Penguins Learn to Fly
Ok, so maybe the title is a bit misleading, but here is the deal. The Linux Foundation, you know the guys who safe guard Linux and employ Linus, are going to offer free, as in beer, educational webinars on the topics of Linux starting in March.
This is a great opportunity for you to learn more about Linux from the folks who are developing and changing Linux everyday! You can sign up for the courses at:
http://training.linuxfoundation.org/lp/sign-up-for-the-free-linux-training-webinar-series
Here are some details from the page above:
Starting in March, The Linux Foundation will be offering free Linux Training webinars taught by well-known Linux developers directly building on their own experience. This is an excellent opportunity to learn directly from key developers and to experience a sample of the type of courses offered through our Linux Training program.
Some of the upcoming courses are:
- "An Introduction to Git," by kernel maintainer and TAB chair James Bottomley
- "Linux System Troubleshooting and Tuning" by Linux author and community manager Joe Brockmeier
- "Linux Administration 101" also by Joe Brockmeier
- "How to Work wth the Linux community," by LWN.net editor and kernel developer Jon Corbet
- "A Linux Filesystem Overview," by kernel dev Christoph Hellwig
- "Btrfs: An Intro and Update" to the new file system for Linux, by project lead Chris Mason
- "Linux Performance Tuning," by North America's first kernel developer Ted Ts'o
I personally am looking forward to these and hopefully many more webinars in the future, and would like to give an advanced thank you to the Linux Foundation for all the great work they are sponsoring every day.
Apple introduces iPad
Apple iPad
Apple held a conference yesterday and the introduced the Apple iPad, an over grown iPod with limited support as a real computer.
Apple has built a really small, but still over sized, tablet for the purpose of surfing the net, and basically doing what you do now on your iPhone or iPod Touch.
The unit weighs in at 1.5lbs for the wifi only model, and slight more at 1.6lbs for the WiFi + 3G model. The size of the tablet is a small half inch depth, with a 9.7 inch screen, the whole shell comes in at 9.56in x 7.47in.
Running a 1024x768 (132 ppi) resolution the screen looked really nice on the videos everyone posted yesterday.
The 1Ghz Apple A4 processor gave the unit a good smooth power that made all the apps run really nicely.
More specs for the iPad are available at the Apple Store
Since the device is built on a modified iPod OS, it is sort of crippled. Furthermore you might expect the iPad to be able to multi-task, or even run background processes. This is not the case. Apple has continued with their less than stellar no-background-processes policy. Although this can really boost the performance of apps, it cripples the device from being a good twitter/facebook/social media device.
Given the device also has WiFi you would expect it to sync with iTunes over the WiFi (ala Zune), still not the case. Apple is still requiring you to sync with a good old fashion USB cable, truly disappointing.
Finally, there is no Flash support, so sorry to all you guys and gals (my wife) who thought it would be good for playing your Facebook games.
Over all at $499 there are some things the iPad might be good, and even great at, but it still doesn't meet the needs of my family, and as such won't be on our to purchase list.
T minus 13
Me rocking the scarf Angela made me.
So with my birthday approaching I know people are asking "What do I get him?"
For all those who follow my blog and want to know what to get me for my birthday, here is a short list of things I would love to have this year:
- The Facial Hair Handbook -- I am looking forward to growing out my beard in support of awesome facial hair everywhere, so you can chip in $15 to make sure my beard stays looking semi-professional.
- NewEgg.com Certificates -- I am looking at upgrading the old computer situation at home this year, and any little bit helps.
- ThinkGeek.com Certificates -- If there is anything a geek loves, it is geek toys, geek clothing, and geek swag. Some how true geeks can never get enough, and ThinkGeek helps by bringing to market some of the geekiest of toys, clothes and swag.
- WalMart Cards -- I shop there, alot. The only thing better would maybe be shares of WalMart stock.
- Knitted Goods -- I love the scarf (pictured above) my sister Angela made for me.
- Music -- Can never have enough good music. Please do not give me iTunes cards though, maybe an Amazon card?
- Clothing -- I am man enough to rock that pink t-shirt you have been eyeballing for me.
I look forward to seeing (or hearing from) you all at my B-day party, no I don't know what we are doing, talk to my social secretary.
PHP and Josso – Transparency Rocks!
Bogdan recently asked in my comments:
I can't seem to find a call like josso_authenticate($name, $pass), returning an array to be appended to user's SESSION. I was expecting such a method, because SOAP is already used everywhere, so it shouldn't be too hard implementing this.
Has anyone had success implementing this kind of "transparent" login?
JOSSO simply doesn't make it easy to log people in with a single call. Instead you need to make an interface to the API to do so. I just so happen to have an example of such a wrapper function.
Book Review: Pomodoro Technique Illustrated
Pomodoro Technique Illustrated (Book Cover)
Today I am reviewing Pomodoro Technique Illustrated: The Easy Way to Do More in Less Time which is best summed up by the books official website on The Pragmatic Bookshelf site:
Do you ever look at the clock and wonder where the day went? You spent all this time at work and didn’t come close to getting everything done. Tomorrow, try something new. Use the Pomodoro Technique, originally developed by Francesco Cirillo, to work in focused sprints throughout the day. In Pomodoro Technique Illustrated, Staffan Nöteberg shows you how to organize your work to accomplish more in less time. There’s no need for expensive software or fancy planners. You can get started with nothing more than a piece of paper, a pencil, and a kitchen timer.
The best part of the above statement is that it is 100% true. I haven't had enough time to really evaluate the use of the Pomodoro Technique, but the book really lays it out in a clean an easy to understand way.
Author Staffan Nöteberg has really written a quick read about the Pomodoro Technique, that will allow you to breeze through the book, learning the technique as you go.
The book is short, approx 200 pages total, with each page being an indepenent thought or section. You literally could read a single page each time you sat down and feel good about stopping in the middle of a chapter. The thoughts are clear and expressed in a clean format that really makes the things stick.
The technique itself is really simple. And Staffan's style of writing only makes it even easier to pick up and use.
I would strongly suggest getting Pomodoro Technique Illustrated: The Easy Way to Do More in Less Time if you plan to learn or at least try the Pomodoro Technique, even more so if you plan for the year is to be more productive!
Looks like I wasn't the only one to write a review on this book today either.
McDonalds go wireless, for free!
Yes, in the past you could have used wireless internet at McDonalds, but unless you were using it on your Zune (thanks to a deal with Microsoft) you had to pay $2.95 for a few hours of wireless connectivity. Well now it has all changed.
Starting today, according to Reuters, McDonalds will begin offering free WiFi access in approximately 11,500 of its over 14,000 locations. That gives you an better than 80% chance that your local McDonalds has free wifi!
Check out the McDonalds location finder to see if your location has wifi.
UTOS Bookmarks
If you are lazy like me then bookmarking is great!
In that thought, I have copied all the links from utos.org and made them into a bookmarks file for Chrome.
I have tarred and gzipped it, so you will need to untar and un-gzip it 
My kids are geeks!
You know you wish your kids were sporting Fedora tats!
Isaac with Fedora tattoo on chest
Madison with Fedora Tattoo
