Coats Sez

I guess I’m one of them. Angry, that is. But angry doesn’t get you anything. That’s probably one of the reasons we’re angry. No one is listening.

I was watching a politician on a news program tonight. He was a Republican. The interviewer was asking him what he had discussed in his recent meeting with Wall Street execs. The Republican never did give a straight answer to the question. Although he didn’t say so he acted like it was none of our business. And therein lies one of the many problems annoying us common
American citizens. The people in Congress and the Senate think it is none of our business what they do.
They act like they are smarter than us yet their decisions are making a royal mess of our country.
Trillions of dollars are spent in various and diverse places and we citizens are seeing no return on our
investment. Hard-working Americans work 10 and 12 hour days 6 and sometimes 7 days a week including
weekends and holidays paying taxes which disappear down a black hole and they’re not getting any
benefits from this donation of income. Fat-cats who lose their bundle in bad investments are immediately
compensated for their loss with trillions of tax-payer money and they get it without much debate while
a health care plan for citizens is debated for months. It’s clear who the Democrats and Republicans
really work for. They work for high-rolling fat-cats and the ordinary American worker is simply the sucker
who funds it all while the puppet-masters laugh all the way to the bank. Yes, my fellow Americans, we are
all puppets and the situation is likely to continue that way unless and until some heroes emerge from
among you to help steer a new and better course for our country. What are you waiting for?

Terry Coats

I’ve been having a problem lately with image border colors not showing up correctly when
viewing a couple of my webpages. Tonight I figured out why but I don’t know what to do
about it. The graphics on my message board page had black borders around them which
did not match the background color of the page so I wanted to change the border color to
blend with the page background. This I did by loading the images into “the Gimp” graphics program on my Ubuntu Linux system here and carefully painting the black image borders
to match the background color of my message board webpage. This done, I uploaded the images to my
website and took a look at them with my browser. Everything looked just like it was supposed to with the
image borders blending perfectly matched with the background. Everything looked ok for quite a while until
one day I visited my message board and noticed something different. The board’s images were no longer
blending into the background! Huh? How could this be? I had not changed anything that I could think of
to make a difference in what I was seeing. The image’s borders had changed from blending in to a lighter
color that no longer blended and my borders were back for some reason, although in a different color than
I had started with. I briefly considered that my website had been hacked somehow but I couldn’t figure out
why anyone would just want to mess with my image’s border colors.

Tonight I finally decided to put some real thought into the matter and did some investigating. I downloaded
the images from my website and used a color picker and my graphics program to check the images. They were the same images I had uploaded in the first place. The colors had not changed and they were correct when I was looking at them here on my computer but viewing them with my Firefox browser made the borders of the images change color to something else. To be more specific the color I used for a border was #121315 but that changed to #19191B after Firefox got done with it. Why? Why was Firefox
monkeying around with my chosen colors? After doing some googling I finally came to the answer. It
wasn’t an answer I understood very well. All I know is it’s messing with the way the browser renders colors
and as far as I am concerned not in a good way. Things which were working before are not working now and I don’t like it. Firefox has been my chosen browser for quite some time now but this concerns me.

The Firefox explanation I found at https://developer.mozilla.org/En/ICC_color_correction_in_Firefox.
Something to do with color correction and International Color Consortium tagging. I’m not going to pretend I
understood everything I read but I read enough to understand that the most recent version of Firefox from version 3.5 onward have tinkered with color correction and I can’t understand how this can be good. How can a website designer know what his or her graphics are going to look like if the browser renders the
colors different from what they are in the designer’s graphics program? Has this been a problem in the past? If it has I have never noticed it but I certainly noticed this change.

