Re:The best tools stay out of the way...
on
Goodbye Cruel Word
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I edit a (UK) monthly news-stand magazine using Apple's little bundled TextEdit as the sole word-processor. (For Windows users, I guess the nearest equivalent is WordPad.)
It's superb. It doesn't get in the way: you type, you copy, you paste, you save. It happily reads RTF (default format) and Word.doc, so is interchangeable with anything else my contributors are likely to use - with the exception of those who use Microsoft Works. (They get asked to find something different if they want to be recommissioned.;) ) The only two things it doesn't do that I need are smart quotes (apparently fixed in Leopard, and the alt-key combinations are now second nature anyway) and word count (plugins easy to find).
I remember working at a Government department where the entire press office asked to be kitted out with Adobe Photoshop, full version, so that they could open JPEGs and once or twice crop and resave them. I persuaded them to settle for something cheaper.
Microsoft has been pulling the same trick with Word for many, many years and with much more success. OpenOffice isn't the real alternative - the real alternative is a program that only does what you need it to.
(FWIW, WriteRoom is pretty much TextEdit with a full-screen mode and a constantly-updated wordcount.)
Yeah, because the US already has free geodata, so OpenStreetMap's efforts have thus far been concentrated in Europe. The coverage of the UK and Germany is coming on very fast, and the Netherlands is complete.
For what it's worth OSM has recently started importing the US TIGER data, so Philadelphia will be there sooner rather than later.
You go with Mapstraction. It's a generic JS library that abstracts away the details of each individual provider, and supports not just Microsoft and Google, but also Yahoo, OpenStreetMap, MapQuest, Map24, Multimap, and a couple of others.
It's under very active development. So if one of the providers decides to impose unacceptable Ts&Cs (such as flashing geolocated ads), you just flick a switch and go to one of the others. And it's entirely open source.
The best bit? You can start off with Google, and when OpenStreetMap gets enough coverage for your area, just move to them - no extra coding required.
toss aside the pursuit of freedom and social solidarity that are at the heart of the free software movement (and which the open source movement was built not to talk about).
Well, maybe. But FSF's notions of "freedom" and "social solidarity" effectively spring from a US libertarian viewpoint: they are alien to the European liberal/social democratic tradition.
That's not to say FSF is wrong, just that it doesn't have a monopoly on the definition of "freedom" or "free". For some of us, the open source movement can offer more opportunities for freedom.
IANAL, obviously, but I'm the editor of a UK magazine which regularly prints pictures which happen to include people - without getting their consent. And I don't agree with TFA at all.
It says that "if we're taking snaps for commercial use, where individuals are identifiable, there is no such exemption". Fine. But to back this up, it links to a report of an earlier ECJ case. This report says:
Mrs Bodil Lindqvist was an active member of her church in the parish of Alseda in Sweden. As part of a computer course Lindqvist had to set up an internet home page, and chose to create a site giving information to church parishioners.
Unfortunately the pages included information about Mrs Lindqvist and 18 of her fellow church volunteers. This information included some full names, telephone numbers and references to hobbies and jobs held by her colleagues
And according to the ECJ, this was a problem because:
"that the act of referring, on an internet page, to various persons and identifying them by name or by other means, for instance by giving their telephone number or information regarding their working conditions and hobbies, constitutes the processing of personal data wholly or partly by automatic means within the meaning of [the Directive]."
You see the difference with what Google's doing?
Google Street View means people are identifiable. But it doesn't identify them. That's what Mrs Lindqvist did - she posted their names and phone numbers - and that's what she was fined for.
So if you annotate GSV to say "this is Fred with Mary, who isn't his wife", you've infringed. But I don't see how Google, by merely posting the photos, is doing anything wrong.
(French privacy law may well apply a stricter standard, of course.)
A simpler solution would be for the manufactures of these routers to have them refuse to act as routers with any of the default settings
And for the manufacturers to make the web-based config interfaces suck a bit less hard.
Garmin eTrex. Dirt cheap consumer GPS, pretty rugged, 'smart' tracklog recording and good battery life. There are plenty of accessories available for it: 12v adaptors, bike mounts, RS232 cables, etc.
If I were buying new, I'd probably go for a Garmin Geko, which is similar but has larger tracklog storage capacity.
A Keyspan RS232 to USB converter (USA-19 model, but they're probably all the same).
A homebrew Perl script to take the resulting GPX tracks, and draw an Adobe Illustrator 6 file from them.
Adobe Illustrator. Earlier versions have 'teh snappy' and can be picked up for a few quid, but require Classic. Newer ones suffer from feature bloat and cost loads, but run natively under OS X.
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I edit a (UK) monthly news-stand magazine using Apple's little bundled TextEdit as the sole word-processor. (For Windows users, I guess the nearest equivalent is WordPad.) It's superb. It doesn't get in the way: you type, you copy, you paste, you save. It happily reads RTF (default format) and Word .doc, so is interchangeable with anything else my contributors are likely to use - with the exception of those who use Microsoft Works. (They get asked to find something different if they want to be recommissioned. ;) ) The only two things it doesn't do that I need are smart quotes (apparently fixed in Leopard, and the alt-key combinations are now second nature anyway) and word count (plugins easy to find).
I remember working at a Government department where the entire press office asked to be kitted out with Adobe Photoshop, full version, so that they could open JPEGs and once or twice crop and resave them. I persuaded them to settle for something cheaper.
Microsoft has been pulling the same trick with Word for many, many years and with much more success. OpenOffice isn't the real alternative - the real alternative is a program that only does what you need it to.
(FWIW, WriteRoom is pretty much TextEdit with a full-screen mode and a constantly-updated wordcount.)
Yeah, because the US already has free geodata, so OpenStreetMap's efforts have thus far been concentrated in Europe. The coverage of the UK and Germany is coming on very fast, and the Netherlands is complete.
For what it's worth OSM has recently started importing the US TIGER data, so Philadelphia will be there sooner rather than later.
You go with Mapstraction. It's a generic JS library that abstracts away the details of each individual provider, and supports not just Microsoft and Google, but also Yahoo, OpenStreetMap, MapQuest, Map24, Multimap, and a couple of others.
It's under very active development. So if one of the providers decides to impose unacceptable Ts&Cs (such as flashing geolocated ads), you just flick a switch and go to one of the others. And it's entirely open source.
The best bit? You can start off with Google, and when OpenStreetMap gets enough coverage for your area, just move to them - no extra coding required.
Well, maybe. But FSF's notions of "freedom" and "social solidarity" effectively spring from a US libertarian viewpoint: they are alien to the European liberal/social democratic tradition.
That's not to say FSF is wrong, just that it doesn't have a monopoly on the definition of "freedom" or "free". For some of us, the open source movement can offer more opportunities for freedom.
And upload your tracks to OpenStreetMap as you go. Do some good on your trip.
A simpler solution would be for the manufactures of these routers to have them refuse to act as routers with any of the default settings And for the manufacturers to make the web-based config interfaces suck a bit less hard.
If I were buying new, I'd probably go for a Garmin Geko, which is similar but has larger tracklog storage capacity.