I've been working on the Wikipedia, Wikiquote, Wiktionary and other similar works to convert them to Palm handheld formats (primarily Plucker format, but now iSilo for those users as well, with less functionality in iSilo, of course). I did a lot of work to the core Mediawiki software that drives it, to make it more usable on handheld devices.
You can see my work so far at the following links:
This breaks down very simply, when dealing with "developing countries" as a paradigm:
If you were in a developing country, would you rather license something or learn something? In this case, license the IP from a proprietary (United States-centric) company, or use Free Software, under a license that encourages sharing, which increases your skills and marketability in the industrialized world.
Using Free Software and Open Source software encourages you to find solutions to common problems, work with a broad community of users and developers from dozens of other countries and language barriers, and in general encourages you to improve technology for everyone's sake, not for your own wallet's sake.
Would you rather learn how to install software? Or learn how to write software?
OT: I just wanted to mention that my wife is also a Celiac, and has been for ~20 years (we're both in our mid-30's). She's Type 2 diabetic as well, and a distance runner...
If there's anything you want to know about Celiac Sprue, just ask. She's exceptionally knowledgable about it, and still continues to amaze people at the conferences we attend on the subject.
For example, here's a minor tidbit... reading ingredients isn't enough to know if there's gluten in your food. You have to CALL the manufacturer. We had an issue with her getting a reaction to some energy bars that we found that claimed "gluten-free", and had no gluten in the ingredients, but when we called the company directly, they said they dust the conveyor with flour to prevent sticking... so it isn't in the ingredients, but it is definately in the formulation. You can never be too careful.
The same goes with restaurants.. just because your meal has no gluten, doesn't mean that the fryer it was cooked in wasn't used to cook some breaded chicken right before your meal, etc.
There's a lot of deception out there, but with awareness it is getting better.
The good side of this, is that without gluten in your diet (or your son's diets), they will have better memory, recall, and retention, because the gluten peptide is a "fatty" peptide, and gets in the blood/brain barrier, and impedes neuron signalling (I should mention, my wife is also a Research Biologist at the largest pharma in the world). I'm not a celiac, but I do live a gluten "lite" diet, and I've noticed a significant difference in my memory and comprehension.
The food is much vaster too, many more recipes, ingredients, and flavors to sample from. Instead of just "flour", you now have rice flour, tapioca flour, potato flour, and all kinds of other things to try your hand at cooking with.
There are also lots of stores online that sell pre-prepared foods or mixed ingredients to cook with. The sheer number of choices in the gluten-free world far outweighs the gluten world, and the food tastes much, MUCH better.
You DO realize of course, that you are required, by law, to pay tax on the full price of the item, not the price-after-rebate, right?
In most cases, you're not getting the discount you think you are (if you aren't also calculating the tax you pay on the full-price item + your stamp to mail in the MIR, etc.), and if your CPA is telling you that you can claim the tax on the after-rebate cost, he's wrong, and he's putting you in jeapordy (or risk of an audit).
Be careful how you approach these MIR incentives, they could put you at risk, if you file them incorrectly.
But that's not true at all, because they don't use the file magic to determine what the file actually contains, they use the file extension. Go ahead, try to remame a jpeg to.txt, and double-click on it, with or without showing file extensions. It will try to load in Notepad. Why?
Braindead Microsoft is why. They care about file extensions internally, they just want to make you think they don't matter.
What is your Content-Type though? DOCTYPE means nothing, if you're sending a text/html Content-Type in your page. You're not sending an 'application/xhtml+xml' Content-Type if you aren't using a special handler for those.html pages, or you've registered your own handler for.xhtml pages (assuming you use a different file extension for those resources)
My bet is that you're still using text/html, not application/xhtml+xml.
"If it can't be done with XHTML1.0/1.1, CSS1/2, and a little javascript (note a LITTLE javascript) than the design needs to be rethought."
Are you sure you're using XHTML? Are you sending it with the required DOCTYPE and Content-Type of application/xhtml+xml? If you're sending text/html, you are NOT using XHTML, you are using HTML 4.01 with an XHTML DOCTYPE, which is not XHTML.
"IIRC one of the guys from WU has a hiptop (T-mobile sidekick) and even went so far as to create a rocking WU client for it (which I use daily)."
Apparently he's not a web designer, because using tables has been deprecated for at least a decade, for layout. It looks absolutely atrocious on a handheld, and doesn't work well at all for text-mode devices and text-to-speech devices.
Nope, nothing to see here, more of the same "Not-Really-Mobile-But-We'll-Call-It-That" garbage that the rest of the sites are producing.
Removing banner ads does not automatically make your page "mobile-capable".
