Category: Uncategorized

From the Bangor Daily News…

… “Now it seems it is at a slightly more advanced stage,” Roback said of opposition to the Patriot Act. The common hope of the various committees, she said, is that the local resolutions in Maine will help pressure Congress to repeal the law.

MCLU and the Maine Library Association are two statewide organizations that have taken formal positions against the act, while leaders of the Maine Gun Owners Association and the Maine Council of Churches have said they have concerns about it….

I hope this goes through. Contact Your Local Politician™ or something….

My Grandfather’s obituary has been published in the local Cincinnati papers.

It occurs to me that “commons software” might be a better overall term for what is known as “free software”. After all, the function of the GPL is to preserve the commons itself.

Perhaps the real question is the notion of “freedom.” Does a commons grant complete freedom? No, there are restrictions; these restrictions of freedom provide the definition of “commons”.

Compare this to Stallman’s 4 freedoms…

Free software is a matter of the users’ freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software:

* The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
* The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
* The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
* The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

A program is free software if users have all of these freedoms.

These 4 principles are essential to the virtual commons (“no one owns it, everyone can use it, anyone can improve it”). And a commons avoids the amibuity of the word “free.”

Something to process further…I’d love to hear comments on this one if you have an opinion.

Though some are arguing that the desktop wars eventually won’t matter, I’ve been having lots of fun with my Linux desktop. I recently upgraded my PCLinuxOS distribution to run KDE 3.2.1. It’s quite nice. I have some thoughts about it, as well as some screenshots.

This is what my desktop looks like (click on the image for a larger version). Note that there are 4 panels (in KDE, a panel is what Windows calls a taskbar), one running along each edge of the screen. They are all highly customizable. They can be transparent, as I have it here. I like the looks of that.

The main panel on the bottom doesn’t extend to the edge of the screen, a la Mac OSX. The big K button with the gears on it on the left is equivalent to the ‘start’ menu in Windows; it lists the many applications installed and lets you start them from there. The next icon clears the desktop, minimizing any open windows on that desktop. The home icon is … my home directory. It opens in Konqueror (see below). The monitor icon opens up a terminal, so I can quickly type in text commands on the command line.

The next icon, 6 boxes stacked in a 2×3 matrix, are the virtual desktops. I have 6 of them, and have named each according to Greek myths. Hermes is the desktop where I keep email programs running. Ariadne is for the web; I usually have some version of the mozilla browser running here. Homer is for writing, I will have OpenOffice running for my writing, or also Quanta Plus open for my website stuff (html editing). Zeus is usually where Konqueror lives, so I can do file management, command line stuff, or system administration. Apollo is sort of a miscellaneous task place, it’s where I do stuff that comes up that doesn’t have a regular spot in the virtual desktops. Finally, Dionysus is usually where I have xmms playing oggs and mp3s, madman for organizing my oggs and mp3s and for making playlists, and xine for playing videos, including DVDs.

To the right of the virtual desktops, you will see three bar graphs. These are indicators of how fast the computer is running; the first is cpu, the 2nd is memory, and the 3rd is swap memory (virtual memory). The control panel next to that launches a utility that shows which “processes” or programs are running and how much power they are using; if a program crashes it can easily be killed here. Gone are they days where a program crashing takes down the entire operating system.

To the right of that is the dock, where programs that are actively running can hang out. THe three icons showing are the Klipper, which manages cut and paste (you can go back and select something you cut 5 cuts ago and it will paste that), the GAIM chat program, as well as Kmoon, an application that shows the current phase of the moon.

Kweather is next. The icon shows me the general weather conditions, if I hover over the icon it will tell me temperature, windspeed, and barometric pressure, if I click on the icon a full weather report pops up. Finally, next to kweather, is the clock.

