Omar's Blog

This week, one of the updates that were recommended by the Ubuntu Update Manager was the newest grub-pc. As soon as I saw it on the list of updates to install I got that sinking feeling…”This is going to wreck my Wubi installation again, isn’t it?”

Sure enough, it wrecked it.

Good news is, the fix I posted a few weeks ago still works. So if you find that your Wubi installation is not working after updating, make sure you read my post on how to fix it. It still works, and you’ll be back to booting Ubuntu normally in no time.

It just ended and I wrote up a small review at the Latin Tech Talk site, it’s in Spanish, but here’s the link in case you want to check it out.

I’m actually using a word processor to write this post. Not because I want to, even though Open Office Write is an awesome word processor and I would just love to write everything here, but because for the 1^st time God knows how long, our Internet service provider has had a massive outage.

We’ve had such great service from our provider that we decided a few years ago that we’d give them the contract to supply our whole corporate communications package. They handle our phones, our cellphones, and our Internet service. Which, in hindsight, may not have been such a good idea. Then again, this is the 1^st time they’ve had a problem of this magnitude in the 3 years that we’ve been their customers, and the price consideration they gave my company when we gave them the contract for everything is very considerable (sorry for the redundant redundancy… sorry again).

As soon as I walked into the office this morning and turned my laptop on I noticed: no Internet. All local e-mail and services were running, but our gateway was not letting me access the outside world. Funny, it never occurred to me that our ISP may be at fault, I immediately though our firewall was acting up again! I needed to get through my morning e-mail so instead of calling the IT department and asking what the problem was, I decided I’d connect to the Internet on my N95 and create a hot spot with the Joiku software (which deserves a post all of it’s own… I promise I’ll write about it soon). Alas, Internet on the cellphone is not working either.

Funnily enough, as soon as I notice that there’s no Internet on my cellphone I get a call from my wife, and she complains to me that there’s no Internet at the house either (yes, we use the same company that provides Internet access at the office for my Internet connection at home). The the coin finally drops and my head goes CLICK… the ISP has had a massive outage. I called our IT department, and they confirm my fears.

It’s been almost an hour now of no Internet access. Our provider is one of the largest providers in El Salvador, so I’m guessing that the outage will not only affect our company, but a whole bunch of big companies and many home connections as well. I can’t wait to hear what people have to say about this on the local blogs, the newspapers and the media.

Also, lately I’ve been siding with John Dvorak’s point of view that the “cloud” is very unreliable and that putting everything up on the cloud may be a bad idea. These kind of events (massive country-wide ISP outage) just prove his point. The cloud is a very wonderful but brittle and fragile thing. We can do a lot of very cool and interesting things on the Internet, but it’s just not reliable enough to BE the new platform.

Steve Gillmor keeps saying that Office is dead. Today is the 1^st time in a long time that I’m very happy he is wrong. Because if I had all my stuff up on the cloud as he suggests, my whole company would be unproductive this morning. Oh, BTW… we don’t use MS Office, we deployed Open Office company wide almost 5 years ago… But, I can write about that on a later post.

Check THIS out!

Amazing.. a digitally altered picture makes it to the front page of a bunch of “respected” newspapers. So, again, whats the difference between Bloggers and journalists? Oh, right, journalists take classes and get payed a lot to make mistakes, while bloggers make the mistakes for free. Or something to that effect.

Ok, here’s the skinny. At 1:00pm my brother was driving home from a fast food place drive-thru. At an intersection less than a block away from home, he hit a motorcyclist with his rear-view mirror (he hit the brakes as soon as he saw the motorcycle slow down to turn at the intersection, but his car skid and he managed to only hit the guy with his rear-view mirror). The impact, however was enough that the motorcyclist lost control of the bike and collided with an on-coming guy’s bumper.

Luckily, the motorcyclist only had a minor bruise and did not press charges against my brother. My older brother and I coordinated efforts with our insurance company, a local hospital, where we took the motorcyclist to get first aid and have x-rays taken.