"All my posts are valid XHTML. Too bad Slashdot isn't."
I'm not sure if you're joking or not, but your posts, and your blog site mentioned in your.sig, are not valid XHTML. You are presenting them with the Content-Type of text/html, which is HTML4.01, not XHTML.
Also, your blog doesn't validate cleanly either. You are sending a DOCTYPE of XHTML, but a Content-Type of HTML. You might want to pick one, and stick with it, and then begin to validate the content presented with it.
Lastly, while you're wondering, the correct Content-Type for XHTML is 'application/xhtml+xml', not 'text/html'. Just be aware that MSIE doesn't support XHTML at all, so you may want to stick with HTML4.01 for now, if you have MSIE users.
"Nothing about the BSD license says that a company cannot take BSD licensed code and use it however they want, including in a proprietary, commercial product. Part of the intent of the BSD license was to let persons/groups/etc do just that!"
...except for the part where the copyright and attribution has to remain in the source and shipped products. How many commercial companies repurposing BSD-licensed code do you know that properly give credit back? I don't know of any at all.
Even if the commercial company takes the code and relicenses it, the attribution must remain. Most (all?) commercial companies using BSD-licensed software simply rip it out, and behave as though they had written it themselves.
There is this growing misconception in commercial companies that the BSD license is GPL-without-restrictions, i.e. public domain. It isn't, and some re-education has to happen to clean that up in the commercial space.
Re:Good reasons for chosing GPL over BSD
on
Tracking GPL Violators
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
"I've written many free software tools over the years. I've licensed these using the GPL, BSD licenses, and finally switched a couple of years ago to GPL for everything."
There's one other small subtle reason why the BSDL is more restrictive than the GPL.. it encourages people to use the code without proper attribution or credit, while the GPL does not have this problem.
BSDL-licensed code can be abused, and in most cases, is. There is no incentive to contribute back to the community, and many commercial companies using BSDL-licensed code continue to do so every day.
The GPL, being the "more-free" license, does not allow this kind of abuse.
If you like mbox, you should try the original uwash.edu format, mbx, MUCH MUCH faster to load, search, and index. Its not entirely text though, there is a small binary header.
I still use mbox exclusively with pine, but I use mbx for larger archival mailbox files.
"I just clicked on your link, and you are out of spec. because you serve XHTML as text/html without complying with Appendix C of the XHTML 1.0 recommendation."
MSIE doesn't support XHTML, at all. I know all about the issues with text/html, but this allows the site to function for those using a crippled browser (MSIE).
"Furthermore, your code kicks Internet Explorer and Opera into "quirks mode", where they intentionally go out of spec. in order to cater to non-compliant pages."
That main page was a testing ground for several different ideas I had at the time. It needs to be rewritten anyway, and I'm not surprised it kicks those other browsers into "quirks mode". Shrug. It'll be fixed when I have time to fix it.
"If you are going to claim to be an absolute authority on something, make sure you're doing it right, eh?:)"
But why? Before you mod me down, hold on a second...
Mozilla's suite, speaking just about the browser component, is FAR superior to what Firefox offers. Not only are there many more options for security, cookies, Javascript, saving form data, and many other things... that killing the suite, even if it was just this ONE component, would really be a bad move on their part.
Personally, I don't like Firefox at all. Even though they're both based on the Gecko engine, Firefox renders CSS much differently than Mozilla in some cases. Mozilla tends to be more accurate with placement. Its not as flexible, and it just looks plain ugly (as compared to Mozilla again, even with the same theme).
I can't speak for the other parts, because I only use the browser component of the Mozilla suite (and I'm a full-time, very-pedantic, anal-about-standards, web developer, so I can speak with absolute authority on this; my internal QA/test suite includes 13 browsers before I release a site to a client). Firefox, while great as an MSIE replacement, can't even remotely compare to what the Mozilla Suite browser component offers.
Don't kill the Mozilla Suite, please, and if you do, at least keep the Mozilla Browser component around.
...and just remember, they're not responsible, or liable, if they get your numbers wrong.. unlike a certified, qualified CPA.
The CPA is always, ALWAYS the better approach. Not only do they get you more money back (if you choose), but they know exactly how to work the deductions, so you pay the least amount necessary to meet your tax obligations. They also look longer-term, vs. how H&R block looks to you as a McDonalds customer: "Next!"
Also, the CPA is responsible for defending you, or them, in court, if there is ever a discrepancy with your taxes. H&R block doesn't, because they're not legally accountants.
Big difference, and if you make close-to or over 6-figures, have children, own a home, or many other things (I was able to deduct a significant portion of my home and expenses due to my Free Software work, for example; H&R block wouldn't even know to ask), H&R block can do a LOT more damage than a properly-qualified CPA.
