Bell proposes end to ‘unlimited internet’

If there’s one that I hate about Canada is how some companies there try to take advantage of the regulatory environment and the nation’s social net. They believe this net applies to large corporations, but in reality, these should only be considered under the gravest conditions, as they should be self-sufficient. After all they’re private businesses and are not public. The technique usually involves a sappy story about not being able to stay afloat, because of current economic conditions, and how it’s necessary to give leeway. Sacrifices may come in the way of wage cuts, benefits, and/or demand public financial support, and as will be outlined below, also come as a costly –to the customer– billing system.

BSD Needs Spiced up Atmosphere-bsdtalk

I’m not sure why I can’t post comments to bsdtalk. Maybe it’s because I’m not signed up with the hosting service or because it doesn’t support Firefox. I can’t remember as I quit trying sometime ago. Anyways … seeing that I can’t post, I thought I’d post a comment on my own blog.

Note to Will Backman, bsdtalk Host
I like your podcasts but it’s starting to seem to me that the shows always have the same general theme, people sitting around talking about why BSD (and sometimes OSS in general) is so great –amounting to “feel good” interviews.

In episode number 139 you ask what “we” can do to improve BSD bookshelf visibility. I think generating interest might attract public attention and translate in hard book visibility. So, why not diversify and talk about threats to BSD development (whether they be internal/external, from proprietary competing OSS sources, and conflict (such as political/power struggles, or personality conflicts). Each postcast need not be entirely controversial as potential solutions to problems could also be pondered.

Here’s an idea I’ve thrown your way before. When are you ever going to cover comments by C. Hannum stating that”NetBSD is Dead”. See: <http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-users/2006/08/30/0016.html>.

Collanos Standalone Phone dead, & “Expropriated” into Workplace

Feb 14, 09 UPDATE: Peter Helfenstein has confirmed that a stand alone is in production. Read the comments section for details.

What irks me about big business is how they sometimes take GPL software, sometimes created by non-profit communities (let’s call it community software), and incorporate it into their product without regard for where the software originated and that community’s sensibilities and social contract.

This is what I feel has happened with the Collanos Phone, a product that I once believed to be a viable GPL replacement for Skype (I even recommended it to others) and the successor to WengoPhone. In fact, I think Collanos Phone was based on much of the same code as was WengoPhone, although the Collanos forum¹¹¹¹¹¹ is vague about the exact providence stating, “Collanos Phone is based on many pre-existing open-source components and governed under the General Public License (GPL)”. True, Wengo might not qualify as a “software community” but I understand the code upon which WengoPhone was based was and continues to be community driven (ie., the libgaim library from Pidgin, previously known as Gaim).

If you haven’t clued in yet, Collanos has effectively cancelled the stand alone Collanos Phone. The download page now only mentions, “Collanos Workplace … now includes Collanos Phone”. The first of this that should have sounded bells off is a Dec. 16, 08 email I received from Peter Helfenstein and Franco Dal Molin mentioning the extension of Workplace’s capability to that of video and audio based telephony. It didn’t mention the killing off of the softphone project, but that’s public relations for you. You can “read into” this change-over on Helfenstein’s blog entry from January 28, 09 entitled “Team – It’s Time to Talk²²²²²²“.

EndNote creator sues Zotero creator

Actually, it’s Thomson Ruerters (creators of EndNote) that is suing George Mason University (Virginia), which funds Zotero, They are suing for 10 million annually. As I understand it, there are two aspects to this. One, is that Zotero allows accessing EndNote’s proprietary format. Two, Thomson alleges that Zotero reverse engineered the proprietary format through decompiling EndNote.

I think icebergradio.com sucks!

IcebergRadio’s OS X support is terrible!

They are resistant to having their service heard on the widest possible range of platforms. This is
ridiculous. It’s like a tv station wanting to be solely watched on Sony television sets, and assuring it stay that way. You’d be out of luck if you had a Toshiba or any other brand tv!! The music was great, but their disregard for maximum interoperability is atrocious, meaning they’ve consistently shown they do not care about having their music heard by Mac users. I don’t have memories of getting it to work on Gnu-Linux, either.

Peter Grabriel a la Motown

And now something on music and technology.

Doghouse Riley has rendered a Motown version of Peter Gabriel’s “Shock the Monkey”, which placed third in a “re-mix technology/music” competition –hosted by www.realworldremixed.com. Comments from the site suggest that it sounds very B-52ish. I disagree. The organ-work, and brass section all sound like something Ray Charles might incorporate. The song also contains a bass line that makes for a marked dance groove, dated albeit.

