| Strypey's Free Software Kitchen |
| First
a couple of brief glimpses at the future of hardware... ...why open architecture standards are so important: "Palladium is a big deal. It will require a major re-jiggering of how computers are built and run, with changes to hardware, software and even the data itself... The consequences of its deployment in the real world, however, will likely be decreased user control over the contents of their computers and a serious increase in Microsoft’s stranglehold on desktops." - David Weinberger, taken from "The Experiment Network" website "[Trusted Computing] provides a computing platform on which you can't tamper with the application software, and where these applications can communicate securely with their authors and with each other. The original motivation was digital rights management (DRM): Disney will be able to sell you DVDs that will decrypt and run on a TC platform, but which you won't be able to copy. The music industry will be able to sell you music downloads that you won't be able to swap. They will be able to sell you CDs that you'll only be able to play three times, or only on your birthday. All sorts of new marketing possibilities will open up." - Ross Anderson, taken from "Trusted Computing FAQ" ...and in the longer term why the debate over genetic engineering and freedom of information is so important: "One pound of DNA has the capacity to store more information than all the electronic computers ever built; and the computing power of a teardrop-sized DNA computer, using the DNA logic gates, will be more powerful than the world's most powerful supercomputer." - taken from 'How Stuff Works' website A brief summary of what free/ open source software (FOSS) means There are many ways of licensing computer programs (software) but from a programmers point of view all of them can be reduced to one of two kinds - proprietary and free. Proprietary means the code, the digital DNA that makes the application work, is the intellectual property of a person or (more often) a company or corporation and is kept secret. Free means the code is made publicly available so that the program can be altered to suit the needs of the user. There are many other issues which muddy the waters of the free vs. proprietary software debate, especially those of how programmers and software companies should make a living and whether programs should be marketable commodities at all but these are side-issues. Can you obtain the code and customize or debug it? If so it's open source and likely in the long run to work better because of all the talented people working on it for their own use. Are you guaranteed the same freedoms to use, modify and distribute the the program that were given to the person you are obtaining it from by the author(s) of the code? If so it's free software - free as in speech rather than free as in beer - although usually available somewhere (eg internet download) at no cost. The differences between these two major 'libre software' movements are trickier of course and part of an ongoing debate among the various development communities. Follow the links above to read more about them. Most computer users (for whom free software means a pirated copy of Windows) will at least have heard of Linux (which incorporates the GNU system designed by the Free Software Foundation), the most popular open source operating system - ie a potential threat to Microsoft just as clone PCs were to IBM. Hopefully in the next few years many of them will try installing it and find that it is as easy to install and use as Windows if not easier. 30/09/2005 Commercial Radio Making You Irate? In a wonderful bit of serendipity I stumbled across the homepage of one of the developers of IrateRadio, a radical new innovation in music downloads. Rather than using a direct peer-to-peer network IrateRadio downloads music from the websites of artists that have willingly made their songs available for free, especially those using appropriate Creative Commons licenses. It uses a nifty rating system which compares your responses with those of other users to automatically find and download music that suits your tastes. The client is still in the early stages of development but it already boasts an attractive an easy-to-use graphic interface. With the addition of the ability to sample partially downloaded tracks and to give the client some direct input on your musical preferences as well as more ability to manage downloaded files it has enormous potential in the war against corporate control of music. 30/03/2005 Web Page Making for Bloggers Although some may argue that personal homepages are being gradually rendered obselete by the blogging revolution I am a little old-fashioned and I've been making this here homepage you're reading using Mozilla Composer (or its Netscape distribution) for a couple of years. I was therefore thrilled to bursting to discover Nvu (short for NewView), a dedicated pagebuilding application based on the Composer code. Check out these reviews on thesitewizard.com. 30/03/2005 Playing With Your Source I have been looking at the progress of open source game development. Adam Geitguy is skeptical of the benefits of applying open development to gaming but game developer Shawn Hargreaves is a little more optimistic in his analysis of the limitations and potential benefits. The main point made by both is that games have a short shelf life and involve both engines and art. Potentially CreativeCommons licensed art components and free gaming engines like Allegro and the Saturation Engine could be combined by game developer groups like Sekoya to create open source games. Some good sites to check out are Open Source Gaming and the Underdogs game archive. Even the venerable Free Software Foundation do games! Probably the most exciting development I found was GameGarden, a site that hosts multiplayer online games using their own Java-based game development toolkit. 