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Basics of mapping with KML

Two of the most useful free (as in beer) software applications from Google are Google Earth, which runs on your computer, and Google Maps, which runs as a Web service. You can use both Google Earth and Google Maps to plot your own points, lines or shapes on an interactive map. You can also annotate these things with informative details. Unfortunately, the user interfaces provided by Google for doing this kind of DIY mapping are... well, clunky. They're slow, especially if you have a lot of items to add to a map.

DRM books need to disappear. NOW. (Or, my horrific experience with www.kalahari.com)

DRM turned a 10 minute purchase into a 2 and a half nightmare (and counting). I wanted to buy a book: I ended up in a journey which made it dead clear that in a sane world, there is absolutely no space for DRM-protected contents. The only real warning I have about this article is that it may make you feel sick.

File Thingie: A No-Nonsense Web-Based File Manager

File Thingie is not the sleekest or feature-richest web-based file manager out there, but it's a perfect fit for those who need a no-frills solution that is easy to deploy and use. This is not to say that File Thingie skimps on features. All the essential functionality is there, including the ability to upload multiple files in one go, support for users and groups, file access control based on black and white lists, and more.

How to Purge Memory in Google's Chromium browser

Since its launch, Google's Chromium browser has proved to be immensely popular. Chromium introduced many new and innovative features but it also brought along with it a familiar problem. Memory hogging. However, as Google released subsequent versions they addressed it. This short article will show you how to gain some traction over Chromium when, after prolonged browsing, it starts to seriously hog that resource.

You don't need to be a web browser developer or a coder. All you need is Chromium's built-in Task Manager and a command line switch.

Gnome-Shell 3.2: Usable--but only with Gnome 2 shell extensions

If you hated Ubuntu's Unity desktop then the shock of your first encounter with the Gnome-shell likely caused your entire digital weltanschauung to implode. Make no mistake about it, it takes you right out of your comfort zone to a strange and unfamiliar place even if you've already tried Unity and decided to throw it back or put it in the keep net. Be shocked, very shocked.

How and How NOT to Re-License your Work for Free Culture

The last week has been terrific for "Lunatics". We've cleared the licenses on almost all of the music -- and certainly the most important pieces. However, for a moment, I want to focus on the little problem with the one minute of music we probably won't get to use, and the right and wrong way to relicense your art if you are ever in that situation.

Lib-Ray Video Project Now on Kickstarter -- Let's Make it Happen!

Today is the Free Software Foundation's "Day Against DRM" and it seems like an auspicious time to launch a Kickstarter campaign to support the completion of the Lib-Ray standard for publishing high-definition videos on fixed media. I've been posting my progress on the prototypes here in Free Software Magazine, and it's clear to me that this is now just a matter of being able to dedicate the time and resources to finish the job.

A MediaWiki workflow for screenplay development using Labeled Section Transclusion

We use a common extension for MediaWiki for managing our script-development process on "Lunatics". It works quite well, and it might not be obvious, so I thought I'd explain it here. The idea is to make it possible for the writer to work on the script in a single page while allowing the director to add shooting notes, storyboards, and other material to each scene -- and to keep everything synchronized so that we don't have two versions of the script.

Nagios Vs. Icinga: the real story of one of the most heated forks in free software

In March 14, 1999 Ethan Galstad released the first version of Nagios. Then, nearly exactly 10 years later (May 2009), Icinga (a fork of Nagios) was born. What happened there? Why a fork? In this article, I will shed some light about what made the Icinga developers decide to fork (although they still send patches to Nagios). In this article, I will talk to both Ethan Galstad himself, and Michael Lübben (one of the founding Icinga team members and Nagios addon developer). I will quote Michael and Ethan in the article. You get to read their points of view here.