The most effective step that you can take to help protect yourself from malicious hyperlinks is not to click them. Rather, type the URL of your intended destination in the address bar yourself. By manually typing the URL in the address bar, you can verify the information that Internet Explorer uses to access the destination Web site. To do so, type the URL in the Address bar, and then press ENTER.
"Linux users are not exactly known for rushing out to pay for software."
I think I speak for my community (having been a part of it, both as a Linux user and a Linux developer for over a decade, and now president of my LUG), when I say that "Linux users" aren't choosing NOT to pay for software because they don't WANT to, they're not paying for software because they don't HAVE to.
Just because it is commercial, doesn't mean it is better than the free or non-commercial software out there. Look at some of the VERY successful projects that are given away freely: Apache, PHP, Gaim, Samba, Subversion, Mozilla/Firefox, Plucker and hundreds of other projects.
Nothing in the commercial space can compare to these, and why would users want to spend money to get something of lesser quality or value. The additional benefit they get, at no cost, is the ability to use the source however they choose, including the ability to sell it, or create their own projects based upon it.
NO commercial software that I'm aware of, has that level of freedom and flexibility. Can you think of any?
"People who TRULY, REALLY, need directions for business purposes use GPS anyway. This ain't targetting them."
That's exactly my point. This is targeted towards people who want to print a map for their wall to say "See? I live here!" or "This is a map of my state.". This is further reinforced by all of the unnecessary eye-candy and the Print output being exactly the same as the non-Print output.
You're right though, this is just for "pictures", not for "using".
But have you ever tried driving those roads? Trust me, its easier (and faster) to take the longer way around as indicated there, than to take the more-direct route.
Ask anyone that lives near that area, and they'll confirm it.
The service isn't broken, its doing exactly what you've asked it to do; giving you the shortest (in terms of time) route to the destination.
Here are a few brief reasons why Google's mapping service fails, and will not ever be as good as much of the competition (MapBlast, MapQuest, etc.)
Requires javascript, so I can't use it from my PDA, cellphone, or automated with Perl to fetch and print maps for me.
No turn-by-turn maps for driving directions
No markers for one-way streets and directions
Their "Print" view is exactly the same as their non-print view.
No PDA version at all (ala MapBlast)
For people who want to go "Ooo... pretty map", it will be fine, but for people who actually use mapping services to navigate, or use them from non-full-blown-desktop browsers (cell, WAP, PDA), this service is useless.
Why Google insists on building everything they do upon reams of Javascript, is beyond me.
I don't remember where I saw this quote, but I've had it here in my logs for awhile, and I think its relevant here:
"Microsoft properly asserts that OpenOffice is not 100% compatible with their product. Microsoft, however, has apparently decided not to support the OpenOffice formats either, for which they have no excuse: the standards for OpenOffice documents are publicly available, whereas Microsoft makes it a habit to sue people for reverse engineering their own formats."
"If you distribute the source with binaries (or just source) then you aren't required to make the source availabe because it already is."
Not quite, as Sony can attest to.
Sony has been violating the GPL for several years now, and I wrote an article about it which was slashdotted a few years back, regarding their Sony Palm OS Emulator.
Sony was releasing a binary version of 2.0 of the emulator (for example), but only providing source for 1.0. When they released 3.0, they'd release source for 2.0, always one-step-back.
They contended that they were incompliance, but they were not.
Slashdot Mirror
You can see my work so far at the following links:
..and of course, my beautiful anti-alias fonts for Plucker, made with PalmFontConv by Alexander Pruss.
I've also converted the Creating XPCOM Components book by Doug Turner and Ian Oeschger to Plucker format as well as the FreeBSD Handbook.
I have literally hundreds of similar-quality works I'll be releasing over the next few months to the community on an ongoing basis.
If there's something you'd like to see, just let me know
As you can see, I've been busy ;)
This breaks down very simply, when dealing with "developing countries" as a paradigm:
If you were in a developing country, would you rather license something or learn something? In this case, license the IP from a proprietary (United States-centric) company, or use Free Software, under a license that encourages sharing, which increases your skills and marketability in the industrialized world.
Using Free Software and Open Source software encourages you to find solutions to common problems, work with a broad community of users and developers from dozens of other countries and language barriers, and in general encourages you to improve technology for everyone's sake, not for your own wallet's sake.
Would you rather learn how to install software? Or learn how to write software?
If there's anything you want to know about Celiac Sprue, just ask. She's exceptionally knowledgable about it, and still continues to amaze people at the conferences we attend on the subject.