Anyway, the Firefox webpage I referenced shows how to change this behavior. If you type “about:config”
into your browser’s address bar you’ll get a page of configurations which you can change but tread
carefully here. The option I had to change to get my browser to view the page the way I wanted was
“gfx.color_management.mode”. It was set to a 2 by default. you can experiment with this option by
right-clicking it and entering a value from 0 to 2. I changed it to a 0(zero) and the browser was back to
rendering my webpage correctly, at least in my mind correctly because I can see my page the way I
meant it to be seen and not the way the Firefox developers want you to see it. If you make a change
you have to close the browser afterward and then reopen it for the change to take affect. I’m not
suggesting that you make this change but I’ve written this so that people can be aware of what I
consider to be an issue. By default now with Firefox color renderings will be unpredictable and most
people are not technical enough to figure out what is going on. And by the way, Firefox developers,
do you have some formula people can use so they can figure out what color to make their graphics
so they’ll show up on a webpage as intended?

Terry Coats

I was just trying to get my wireless card to go into ad-hoc mode while experimenting with
wireless to wired bridging on my Ubuntu 9.10 system here and I kept getting the message “Set Failed on device wlan0; Device or resource busy.” I played with this for an hour without figuring it out. Even doing some googling didn’t give me much except other people who were also getting the error. I eventually figured out that I needed to do a “sudo ifconfig wlan0 down” to bring the interface down. I guess that’s why I kept getting the busy message. After bringing wlan0 down it accepted the command “sudo iwconfig wlan0 mode ad-hoc” and then I brought it backup again with “sudo ifconfig wlan0 up” and I was able to continue with my experimenting. So, if you get this error message, try bringing the interface down first and see if that works.

Terry Coats

I just had to resize a bunch of jpegs. I was making a webpage gallery to show a bunch of pictures I had just taken of the Springtime color around here. I assembled my pictures and uploaded them to my website but when I tested the gallery I could see that the large images which came up when I clicked on the thumbnails were much too large and were taking a long time to load. I have a fairly fast cable internet connection and I realized if the pictures were slow downloading for me they would surely be slow for anybody else, particularly those with slow connections. The full-size jpegs were several megabytes and I could tell that was way too big. I obviously needed to make them smaller but how to do it? I thought about the Gimp and its ability to scale images but I had a lot of images to do(91 jpegs). I did some googling and found what I needed: The “mogrify” command from the ImageMagick suite of tools. I knew I had this already installed on my Ubuntu system so I thought I would give it a try. It did the job really fast! I was impressed. It made quick work of reducing the 91 jpegs in my folder to a more reasonable size for the internet. I kept copies of the originals, of course, so I wouldn’t lose my full resolution pics. The originals are anywhere from 2.5 megabytes up to a little over 7 megabytes. After using the “mogrify” command they were resized to around 150k to 450k and still had good picture quality and were much faster to download after I got the resized versions uploaded to my website folder and tested them out.

The command I used was:
terry@mairead-desktop:~/$ mogrify -resize 1024×683 *.jpg
using xterm while in the folder where the jpegs are. 1024×683 can be whatever you want the new size to
be. I figured out what size I wanted to use by loading one of the monster jpegs into the Gimp and scaling
it down and the Gimp computed the ratio automatically while doing this and those were the values I used.
Here is the ImageMagick’s page on “mogrify” in case you are interested. It can do other things besides resizing.

I made my picture gallery by using a combination of handwritten HTML and also using Shadowbox which
I found at http://www.shadowbox-js.com/. I had looked around for something which would be easy to use
to help me make a gallery and Shadowbox turned out to be it. I still had to do some hand coding of the
webpage but that’s ok. I like doing stuff like that. It wasn’t that hard to do. If you want to see some colorful
pics of Springtime in Oregon 2010 the pics are at http://terrycoats.net/oregon_spring_1.html

Terry Coats

Ok. So I recently screwed up my BEFSR41 router. I downloaded the most recent firmware and used my Firefox browser to try to do the upgrade and you guessed it, it didn’t work. After waiting around for several minutes I ended up with a router with a flashing power light which never quit flashing and I could no longer bring my router up thru my browser. Uh oh, what do I do now?