Lib-Ray Video Standard: Assembling the Matroska MKV container file with mkvtoolnix-gtk

In my previous installments, I described the success I've been having with compressing "Sita Sings the Blues" with the VP8 video codec, and at the end I had a video file. Then I converted the audio to get a FLAC copy of the soundtrack (opting to retain this rather than compress into Vorbis format). Now in this installment, I'll show how I used mkvtoolnix-gtk to build a complete MKV file with VP8 video, FLAC audio, and named chapters. The result is the complete "main feature" multimedia file that will form the core of the Lib-Ray prototype.

Lib-Ray Video Standard: FLAC and Vorbis codecs for Sound

In my previous column, I described the success I've had with using VP8 for compressing the video for the Lib-Ray main feature multimedia file. At the end of that process, though, I still have a silent film. We also need to get the audio, and make a decision about the format. WebM calls for Vorbis sound, which probably makes sense for internet downloads, but this is where we part ways -- for my application, bit-perfect audio with FLAC seems to make more sense, at least for the main audio tracks (Vorbis is still in the picture for things like commentaries).

Oracle and the slippery bars of soap called Java and MySql

News about the lawsuit between Oracle (which owns Java) and Google (which uses aspects of Java in Android) are resonating far and loud at the moment. At this point in the article, I should summarise the story: the trouble is that a summary at this point is impossible. The main problem is with Oracle, and their inability to understand free software.

Programming effective reminders in GNU/Linux

There are some nice sticky-note applications for Linux, and they're good places to write down reminders, like Ring Fred or Pick up a litre of milk.

Unfortunately, sticky-notes are no help to me at all. I'm often forgetful, and I'm more than likely to shut down my computer without checking to see if I've written a note to myself. To get around this problem, I wrote a couple of very simple scripts, each launched by an icon on my Xfce panel.

Lib-Ray Video Standard: Using Google/On2's VP8 Video Codec

When I started working on a no-DRM, open-standards-based solution for distributing high-definition video on fixed media ("Lib-Ray"), I naturally thought of Theora, because it was developed as a free software project. Several people have suggested, though, that the VP8 codec would be a better fit for my application. This month, I've finally gotten the necessary vpxtools and mkvtoolnix packages installed on my Debian system, and so I'm having a first-look at VP8. The results are very promising, though the tools are somewhat finicky.

Find duplicates and originals in a spreadsheet using the Unix command line

Sometimes, you need to find and group together the replicated records in a spreadsheet. There are several different ways to identify duplicated records (see this tutorial for a good one), but what I wanted was something a bit more fancy. I wanted not just the duplicates, but each original record as well. Furthermore, I wanted any replicates (original + duplicates) grouped together in neat little sets in the spreadsheet.

Here is how I did it using the Unix command line.

Tethered Shooting with Entangle

Tethering your DSLR camera to a computer opens a whole new world of possibilities: you can instantly view your shots on a large screen, trigger your camera remotely, practice the art of time-lapse photography, and perform other clever tricks. While commercial tethering software for Windows and Mac OS X often costs serious money, you can enjoy all the advantages of tethered shooting on Linux free of charge courtesy of Entangle. This tethering software lets you control practically all camera settings, trigger the shutter from the computer, view a live preview of a scene, and automatically download captured images to the computer.

Measures on the command line

In an earlier article I promised to demonstrate more 'magic words' for the command line. All you do is open a terminal, enter the magic word, hit Enter – and cool things happen! The magic word this time is units. The GNU Units program isn't installed by default in most Linux distributions, so you'll probably need to install it from your distribution's repository. Also, until you get to know GNU Units, I recommend that you enter units -v (v for verbose) on the command line. This makes the output a little more easy to understand.

The GNU Units program converts quantities from one unit system to another.

Debian/Ubuntu: Making a Package Repository on Your LAN

This is one of those things that doesn't get explained much, because it's almost too simple to document: it's often useful to keep a few Debian package files (.deb files, used in Debian, Ubuntu, and Linux distributions derived from them) available for installation, either on your local host or on other computers on the same local-area network (LAN). You can make these available as an extra "repository" for your APT system, so that APT-based package tools (apt-get, Aptitude, Synaptic, etc) can access them. This makes managing these special packages just like your other packages, which can solve a lot of problems.