17/10/2004 The Return of the Prodigal Blog - Jabber The return of the first and only post I shifted into my now abandoned open solutions index. Jabber is an open source protocol for connecting instant messaging servers. Tonight I signed up for a Jabber account with an Australian Jabber server. It seems that you need to sign up for an account with each server you want to use. If so, this is kind of stupid - is there no way to have a distributed authentication system so client appications could be programmed to log into the nearest or lowest traffic server? So far I have tried two Jabber clients, Vista and TipicIM, which were both proprietary and both crap. Admittedly the PC I'm installing them on is running a fairly krufty install of Windows 98 SE, complete with shutdown bug, GoBack software and buggery-knows-what kind of hardware. I have dropped and installed Psi on a different system running Windows 2000 and it installed fine, although at that point I hadn't figured out how to sign up for an account ;) It seems to be the most recommended client so I think I will try that next. (Update: JAJC is the most reliable client for Windows of those I've tried so far.) The main thing holding Jabber back is the lack of support for voice and webcam services. I don't know if these are being planned for future releases of the protocol but if not separate protcols need to be written that can be incorporated into the Jabber clients, otherwise people will stick to MSN despite all that's crap about it. (Update: There are plans to incorporate VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) functionality into the Jabber standard. Still no word on cams though.) 29/04/04 A Dream Come True Thanks to an 8 hour layover at Auckland airport I happened to notice an ad for Hewlett-Packard that informed me that the computer animation company Dreamworks, makers of Shrek, are using Linux for most of their work and moving towards making it 100%. Finally, proof that Linux isn't just for webservers! If it is be used by one of the world's most successful companies involved in one of the most demanding uses you can put a computer to, what can't it be used for? 29/04/04 You Haff Bin... E-Raced For the geek who has everything, Eraser is a free software tool for completely obliterating any trace of MS software from your harddrive. 29/4/04 I Can See Clearly Now WMP Has Gone I needed some Windows software to test whether my Dad's DVD-ROM drive was working and presumed I would have to use the abominable bloatman known as Windows Media Player. After three failed attempts to drop the latest version using the reliably unreliable Windows Update, I gave up and in the spirit of pure optimism did a websearch for open source video player. Miraculously, in the time since I implored the universe to provide me with one (see below), at least four have appeared! "Ask and ye shall receive" indeed. Unfortunately the only one that's been ported to Windows is VLC, part of the VideoLAN project. The clunky graphic interface doesn't look very impressive but according to the site it's capable of streaming video (and audio of course) from disc or hard drive in dizzying variety of formats. This is very impressive but probably more power than you need for a simple desktop DVD player - I did notice it had a tendancy to crash when faced with the unexpected - like being asked to play a disc in D: when the DVD-ROM is actually E: But given clear instructions it played both audio CDs and DVDs just fine. The other three video-related projects I found are only usable on Linux-compatible desktops so far. First there is MythTV, a multi-featured video player and simple editing suite aimed at people with TV-Tuner cards in their PC. It looks like a great project with much potential but so far only source code 'tarballs' seem to be available. In a strange twist of fate RealNetworks, vendors of the super-proprietary and spyware-ridden shareware/ payware RealPlayer, seem to be supporting an open source multimedia project named Helix. Obviously Real were feeling threatened by the impending release of Ogg Theora and felt obliged to get themselves into the Linux game. Finally the developers of MPlayer have just released a new build of their player. FreeA*p Rides Again I finally managed to drop the latest version of Zinf which is the new name for the audio player formerly known as FreeAmp. They had to drop this name as apparently the common abbreviation "Amp" is now the trademarked property of PlayMedia Systems, Inc whose site was temporarily unavailable when I wrote this. Sheesh!. With all the audio features of WinAmp and RealPlayer put together (minus the spyware of course), all you need is Zinf and a DivX player and you can rid