Monthly Archive: October 2007

photo by guppiecat

I’ve been running a dual boot on my laptop with Windows 2000 and Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft). I recently upgraded to 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) so that I’d be ready to try out 7.10 when it came out. I don’t use the laptop much, so it’s good for experimentation. I don’t expect to upgrade my main desktop from Feisty right away.

I first tried the upgrade route through the update manager. It was a little bit slow on Friday with everyone hitting the Ubuntu servers, but I made it through the process and had the brand shiny new Gutsy Gibbon running with no trouble.

I did the upgrade, wanting to verify that it worked ok, but my real plan was to wipe out everything and start fresh with 7.10. No more Windows there (although I’m not Windows free yet, but more on that later). I had downloaded the ISO image via BitTorrent. I’m pretty sure …

Jeremy Allison is fast becoming one of my heroes. Not only for the great technical work he has done with Samba, but also for his principled support of free software. He quit Novell in protest after they signed their patent pact with the devil, and he and the Samba team gave an early vote of support to GPL v3 by moving Samba to the new license soon after its release.

He also regularly contributes thoughtful essays to Tux Deluxe. I just found The Innovation Game in my feed reader, which has some positive points about innovation in free software, but also deals with a depressing subject, Microsoft and software patents:

So who could possibly be against this wealth of the commons? People wishing to own innovative ideas, that’s who. Not just one specific implementation of an idea, but the very ideas themselves. I’m referring to software patents, which have recently been used in a very direct threat against …

I’ve been trying out some new music download options lately. I was happy to see that Amazon started selling non-DRM MP3 files for about a dollar each. I think a dollar is too much for individual song downloads, but I wanted to try it out and help show that people are willing to pay for unrestricted music even when it can be had for free.

Not totally unrestricted, of course. MP3 is still patent encumbered. I’d much prefer Ogg Vorbis. Ogg is free as in freedom and supposedly it is technically better, although my tin ears wouldn’t know the difference. And the name “Ogg” sounds cool. I’m reluctantly willing to go along with MP3 since I already have a huge library of MP3 songs and there are a couple of devices I use that don’t support Ogg. Sure, it may be coming off patent in a few years, but screw the patent holders. …

Finding my way around SVN. So far I’ve created a repository to hold my WordPress theme files and miscellaneous scripts. The working directories are scattered around my home dir, and I found that I wanted a way to view the structure of the repo itself. You can do this with the svn list command:

svn list –recursive file:///path/to/your/svn/repo/dir

And you’ll get a list of all your directories and files. I thought it might be nice to only see the dirs, and then furthernice to specify the depth of dirs to browse, so I cobbled together the bash script below to accomplish this. It takes the output from svn list -R and prints only items that end with a forward slash, e.g.:

svn list -R file:///home/scarpent/src/svn | svn-dirs.sh -d 2

To produce the output:

bash/
bash/nautilus-scripts/
home-bin/
web/
web/mtf/

(I also created a script that runs svn list on my local repo and pipes to svn-dirs.sh, so I don’t have to type …

(Continued from part one.)

Google Code Project Hosting

I mentioned this in my YARQ post and have since explored it further (although not much further). It’s a pretty cool free (as in beer) service. I like that they offer a Subversion (SVN) respository and it is easy to start up new projects. I had briefly looked at how to start a SourceForge project and it seemed more involved. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing and maybe it helps ensure people are more serious about their project, but there are a lot of little projects you might want to host and not spend so much effort up front.

To experiment, I created the bash cpafter project for my bash cpafter.sh and copy_it.sh scripts. An important feature for me is that you can use SVN’s sync command to retrieve the full source control history, so you’re not locked in to Google Code if you …

I’ve been busy with this and that and wishing I had something more substantial prepared to post. I’ve been doing free software stuff, although nothing lately has generated a longer article. Here’s some scrips and scraps on what I’ve been up to:

(Wait! One of the tidbits grew in to its own post! Stay tuned…)

Free Software Magazine, Issue 20

My first article for Free Software Magazine has been published, in Issue 20: Extending Nautilus (the GNOME file manager): rotating JPG images. I’m actually going to be paid for this one, in cash and a book, so it must be good. See, free can pay. :-)

Thanks, FSM!

OpenOffice.org

Working on miscellaneous details in the overall “moving to freedom” process. I spent some time figuring out how to do envelopes and labels in OpenOffice.org Writer. You would hope it wouldn’t be that difficult, but once upon a time when I couldn’t see an envelope option and went looking for …

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