Prince is releasing his new album free, and the retailers are not happy

Hmmm well its nice to see the artiste themselves use alternative distributions. In fact this should long have been done to reduce the consolidation of power.

Helloooooooooooooooo MOKO!!!

Ooookaay, now that that bad joke is done.


Let have more =) Howabout...

Neo is the first. Now its your turn. Free your mind.

heh heh


Okay, now that we are truly done with the bad jokes, check out this phone Ne01973

Oki its a tat ugly (to me, yes beauty is in the eye of the beholder, yes I find it ugly). But it runs on Linux and it does not tie to a particular phone brand, i.e. the software on it is not tied to any hardware.

For awhile I thought it was an IP phone... but I think this phone is a good step in the right direction. Yours for 300USD.

Its too high to be of interest to me, but maybe if you are mista money baggs, this one may the The One.

Gawd... another bad matrix joke....


Did I mention it has a developer's kit?


I think this is a good example of using software to built your business, note that he is selling the phone, not the software. A phone is a good barrier to entry. But one wonders how long that will last, and whether the software built would be open source.

No doubt if geek power is enough to propel this phone to The One status, the software would come. And you will see the advent of the next wave of software development on handphones.

This is not pure conjecture. In fact I am so unoriginal I am ashamed of myself haha. Using the history of computing as an example. Or rather operating systems. In the beginning there was a ribena berry ... damn! (at least it was a bad ribena berry joke) I swear it is the smell that drives me nuts... (oki bad matrix joke AGAIN lol). Seriously now, in the beginning, the operating systems available were disparaged and scattered. This meant that hardware also was scattered. Overtime, we know what happened. The PC became open sourced. IBM released the specs and the PC was "commoditised". This is why you and me can build cheaper PCs. Note that at the time PCs were not well known and the knowledge for building one might be as exclusive as say .. ermm building your own aircraft??? So IBM started the ball rolling, and Linus made the first *86 compatible kernel and PCs boomed, open source baamed and the rest was history. (Vista is trying to bring us back to the dark ages, but may the hardware NEVER follow Vista, else my dears, say good bye to your currently still quite affordable and CONFIGURABLE PC, don't buy into all that DRM bull, they are trying to tie it to hardware now, a definite admission of theirs that software, by its nature cannot be locked, now they have done it to DVDs and MP3s, would you like them to do it to your PC? That is the question. Answer the call! =P dang.. Live Earth joke now lol)

Oki enough of that drivel (yes people really have no idea about the politics in software and are too caught up by marketing. That always riles me.)


Microsoft and Sun (among others in the telco biz) have been looking at the smart phone/PDA as the next frontier for sometime now. But I have always stated that commercial means are like a lunatic strap on creativity. This phone if it gains momentum will free that strap. Ermm for a cool 300USD. The question now is can the barrier to entry (the hardware technology), keep it from becoming 'gratis' rather than 'libre', because face it the dude who started this wants to feed his kids.. or cat or goldfish. whatever. So there must be some incentive. Or is it that easy to put together a phone? If so this brand will do well before going down in flames. But not before possibly giving a very precious gem to the open source world which is it's platform (I am assuming it is open source here). Already there are hacks that allow a person to use a palm using Linux. So the concept is not new. But hardware, people, we are lookin' at portable handphone software. The One Ring to rule them all. Ermm okay enough with the bad jokes. Get on with your life and I've got an exam to study for.


Debate or find out more here ;)

Formfeed

So this thing has been buggin me for so long, what is formfeed??? or /f

Formfeed is also a character that demarcates the end, whose character is FF, then there is also LF etc etc

So the link answers that quite thoroughly =)

webopedia has this definition, and it is the gist...

Linefeed mean move down one line...

the definitions I like are here:

webopedia

The entire history of newline gets really messy, and here I thought /n is a relatively innocous character lol

This is an excerpt from the wikipedia link that I think summarises the difference between linefeed and carriage return:


"The line feed indicated that one line should feed out of the printer, and a carriage return indicated that the printer carriage should return to the beginning of the current line."


Remember to read the "History" portion, it would explain quite clearly the confusion between using LF or CR+LF to represent /n

It is rather long(the wikipedia article) but worth reading

TortoiseSVN Tutorials

This tutorial is somewhat useful, but I guess nothing beats trying it out =)

Pidgin IM - A NEW OPEN SOURCE IM !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! oh and WIRESHARK!!!!!!

Well no.

Not really.


If you are into open source, you would have heard it before.


Its GAIM =)


But its preetier and cuter.

Besides, I like pigeons haha.

It was changed as GNU AIM had some trouble with AIM, and it was a pretty obvious problem, I am glad they changed it to Pidgin. Given that the Internet has spawned it own vocabulary with emoticons and strange terms like brb, lol, rtfm, sarnath' hay Pidgin is the right call =)


2.02 is the version todate, and it is preety stable =)


In other news(old one I guess), Ethereal is now known as Wireshark, now I feel Ethereal is a much better name and I suspect it gave the original company more mileage than they care to admit, but their loss. Wireshark is alot more stable now anyways ;) Oh the salt in the wound? Wireshark works better than the older version on windows. Did I mention that is were the masses are. 10 points for open source! and ironically because of the non-open source crowd =)

Widget for News

Okay... someone posted this link as a comment so I guess its one of those spam your blog ads.

But I checked it out and it was'nt so bad. Cool even. It is mostly javascript that links back to some kind of newsfeed aggregator.

And it makes your blog look like a newsite haha, so if you want your blog to look like a la Google news, well, this looks somewhat like it.

I am not sure about putting it on my blog, yes I know my blog is kinda empty, but the news thing just kinda seem like unnecessary clutter.

Still I'll probably try it just to see what it looks like and then see if I want to keep it.

Hell I might write my own search aggregator and widgets ;)




Edit:


Oh blogger is acting weird recently... I need to do the type the friggin' text in the picture twice...ALWAYS TWICE. Sighz.. at first I thought I was getting spastic in typing, but I am conciously lookin' at blogger's behaviour and have assured (myself at least) that it is not me... its blogger!!! GRRRRRRRR!

Well my Firefox just got an update whoo hoo!

I hate the new Firefox look.

Its to smooth and shiny, and the title bar looks even smaller???

Hell I hated how all the new versions looked when they first came out.

I am an old cootie I know I know.

Whatever, I'll get used to it and stop complaining after awhile I guess.

Anyways it can't get worse than "ieeeeeee!!!! 7"

So I will shutup now and stop complaining. =P


Edit:

Ooooh... everything looks sharper.. dang...