your computer of a whole bunch of inferior proprietary media software. All I need now is a fully open source video feature supporting Ogg Theora and the common movie file formats and I'll be in digital media heaven! Apparently there is talk of creating an Indymedia Player which would be awesome - I presume some of the Zinf source would be included. RSS Feeds the Magpies RDF Site Summary (RSS) is a way of placing news feeds on your website that constantly and automatically update from an online source. For instance the open-publishing newswires and features of many Indymedia sites are available as RSS feeds. MagpieRss is an application used to manage RSS feeds for your site. I am currently investigating whether my free hosting allows me to include RSS feeds in Strypey's House. Middle Management for Webservers As well as CMSimple, mentioned below, I have come across another few of content management applications. Xaraya and PHPNuke are both based on the PHP scripting language. TikiWiki is worth a look too. They are designed to allow a website administrator to set up an integrated system of forums, homepages, chat and other common internet services with one out-of-the-box server application. Who needs Yahoo? Another useful service commonly used for group communication is email discussion lists. A server application used to provide email lists is called a listserver. Two listserver packages are Sympa and Mailman, which is programmed in Python. Psi-ched Out Well I downloaded Psi as mentioned below and while it installed fine it was quite complicated to use. Clearly I need to do some reading about Jabber. Sounds Good to Me Looking for the Open Source Society of NZ I typed OSS into Google and found a website dealing with digital sound for Linux. Considering my interest in independent music I was quite thrilled to find such a repository of information specifically about open source sound software. Now I just need a similiar resource for video editing and 3D animation programs. Surveying the Vista I recently wanted to talk to a friend who uses Yahoo Messenger so I could do some webwork while I chatted to her (and saved megabucks on toll calls ;). What I wanted was an open source instant messaging (IM) client which could connect to all the major proprietary IM networks (AOL, MSN, ICQ, Yahoo etc). I couldn't find a stable build for Windblows so I ended up going for proprietary client called Vista. Similiar to Trillian, this supports the proprietary chat networks mentioned above as well as the time-homoured open chat protocol IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and the newer open IM protocol Jabber. There are a plethora of jabber clients, one called Exodus is even free software but it doesn't support any other protocols. I did find two projects based on the old Everybuddy source which aim to be as interoperable as the likes of Vista and Trillian.. However AYTTM (Are You Talking To Me) seems to be a straight repackaging of the (fairly unstable) existing source while the rewrite EB-lite is still very much a developers toy and must be compiled from source to be used. I Finally struck paydirt while updating this page by findng Psi. I'll drop and install it on some friends' boxes when I get to Hamilton and give it a thorough field testing. Stay tuned... Return of the GIMP I installed the GIMP off my recently burned CD onto my Dad's computer and associated all graphic file types with it. Then I found to my horror that none of the graphical files that now bore the GIMP logo would actually launch the GMP when double-clicked. Luckily a quick Google search (yes I'm a hypocrite but's it's just so damn good!) turned up a file called 'gimp-win-remote.exe' which when bunged into the 'bin' folder with the gimp.exe solved the problem. The program has a lot of good features but it doesn't seem very stably on this Windblows 98 box. I will try it with a few other Windblows boxes and see how it goes. Either way I can't wait for someone to take a stabilized build of the original Linux GIMP and put together some decent, reliable 'works-first-time-out-of-the-box' Windblows installers. DNS troubles affect Mozilla and Zinf Tried to get copies of Mozilla (Communicator-style internet suite) and Zinf (audio player with support for most file types as well as streaming) today to add to the CD Worik put GTK and the GIMP on for me (thanks again man). Both seem to have been affected by the DNS troubles that have been randomly striking different sites all day, including Cat.org.au which hosts Aotearoa Indymedia. I need to come up with a list of open source apps for Windblows that aren't on the OpenCD coz it's a bit of a waste of space having a whole CD with just the GIMP on it. Cygwin links XP to Linux Had a look at a friend Worik using Cygwin today (as mentioned below). He is running an XP box on a Linux server and using Cygwin to provide access to certain Unix tools within the Windows enviroment. Although Cygwin is not a full Linux emulator (just as WINE is not a full Windblows emulator) it offers a set of Linux APIs which run inside the Windlows GUI and most linux software can apparently be made to run on it with a bit of tweaking. GIMP Strikes Back! Had another crack at the GIMP tonight on another XP box (yuk again ;). This time I found a download page for GIMP-for-Windows and dropped GTK 