Debian GNU/Minix

Finally someone has seen the light and started a project that I called for in a previous article. This melding of the Minix kernel with the GNU userland is called Preventa, and seems to poke fun at the name Nexenta –a similar project using the Solaris kernel– all in good fun I’m sure, considering that the project leader’s blog is called “La Salle Debain” (a play on “Debian” and the French for “bathroom”).

Linux has New MultiMediaCard Support

Liquidat reports, “Pierre Ossman, the MultiMediaCard (MMC) subsystem maintainer, announced the new related patches for the Linux kernel almost two weeks ago. He described the patchset as “probably … one of the biggest ones for the MMC layer so far” and highlighted the SDIO and SPI support as the major improvements.“

Sure, it sounds great but how long before a renovation wreaks havoc on users? I recall an issue where implementation of USB scanners caused such confusion because on my beloved Debian that scanners could only be accessed as “su”, and doing that invoked warnings. This occurred because people on the kernel side of things decided to change the infrastructure. And you know what? Nobody seemed to know what was happening, except the good old folks that were doing the renovating, and their documentation was useless –at least to the non-developer Gnu-Linux user sort. Yes, I read the documentation, and it was cryptic, decentralised, and seemed incomplete and contradictory.

Windows, a Victimized Hip Culture

In the years of his PC computer use, my younger brother got caught up with the “build your own custom computer, install pirated Windows and save money” movement. While I, at the time, recommended he buy a mac, he was told they were over-rated and expensive, thanks to his Windows karate friend named Jeremy who always thought he knew better. (If I recall, you could get an 400MHz G3 IBM processor in a second generation iMac, while Intel made lowly 200MHz processors on which Windows ran.)

Well, the “build your own computer mindset” lead to stability problems, presumably due to a lack of hardware support in the way of frequent system crashes that didn’t let up until Windows XP, which –by that point in time– ran slow on my brother’s ageing machine. Adding to his continuous stream of problems, lately, he has all sorts of trouble with his Windows installed laptop. He associates his Hotmail problems (he has problems receiving emails) to the fact that he runs a pirated copy of Windows. Because of this, he can’t update his system, either. So, his OS is a security powder keg waiting to happen. Not too impressive considering that he does intelligence gathering on the middle east for a think-tank on this setup.

Show Stoppers, OS X vs. BSD & Gnu-Linux

I hate how Free OS critics attempt to undermine projects by mentioning that little things here and there don’t work or configure easily on BSDs or Gnu-Linux distros as they do on Windows or OS X (yes, I know what it’s based on). They list them as “show stoppers” as in they stop users from taking up these other OSes. In response, I’ve compiled a small list of OS X failures. Keep in mind, this is not comprehensive at all, but just to make a point.

Composer, a Potential .html Based Word Processor

ATTN: An edited version of this article was published by FSM (Free Software Magazine), in issue #22, at FSM.

Rosalyn Hunter writes about Composer and the fact that she uses Composer as a stand-in word processor. I too, have used Composer as a replacement word processor. As I as of late work on OS X and because Abiword is available for OS X, I’ve tried it –but it’s OS X port leaves a lot to be desired. For instance, it has serious viewing issues –in the way of displaying illegible fonts.

I like Composer for various reasons. I’m quite familiar with it, as in the past I’ve used it for website authoring. It creates HTML (.html) –a markup language– files. I’ve come to the conclusion, “.html is not a bad “language” to use for a word processor”, considering that it already allows for basic editing, and then some, features.

Composer Features
Here are the reasons for why Composer (as a word processor) makes a decent stand-in. Keep in mind that these features are not revolutionary, but the point is that one need not resort to an overblown word processor to get these features, that Composer really can be used as temporary replacement word processor and even that it makes a good basis for a word editor –due to these features.

Basic Features

• supports basic formatting (indenting, paragraphs, bulleting, etc)
• supports various fonts
• supports tables
• supports images
• has a spell checker (dictionary)
• embedding hyper-links is easy

Universality of HTML

• supports multiple character encodings, the near universal UTF-8 and my past favorite ISO-8859-3 for southern European languages. It even allows for a quick and simple conversion from one to another.
• .html is a markup language that’s humanly understandable, if you want to read it. For the tech inclined, it even allows for low level hacking under the source tab. Don’t try to read any word processor’s file format after opening it up in a text editor.
• supports ftp transferring, allowing the saving of documents to ftp servers
• created documents can be easily integrated into .html based emails, just copy and paste
• Lastly and perhaps most importantly, .html files can be viewed by any browser on any operating system (provided an Internet browser is accessible). Imagine putting a stop to friends and colleagues saying, “I can’t open that file. Can you buy (the latest) Word?”

