ASL as an Introduction

There's a time in your life when ASL means: Age, Sex, Location... (a sort of "Hi!" on the IRCs :)

But then you grow up, settle down and engage in OO programming practices that will override some of your initial methods. In our case, that's ASL which nowadays means: American Signing Language.

You might throw away those Baby Einstein DVDs, even if a few of them are quite interesting (i.e. "Meet the Orchestra"), but Signing Time is a keeper :-)

Plus, they're introducing this year the Sign of the Week: free flashcards for you to download (and print at home), short teaching videos for each sign. Thank You Rachel & co !!

The story behind the Signing Time program is moving, but most important are the results. Still, it makes you stop and wonder why the signing language is not standardized (worldwide) and the ones who need it most face another communication barrier. Yeah, the world we live in is (still) a jungle...

the wrap up

I'm wrapping up an interesting year, with just a few highs and several lows 'll need to work on for quite some time. Interestingly enough, the average might be comforting, but maybe one would wish for more (clustered? :-) average values rather than highs and lows :-)

Lets see how 2010 would be... Happy holidays and A Happy New Year! :-)

feel the pain

via xkcd

how to automatically create/extract multi volume TARs

For the past year(s) or so I've been running into situations where I have created some code snippets to help me out with my (hobby) projects, only to lose them later from .bash_history :-)

This is about to change now, thanks to the great hints I find evey now and then via Jeremy's linkblog and the inspirational "splitting large files with TAR"

First, we need to introduce the following TAR helpers

move.sh

link.sh

Then, we create (i.e. 1MB) TAR multi volume/part archives on the fly

Extracting is again, almost painless :-)

PS. I hope the gist is showing ok, Blogger's preview is blind to it :-(

PPS. The above code was successfully tested on Debian/Ubuntu, on some other platforms (i.e. RedHat) --volno-file might start counting from... 2 (stupid!). You can always modify move.sh to use its own increment scheme (same as link.sh). Take care!

Where is Google/Android heading?

Powered by a large gold minting machine (its advertising & search business), Google runs the most power efficient datacenters, indexes your world, listens to you, virtualizes your mobile, puts you on the map and many other things (to come). What is Google up to? really...

Imagine a world where everything is connected, imagine a world where your (Android) mobile phone dials home and starts the owen, makes the coffee, orders the missing groceries from the shop (wait, the Android powered fridge will do that :-)

Surreal? Not really.

How about speaking to your own android, giving him/her instructions, asking for advice. Is it far fetched? Not really.

The cloud will do all the magic, will be the soul in your small appliances if they are underpowered. The cloud will know more about you than you ever will, but it will (always?) be on your side. Assisting, Helping, Advicing. Far fetched? Yes.

Still, doable. And Google is the front-runner...

The next 10 years will prove me wrong, or maybe not :-)

how to use Google Voice from abroad

Remember how to watch Hulu from abroad?

It gets even better, now with Google's Voice :-)

This how-to requires of bit more work, energy and maybe commitment ($$), but I'll keep it short, I don't want to bother you with the technical details (sic).

You'll need:

+ Google's invitation to the service (it helps if you enroll :-)

+ the "Hulu setup" (Opera, SecureConnect, SSH access)

(then it gets interestingly harder)

+ US DID number (googling "free DID" should help)

+ Asterisk setup to hook the DID into and pass the call to...

+ your VoIP client (the free X-Lite comes to mind)

Then type your DID in Google's Voice,

answer the incoming test call,

key in the test PIN and you're set

PS. many thanks to my * friend (you know who you are :-)

how to watch Hulu from abroad

Well, it might not be that easy & cheap to do it, but lets march / dream on :-)

You'll need

+ VPS or better in the USA (or just SSH access :-)
+ a bit of luck to get the evaluation for SSH Tectia ConnectSecure
+ decent browser (that's easy, isn't it? :-)

The ConnectSecure evaluation will expire after 45 days, but if you're reading this I'm sure you have enough money to fork / buy your own copy. The magic is worth the investment since ConnectSecure will allow you to transparently tunnel any of your applications (Windows or Linux :-) across the water so that they'll feel "at home" over there.

Enough talking, lets jump to the meat of the problem - the configuration

create a new profile, you'll need a hostname and an SSH account



go to Filter Rules and select the application to be "teleported"



optionally you can disable the small security popup shown during operation



then you can Get Happy :-)