Gutenbrowser

It has been 7 years since I started the Gutenbrowser project on Sourceforge. I had developed it for at least a year or so before that.
I have started hacking on it again, to fix a few things up. It is still far from what I entirely imagine when I think about what it should be.

In 7 years, the Project Gutenberg when from a few hundred books, maybe even a few thousand, to 10's of thousands. All free.
Now there are devices like the Kindle where you can buy ebooks and read them.
You don't have to buy any books from Gutenberg project. That are all free. Everyone of them.

I will create a new release in the coming weeks, with Linux, Windows and Mac OS X binaries.
You can always get Gutenbrowser in Debian. I am not entirely sure which version it is, but they usually keep it up to date, and occasionally pester me for updates or bug fixes.

I am pretty sure I started working on gutenbrowser 9 years ago. My how things have changed in the last 9 years... blah blah blah....

long time now...

Haven't written anything for a time now, so maybe I should.

It's been a cold winter this year. Lot of days that are below 20 and nights getting down to below 10.

I have become a cold weather ninny.

Nokia and open source

Nokia makes some  big news announcement

Ok, so they made an announcement they are buying a controlling percent of Symbian, and will be putting it under an open source license. Specifically the Eclipse Public License (EPL).

What remains to be seen is just how much source will be released as open. The EPL  is very generous to proprietary interests. Allowing contributors to relicense their derived works. Which means, "it" won't stay open source. If it is anything like their Maemo offering, it won't be much. Just enough that PR can call it open source. 

Unfortunely, the EPL is not compatible with all the GPL and LGPL works out there, so not very many of the thousands of really great applications for Linux will be available for this. Unless, of course, an application can be relicensed and uses Qt, which will surely be licensed to allow development on this new EPL Symbian.

As with Nokia news lately, I feel it is generally good and it is great to see such a huge company try and be a better 'citizen'.

Big business needs to learn open source

There are certain open source rules businesses need to obey. 

Most of them I learned in kindergarden, "Share everything. Play fair. Don't hit people. Put things back where you found them. Clean up your own mess. Don't take things that aren't yours. Say you are sorry when you hurt somebody."

Open Source and the GPL put power and more rights into the hands of users than proprietary software. Such things as DRM, and IPR take rights away from the people, the users.  Richard Stallman sought to empower users and take power back from the establishment that so often abuses it's power and doesn't play fair like a good citizen. This is what open source is about.

To Big Businesses that use open source, you cannot be part of the solution, if you are part of the problem. You cannot move beyond old business models if you are standing still. 

I dare you to take not small steps, but giant leaps forward to bring back power to the users of your software,  hardware and services. 

moving day

Well, today was the first day of moving to the new house. Made two runs and doesn't look like we even made a dent in anything. My new truck needs a new stereo, as the commute to work is longer.

Can not wait to get the swim pool cleaned up and take a dip. and I have a larger area for all my computers. Even have room to break out music stuff! Now if I could just find the time to do things...

long weekends

Long weekends aren't what they used to be. Since having two small kids, I no longer have any real time to sit down and concentrate and really get into hacking on stuff. I have to do that at work.

At any rate. I do find some time in the mornings to do this kind of thing.

n810

just opened the nokia n810. These are my first impressions.

I have used quite a few different handheld devices. The keyboard is not as tactile and easy to type with as the zaurus keyboards. But hopefully it is just a matter of getting use to.

All I wanted to do is test the gps. I eagerly opened the box and started the process of getting a gps fix. It took quite sometime to fix 3 satellites. Longer than half an hour! Maybe it is just the satellites here in the southern hemisphere and Australia. Could have been the mall and the car as well.

--------
a few days with this now. Battery life is good. The keyboard sucks, and I keep making spelling errors because the keys are too close tgogether and fedel tghe samed.

I like tghe zaurfus keyb oard better.

GPS is gbood if you go somewhere tghat you dont know. otghedfrwise itgs just looking at big brother wathinbg where you go.