Drabble: The First

From afar it looks like a sea of darkened solar panels in otherwise empty space. In the middle of the panels, dwarfed, by the panel's massive size lies a small ring suspended by the electromagnets surrounding it. The ring looks perfectly round and the inner perimeter is but the outer perimeter is just spinning, tremendously fast. The electromagnets keep pushing it to go faster but they've been becoming less effective.

A probe approaches the spinning ring while the capacitors start charging.

The capacitors discharge causing a flash of lightning that jumps through the ring as the probe disappears from sight.

My participation in the latest meme.

Better DTV Map

So I previously created a very simple DTV coverage map, apparently the FCC has a similar idea and it does pretty much exactly what I would have wanted it to do.

http://www.fcc.gov/mb/engineering/maps/

Also interesting is to click on a station and the Gain/Loss map which is supposed to predict what will happen come the new transition date. (Although I haven't actually found a key for it)

Public Software and Technology Policy

Late last year I ran with the Cherry Hill Linux User Group a Health Care IT Community Discussion at our local library and we created a report and submitted it to the Obama Administration (they asked for it) with the hope that they will implement some of our ideas.

Summary:
This evening we focused on Health Care IT, referred to in many debates as the magic bullet that will make health care affordable again. We agree that IT can and must play a major role in Health Care Reform, but could be a major hindrance if we make the wrong choices.
The Federal Government through the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) should:
• Maintain a fully free and open source electronic medical record (EMR) system.
• Mandate the EMR be taught in all medical and nursing schools.
• Mandate an open and freely implementable EMR communication standard.
• Mandate a national medical identification number and prohibit the use of, and storage of, Social Security Numbers in any health care system.

It has gotten me thinking about other ways the Federal government can help other local systems such as schools, townships, maybe even police and fire stations. I'm going to use Education as the best other example:

1. Federal goverment funds development of free linux distribution for schools. Requires use of GPL for everything it pays for to ensure school software remains free. This is designed to be the end-all for schools, (maybe Moodle is at the core and all systems authenticate to it?). Basically they pay to add features to make these GPL-licensed systems do everything a school needs.
   
2. Federal government launches grant program to implement free linux distribution in 5 schools (made up number) in every state with the condition that the schools will allow other schools technology departments in to look around and help train them.
3. Profit, err less profit as every school no longer needs to pay for any licenses for software. It also encourages a local software ecosystem as schools can pay locally to fix a bug or add a feature.
   

Perhaps these should both be added to the stimulus package? I'd say this would get a great ROI compared to some of the other stuff on there.

Why GPL? Because I want the federally funded systems for education and health care and any modifications made to them to always be free to hospitals and schools. They are public institutions and as a matter of good public policy we should not pay for the same work over and over and over again, especially if the federal government already paid for it.

DTV Pre Feb17th

Did the last test of broadcast tv in my area before February 17th. NJN and WHYY join the 1080i HD crowd (total 5 1080i, 3 720P). Other than that no big changes, except didn't see any flaky channels during my last test.
February 9th Results

Should be interesting to see what, if anything actually changes on the 17th.

Another related TV item is how much power we might save from the DTV transition, these are power stats from our HDTV:

Digital Broadcast (OTA): 132
Analog Boradcast (OTA): 171
Digital Cable: 131
Analog Cable: 170

That adds up when you do it to an entire country. Of course thats only a saving with DTV ready TVs, TVs that need a converter box will use more power (the converter box needs power).

On yet another related note, I just watched MacGyver for free on cbs.com (they also have original Star Trek). They have just 1 ad in each of the commercial break segments so I actually don't zone out during them. Clever. Must make a media center that let's me stream that (and hulu) to my TV.

"No input" Recovery & Story

So, back in college (a whole 3 months ago). A group and I gave a presentation on Free and Open Source Software. The presentation went well until we got to the end where I wanted to show a nice Compiz demo. Unfortunately, right after I made some comment like, "and these are some features Windows and Mac just don't have", the Microsoft mouse decided to die (keeping free software down conspiracy of course :) ). So, needless to say, my Compiz demo was pretty much ruined. (I was able to show multiple desktops, that's it)

That got me thinking that maybe we should at least at boot automagically determine if the user is missing either a mouse or a keyboard and try to help them around that. It became my most popular idea on Ubuntu Brainstorm (http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/5231/)

I then decided to try to implement it and with a good amount of help got it to work ok on my machine. (The current code is here https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Specs/no-input-recovery).

So, right now, I'm looking for comments, suggestions, testing, what I should do to get it into Ubuntu proper, and output of "xinput list --short" clearly labeled with what you have in the computer at that time and with difference scenarios.
Thanks