Omar's Blog

The best TV comedy in a while is back on the air. Time to spread the word. If you haven’t seen this gem, figure out a way to catch the previous 2 seasons and watch it NOW.. You will not be disappointed, it’s truly inspired!

I don’t think there’s a product out there that has captured my imagination as much as the recent announcement of the Raspberry Pi. The product was announced a while ago, but this past Wednesday it was finally available for purchase. The demand was so great that both sites that had the product for sale went down due to overwhelming traffic.

The product itself is not revolutionary, it’s an under-powered 700Mhz ARM processor board, with 256Mb of ram, an ethernet port, a couple of USB ports, an HDMI port, a SD card slot, and an RCA jack (seriously?). What you get is a board… no casing, and you can power it via a mini USB connector. It also comes with a Fedora Linux based distribution for ARM on an SD card.

The revolutionary part of the whole thing is the price. At $35.00, it has made every geek out there turn their heads. Suddenly every little do-it-yourself project that you’d dismissed as being to expensive to carry out comes to mind as a possibility. Quiet media-center boxes, cheap bittorent boxes, printer servers, file servers, routers, home automation boxes, robotic controllers, manufacturing automation and control, weather stations, etc.

It’s basically a tinkerer’s dream come true.

In a world of snazzy (but expensive) portable devices and expensive proprietary solutions for almost any need, it’s refreshing to finally see a completely open product (so open in fact, that you can see and hook up to the guts of the computer itself to customize it to your own project) ready to be tinkered with and ready to be programmed to do your bidding.

iPads, Apple TV’s, iPhones, netbooks, etc. are all fantastic produtcs, but they don’t hold a candle to the excitement that the Raspberry Pi has created in me. I hope I’m not wrong in thinking that this little machine will be a game-changer… making embedded computing available to everyone with $35.00 and little time on their hands.

I’ve heard the comment that Mac’s are Unix without the pain. And it’s actually a little bit true. However Macs come with their own brand of pain. Even though they’re gaining a lot of momentum in the marketplace, Mac’s are still very hard to find software for. The MacOS App store was a great idea, but when you compare it to the sheer amount and variety of software you can get for Windows, Mac’s are very underdevelopped for. 

That’s not to say they’re useless, they’re fantastic machines. The little software they DO have is mostly well designed and easier to use than Windows counterparts. The hardware is soild (even if some parts feels a little old and outdated like the graphics cards that come with Mac’s which tend to be a few generations behind what you can get for Windows machines).

Regarding the Mac’s interfase and the keyboard and UI conventions I must say they require a lot of getting used to. Things that the Linux and Windows world have managed to work out efficiently, Mac’s tend to complicate. The ‘Home’ and ‘End’ keys on a Mac are useless. To achieve the same effect that you would on Windows, you need to use COMMAND and arrow combinations… why? I have no idea. Mac Keyboards don’t have a DEL key… to achieve the Windows equivalent of DEL on a Mac you need to use the Function and the backspace key. It’s little things like that makes me scratch my head andwonder how a company that pays so much attention to detail in it’s hardware products can make such bonehead decisions regarding UI and keyboards.

However, when you switch into terminal mode on the Mac, the keys behave the way they’re supposed to! It is, after all using BASH, which smartly adheres to the Linux keyboard conventions. I’m hoping Apple wises up and fixes these little incongruencies in the rest of their interface, start packing some real graphics muscle into their machines, and incentivize more development for MacOS for it to have an even better chance of taking over the PC world!

My buddy Iulius sent us this video, and I want to share it with you. It’s just awesome!

It seems that no matter how much I try to keep my blog updated, something comes up that takes my time away. When I started podcasting I stopped blogging, but I decided that since podcasting is a form of blogging (lies I tell myself) then it was OK to have my blogging frequency reduced. When I started playing online games I justified my lack of blogging with the benefits of gaming to my psychi and release of stress.

This year I resolved to write a short blog post daily on any of my blogs. But alas, I bought a new game called Skyrim, that has really captured my imagination, and my free time. The game has beautiful graphics, a detailed environment and what seems like endless quests to go on. I’m hooked.