For example, here's a minor tidbit... reading ingredients isn't enough to know if there's gluten in your food. You have to CALL the manufacturer. We had an issue with her getting a reaction to some energy bars that we found that claimed "gluten-free", and had no gluten in the ingredients, but when we called the company directly, they said they dust the conveyor with flour to prevent sticking... so it isn't in the ingredients, but it is definately in the formulation. You can never be too careful.
The same goes with restaurants.. just because your meal has no gluten, doesn't mean that the fryer it was cooked in wasn't used to cook some breaded chicken right before your meal, etc.
There's a lot of deception out there, but with awareness it is getting better.
The good side of this, is that without gluten in your diet (or your son's diets), they will have better memory, recall, and retention, because the gluten peptide is a "fatty" peptide, and gets in the blood/brain barrier, and impedes neuron signalling (I should mention, my wife is also a Research Biologist at the largest pharma in the world). I'm not a celiac, but I do live a gluten "lite" diet, and I've noticed a significant difference in my memory and comprehension.
The food is much vaster too, many more recipes, ingredients, and flavors to sample from. Instead of just "flour", you now have rice flour, tapioca flour, potato flour, and all kinds of other things to try your hand at cooking with.
There are also lots of stores online that sell pre-prepared foods or mixed ingredients to cook with. The sheer number of choices in the gluten-free world far outweighs the gluten world, and the food tastes much, MUCH better.
The only downside (right now) is the cost.
In most cases, you're not getting the discount you think you are (if you aren't also calculating the tax you pay on the full-price item + your stamp to mail in the MIR, etc.), and if your CPA is telling you that you can claim the tax on the after-rebate cost, he's wrong, and he's putting you in jeapordy (or risk of an audit).
Be careful how you approach these MIR incentives, they could put you at risk, if you file them incorrectly.
Braindead Microsoft is why. They care about file extensions internally, they just want to make you think they don't matter.
What is your Content-Type though? DOCTYPE means nothing, if you're sending a text/html Content-Type in your page. You're not sending an 'application/xhtml+xml' Content-Type if you aren't using a special handler for those .html pages, or you've registered your own handler for .xhtml pages (assuming you use a different file extension for those resources)
My bet is that you're still using text/html, not application/xhtml+xml.
Are you sure you're using XHTML? Are you sending it with the required DOCTYPE and Content-Type of application/xhtml+xml? If you're sending text/html, you are NOT using XHTML, you are using HTML 4.01 with an XHTML DOCTYPE, which is not XHTML.
Apparently he's not a web designer, because using tables has been deprecated for at least a decade, for layout. It looks absolutely atrocious on a handheld, and doesn't work well at all for text-mode devices and text-to-speech devices.
Nope, nothing to see here, more of the same "Not-Really-Mobile-But-We'll-Call-It-That" garbage that the rest of the sites are producing.
Removing banner ads does not automatically make your page "mobile-capable".
I'm not sure if you're joking or not, but your posts, and your blog site mentioned in your .sig, are not valid XHTML. You are presenting them with the Content-Type of text/html, which is HTML4.01, not XHTML.
Also, your blog doesn't validate cleanly either. You are sending a DOCTYPE of XHTML, but a Content-Type of HTML. You might want to pick one, and stick with it, and then begin to validate the content presented with it.
Lastly, while you're wondering, the correct Content-Type for XHTML is 'application/xhtml+xml', not 'text/html'. Just be aware that MSIE doesn't support XHTML at all, so you may want to stick with HTML4.01 for now, if you have MSIE users.
...except for the part where the copyright and attribution has to remain in the source and shipped products. How many commercial companies repurposing BSD-licensed code do you know that properly give credit back? I don't know of any at all.
Even if the commercial company takes the code and relicenses it, the attribution must remain. Most (all?) commercial companies using BSD-licensed software simply rip it out, and behave as though they had written it themselves.
There is this growing misconception in commercial companies that the BSD license is GPL-without-restrictions, i.e. public domain. It isn't, and some re-education has to happen to clean that up in the commercial space.
There's one other small subtle reason why the BSDL is more restrictive than the GPL.. it encourages people to use the code without proper attribution or credit, while the GPL does not have this problem.
BSDL-licensed code can be abused, and in most cases, is. There is no incentive to contribute back to the community, and many commercial companies using BSDL-licensed code continue to do so every day.
The GPL, being the "more-free" license, does not allow this kind of abuse.
If you like mbox, you should try the original uwash.edu format, mbx, MUCH MUCH faster to load, search, and index. Its not entirely text though, there is a small binary header.
I still use mbox exclusively with pine, but I use mbx for larger archival mailbox files.
