Marcel Gagné

Who's listening? Apparently not many.

This is a story about not paying attention, or choosing not to. I'll let the philosophers argue about which is worse. For the sake of this post, I just want to talk about the yellow ribbon campaign. You know the one. A soldier comes home from the war in Iraq or Afghanistan and people wrap yellow ribbons around the trees as a welcome. This morning I was chatting with a young lady, aged 25, who had no idea what the significance of the yellow ribbon was. If you, like her, don't know, then let me enlighten you. Then I'll tell you why it's nonsense.

Oh, and today, on April 14, 2009, CBC Radio reported that 21 year-old Trooper Karine Blais died in Afghanistan. She is the second Canadian female soldier to die in combat in Afghanistan. Ironically, yesterday, a local family dropped off yellow ribbons to all the houses in our neighborhood, asking us to tie those ribbons around our trees to welcome their son, 23, who is making it back.

About that song . . . It all started with a 1970s band called Tony Orlando and Dawn.
Read more

This past weekend, a friend dropped in with an interesting bottle of wine she picked up while driving through the Niagara wine region (thanks, Genine). The 2006 Pipe Down is a blend of 45% Cabernet Sauvignon, 45% Syrah, and 10% Petit Verdot, aged 16 months in French oak casks.

The Organized Crime Winery in Beamsville, Ontario, has such an interesting name, you must hear a little about its name and the origins thereof. It seems that in the early 1900s. there were two Mennonite congregations who fought over a rather liberal idea, to play music in the church. The liberal congregation acquired a small organ, an act that greatly irked the more conservative of these two congregations. The outrage was such that on night, the stricter, presumably more God-fearing group broke into the church belonging to those sinful, liberal-minded Mennonites, stole the organ, smashed it to bits, and threw the wreckage down an embankment into a stream below. Oh, the irony.

So, how was the wine? Pleasant. A little cherry and oakiness on the nose. It has a nice deep ruby colour, but it is nevertheless surprisingly light. That said, I would be more likely to recommend it with food than on its own though it is still a fairly nice drinking wine. Dry with a long finish. The cork has the words, "Thou Shalt Not Steal Music" written around its perimeter. You can visit the winery's Website by clicking here.
Read more

On Monday evening, just before calling it a night, I decided to attend to that little 'updates available my OpenSUSE 11.1 notebook. There were half a dozen updates, one of them being a kernel update, which doesn't happen too often.  A few minutes later, I rebooted, and got nothing but a text login. Couldn't start X or even reconfigure it.  Then I noticed that there was no networking, and only a small handful of modules loaded -- I looked at loaded modules to try to figure out why I wasn't getting networking, even via my wired Ethernet port. Something had gone wrong with the update, a process that normally causes me no grief at all.

I tried several things, then gave up for the night. Next morning, I went looking for the problem, hoping it wouldn't cut too deeply into my day. The kernel package had installed, but kernel-base wasn't there and neither was kernel-extras -- that kind of explained the problem with missing modules. Okay, can't get networked, can't transfer files via my USB memory stick, and can't do a lot of other things. Time for the old bootable CD trick. The first I got my hands on, ironically, was Mandriva 2008.1 which I had previously installed on this notebook and later erased to load up OpenSUSE 11.1.
Read more

Allow me to once more use that word, historic. Yesterday was indeed an historic day as Barack Obama became the 44th President of the United States of America. Watching from Canada, where there was never much love for Dubya and his policies, there is much hope for the future under the new President. And a great deal more cautious optimism. During the noontime celebrations, I was busy feeding my son his lunch, so I caught the show later that evening. Even distanced by the sound bites and analysis of the nightly news, it was still powerful to watch. Obama said many things to many people, each person taking away what they felt was important to them. Here is part of what I took away; what drives my hope that real, positive change may well be upon us.

“Our health care is too costly and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.

“We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place and wield technology's wonders to raise health care's quality and lower its costs. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age.
Read more

by Sally Tomasevic, MBA

Disclaimer and Preface. First, Sally Tomasevic, the author of this article, is my wife (I am Marcel Gagné, the owner of this site). Second, Sally wrote this article as part of her MBA work, but with the constant news talk about cloud computing, both hype and reality, including the inevitable quotes from Nicholas Carr, I found that Sally's work was as relevant and important now as when she wrote it, nearly three years ago. With her permission, I publish it here. -- Marcel Gagné

Introduction

Are we now, as Nicholas Carr speculates in his provocatively titled paper, "The End of Corporate Computing", on the eve of an IT revolution? While Carr claims that corporations can share utility hardware and software and champions the cost effectiveness of utility IT computing in the future, he completely fails to consider necessary elements of computing that cannot be provided for within this model.