After playing it for a while, you start to discover the game’s little nuances. The best example of this is that all the game’s guards (no matter how advanced or what part of the game’s geography you are in) have limited lines of dialog they say to you. Perhaps the funniest of these lines of dialogue is: “I was an adventurer like you, then I took an arrow in the knee.” After playing Skyrim for a a while you start to realize that there is a world-wide epidemic of arrows to the knee.

Due to the game’s popularity, this little phrase has turned into an internet meme in which you say you would have accomplished something, or affirm something, then you follow it up with the now fatalistic, “then I took an arrow to the knee”.

At a meta level, I guess it rather fitting that I affirm that I was going to be a Blogger this year, then I took an arrow to the knee.

The last few years I’ve been working a lot on making our company an accesible and safe place to work for people from all walks of life. Ever since we embarked on this endeavour, with help from my friend David Reyes, I’ve noticed that El Salvador has a lot of work to do to include people with disabilities into society. We’re way behind, and there is a lot of work to be done. I hope my work at Caricia will help somehow to inspire other companies to do the same, and make David’s work come to fruition. Maybe someday in El Salvador we will see something as beautiful as this video:

I’m very sad today. It seems our country values only the bad guys’ rights. People who don’t pay taxes, people who work outside the law, people who make a lot of noise, make a lot of threats, people who basically hold the country hostage with terror.

I can’t get to work today. I’m stuck at home. Why? Well, bus owners all over El Salvador decided they had to protest a veto to a law that would benefit them. So they took the country hostage by not letting anyone leave their homes. Clogging up the main streets and throughways of El Salvador. People can’t get to work anywhere. I just read on the local newpapers’ websites that a bus driver, on his way to the “protest” driving recklessly, ran over and killed a woman.

These bus owners, who pay little or no taxes, who recieve government subsidies, who don’t really contribute anything to the country except for corruption, pollution, and death (the number of people who die on busses, get robbed on bussed, who get run over on busses each year is staggering), somehow manage to get fantastic special treatment from the government.

However, company owners, entrepenuers, and corporations, who pay taxes, create jobs, create safe working conditions, pay social security… we get our taxes raised. We don’t really get anything in exchange for this raise in taxes. We don’t get safer streets. We don’t get special protection from potesters to get to our work in time. Quite the opposite, we get attacked in the media for not paying enough taxes. We get attacked every chance the government gets to speak in public for not doing enough for the country.

Meanwhile, our government officials get caught drunk while working, and get “pardoned” because of some bullshit about being medicated. They give themselves raises, and they get exempted from taxes.

Maybe what El Salvador needs is that all corporations, all business owners, everyone who pays taxes; get together and protest the government by simply not paying taxes for a month. No IVA, no Income Tax, no nothing! And we maintain this cease of payment until we get a serious commitment from the govrenment. Until we get a plan of how they are going to fix things and somehow guarantee justice for all.

I’m not saying we should do this. Because even when the laws are dumb, they are still the law, and we must obey the law. But if protesters can get away with murder, why shouldn’t we?

I’m hoping to write a little more this year. but I feel guilty writing here rather than writing for my other blogs.. so I’ll try to keep them short and sweet. My plan is to write an article every day… if not on each of the blogs, at least on once post a day on any of them.

Happy New Years!

BTW.. does anybody know how to install Ubuntu properly on a MacBook Pro?

Well… what can I say… I don’t really feel any more artistic now that I’ve been using a MacBook for over a month.

But seriously, I love that it’s a no hassle machine (so far). I like that it boots up and shuts down quickly. I like the very solid construction and quality feel of the hardware. I am really enjoying figuring out all the little design conventions that Mac users have known for so long. Not everything is perfect though…

I really hate that for some reason end END and HOME keys work completely different than the rest of the computerized world. I hate that the friggin CTRL key and the COMMAND key are screwed up. I hate that everywhere else CTRL-F is fullscreen, but in Mac Land it’s CTRL-SHIFT-F… it feels like they went out of their way to complicate things, for what?

I’m still getting used to it… and learning new things about the Mac Os… but it’s been a fun ride… now I just have to figure out a way to make Ubuntu run natively on the machine, and I’ll be very happy!