To elaborate on the economical size of .html files … as with Scribus, Composer does not save images “within” the .html files it produces. This allows for a small sized documents. File size gains can be further leveraged by placing images –meant to be viewed in documents– on-line on ftp servers and have the document link to them via Internet for viewing. Pathways from .html documents to images need to remain constant, though. Otherwise, images will not be found to be where expected and consequently not shown.

Reasons Why Composer is Not Ordinarily Used as a Word Processor
So why hasn’t Composer been extended into a word processor? I’m not sure … maybe it’s because Microsoft Word won the most mind share. Also, OpenOffice and even Abiword are rather well established. There is also NeOffice for OS X, a Java based porting of OpenOffice to OS X. In the end, I usually find these slow, huge file downloads, and buggy. Word start quickly (on Windows anyway), but I recall that the trick to this is that Microsoft keeps Word in ram at all times. This is not to say that Composer doesn’t have it’s own issues, but given the slow start-up times, and overall sluggishness and memory use of the established apps, why use not use Composer. On the other hand, a Composer shortcoming is that it misses layout capability. It’s difficult to see what is going to hard-print beforehand. Another short-coming is that it prints a pathway header, which is undesirable and unsightly. A work around is to print it from Shiira 2.0 b2 which doesn’t insert the header. The selecting of paper size and wysiwyg implementation would be all that is needed to make Composer a respectable basic word processor.

There is another reason that no one has taken up in this .html processor idea. There already is a markup based writer’s program and its been around for decades, although accompanied with a steep learning curve. It’s called LaTeX. It provides professional quality usage and results. Unfortunately, it’s limited to academia and has never won avid support among laymen. It’s also a nuisance to install, with numerous and sizable files coming from various sources with various licenses. For instance, to get a working install, you must have a front-end, but front-ends do not provide the plethora of back-ends needed for a simple run of the mill install. Another problem again is interoperability; Common programs, such as Internet browsers, do not display LaTeX files. On the other hand, I don’t think .html renders mathematical equations, as does LaTeX. But then again, most of us don’t need to display them. There are some “work arounds” for installing LaTeX on OS X. For instance there are two installers, MacTex and i-Installer, freeing you from manually installing multiple files, whose functionality is not always clear.

The fact that this article juxtaposes two opposing approaches does not escape me. Word processors format words, while LaTeX is a document processor (or are said to be document orientated). Early on, word processors differentiated themselves from text editors in that they added styling to ordinary alpha-numericals. LaTeX differs in that it deals with wysiwyg, equations, and frees the writer from formatting. Both previsouly said, concepts are not lost on me, rather an application such as Composer allows for both approaches. That is, Composer easily allows text processing, the stylisation of individual or groups of words, while CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) could allow for a document orientated take. That is, CSS could work as templates, thus freeing the writer from formatting and to simply write, perhaps implementing the template afterwards or synchronously (”as you go”) by simply plugging words into the template. As for the typical critique of .html presentation inconsistency, CSS increases uniformity. Add the cross platform universality of .html and the fact that produced files are viewable in any browser (even curses based ones), and you have a powerful writing tool. As should be obvious by now, Composer needs development to make it a word/document processor envisioned herein.

Scribus, an XML Markup Page Layout Attempt
There is a Libre program that offers the layout elements missing from Composer. It’s a page layout program called Scribus, and an OS X port is available (Scribus/Aqua). It’s fairly easy to install, just a few dependencies in addition to the Scribus program. The learning curve is not steep, just different from word processors. Last I checked, the OS X port was a little rough around the edges (slow, and key-bindings don’t always hook, so use the menus) but it’s workable (with occasional crashes). The port is sure to stabilise in the future as work progresses and a native Intel port is eventually released. Even so, the problems are OS X specific (it flies on Gnu-Linux, though). It produces its own XML based .sla file format, without self-contained images contained (keep image pathways constant). As you might already have deduced, .sla documents are not viewable with most other programs, but Scribus can convert to universal .pdf and .eps files (among others) with great resolution (what are undoubtedly larger than .html files). Setting aside file size issues, I still prefer the .html approach because it’s easier to edit .html files than it is to edit .pdf or .eps files. Afaik, you can’t render images remotely with .sla as you can with .html, either.

Other .html Word Processor Attempts
There are/have been a few attempts at a .html word processor, although not with Composer. FLWriter fits the bill, EZ editor does as well (it also does equations), and GWP (GNOME Word Processor) may have had similar aspirations (hard to tell as their site is really slow, check GNOME for source). Afaik, only FLWriter is currently under development, and in alpha stage. Thus, Composer –being that it is mature– would seem to be the natural candidate onto which add page layout capability –to create a useful word/document processor– for a dual purpose word and document orientated processor. Most of it is already written.

Maurice Cepeda

This is licensed under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons License. All brands mentioned are properties of their respective owners. By reading this article, the reader forgoes any accountability of the writer. The reading of this article implies acceptance of the above stipulations. The author requires attribution –by full name and URL– and notification of republications.

