To Software License Group members:

I agree that it is a noble cause to provide students with access to software at a cost that is commensurate with the resources of the average university student. However, with full-priced office suites and programs running as much as $300 to $700, even discounted software can be prohibitively expensive for this university’s students who are most in need of the discount. In the interest of accessibility, this program should be expanded beyond simple discounts.

This committee should task itself with locating and increasing awareness of Open Source and Closed-source free software. Through the use of Open Source Software, the university will promote the continued development of programs that work independently of proprietary systems and encourage the development of software that does not require a discount to be use-able by the vast majority of students.

For nearly every proprietary software packages, there is a free alternative. The following list is just a small selection of the many open source and free applications that are equivalent if not superior to their closed-source, proprietary and often expensive counterparts.

Microsoft Office Suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access) -> OpenOffice.org
Photoshop -> TheGimp
Adobe Illustrator -> Inkscape
3D Studio Max -> Blender

There are many equivalent software packages, so the following site is one of many that may be of use to the Committee. http://www.osalt.com/

Many school districts, universities, businesses and even governments are switching to open source projects because not only do they save money, but often the open source applications are more secure because of their transparency.

I am a Linux user, so I do not specifically use most of the closed-source applications that the university promotes; however, I am able to design programs, write documents, and create movies as easily as any user of the proprietary systems. My .doc and .xls files created in OpenOffice.org (a platform independent program) transfer into Microsoft Word and Excel, but do not require that I spend what is for some, a weeks pay. All of my work, both academic and personal, is done with free and open-source software which is available for nearly every operating system.

I urge the committee to look beyond its admirable but basic goal and to work expand this university’s students ability to access the tools they need to succeed in their educational endeavors. It is our responsibility as employees of this university to encourage students to learn — regardless of whether they are learning quantum mechanics or a better program on which they may write an essay.

Sincerely,
Aaron Harun

fin

1. Go to start and either search for “notepad” or go to All Programs > Accessories
2. Right click “notepad” and select the “Run as Administrator Option.”
3. Once Notepad opens go to File > Open and browse to “C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc”
4. Set the file filter to “All Files”
5. Select and Open “hosts”
6. Edit it and save it.

If you get an error about it being read only:

1. Go to File > Open, right click the “hosts” file and select properties
2. Uncheck read-only at the bottom and click OK.
3. Click Cancel to go back to notepad”
4. Save it

It isn’t often that Linux fails me, but all I can find are complaints about how Linux Blogging Sucks. I have a few more programs to test but for right now I agree. I am right now testing Bleezer. Although it looked like one of the most promising, I’m not impressed. I’m able to download my last 15 posts, but not my draft posts nor posts older than 15. In the WYSIWYG interface inserting links is rather irritating and I’ve had to come up with "tricks" just to be able to comfortable add links — sort of a non-issue because I’d never use it.

I’m also getting a few weird display bugs and the spellcheck doesn’t actually spellcheck, but I’ll assume that they are just local issues.

I have a few more programs that I’m going to try after this including QTM, Drivel, and BloGTK.

Addendum: I posted this using the program and I have a couple more comments.:

• The checkbox on the left was the one that mattered in the image above, so this ended up without a category.
• Tags are not added to WordPress, but I expected this.
• It uses WordPress’ native image uploading to some extent, so the image I added from my desktop ended up in the right location and is still attached to this post.
• It doesn’t post line breaks even though it shows up in the HTML preview. This leaves me with a very hard post to edit between that and all the tags its WYSIWYG interface adds.

Addendum 2:

Unfortunately, QTM, BloGTK and Drivel also fail to meet my criteria. Neither support WordPress specifically and support a generic API, so they both ignore features that I find important like tags and downloading draft posts. Draft posts are very important to me as I have about 25,000 words floating around in various states of postability, so any program or add-on that doesn’t allow me direct access to these words is not useful to me for all my blogging needs.

I’m posting this addendum with ScribeFire, but it has the same problems of not listing draft posts separately and no tags, but what it does allow me to do is change websites and have my research content directly above the post pane, so I can read and research while I write.

Anyway, I recently bought a new laptop and I set it up as a dual-boot system with Vista and Ubuntu (I originally had a triple boot system with Open Suse until I remembered how clunky RPM based Distros are and I have a whole post full of “observations” about Vista, but this is all neither here nor there.) I was testing the battery life, ran it down, plugged it back into the power cord, and, for some unknown reason, I right clicked the battery life indicator. It had an interesting option called “power history,” so I clicked it. Turns out that it prints out these nice graphs that show everything from the voltage to the wattage to the accuracy of the batteries prediction ability. Needless to say, it impressed me. I’ve used Ubuntu for a long time now on a laptop and never noticed that little feature.