As local police procedure mandates, Carlitos was taken to the local police delegation to await a legal document signed by the motorcyclist saying that they had come to an agreement. This agreement was reached by the insurance company’s lawyer and the motorcyclist after his x-rays and the doctor’s diagnosis showed he did not have any fractures and was otherwise OK. I heard he did receive a shot and some pain medicine.. all taken care of again by the Insurance company.

My older brother accompanied the motorcyclist and his family and the insurance company’s lawyer to the hospital, while I took care of sending the broken motorcycle to the get repaired, once that was done.. I then joined a very gloomy and scared Carlitos at the police delegation.

Finally, at around 4:15, the motorcyclist and his family, my older brother and the insurance company’s lawyer walked into the precinct with the legal document releasing my brother from custody.

In the end, everything turned out OK for all involved… well, sorta… the guy did have a bruise, I got sunburned and had no lunch today, Adolfo only managed to get half a lunch, and Carlitos had quite a scare! But in the big picture, I can happily report that everything is going to be well!

A good friend of mine called me on the phone this morning to tell me the news that Microsoft has put in a $44.6 billion bid for Yahoo. I’d heard the rumor mill going on about this for a long time, but everyone always dismissed it as being a dumb move. Now that the cat is out of the bag, is it a good move or not?

I still need to ponder it a bit more, and maybe the real discussion will take place on Latin Tech Talk next Monday. In any event, be sure to check it out. The real question may turn into: “Is this relevant or not”. What will this mean for Flickr and delicious?  I’d really hate for Microsoft to get their grubby little hand into those great products and Microsoft-ize them… look what they did to Hotmail for goodness sake!

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Here I am waiting for the much hyped Google Phone. The only thing I know at the time is that there’ll be a related announcement tomorrow. I can hardly wait, and will keep my eye on Engadget’s and Gizmozo’s RSS feeds all day waiting for more news.

Why am I so happy about these news? Because even though the iPhone is a revolutionary device (which I’m hoping to eventually get one here in El Salvador), there are many decisions Apple made that have sort of crippled the device (much like they crippled the AppleTV, which I own) and Google, on the other hand, has a record of being more open about their models, which in turn, has been why so many of their products are big successes!

Can an Open version on an iPhone beat Apple’s hype? Stay tuned!

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I saw David Copperfield perform in Las Vegas during a Comdex week, and I must say it was very impressive. It’s strange that the FBI is investigating him and raiding his “secret” warehouse. Here’s the link to the Superficial’s Coverage of the story.

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Here’s the news that we’ve been waiting for all these years. It looks like some big name artists are starting to figure out that technology is making record labels obsolete. ALso, when you think about how much more money they will be making per album sold, it makes automatic sense!

Check out this article… it’s in Spanish. Here is one of the sources cited, Crunchgear.

On Sept 25th I wrote a blog post about the wonders of Amazon MP3 and how it was my music store of choice. Last week a friend of mine asked me how I had hacked the site to be able to buy music bypassing the regional restrictions. I said, “huh?”. So I went back to the site to buy another album. Sure enough, the site no longer allows me to buy music there. Here’s the official message I get from Amazon when I try to buy stuff there now:

  We are sorry…

We could not process your order because of geographical restrictions on the product which you were attempting to purchase. Please refer to the terms of use for this product to determine the geographical restrictions.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

Needless to say, I’m very pissed off about this new turn of events and will go back to buying music from independent bands on the PMN, or on the internet at large. From now on whenever anybody asks me how to buy music online I will send them to independent sites to buy their music directly from the artists and not from greedy record companies that are hell bent on figuring out ways to restrict consumers from buying their products. If you big record companies don’t want to sell me your music, then fine… I will no longer consume your music and I will tell my friends and anybody whom I talk to of the alternatives. Thank you very much.

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