EZ Editor
http://www.hps.com/~tpg/toolbox/auis.php
http://www.hps.com/~tpg/toolbox/auis/
http://www.hps.com/~tpg/toolbox/auis/ez-wp/
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/atk-ftp/web/andrew-home.html

GWP (previously XWord)
http://www.hungry.com/old-hungry/products/gwp/

Scribus/Aqua
http://www.scribus.net/index.php?name=Sections&req=viewarticle&artid=3

SeaMonkey (contains Composer)
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/seamonkey/

FLWriter
http://www.whoow.org/people/Jean-Marc.Lienher/xd640.html

On LaTeX:
LaTex OS X Installers
http://ii2.sourceforge.net/
http://tug.org/mactex/

LaTeX Orientation
http://www.physics.brown.edu/physics/userpages/students/Michael_Abbott/stuff05/mctex.htm
http://www.tug.org/mactex/fonts/fonttutorial-current.html
http://latex.yauh.de/index_en.html

LaTeX Front-ends
http://www.uoregon.edu/%7Ekoch/texshop/texshop.html
http://www.xm1math.net/texmaker/download.html

Other LaTeX Info or Implementations
http://wiki.lyx.org/Mac/Mac#toc1

Edubuntu to the Rescue of Underfunded Chilean Schools!

Okay, reading a couple of articles –that mention the implementation of Gnu-Linux as a low cost saviour to an underfunded school with low processing powered computers within Chile’s under funded school system– really sets me off into a barrel of laughs.

Everything You Wanted to Know About Firefox, and More

Well, someone decided to write down all the reasons to use the Firefox browser. It’s a great read, if not too extensive for the layman. Or, just try the browser, and then come back to the article and “spot” read it. I’m actually of going back to a minimalist desktop when I install Gnu-linux or BSD again. Why use a processing hog desktop when there’s SeaMonkey and when Firefox is so extensible? Just use a WM and you’re done. Now if I could decide on a WM …

To be honest. I hate looking to icons/aliases to double click them. My brain doesn’t seem to think that way. When I want to start a program, I usually think of its name. And when I think of it, I can write it’s name into term to evoke it. Simple as pie. Wow, how innovative is a paradigm where writing the name of the program you want to start into an input shell gets output! I even taught my mom how to do this. “Input/output”, “garbage in/garbage out”. Remember computer theory? This is what we were all taught in elementary computer classes. Please! All this desktop analogy seems like nonsense to me and an excuse to sell faster and expensive video cards. I mean why do people need the latest and greatest video card? On what activity do most people spend their time using their computers? Writing emails, essays, looking at the odd photo? Do they need a lot of processing poser for this?

Hurd & the Minix 3 Microkernel

I assume there are others that are disappointed in the fact that Hurd drives forward at a snail’s pace. What? It’s been out for over a decade and it still doesn’t function as a server or a desktop?

Just to recap the most basic features of Hurd …

Gnu/Hurd is a operating system that looks to revolutionize OSes with a micro-kernel approach, where modern desktop (and server) OSes use monolithic kernels (some of which are monolithic-like and marketed as hybrid). This micro approach, in theory, is supposed to increase stability and security, and takes many utilities out of the kernel and places them into user-land. Thus, this would leave the kernel to do what it is supposed to do and little else, manage resources.

Getting back to the disappointment in Hurd’s progress, and considering that there is another micro-kernel OS project progressing by leaps and bounds, namely Minix 3, why not integrate that new OS’s micro-kernel into Hurd?

Install Fest. Pamplet

Sept. 2005/06
Philosophy Committee

Gnu-Linux is Free as in Libre/Liberty.
* GPL’d software such as GNU-Linux is primarily about digital rights, an extension of human rights issues
* Why is this a rights issue? This is complex, but for the end user the proprietary model pushes onto its consumers a position of empowerment/disempowerment, rather than an equal footing. To clarify, proprietary (closed) software holds the source code (instructions for building the software) secret, thus the user can never be sure if there are hidden agendas behind closed software. The closed commercial model asks the consumer to trust them but does not allow itself to trust the customer to use their software ‘fairly’ (ie., making backup copies). Restrictive electronic licensing agreements are evidence of this. Furthermore, Free OSes do not hold updates/fixes ransom, meaning that needed updates/fixes for buggy software are not dispensed to only those who can afford them. Nor do they actively seek to create a dependence on closed source by keeping hardware specs secret as Apple/Broadcom does with Airport Extreme. Currently, iBook owners who wish to use the Airport Extreme wireless card must reboot into Apple’s OS (Operating System). Owners are boxed in, and thus their freedom impinged.