Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral.

Sometime back I gave a pretty strong pan review of a couple of “toys” that were not compatible with GNU/Linux — with open standards really, since the community ensures that free software is compliant — and were therefore nothing more than a disappointment to my kids. Recently, I fully expected to repeat this depressing experience when my brother-in-law gave my son a “Flip” digital video camera, but I was pleasantly surprised: it works exactly as it should. That seemed worth a column in itself.

This is my story about searching for Japanese pop music under a free culture license. It’s a little tricky, because the best sites for this are of course, in Japan, and not well advertised on the English web. I discovered how to use Python’s XMLRPC library to run searches using the web API for a Japanese music sharing site called “Wacca”. The results were very interesting — I found some of what I was looking for, though not all.

Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral.

Net neutrality has been a hot and persistent topic on the internet for some time, so I’m not even going to attempt to summarize the debate here. Anyone who values their personal and online freedom knows it’s a crucial issue. Regardless of your operating system or the software we use it will affect each and every one of us. However, if you use GNU/Linux you’re already tech savvy and familiar with the politics and philosophy of free and open software, so you’ll be particularly sensitized to the impact of threats to net neutrality on free software.

Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral.

I am currently in that level of hell reserved for people who upgrade their GNU/Linux system too quickly. I have for some time now been happily using KDE 4 with the plasma desktop enjoying the cute little animations and eye candy, and learning to use the task-bar and widgets. Then my bliss was interrupted by a simple mistake. I decided to upgrade. I forgot that my /etc/apt/sources.list was set to load experimental versions of the software, and now my X-server system is broken. It is only now that I am discovering that there is no apt-get undo.

Packt publishing is now organising the 2010 Open Source Awards. The winning projects will actually get a monetary prize (which I am sure will be most welcome).

I am always a little skeptical of these awards. However, I have to say that Packt really have proved themselves here: they started with the Open Source CMS Award a few years back, and they have now expanded it to several different categories.

Go and check out their web site, and make sure you nominate the projects you think should win!

Manufacturing has been getting smaller, cheaper, and more flexible for years. It’s now possible to make products as sophisticated as smart cel-phones, PDAs, toys, clothing, books, and even houses in almost any shape or form you want down to very small numbers. The mass production barrier has fallen, so that today, it’s possible for a home inventor, hobbyist, or crafter to create almost anything by assembling one-off manufactured components, either from a service or from affordable home-fabrication equipment (or a combination of these).

In the past few years we’ve seen a lot of hardware-based innovation (or at the very least expansion). New products and markets have arisen built around hardware and its use. Smartphones, tablets, netbooks and gaming systems are all examples of markets that have expanded and some if not most of the products make use of free software. This is great but why does it seem to be that the free-software products are second-generation, playing catch up. Where is the device innovation driven by free software?

If you haven’t heard, Google have announced they are pulling the plug on Wave, their interactive, real-time communication product. It’s a shame but I can understand why. It never really took off. Google have blamed lack of user adoption for the poor showing, and maybe that’s true, but in the end if people aren’t using your product: it’s not their fault - it’s yours.

Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral.

People have been talking about “micropayments” since the early days of the world-wide-web, so I’m always skeptical of micropayment systems. Flattr is an interesting variation on the idea though. It’s a voluntary system, without the overhead or chilling effects associated with “pay walls” and it puts donors in control of how much they spend, allowing them to split their donations among beneficiaries based on a monthly “pie” model. The greatest asset of Flattr is its simplicity of use — similar in many ways to the various social networking services that abound on the web today. Flattr may well succeed, and it may fill a niche of financing small projects from free software to online videos.

Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral.

I am typing this as I am finally connected in shell to my Android phone. The prompt reminds me that it’s based on the Linux kernel (it’s free), the Dalvik virtual machine (it’s free), and free libraries. Millions of Android devices are shipped every day, each one is a Linux system. Today, it’s phone. Soon, it will be tablets: Android 3.0 (coming out at the end of the year) will finally be very suitable for tablets. Apple alone will have to face fierce competition on pretty much every front. Microsoft… who? They are more irrelevant every day. I should be happy, right? Well, sort of. Looking back at how long it took me to get this shell prompt makes me worried. Very worried. We are heading towards a world where we no longer own the hardware we buy — and there is no point in having free software if you can’t own your hardware.

What exactly does it mean when Richard Stallman says that the Creative Commons’ Attribution-ShareAlike license has a “Weak Copyleft”? Why exactly is it that “Freeware” and “Non-Free Software” mean the same thing, while “Free Software” is something else entirely? And what is this business with “Free Beer”, and where can I get some? If you’ve asked yourself these questions, this column is for you.

Often, when modelling in 3D, it’s necessary to create a “backdrop” panoramic image. Typically this shows sky and distant land which should appear behind the foreground action. One place we’ll need this for the pilot to Lunatics is for the sky in Baikonur, Kazakhstan on launch day at the beginning of the story. I had some very particular ideas about how this should look, and I want to create just the right look. Here’s how I constructed it.

Having defined the terms that represent the core values of free culture and free software in a previous column, today I want to talk about the terms that define its boundaries: how we describe them and defend them. And what’s on the other side of them.

Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral.

One of the great advantages of using a free license for a work is that you can re-use a growing body of free-licensed source material to help you do it. But it can seem a little daunting to find the material that you both want and can legally use. Here’s a little bit of my strategy, a few tips, and some sources, including Jamendo, which I found to be the most useful for finding music. I also touch upon some useful free software tools for listening and sorting tracks.