Easy File Sync with Bitpocket

Need to keep files and documents in sync across multiple Linux machines? Bitpocket provides a no-nonsense solution to the problem. This tiny shell script uses the excellent rsync software to perform the syncing jiggery-pockery. This means that you can have one machine acting as the "main repository", and then have several "client" machines which will be able to sync with it. (This obviously means that all client machines will have the same files). Here is how you configure it.

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Interview with Dave Mohyla, of DTIDATA

Dave Mohyla is the president and founder of dtidata.com, a hard drive recovery facility based in Tampa, Florida.

TM: Where are you based? What does your company do?
DTI Data recovery is based in South Pasadena, Florida which is a suburb of Tampa. We have been here for over 10 years. We operate a bio-metrically secured class 100 clean room where we perform hard drive recovery on all types of hard disks, from laptop hard drives to multi drive RAID systems.

Anybody up to writing good directory software?

Since the very beginning, directories (of any kind) have had a very central role in the internet. (I have recently grown fond of Free Web Directory. Even Slashdot can be considered a directory: a collection of great news and invaluable user-generated comments. As far as software is concerned, doing a quick search on Google about software directories will return the free (as in freedom) software directories like Savannah, SourceForge, Freshmeat and so on, followed by shareware and freeware sites such as FileBuzz, PCWin Download Center and All Freeware (great if you're looking for shareware and freeware, but definitely less comprehensive than their free-as-in-freedom counterparts).

Interview with Mark Shuttleworth

Mark Shuttleworth is the founder of Thawte, the first Certification Authority to sell public SSL certificates. After selling Thawte to Verisign, Mark moved on to training as an astronaut in Russia and visiting space. Once he got back he founded Ubuntu, the leading GNU/Linux distribution. He agreed on releasing a quick interview to Free Software Magazine.

Is better education the key to finding better software?

I read David Jonathon's article Anybody Up To Writing Good Directory Software? the other day, which got me thinking about software directories in general. As David mentioned, many of the software directories one finds when doing a quick google search are free as in beer, not as in freedom. But what interests me is the software directories that already exist, providing a combination of both free as in beer software, and open source software. Sites such as Freeware Downloads and Shareware Download don't advertise themselves as providing free as in liberty software, but each of them have a good selection of open source software available... if you know where to look.

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Free Open Document label templates

If you’ve ever spent hours at work doing mailings, cursed your printer for printing outside the lines on your labels, or moaned “There has got to be a better way to do this,” here’s the solution you’ve been looking for. Working smarter, not harder! Worldlabel.com, a manufacture of labels offers Open Office / Libre Office labels templates for downloading in ODF format which will save you time, effort, and (if you want) make really cool-looking labels

Creating a user-centric site in Drupal

A little while ago, while talking in the #drupal mailing list, I showed my latest creation to one of the core developers there. His reaction was "Wow, I am always surprised what people use Drupal for". His surprise is somehow justified: I did create a site for a bunch of entertainers in Perth, a company set to use Drupal to take over the world with Entertainers.Biz.

Update: since writing this article, I have updated the system so that the whole booking process happens online. I will update the article accordingly!

So, why, why do people and companies develop free software?

More and more people are discovering free software. Many people only do so after weeks, or even months, of using it. I wonder, for example, how many Firefox users actually know how free Firefox really is—many of them realise that you can get it for free, but find it hard to believe that anybody can modify it and even redistribute it legally.

When the discovery is made, the first instinct is to ask: why do they do it? Programming is hard work. Even though most (if not all) programmers are driven by their higher-than-normal IQs and their amazing passion for solving problems, it’s still hard to understand why so many of them would donate so much of their time to creating something that they can’t really show off to anybody but their colleagues or geek friends.

Sure, anybody can buy laptops, and just program. No need to get a full-on lab or spend thousands of dollars in equipment. But... is that the full story?

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