Recently, some less than reputable companies have started repackaging and distributing Blender under different names, so they can charge people for a product that can be downloaded for free. They’ve also been stealing graphics done by members of the Blender community and using them in their advertising without any compensation being paid to the artists.

While it’s perfectly legal for anyone to redistribute Blender and even charge a price for doing so, these companies are doing it in a way that is misleading to their customers. Since the customers might not even know they are actually using Blender, they never know about the great user community and tutorial videos that are available.

3DMagic and IllusionMage are the worst offenders.

You can read more about this at the following link:
3DMagix, 3DMagixPro, IllusionMage, scam

I’m going to try developing some apps for the Android. So I’ll be writing more once I’ve had a chance to try it out. The charging light just turned green, which means I can play!

—

Well, I mostly love my Nexus One and Android, but with any open system, there are some issues. The most annoying of which is the infamous FC or Force Close, which happens when there is an unrecoverable error in an application or when the system runs out of resources. Your phone can be working fine, then you load a few new applications and all of a sudden you can’t do a thing because of the constant Force Close messages.

I’m not as frustrated as I might be with another phone. For one thing, I can hook up a debugger and see what’s going on, making it a bit easier to figure stuff out.

Since Android runs on lots of different phones, it has to deal with a lot of different configurations. Android developers don’t have the luxury of knowing the exact hardware configuration their software is expected to run on.

Another contributing factor to some of the problems people have been having is the comparative ease with which you can develop Android apps. That might sound contradictory, but the ease with which you can develop and publish an application is deceptively easy. There seem to be a lot of first-time developers who are writing applications for the first time.

– more later –

1. You plug in a new card/printer/USB device
2. The computer’s operating system, OS, sees the new device and sends a Friendly Utility Query, or FUQ.
3. The new device responds with a Reply to Your Friendly Message or RYFM, which reveals the nature of the device and it’s specific capabilities.
4. Now the OS sends a Polite Request for OS specific Driver, or PROD.
5. The Device responds by transmitting providing a basic driver and a URL where the OS can download the latest driver or patch.
6. The Operating System installs the generic driver, getting things running, and can then download the latest and greatest driver.

Now, I understand this will cost a little money, but Flash RAM is pretty cheap. The hard part will be getting some industry group to put the standard together and get companies to agree to it. Still, isn’t it about time? This idea originally occurred to me years ago. I’m really surprised it hasn’t been done already.

A lot of terms that are used in science and in science fiction are from Latin, and I got tired of having to check each one and add an exception to my spell checker for it. So, I went looking for a way to teach Latin to Open Office.

I found the answer in a posting here:

http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=5814

To summarize, you grab a Latin dictionary file here: http://www.drouizig.org/oo/la_VA.zip

and put it into:

If you use Windows:

C:\\Program Files\\{Your Open Office Directory}\\share\\dict\\ooo\\

If you use Linux:

[HOME]/.openoffice.org2.0/user/wordbook

Then, you can set the language of a selection of paragraph, or even the whole document, by selecting:

Tools->Language->For Selection …
Tools->Language->For Paragraph …
Tools->Language->For all text …

It worked like a charm for me.

Read on for more …

An interface is the way one system talks to another. Right now, patents on interfaces are used to create monopolies that really have no benefit for society. Patents are intended to reward innovation that contributes to society in some way, not just to make people rich.

How about some examples? Printer ink cartridges have patented interfaces in order to block competitors from making replacement cartridges. This allows the printer manufacturer to charge exhorbitent prices for printer ink and sell the actual printer hardware at a loss, turning it into a throw-away product that clutters our landfills. These consumer printers aren’t meant to be repaired. If something goes wrong they are thrown away. In a world that needs to rapidly reduce it’s carbon footprint, we need to rethink the idea of what should be disposable and what shouldn’t be.

How about music file formats? Apple uses patents on iTunes to exclude others from the music business, then they produce iPod players that are more expensive than competitors devices. The ipods also have batteries that can’t be replaced. When they go bad, you have to throw it away and buy a new one. Many people disposing of their ipods won’t even think about the fact that the batteries have cadmium, a dangerous pollutant. So rather than tossing the ipod into a battery recycling bin at the local Best Buy (Kudos for Best Buy on providing those.) they toss the iPod into the trash.