I tried to log on to my router with tfpt, which is a standard program that’s on most Linux distros. I kept trying over and over but I couldn’t get in because the router wanted a password and tfpt does not deliver passwords! So, I disconnected my router and hooked up to the internet directly thru my cable modem and searched around some for a solution. After much reading of pages I finally came to the page that gave me the solution to my dilemma. The page is http://redsand.net/ and the owner of the website has created a utility which was the solution to the Cisco(Linksys) tftp login problem.It is a tftp client which allows you to enter a password so you can get in to your router. This little utility saved me. There is a link on the page to Linksys-tftp Client 1.2.1 which you can download and compile and then get your router back in business. Thanks, Redsand Networks!

I don’t know why I had to do this. Cisco should know that the tftp client on Linux will not let you enter a password. Are you reading this, Cisco? Please fix this so thousands of users don’t get stumped about what to do when their firmware upgrade fails.

Hmmm. Further study of this issue shows me that simply getting rid of the router password before you start to do the firmware upgrade should make things go easier. I wish I would have known this before I started. Live and learn, I guess. I haven’t tried this yet, however. The router is working now so I’m going to leave it alone.

Terry Coats

http://91.121.72.50:9106

I find this kind of music does relax me. Rock and rap and hiphop grate on my nerves
in my old age. Better to relax and meditate and slow down. Listen to what your mind
tells you. You can hear it if you turn other stuff off. That still, small voice inside us that’s
a piece of the Creator, put there so we can have a direct line to the Boss. No one needs
to be our go-between when it comes to conferring with and listening to that Infinite Mind.
Other people can just steer you wrong. Go to the Source. Don’t let someone else do your
thinking for you. Some people may be able to point you in the right direction but you must
do your own looking and finding.

I’ve tried to do some story writing tonight but am blank so far. No hurry. I guess it’s not
necessary to write one every day but maybe tomorrow never comes. My cousin Pam was
writing her own obituary in the form of a life story but she passed on before she got it completed.
I would like to leave something about myself behind or it would be as if I never lived. My
stories will live on somewhere in an internet archive so maybe I’ll leave something behind
that’s more than zero.

Want to leave your name in a chip on a Mars mission? Your name will be on Mars forever.
Go here while there’s still room for more names:
http://marsparticipate.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/participate/sendyourname/
Beings in the far-off future who come across the vehicle sitting on the Mars surface will be
able to read your name and mine. I think that’s cool. Kind of like saying “I was here!”

Terry Coats

To all my fellow United States citizens East of the Rockies who are
shivering to death, I would just like you to know that here in Oregon where
I live as I write this on Jan 11, 2010, the temperature is 66 degrees F and
the sun is shining thru a partly cloudy sky. Y’all live in the wrong place. It’s
warmer here right now than it is in Florida. The grass is green and there’s
some places where I know I can go down the street where flowers are still
blooming. Eat your hearts out. Don’t give up, though, warmth will return
to your areas someday. If you can just survive the single digit temperatures.
I know, as I used to live in Missouri. It was -3 F there a couple days ago.
Brrrrr! I don’t miss it.

teryc

I picked up my new Korg keyboard at the music store on Tuesday the 5th
so I am now enjoying making music for myself. It is sweet. It makes a
zillion different sounds and combinations, drum tracks, etc., so it’ll keep
the boredom away for some time to come. Plus I get to brush up on my
keyboard skills, which are not good. Maybe I’ll really learn to play this time.

teryc

Well, here it is several days into the new year and I haven’t been able to come up
with any cute sayings or any great philosophical thoughts so I guess I’ll just say may
we all live for another year. Life can be short, even for you young people, so enjoy
every day while you have it because tomorrow you may be in the afterlife wondering
what happened.

teryc

I went shopping Sunday at a local music store looking for the keyboard I wanted.
They didn’t have one in stock but I went ahead and ordered one, along with some
accessories. The keyboard’s enroute to the music store right now by UPS. I’ll be
entertaining myself pretty soon. I’m excited. A new toy!
Here’s what I’m getting:
http://www.guitarcenter.com/Korg-M50-88-Key-Keyboard-Workstation-105137087-i1424628.gc

teryc