Penguins-On-Hudson is an advocacy program sponsored by Codefix Consulting to help promote Linux and F.O.S.S. (Free Open Source Software) in the lower Hudson River Valley.
I finally built a red box, not the phone phreak device that generates coin tones for pay phones, but rather a Linux PBX which gives me the power and flexibility of a commercial grade phone system at a fraction of the cost. I call it a red box because the primary VoIP number I […]
One of the reasons I’m a consultant is because I love to solve problems; this does not mean, however, that I enjoy all the problems I solve, nor that the pursuit is always rewarding in itself. This week I got stuck in a mind-bender that had all the satisfying crunch of a soggy pretzel.
The first Ogg-friendly music player I purchased was a Neuros II; this was late in 2004 and hardware support was fairly new as the Vorbis codec didn’t reach 1.0 until 2002. Then, as now, the best place for information on Ogg-friendly devices was XiphWiki. I recall being quite impresssed with Neuros’ willingness to open […]
I have music on my mind. I’m listening to Voodoo Child (ten point bonus if you know how this relates to Doctor Who) and thinking about my next portable music player. Like most geeks, the first question I ask about any digital music device is, “does it play OGG?”
Generally superior to MP3, Ogg Vorbis […]
I’m working on a marketing letter, and I’ll be using one of my favorite success stories which is about Russ, owner of a small Internet service provider (ISP) providing web hosting, e-mail, and related services to his local community.
Once upon a time, I would listen to Russ complain of problems with his proprietary e-mail server, […]
During the summer of 1982, I borrowed a 35mm camera from my father and enrolled in a photography workshop; I took surprisingly decent photographs with that old Argus C3 and found that I very much enjoyed working in the darkroom as well. Still the oldest camera I own, the Argus has long been retired […]
Today is sort of a birthday for Codefix: I first registered the codefix.net domain on August 22, 2003– eight days after the Great North American Blackout; however, wondering how people lived without electricity and meeting my Brooklyn neighbors weren’t the only things going on back then. Work as a Linux consultant was just starting […]
A funny thing happened in Chicago, I was there for YAPC:NA and avoided having to check luggage at the airport by cramming everything I would need into a garden variety nylon backpack. On the last day of the conference, I noticed that my backpack had torn at the seam near it’s laptop compartment. […]
As I write this, Vim 7 is making waves as the next great thing in Open Source software; although it’s not yet available in most package management systems. Fortunately, Vim is easy to compile from source. I used the following to compile the source on my Ubuntu laptop:
sudo apt-get build-dep vim-gtk
sudo aptitude install […]