MSIE doesn't support XHTML, at all. I know all about the issues with text/html, but this allows the site to function for those using a crippled browser (MSIE).
That main page was a testing ground for several different ideas I had at the time. It needs to be rewritten anyway, and I'm not surprised it kicks those other browsers into "quirks mode". Shrug. It'll be fixed when I have time to fix it.
Thanks, I always do, and will continue to do so.
But why? Before you mod me down, hold on a second...
Mozilla's suite, speaking just about the browser component, is FAR superior to what Firefox offers. Not only are there many more options for security, cookies, Javascript, saving form data, and many other things... that killing the suite, even if it was just this ONE component, would really be a bad move on their part.
Personally, I don't like Firefox at all. Even though they're both based on the Gecko engine, Firefox renders CSS much differently than Mozilla in some cases. Mozilla tends to be more accurate with placement. Its not as flexible, and it just looks plain ugly (as compared to Mozilla again, even with the same theme).
I can't speak for the other parts, because I only use the browser component of the Mozilla suite (and I'm a full-time, very-pedantic, anal-about-standards, web developer, so I can speak with absolute authority on this; my internal QA/test suite includes 13 browsers before I release a site to a client). Firefox, while great as an MSIE replacement, can't even remotely compare to what the Mozilla Suite browser component offers.
Don't kill the Mozilla Suite, please, and if you do, at least keep the Mozilla Browser component around.
The CPA is always, ALWAYS the better approach. Not only do they get you more money back (if you choose), but they know exactly how to work the deductions, so you pay the least amount necessary to meet your tax obligations. They also look longer-term, vs. how H&R block looks to you as a McDonalds customer: "Next!"
Also, the CPA is responsible for defending you, or them, in court, if there is ever a discrepancy with your taxes. H&R block doesn't, because they're not legally accountants.
Big difference, and if you make close-to or over 6-figures, have children, own a home, or many other things (I was able to deduct a significant portion of my home and expenses due to my Free Software work, for example; H&R block wouldn't even know to ask), H&R block can do a LOT more damage than a properly-qualified CPA.
A famous quote comes to mind...
The problem isn't "bad" languages, its unseasoned developers.
I think I speak for my community (having been a part of it, both as a Linux user and a Linux developer for over a decade, and now president of my LUG), when I say that "Linux users" aren't choosing NOT to pay for software because they don't WANT to, they're not paying for software because they don't HAVE to.
Just because it is commercial, doesn't mean it is better than the free or non-commercial software out there. Look at some of the VERY successful projects that are given away freely: Apache, PHP, Gaim, Samba, Subversion, Mozilla/Firefox, Plucker and hundreds of other projects.
Nothing in the commercial space can compare to these, and why would users want to spend money to get something of lesser quality or value. The additional benefit they get, at no cost, is the ability to use the source however they choose, including the ability to sell it, or create their own projects based upon it.
NO commercial software that I'm aware of, has that level of freedom and flexibility. Can you think of any?
That's exactly my point. This is targeted towards people who want to print a map for their wall to say "See? I live here!" or "This is a map of my state.". This is further reinforced by all of the unnecessary eye-candy and the Print output being exactly the same as the non-Print output.
You're right though, this is just for "pictures", not for "using".
But have you ever tried driving those roads? Trust me, its easier (and faster) to take the longer way around as indicated there, than to take the more-direct route.
Ask anyone that lives near that area, and they'll confirm it.
The service isn't broken, its doing exactly what you've asked it to do; giving you the shortest (in terms of time) route to the destination.
Here are a few brief reasons why Google's mapping service fails, and will not ever be as good as much of the competition (MapBlast, MapQuest, etc.)
For people who want to go "Ooo... pretty map", it will be fine, but for people who actually use mapping services to navigate, or use them from non-full-blown-desktop browsers (cell, WAP, PDA), this service is useless.
Why Google insists on building everything they do upon reams of Javascript, is beyond me.
Move along, nothing to see here.
I don't remember where I saw this quote, but I've had it here in my logs for awhile, and I think its relevant here:
Stick this on your Mozilla/Firefox toolbar (all on one line of course), highlight a word or words, and click it.
It also works if you click it without highlighting text. It will pop up a dialog where you can enter terms you want to search.
Simple!
Not quite, as Sony can attest to.
Sony has been violating the GPL for several years now, and I wrote an article about it which was slashdotted a few years back, regarding their Sony Palm OS Emulator.
Sony was releasing a binary version of 2.0 of the emulator (for example), but only providing source for 1.0. When they released 3.0, they'd release source for 2.0, always one-step-back.
They contended that they were incompliance, but they were not.
But your point is well-taken.