc.pyo", line 29, in 
  File "common\__init__.pyo", line 22, in 
  File "common\common.pyo", line 26, in 
  File "tools\__init__.pyo", line 28, in 
  File "dateutil\relativedelta.pyo", line 12, in 
ImportError: No module named six

Not sure why RHEL would even install the sosreport package without one of its dependencies, but that's what it did, it seems. Chances are this is due to a problem in the packaging. In any case, running the following command to install the needed Python module fixed it:

# easy_install six

{link to this entry}

[Wed Apr 4 21:09:37 CDT 2018]

I was just copying files into a USB thumb drive, and noticed that my Debian laptop mounted it with a horrible (and long) label that included the name of the distribution, a date, etc. In case you are wondering how to change the label on your USB thumb drive, here are the commands (assuming it is formatted with a FAT filesystem, which tends to be the case):

1.- To find which one is the USB thumb drive:

    # fdisk -l 


2.- To check the current label:

    # file /dev/sdb1 -s


3.- To write a new label:

    # mlabel -i /dev/sdb1 -s ::"MY LABEL"

One more thing: you will need the mtools packahe to write the new label. {link to this entry}