The left and right panels have buttons for programs that I often use on them. For example, the one on the left is roughly divided into three sections, the top section has Internet apps (Mozilla Thunderbird, Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla, Konqueror, gFTP, GAIM, Xchat), the middle section has writing/document creation apps (OpenOffice Writer, LyX, Quanta Plus, KEdit, Kate), and the bottom section has image/DTP software (Scribus, OpenOffice Draw, the GIMP). On the right are multimedia apps, games, and configuration utilities.

Note the transparent menus in KDE. More specifically, I am using the Plastik theme for KDE, which is one of several themes that allow transparent menus. Pretty cool. This desktop has a highly polished appearance, and it is fast. Much faster than Windows, and much better looking, imho. In my eyes, its appearance rivals that of OSX, but KDE is much, much faster. I make this statement subjectively, of course; recently I saw a friend of mine who has a whiz-bang 17″ powerbook laptop running OSX, and it wasn’t subjectively faster than my 400MHz Celeron running KDE. And KDE 3.2 is faster than the version of KDE I was running back then. Of course, that machine would still smoke mine for heavy duty processing (ie, ogg encoding or compiling programs), but as far as the feel, there wasn’t a huge difference, much to my surprise.

Mozilla Thunderbird is my email client. It’s a nice program; it has filters and multiple folders, so my incoming email is automatically sorted into the correct folder. It also has a pretty nice junk mail filter, which helps dramatically cut down on spam. Note that in this image, Thunderbird is maximized; it extends to the edges of the transparent panels. So the transparent panels are always “on top.” A very nice, consistent appearance. This is showing the default Thunderbird theme, many more are available. This one is simple and attractive, so I like it.

Mozilla Firefox is my browser of choice at the moment, though sometimes I still use the older regular Mozilla. I like that Firefox and Thunderbird are now different apps, so that when one slows down (usually the browser, usually due to badly-coded java pages) it doesn’t affect the email app. This is also the default Firefox theme.

Finally, there is Konqueror, the swiss army knife of KDE. This great application is a web browser, a file manager, a multimedia player, and much more. It, like all of KDE, is heavily customizable. In this shot I have a tweaked version; there are 2 windows open for file management (I can just click and drag icons where I want to move or copy them), and along the bottom I have a terminal open. Though I’m not a Unix guru, I still find the command line useful for some tasks in Linux. It’s here, built right in to Konqueror, when I want it. I can do all of my file management here.

So anyway, this is just a quick tour of what my desktop looks like these days. I hope you like it. Linux on the desktop is big fun. I urge you to try it using the PCLinuxOS live CD (similar to Knoppix), which allows you to run it directly from the CD, no installation necessary. This is a great tool. Check it out.

Grandpa passed over last night at around 10:10pm.

For those of us that need to be gotten up to speed on the Haiti situation, here’s one valuable perspective.

…I’m at work (it’s slow), and the station where I’m sitting has a Microsoft Natural Keyboard, one of the split-keyboard, ergonomically-correct designs. I used to have one of these until it stopped working. I had forgotten how much I missed it. This design works really well for me. Now I have a similar model made by Fellowes, and it just doesn’t have the same feel.

So yes, it’s true: Microsoft does do some things very weGACK COUGH ***CENSORED

Well, I finally got around to installing the Mozilla Thunderbird email client. Perhaps I’m heeding the advice of the article in the previous entry. It installed very easily; I just typed ‘apt-get install mozilla-thunderbird’ and it was ready to go. I’d have done this weeks ago, but Thunderbird only now found its way into the PCLinuxOS apt repositories.

So far so good. I was able to import my old mozilla mail settings easily enough, which was nice. So far it’s definitely faster than Mozilla. And supposedly the spam filters are better, which is good. Mozilla Mail was getting about 70% of the spam I was receiving. I’m hoping Thunderbird will do better than that.

This article recommends a step at a time:

The 6 month guide to desktop migration:

1. Switch Outlook for Mozilla Thunderbird. If nothing else this will immediately give immunity from quite a lot of viruses which exploit weaknesses in outlook. Although Thunderbird can do all the things Outlook does, many of them it does in different ways and the configuration is different. There are procedures for migrating, but is far better to learn how to configure it from scratch if you want to make best use of it’s features.