1.3 and GIMP 1.2.4. Following the instructions on the page I installed GTK first, then GIMP and viola - the GIMP booted up and started its user configuration process. It still needs some polishing but given enough support from graphic artists who don't support software companies arresting programmers for demonstrating the flaws in their product it could really take off! The other thing it needs is more helpful online documentation and reliable Windblows installers that incorporate the necessary GTK libraries. No More 2 Hour Downloads! I finally got a copy of the Open CD burned for me. Now I can install the tools I use to maintain these pages on any Windblows system without having to wait eons for them to download first.The CD contains a selection of graphical appications for Windblows ranging from office suites to internet tools. I'm going to keep my eye out for other similiar utility kits of open source software so if you come across any please email me. Two other CD burnable ISOs I've been looking at are Knoppix and Dynebolic. These are both distributions of Linux that run straight off the CD without having to install them to a hard drive. They are excellent for giving people a chance to test drive linux before they try dual-booting it with their existing Windblows system. Easy To Update Webpages Today a friend showed me an excellent free 'content management' program. CMSimple works with the PHP on your webhost's server and allows you to update your webpages from any computer with internet access and a compatible browser. According to the homepage "WYSIWYG [graphical] editor supports IE on Win and newest version of Mozilla - both on Win and MacOS." The program is a 50KB script which you upload into your file area on your host. Your website is then stored as a single HTML page which you can edit every aspect of using your browser. Free software for Windblows As mentioned on my home page I have been teaching beginners how to make web pages. I have been showing them Mozilla and Filezilla (see Page Making) which I installed on a Windows XP (yuk!) box belonging to one of the families in the community. Tonight I tried to download and install the GIMP and Open Office for them from ftp sites. I had some teething problems and gave up on OO (maybe next time). I managed to download some Win32 executables of the GIMP but couldn't seem to get them to install and work. I also had a look at some other image-related free software. The other fascinating thing I stumbled on tonight was Cygwin, a Linux-like operating enviroment for Windblows. It supports other open source packages like VREng which looks damn cool and I am going to work on getting an implementation of VREng incorporated into Indymedia's communications infrastructure. Open Solutions Indices My original plan for this page was to create a categorised index of open source applications for home and non-profit users but there are a number of sites that maintain lists of usable open source software including this one on Wikipedia. Put 'alternatives to Microsoft' into a search engine (preferably a Nutch based one ;) or look up the Tucows download site for more information on obtaining FLOSS (Free Libre and Open Source Software) programs and other freeware (as in beer : gratis). Watch this Space? The new plan is to make this page a link-heavy feature (Indymedia style) assembling all the most easily understood writing about FLOSS into one resource. I am now adding these blog style summaries about open source into my new blog at 22blog.com. Other entries are still in the archives of the fairly defunct DIYWeb email list. Developers of note (in no particular order and purely for the sake of giving credit where it's due): The Jabber Foundation are the standards organisation for the XMPP (eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) based Jabber instant message system. The Mozilla Foundation arose from the ashes of Netcape Communicator 4.0 and their Gecko HTML engine - based on the Netcape source given to them by AOL who still base Netscape on Mozilla builds - is now used in a dizzying variety of open source browsers. Steve Gibson is a Windows freak who writes lots of Freeware in assembly language. Linus Torvalds is the creater and lead programmer of the Linux kernel. He is also a member of the team that created the Crusoe chip that threatens hardware giants Intel and AMD. Richard Stallman is the geek guru behind the Free Software Foundation which develops the GNU software tools which combined with the Linux kernel and bundled with other software become Linux 'distributions'. Eric Raymond is an outspoken (I consider this a good thing ;) advocate of open source principles and author of the seminal essays "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" on software development and "How to Be a Hacker".. The Xiph organisation was founded to create a suite of open multi-media file formats, including the MP3-like Ogg Vorbis audio codec and the Ogg Theora video codec. William Blaze is a digital artist and lead programmer on the Saturation Engine. Shawn Hargreaves is a developer on the Allegro free gaming engine and author the article 'Playing the Open Source Game'. |
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| Created: 30/04/2004 Last Updated: 30/09/2005 |
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