Anthology of Ideas

The following is part of an open letter I wrote to an university committee that was surveying students and faculty on the feasibility and desirability of providing discounts to students for popular and expensive software packages. This discount would have been provided by basically sharing the cost among all students by purchasing a large number of licenses and then reselling them at a lower price to interested students. Obviously, I thought there was a better alternative.

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.

BrowserCam has long been the best tool for testing websites in a multitude of situations; however, it isn’t free, so its usefulness is limited for people who just want to test a new design quickly: enter BrowserShots.

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.

If you haven’t heard of it, Tiddlywiki is a single file, off-line, single user “wiki” that you can use to store notes and information in an easy-to-retrieve format. I found it and decided I loved it…for about 6 hours. Now I’m looking at the source code and trying to understand it so I can rip out all the stuff I don’t like and replace it.

Tiddlywiki doesn’t allow any sort of XHTML and requires all code to be done in textile. This is great once in a while or for places where XHTML would be a bad idea, but for people like me who have been writing HTML since the <blink> tag was the “in” thing, this is just irritating and I was finding that I was having to go back over my “tiddles” frequently to coax the content into displaying what I want.

The Habari Project just released version 0.2. I have been watching it for a while now, but even though it has some features that I really like, it still hasn’t reached a point that I would consider switching this website from Wordpress (mostly because I would have to rewrite far too many need-to-have plugins).

However, recently I started thinking about re-writing some of my plugins for it–especially what will eventually become INAP 3.0, but when I try to find reasonable plugin documentation, it just doesn’t exist–not even simple tutorials. There is a wiki for the project, but it is very well hidden and nearly empty. Now I don’t mind reading through the code to figure out what functions do, but even I don’t have the time to read through an entire project just to get started.

So for now I sit back an wait for some docs that at least give me a brief overview of how things work under the hood.