2. Once Thunderbird is doing your mail and newsgroups, then drop Internet Explorer and move to Mozilla Firefox. Here there are few configuration issues, and Firefox will import your bookmarks for Internet Explorer. Once again, read the users FAQ because Mozilla/Firefox does have some features that IE does not have. You will find a few sites that will only work with IE, particularly e-commerce sites. There is no necessity for this, it is just cost cutting on the vendors part. Major e-commerce sites such as Amazon have no problem with different browsers. I have yet to find a site that only accepts IE who does not have a “competitor” that is not so limited. So don’t bother moaning to the site admin, vote with your feet and surf elsewhere.

3. After a month or so you should be happy with Microsoft free surfing, so it is time to get rid of MS Office. There are a number of Office suites available for Linux, both Open Source and commercial, which will run on Windows. I am going to recommend OpenOffice because it does a good job of being familiar to MS Office users and is open source, but other alternatives could be just as valid for this exercise. Most people use office suites for more than one type of task, even if they only use one application. So, don’t suddenly decide to do everything with the new office suite, learn on a task by task basis. OpenOffice does a pretty good job of import and export of MS Office formats, thought in complex documents some re-formatting is required. OpenOffice is generally able to open office documents sent as email attachments and documents on the web, if you can’t open them then tell the sender!

When you are publishing to the web or sending email attachments, get out of the habit of sending them in Office formats. If they are intended to be ‘read-only’ then PDF format is a good choice for documents that are to be formatted to physical pages, otherwise you could just use HTML. OpenOffice has a handy PDF button for converting the document to a PDF file. If you are sending a document that the end user can edit, send them an OpenOffice version of the document and point out that you have “upgraded”, but you can send them an MS Office file on request.

4. Expect to take at least four months to get all your browsing and office work over to OSS apps. Then look at all the other things you do with your PC and evaluate what alternatives will be available under Linux. One place you could start looking is http://www.theopencd.org or http://gnuwin.epfl.ch.

Your aim is to do everything you do under Windows with software that will also be available under Linux.

5. Having satisfied yourself that you have solutions to all your problems, it is time to find yourself a friendly Linux guru. You should show the guru what you are using on Windows and ask for a recommendation for a distribution. Having established what distribution you are going to install you should make a list of your hardware and check it out for compatibility. You also need to establish how your new system is going to be organised (disk partitions) and booted. Do not rush into this, read about it and think it over. Look for newsgroups and forums for your distro of choice and post a list of your hardware (in particular printer and video) and any unusual applications you will be planning to run… try and find out what the potential problems are beforehand.

6. Nike… just do it. No dual boot! Install your distro and forget Windows ever existed. Any problems you have from now on must be resolved in Linux. If you have followed this procedure then you should be able to come up to speed very quickly using the apps you were using under Windows. With time you will find that you have many more options available to you.

Sounds like good advice to me.

There was an article in the Wall Street Journal about the value that Microsoft provides to the computer industry for the prices it charges. One piece of evidence: based on the current cost of PCs, the article argues, 10% of the cost of each PC goes to Microsoft for its Windows operating system. From the article:

Because these prices are never disclosed, the figures here represent best guesses. But you can start to see the contours of the computer industry in that bill of fare. Specifically, you begin to understand how Microsoft could amass its $61 billion in cash and other assets. It’s easy when you collect nearly 10% of the cost of every PC that’s shipped, while having no manufacturing costs of your own.

Note that the other parts of the computer package (the chip, the hard drive, the case, etc) have significant manufacturing and material costs. The software is basically air; they could easily be made freely available on the net (just like Linux). But MS gets 10% of the cost of nearly every computer sold.

So even the mainstream media is catching on to this idea, that proprietary software in general, and Microsoft Windows in particular, makes less and less sense, especially as Free software alternatives become better and more capable. This idea isn’t new in the Free software world, but I’m glad to see our memes beginning to have a wider circulation.