October 2006 archive

5 Ways to Save on Your Monthly Software Rental Bill in the Year 2056

Originally published in Free Software Magazine, 9 October 2006. This one made it to the technology front page on digg (and maybe briefly on the “all” front page also) and has received almost 350 diggs to date, resulting in almost 9000 reads at FSM. It seems like I say “quite a thrill” too much here, but it was rewarding to have so much interest and discussion both at digg and at FSM.
(Here’s a post with a few more comments and some stats about the article and resulting traffic to movingtofreedom.org. One more time: Thanks, everyone!)

Software bills got you down? Here at Intellectual Property Magazine (championing intellectual …

Cell Phone Seduction

The picture here at the top of the post is the cell phone that my wife and I have been using for the past five years. (Well, not this cell phone, but the same model, a Nokia 5120, and we each have our own.)

Pretty old and clunky, huh? They’ve worked great for us. It may not be surprising to hear this from a guy who is interested in “free” software, but I can be frugal about a lot of things. (Cheap! My friends and family might say.) And these phones and our plan have been fairly cheap. They were free through a corporate discount plan and then $30 per month total for both phones and 60 anytime minutes each. We probably average about 5 minutes per month. They’re …

MetaMiscellanyStatsPost

Hello, again. I feel like I’ve been neglecting you. It’s not from a lack of desire to post here, but lack of time. It seems like there is never enough time, and what time there is, I’m quite effective at whiling away. And then as more time passes, I feel like I need to post something substantive and meaty. But if you’ve been reading movingtofreedom.org, you probably know that I’m not really about deep thoughts. I’m more of a used-to-wanna-be intellectual. I think I’m still kind of a wanna-be, but I’m working on simply being who I am. So here is a post about this and that to keep things going.

I have been spending time reading and …

Photos: Autumn in Northern Minnesota

Went on a spur-of-the-moment camping trip this weekend, so I didn’t have much time to write. I did get an entry in for Free Software Magazine: “5 ways to save on your monthly software rental bill in the year 2056.” (Digg it!)

For want of new material, I’ll share these pictures from the trip, taken with my humble two-megapixel Olympus camera. Suitable for wallpaper or what have you. The pictures link to 1600×1200 and 1200×1600 versions. As with most cultural artifacts of my own creation on this site, these are freely distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license.

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Reformation of a Visual Basic Programmer

Originally published in Free Software Magazine, 2 October 2006.

Last week I mentioned that I enjoy programming in Visual Basic and suggested that people shouldn’t act so superior and look down at dweebs like me who program in dweeby languages. Today let’s talk about why Visual Basic is an awful programming language and anyone using it should run kicking-and-screaming away. (I’ll admit that kicking and running may be difficult to do at the same time.) Run away, not because it’s lame, but because it’s so horribly unfree.

Who owns this thing?

People sometimes question free software projects because very often no single organization stands behind them. Who are you going to hold responsible for Program X when it is …

Thomas Jefferson on Patents and Freedom of Ideas

Started reading Unbounded Freedom and ran in to a great excerpt from a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to Isaac McPherson in 1813 about the nature of ideas. It’s not the first time I’ve run across it, and like my Ben Franklin quote it has seen a lot of use in patent discussions, but it’s the kind of thing I think needs to be found on movingtofreedom.org. Looking at more of the letter:

It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be

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