The Bizarre Cathedral - 84
Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral.
Pay Per Patch: A Free Software Market Model
Free software can be viewed as sort of a public good — everyone can benefit from it. Instead of paying for complete applications, buyers may wish to only pay for specific program elements they want, which the software lacks. Therein lies an opportunity to make money on free software, instead of around it.
Motorola Backflip root: simple, step-by-step instructions
Last night, I spent about 3 hours finally gaining "root" for my Motorola Backflip (starting from midnight...). As far as I am concerned, last night my Backflip wasn't actually mine. Now, it is. I can finally run programs that require root access, and -- more importantly -- do tethering.
Basecamp alternatives
Basecamp alternatives
When 37Signals created Basecamp, they filled a huge void in the project management market: the world was full of people who needed to actually manage projects and communicate, rather than learning the black magic of project management and its complex terminology. Free alternatives to Basecamp took a long time to develop: ActiveCollab was released around 2006, a good 2 years after Basecamp. Right now, the most established free alternatives are Project Pier and FengOffice. There are tons of non-free alternatives to Basecamp out there. They are all page-reload applications that mimic Basecamp's interface quite closely. Amongst the non-free ones, there is one I'd like to see as free software: Apollo. More about Apollo later.
The Bizarre Cathedral - 83
Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral.
Saving Identica and StatusNet?
There is a significant spam problem on Identi.ca, and it looks like some fresh ideas are needed to crush it. Here are mine, and a few ideas that I like from other people.
Identi.ca is the open microblogging site based on the StatusNet software. It's a fantastic service, with features that leave Twitter in the dust. But spammers are not being caught and banned quickly. Users are becoming frustrated.
OpenOffice.org is Dead, Long Live LibreOffice -- or, The Freedom to Fork
One of the most controversial freedoms of free software is the right to simply take the code and go make your own competing project -- what is popularly called a "fork". It's controversial because it seems like a betrayal of the original developer; because it distributes resources into competing groups, which may waste effort; and because it may create confusion in the marketplace of ideas that is free software distribution. But it is a critical freedom to have, and the recent fork of LibreOffice from OpenOffice.org, like the fork of X.org from Xfree86 years ago, shows why it's so important.
Free Software News like never before: 24 September 2010 to 4 October 2010
Seabird is a new phone concept. Its main aim is to show you how a really cool video about a really amazing device that doesn't exist yet can be used to talk about a very amazing browser, Firefox Mobile for Android, that doesn't exist yet. What's left to be seen, is whether you exist.
Copying Debian package selections to a new machine
Most of us will install our GNU/Linux system once or twice and then use the excellent package management systems to upgrade when new releases of our chosen distribution come out. Users of Debian and Debian-based systems (such as Ubuntu) will be quite used to the idea that you only need to install it once. But what happens when you want to replicate one Debian system on another machine? Do you use cloning tools? Yes you can but only if the hardware is similar on the two machines. What if one has an Intel Pentium-based processor and the other has an AMD64? In that case what you need is some way to replicate the package selection but use the appropriate ones for the new architecture. Enter dpkg.
The Bizarre Cathedral - 82
Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral.
Marketing Bug: How Do I Contact You?
I don't know how many times I've run into this particular mistake, but free software developers keep making it, so I think it's worth a brief post. Free software is based on contact between users and developers. Without that, it's just not very efficient, and any free software project that breaks that bond is going to flounder for the same reasons that so many proprietary products flounder -- total disconnect with the users.
Some tips for troubleshooting packages on your system or Ouch! the Pain!
When something is working, it seems to make sense to you. For example, we all know that a car burns gas, and uses the energy to run a motor that turns the wheels to make it go. Gas--> motor--> wheels--> Go! It seems simple. The same is true of an operating system. You turn it on, it boots up, some text goes across the screen, then the windows pop up and you're ready to go. Boot--> text--> windows--> Go! Its easy, until something breaks. You never really understand how complicated something is until it breaks.
Choosing and Using Free Licenses for Software, Hardware, and Aesthetic works
What is this "Free Culture" thing? What is "Free Software"? And how do I get my work out there? If you're looking to participate in the "Commons", you'll need to get comfortable with the idea of free, public licenses and how to use them for your works. This won't be hard at all, especially with this short guide, but there are different traditions that have sprung up around different kinds of works.
Free Software News like never before: 17 September 2010 to 23 September 2010
Seabird is a new phone concept. Its main aim is to show you how a really cool video about a really amazing device that doesn't exist yet can be used to talk about a very amazing browser, Firefox Mobile for Android, that doesn't exist yet. What's left to be seen, is whether you exist.
Microsoft's Live spaces bloggers will become Wordpress Apparently, the import procedure might consist in a few people working overtime for one day at the most, to move the few dozens users over from Live Spaces to Wordpress.
Mozilla Thunderbird, IMAP and Gmail--backup, embrace and extend
Ryan Cartwright has written an article on how to backup Gmail with Getmail. It is an excellent piece, but Getmail is a command line program, and while most readers of FSM will doubtless be at home there and in configuring XML files, we also like to behave like electric currents and take the course of least resistance to get from A to B. Besides, using the Thunderbird (or Evolution) e-mail clients to backup Gmail has other advantages too. Let me explain.
The Bizarre Cathedral - 81
Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral.
How do you find and choose free software?
So you've got your GNU/Linux based box. You've installed the base system and you're good to go. Welcome to the world of freedom. But then what? How do you determine what packages to install. How do you decide which of the alternatives to go with?
Free Software News 9 September 2010 to 16 september 2010
The free software news review for people who just don't have time not to laugh.
You can unsubscribe from this at any time, by replying "Mercy on me". Or, you could send me a good RSS source of news to make fun o^H^H^H^H^Hreport.
Magento is now officially available in their Magento mobile version. Magento is very powerful, but it's also the best way to turn a server into an overloaded, underpaid slave if you are not careful with the specs. Their mobile version is reported to respect your PDA's worker rights. In the meantime, for the sleepless, learn how to manage orders using Magento.
Project Management: Apollo, Fengoffice, Projectpier, Basecamp... and the world changed
We are all accustomed to the concept of TODO lists. You might have a shopping list in your pocket right now, or a piece of paper in the shed with a list of things that need to be done around the garden. Or when you go to work in the morning, you might have a morning meeting where your team decides who does what. Or, like some, you might consider every email you receive as a TODO item.
Life -- personal life and working life -- seems to be an immense, endless TODO list. Or, worse, two or three or four TODO lists, probably racing into your head.
The Internet gave us Facebook, the biggest time waster since the invention of the television. Can the Internet also provide us with tricks to manage time properly, rather than wasting it?
Welcome to the world of project management software, a world started by the guys at Basecamp (proprietary) and then continued by free software projects like Fengoffice and then revolutionised by Apollo.
Reflections on a page design: my, how the web has changed...
It's been a long time since I really designed a webpage, and the web -- or rather users' expectations of the web -- has changed a lot. "Craft" web pages constructed largely for fun by individual users, designed from the ground-up in simple HTML, went out sometime in the 1990s. In the early 2000s, the web was all about "content management systems." Later, specific forms of content like forums, wikis, and blogs began to take over.
Try ZenOSS, free monitoring software
Have you tried ZenOSS server monitoring yet? It's free software; we have also published a book on ZenOSS in this very magazine!
Today, even blogs are too content dense for most viewers, and "microblogging" and "social networking" are the new buzzwords. Static images were replaced by kitschy animation and then by full-motion video as most of the viewers are not only using fast machines that can handle the rendering, but are also connected to the server by "pipes" that would've shamed a university computer center back in the 1980s.
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