For many of you the command line may be intimidating, especially if you’re more accustomed to the Windows standard GUI. I want to tell you the command line can be a VERY powerful tool if you just learn a few basic things. Please don’t consider the command line a crutch or “Linux is hard because you have to type commands”. You can do everything via a GUI that you can do via the command line, it is simply easier or quicker to do it the latter way.

Below are a few basic command for those of you new to the command line:

ls - list contents of a directory
sudo - "super-user do" (grants administrator rights)
cd - change directory
aptitude - APT package management system (update, install, remove, search)
clear - clear screen
chmod - change file access permissions
chown - change file and group ownership
cp - copy
mv - move
rm - remove
cat - concatenate files (dump to screen)
nano - basic text editor
vi - advanced text editor
fdisk - partition table manipulator
df - disk free (remaining / used disk space)
users - users currently logged in
useradd - add a user
usermod - modify existing user
uname - show system data (try uname -a)
mount - mount a file system, cd or removable drive
umount - un-mount a file system, cd or removable drive
top - show current running processes
touch - create new, empty, file
reboot - reboot your system
shutdown - shutdown your system
passwd - change user password
ping - ping a network device or location (ping google.com)
more - show output one screen at a time
exit - logout of the terminal
eject - eject a cdrom or removable device

A neckband that translates thought into speech by picking up nerve signals has been used to demonstrate a “voiceless” phone call for the first time.

With careful training a person can send nerve signals to their vocal cords without making a sound. These signals are picked up by the neckband and relayed wirelessly to a computer that converts them into words spoken by a computerised voice.

A video (right) shows the system being used to place the first public voiceless phone call on stage at a recent conference held by microchip manufacturer Texas Instruments. Michael Callahan, co-founder of Ambient Corporation, which developed the neckband, demonstrates the device, called the Audeo.

Users needn’t worry about that the system voicing their inner thoughts though. Callahan says producing signals for the Audeo to decipher requires “a level above thinking”. Users must think specifically about voicing words for them to be picked up by the equipment.

The Audeo has previously been used to let people control wheelchairs using their thoughts. Watch a video demonstrating thought control of wheelchairs

“I can still talk verbally at the same time,” Callahan told New Scientist. “We can differentiate between when you want to talk silently, and when you want to talk out loud.” That could be useful in certain situations, he says, for example when making a private call while out in public.

The system demonstrated at the TI conference can recognise only a limited set of about 150 words and phrases, says Callahan, who likens this to the early days of speech recognition software.

At the end of the year Ambient plans to release an improved version, without a vocabulary limit. Instead of recognising whole words or phrases, it should identify the individual phonemes that make up complete words.

This version will be slower, because users will need to build up what they want to say one phoneme at a time, but it will let them say whatever they want. The phoneme-based system will be aimed at people who have lost the ability to speak due to neurological diseases like ALS – also known as motor neurone disease.

Happy birthday, Universe!

Kinda. It’s not really the Universe’s birthday, but now we do know to high accuracy just how old it is.

How?

NASA’s WMAP is the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (which is a mouthful, and why we just call it WMAP). It was designed to map the Universe with exquisite precision, detecting microwaves coming from the most distant source there is: the cooling fireball of the Big Bang itself.

New results just released from WMAP have nailed down lots of cool stuff — literally — about the Universe.

I am about to explain the early Universe to you. I’ll be brief, but if you want to skip to the results, then go ahead.

Here’s the quick version: the Big Bang was hot. The Universe itself expanded outward from a single point — actually, it’s space itself that expands, not the objects in it — and like any expanding gas it cooled. After about a microsecond, it had cooled enough for protons and neutrons to form. Three minutes later (yes, just three minutes) it had cooled enough for protons and neutrons to stick together. Hydrogen, helium, and just a dash of lithium were created, and these would be the only elements for some time (hundreds of millions of years, in fact). The Universe was a thick soup of matter and energy.

It kept expanding and cooling. At this point, it was opaque to light. A photon couldn’t travel an inch without smacking into an electron and then getting sent off in some other random direction. However, after a few hundred thousand years, an amazing thing happened: neutral hydrogen could form. Before this point, the Universe was still too hot; as soon as an electron bonded with a proton, some ultraviolet photon would come along and whack it off. But at that golden moment the cosmos had cooled off enough that a lasting atomic relationship was in the offing. Neutral hydrogen was born. At that moment — astronomers call it recombination, which is a misnomer, since it was the first time electrons and protons could combine — the Universe became transparent; without all those pesky electrons floating around, photons found themselves free to travel long distances.

It’s those photons WMAP sees. After 13.7 billion years, the expansion of the Universe has cooled the light, stretched its wavelength from ultraviolet to microwave. Another way to think about it is that the temperature associated with each photon went from thousands of Kelvins down to just a few, less than 3, in fact. That’s -270 Celsius, and -454 Fahrenheit.

Brrrr.

That light emitted just after recombination tells us a vast amount about the Universe at that time. By carefully mapping the exact wavelength of the light and the direction from where it came, we can tell the density and temperature of the matter at that time. Incredibly we can also tell how much dark energy there was, and even the geometry of the Universe: whether it is flat, open, or closed.

All this, from the dying glow of the Big Bang itself.

WMAP Results

A lot of this information was determined a while back, just a couple of years after WMAP launched. But now they have released the Five Year Data, a comprehensive analysis of what all that data means. Here’s a quick rundown:

1) The age of the Universe is 13.73 billion years, plus or minus 120 million years. Some people might say it doesn’t look a day over 6000 years. They’re wrong.