Carr's argument centres around similarities he believes exist between the history of electrification and the IT industry. In the early 20th century, private generators were housed and maintained at corporations and over time, while utilities and associated infrastructure were built, corporations were supplied electricity by utility providers. As Carr sees it, the IT industry is transforming from a similar asset based model in which IT components reside within the walls of corporations, to a utility based model wherein all IT services can be provided by large, centralized, utility providers. Carr believes that the technological advances in IT, specifically virtualization, grid computing, and web services, are sufficient to pave the way to a utility model. In addition, he views on site corporate computing infrastructure as redundant, postulating that within the utility model, thin clients will replace PCs on corporate desktops.
Read more

In case you've been away, there's been a bit of a mini-firestorm over an event that took place last week. It's about a teacher who, upon witnessing one of her students doing a Linux demo for other students and handing out live CDs confiscated then, then started a war. You can read about it on the Blog of Helios or watch my WFTL Bytes! coverage of the event.

Truth be told, I've been thinking about this story a lot more than I thought I would. After all, when I first reported it in my WFTL Bytes!, I made fun of it "Oh, no! Linux is under siege! Should I wear the general's press hat?"  It is, in fact, scary that somebody like Karen thinks as she does (from a FOSS perspective, that is), but she was, as I reasoned then, one person. Hardly an army. 

Then came the explosion of posts, both for and against, in the community. My reaction was surprise, but I found it interesting enough to want ompaul to post his take on it. Which got me thinking, and thinking . . .
Read more

This is a story about the devil. You know. Satan. The guy with the pitchfork, horns, bad breath, and the red underwear. Oh, and it's about me, too. When I was just a small child, my parents, good Catholics that they were, did what all good parents of religious upbringing did. They did their best to instill the fear of God into me. After all, hard to worship the big guy if there's no fire and brimstone to tip your kids back in the other direction when they transgress. Right? My parents, like every other set of parents, were brought up with a collection of stories taught to them by their God-fearing parents. Remember kids. You can love God, but you must also fear him. Now, I don't remember exactly how old I was, but it was before my great revelation which happened when I was seven years old, so it had to be a couple of years before.

I had been bad that day. Sure, what kid isn't bad at some point? I hadn't killed anyone or help up a bank, but I might have taken a cookie, not come in immediately when called, or talked back to my Mom or Dad. Whatever the crime, it was a one of those petty crimes of childhood, the kind every 4 or 5 year old kid commits on a regular basis. Whatever the transgression, I remember my mother telling me that bad boys would be punished by God in this way; when looking into a mirror at night, in the dark, that boy (or girl) would see Satan staring back at them from the mirror.
Read more

Maybe it's age. Could be lack of sleep. Or  maybe I'm just being overly picky, but "Compared to what?" is a question I find myself asking more and more as time goes on. Today, for whatever reason, is a particularly bad day for the question.

Some of it is just silly advertising; a bad choice of words or a name that just sounds a bit stupid. There are companies called "Reliable Plumbing", or reliable pretty much anything. Compared to those unreliable guys, I suppose? You might have an "Honest Movers" in your town, or honest somthing else (look in the phone book for a good list). That's compared to the Dishonest Moving Company that operates down the street from HM. Or Lucky Restaurant (or Variety or Sandwich, or etc). That's compared to Unlucky Restaurant where most people wind up with intestinal bugs of some sort.

Badly chosen names can induce the old head shake, but more often, it's the words that promise something they aren't quite up on delivering. here's a sample.
Read more

Lately I've been getting more and more unhappy with blogging under Drupal. Specifically, I'm developing a serious dislike (bordering on hate) for the blog module that ships with Drupal. Regular visitors to this site, CookingWithLinux.com, and my new occasiodaily FOSS and Linux news show, WFTL Bytes!, have already figured out that I'm experimenting with new topics, new content, and new ways of delivering that content. Aside from the sites and content I've mentioned, I want to start talking and writing about other things that excite me, whether it be Linux, science, politics, or religion. What I thought I wanted was a blog with sub-blogs so I could focus each of my blogs on a particular topic and let you, the reader, choose the topics that interested you. What I achieved was more confusion and the beginnings of a grand experiment to do away with the blog module entirely.
Read more