So while Linux may take a little more effort to set it up, it and the people behind Linux reciprocate by giving you the little extras that make the experience go from droll to impressive. The only thing impressive Vista has given me so far is two blue screens of death since Wednesday.

A few screenshots (each of which only took one button press and one mouse click to make).

!/bin/bash

    files=(/usr/lib/xscreensaver/*)               # Look for files in the XScreensaver folder
    n=${#files[@]}              # For aesthetics
    "${files[RANDOM % n]}" -root & # Choose a random screensaver and execute it in the root window.

Use the following in your terminal: telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

This free website has most of the features developers will need to test their sites; however, unlike BrowserCam, there seem to be waits of up to 20 minutes for some OS/Browser combinations, so it is better for casual testing to ensure compatibility rather than live tweaking—it does have a detail page to show how long your wait will be. It has a few useful features: all screenshots are of the entire screen instead of a small part and requests are based on the website, so multiple people can view the results without sharing log-ons.

However, the most interesting part is that the software that runs it is freely distributed and you can, optionally, help the project by volunteering to run a screenshot “factory” from your computer that operates in the background while you go about your normal computing business; thus, combining the best things in life: free stuff and being nice to others. You can just feel the good karma coming.

Besides…it beats signing up for multiple 24-hour previews…

To fix this you need to create the file and make sure that MySQL has access to it. (All commands need to be run as root)

Create the directory (if it doesn’t already exist).

sudo mkdir /var/run/mysqld/

Create the file by “touching” it.

sudo touch /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock

Set the ownership of the mysqld.sock file and folder to mysql.

sudo chown -R mysql /var/run/mysqld/

You can then start MySQL and breath easier.

Please note that this review is based on a much older version of Songbird than the current one. Features and glitches may no longer be applicable.

The Songbird media player is a cross-platform media player that is based on the gecko browser engine. Songbird enables you to use add-ons and skins feathers just like you can in your Firefox web browser, and combines the the most useful parts of the browser into a fully-featured music player. This means that rather than having a web browser added into your music player, like in Amarok, the program natively includes the code, so it is exceptional at both, and allows the media program itself to download music and video files on a webpage automatically or load playlists with a click. These features make this the ultimate program for listening to podcasts at your computer.

How you can use SongBird.

Because you can load playlists with only a click, browsing to websites like Shoutcast allows you to automatically tune into radio stations just by clicking “play now” without having to open/download any files or opening second programs. This is also excellent for podcast websites or playlist-sharing websites.

If you use the DownThemAll extension to download music or videos, Songbird will make this much easier and natively supports browsing to any page and automatically downloading files, so if you use google “hacks” like intitle:”Index Of” mozart to find music files this will make things much easier. If you use a company laptop or have a small drive, you can do the same thing as above, but instead of downloading the files, you can add them directly to your library without downloading, so anywhere you have an internet connection, you can find your music.

This is a little tangential, but if you have ever gotten the urge too look something random up while listening to music, the fully functional browser will come in handy.

This one is iffy, when browsing the web files are automatically added to a “web library” and are stored separately from your normal library. I don’t know if this is good or bad, but if you are normally on a fast connection, it can save you a lot of time, but at the same time, you might get some odd or embarrassing files added there.

Now there are a few things I don’t like

1. The program is a little weighty (~40MB fully loaded.)
2. When loading playlists from Shoutcast it adds ALL servers to your library as individual files.
3. Currently Library information only works off of the ID3 tags without any filename parsing.
   
4. The track editor can’t save changes to the ID3 tags (it can only save to the internal database).
   
5. When listing files found in webpages, there is no way to filter them. For example, browsing to a Librivox page will show you three copies of each recording (one for each file type.) To play them, you have to manually remove the duplicate files. A quick solution would be to be able to arrange them by format, but this doesn’t exist yet.
6. The default “mini” player isn’t so mini.
7. The program isn’t as snappy as a standard media player or web browser, but this should be resolved as the project matures.
8. When playing streams, the currently playing track isn’t updated.

Some lovely Video demonstrations

This video, produced by the guys from Songbird, is for a slightly older version:

This video highlights the collapsible UI.

And the playlists.

Final Thoughts

Songbird is extremely attractive, and it has the potential to replace Amarok as my favorite music player ever, and has the the ability to work across all platforms because I have to jump from OS to OS all the time. I don’t think it is ready for prime-time yet, but a couple more versions and it will be perfect.

(AP) — With a wave of his hand over a homemade receiver, Georgia Tech professor Joy Laskar shows how easily – and quickly – large data files could someday be transferred from a portable media player to a TV. Poof! “You just moved a movie onto your device,” Laskar says.

While Wi-Fi and Bluetooth have emerged as efficient ways to zap small amounts of data between gadgets, neither is well suited for quickly transferring high-definition video, large audio libraries and other massive files.

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