2) The image above shows the temperature difference between different parts of the sky. Red is hotter, blue is cooler. However, the difference is incredibly small: the entire temperature range from cold to hot is only 0.0002 degrees Celsius. The average temperature is 2.725 Kelvin, so you’re seeing temperatures from 2.7248 to 2.7252 Kelvins.

3) The age of the Universe when recombination occurred was 375,938 years, +/- about 3100 years. Wow.

4) The Universe is flat.

5) The energy budget of the Universe is the total amount of energy and matter in the whole cosmos added up. Together with some other observations, WMAP has been able to determine just how much of that budget is occupied by dark energy, dark matter, and normal matter. What they got was: the Universe is 72.1% dark energy, 23.3% dark matter, and 4.62% normal matter. You read that right: everything you can see, taste, hear, touch, just sense in any way… is less than 5% of the whole Universe.

We occupy a razor thin slice of reality.

There are other important things that have come from the WMAP data, and if you’re interested, you can read all about them on the WMAP site and in the professional journal papers.

But if you only want to peruse the results I’ve highlighted here, that’s fine too. But remember this, and remember it well: you are living in a unique time. For the first time in all of human history, we can look up at the sky, and when it looks back down on us it reveals its secrets. We are the very first humans to be able to do this… and we have the entire future of the Universe ahead of us.

Okay, here’s something that’s been going through my mind lately and I think it needs to be brought to the forefront, I think we need to discuss standardisation. Yes, that dreaded word.

While this seems like a bit of a non-subject, or even a mundane one, I still feel it should be discussed. First off, there are over thirty five different package distribution systems available out there. Thirty five! Just like the excess of Linux distributions, that’s just too many. I’m not saying we should suddenly end choice in the Linux world. I’m all for choice. But I’m also a realist. You can’t expect Linux to succeed in the world if there isn’t standardisation at least in this area.

It seems every Linux distro has its own way of configuring network access. For example:

Fedora: /etc/sysconfig/networking/devices/ifcfg-eth0
Archlinux: /etc/rc.conf
Ubuntu: /etc/network/interfaces

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I won’t even go into all the nuttiness that exists out there. Sure, there’s some standardisation across all the distributions, but it’s so little as to be difficult to spot. That shouldn’t be the case, ever. Because of that, each distribution, or distribution group has to have their own custom built version of a given application for their own version of Linux.

I feel sorry for the application developers who want to supply binary packages, and need to build sometimes dosens of packages for all the different distros and their various incompatible versions. Of course in real life they seldom do - so the poor user is faced with having to try and compile the application from source if a binary package does not exist for their distro.

Even the package systems are too diversified. As I said before, choice is good, but not on the core system, and packages are part of the core system. Sure, choice is important and choice is good. I very strongly support choice. But I’m a realist and reality says that sometimes choice can also be your own worst enemy. You can standardise the core of Linux, yet still leave users with all the choice they could ever want. And if we don’t start standardising at least the important things, Microsoft is going to beat us over the head. One of their biggest clubs against us is that we’ve got such a wide range of diversity, while they have a standardised one stop shop.

Really, seriously. Think about it. Who needs fifteen different ways to do network configuration? Or how about hardware detection? Why do we need some 100 different systems for hardware detection? Everyone should get together, pool their resources, and come up with one, two, maybe even three really, really good hardware detection systems and then have everyone use them. Or how about the directory file tree? I absolutely hate it when each distribution has its own unique way to do the directory structure for system and user files. Everyone pick one thing that works, and run with it. Don’t create a thousand unique ways to do things.

People shouldn’t be forced to do something ten different ways across ten different distributions. If you think it drives some of us nuts, imagine what it does in the corporate world. If Linux is ever going to become properly mainstream, some of our choice has to be surrendered. Why do you think Microsoft succeeded so well in the market?

All conspiracy theories aside, they provided end users with a consolidated, single platform which was universal and provided a one stop shop for corporations where other previous operating systems didn’t, preferring to each stick to their own unique and proprietary OS’s, formats, file systems, and more. People loved how Microsoft was consistent and compatible no matter where you went and which version you had. (Yes, they actually believed in cross program and cross OS compatibility at one time) But it wasn’t the home user that ended up making Microsoft so big. Microsoft targeted the corporate workplace. Apple went after the home and school market. You can see who won that war.

So if Linux ever wants to truly become mainstream, some level of standardisation needs to occur. Incompatibilities between distributions, the multiplicity in the ways applications need to be compiled to work on each distribution, and the variance of features across different versions is going to do more harm than good for us in the long term. I’m not saying we need to throw out all we’ve worked so hard for. But sometimes we have to give up a little to gain a lot. Isn’t sacrificing a little choice in the underlying system to gain the victory in the world market better than keeping the tangled mess we have now and ultimately loosing the war?

If we don’t standardise at least the core of every Linux distro, we’re going to find ourselves in a rather nasty place in the near future. Now before you pick up your guns and start shooting (figuratively I hope) at me or each other, let’s stop for a moment. All pride and egos aside, our enemy is not each other. Our enemy is a Redmond, Washington company who would like nothing more than to see choice wiped out of existence. If for no other reason, isn’t that enough to make you want to lay down the sword with your fellow Linux geek and try working together towards Linux standardisation? Or do you actually enjoy the idea of eventually having no choice in what you do on your computer? Think about it. If we don’t start working together and standardising things, that’s all we’ll have. One big bloated monster of an OS, a monopoly hellbent on telling you what you can and can’t do, and more headaches than all the aspirin in the world can cure. So let’s get moving.

Please all feel free to join me at my 100th post party!

The dress code will be smart/casual and feel free to bring your own bottle/comment.