Microsoft, for year, blocked competitors from creating products that could compete with Word and the rest of the Office suite, by using proprietary file formats. Converting from Word to any other file format and back again has been problematic until very recently. What I find astonishing is that it has taken so long for companies and governments around the world to realize that depending on a single vendor for the software they need to conduct day to day business is incredibly foolish. I applaud Massecheusetts for paving the way towards rationality by adopting a file format which really is free and open, Open Document Format.

If we abolished all patents for interfaces, life would go on. Perhaps, instead of ripping people off for ink cartridges, the printer manufacturers might build printers that are robust and easy to repair. Instead of depending on proprietary document formats to force companies to upgrade to the latest version of their software, Microsoft might be forced to actually provide compelling new functionality.

There’s another benefit, too. If all interfaces were free to use, I suspect it would be easier to develop standards and get people to adopt them. This would reduce the cost to develop many products. We could spend less time reinventing the wheel, and more time working on that fusion power plant we need.

A world without interface and file format patents would also be one in which it would be far easier to build and maintain open source software. I’d be able to get open source drivers for my nVidia graphics card, or open source drivers for the broadcomm wireless chipset used in my laptop. That would make it a lot easier for me to use Linux full time.

We need to rethink things. It bears repeating. Over the next few decades, we’ll have to wean ourselves off of oil and other fossil fuels. We’ll have to start paying the full cost of products, including the cost of energy and the cost to clean up the environmental damage done while producing those products. We can’t continue to live like teenagers, tossing our dirty laundry on the floor and hoping Mother Nature will clean it up for us.

We can do better than we have done.

Fortunately for Microsoft, but not so fortunately for me, the people who write the games I love to play don’t write them to run on Linux. They write them to run on Windows. So, while I’d love to use Linux as my normal desktop operating system, I’ve been reluctant to make the leap.

An announcement on June 18, 2008, brought the day of my emancipation from Windows a little bit closer.

You can read about it on SourceForge News – WINE 1.0 Announcement . WINE (WINE Is Not an Emulator) 1.0 has been released. This is a project that has been working hard to provide a stable working Windows API (Application Programming Interface) on Linux, which would allow you to run just about any Windows program on any Linux operating system.

“Hah!’, you say, “but that is only 1.0, how can I trust it? It’s barely a baby!”

But that’s not true. The makers of WINE long ago decided they wouldn’t release a 1.0 version until they had something rock solid. It has taken them fifteen years of beta testing and ongoing development to get there. While it’s still not 100% perfect, there are thousands of Windows programs that now run successfully on Linux, courtesy of WINE. You can check this list, at the WINE Application Database Headquarters. They rank programs by how much configuration you have to do to get them to work cleanly. There are over ten thousand applications listed in this database, so you can probably find yours.

One of the ones I care most about, Dungeons and Dragons Online, is rated Platinum. Lord of The Rings Online, my other MMO addiction, has some issues with the launcher, but there are people outside of Turbine (the company that built LOTRO) are working on. Since games, and in particular MMO games are extremely fussy, it’s likely whatever business application you want will work just fine.

Linux now looks a lot more like Windows than you might expect. You’ll even find that many of the eye-candy features of Vista are readily available on Linux, without the other problems.

Still, Linux is not yet the best choice for those who don’t like to have a bit of a learning adventure, you’d be surprised at how similar it looks to the OS you’ve been using, and all the things that it can do. (It’s pretty cool to install an OS that already has the word processing, spreadsheet, accounting, email, web browsers, drawing packages, and almost anything else you can name, already set up and ready to go.)

Oh, if you are interested in trying out Linux, you can download and burn a CD for a Live installation of most of the various flavors. I’d suggest starting with Ubuntu, which you can find at www.ubuntu.org. Once you’ve downloaded the .iso file, you can use your CD burning software to create a CD. If you boot up with that CD, you’ll be running Linux, but it won’t alter anything on your computer, without your permission. (That’s kind of nice, huh?) If you decide you like it, you can install it. There’s lots of good information on how to do that and lots of friendly Linux users that are ready to help you, all over the Internet. Maybe it’s time for you to get away from Windows, too.

I’ve written articles before on what it was like to build my own MythTV box, so I thought it might be good to write up an article on what I like and dislike about each system.

It’s been an interesting experience, playing with TIVO and learning how it compares with our beloved MythTV.

Now, one thing that has been frustrating to us about MythTV, is that it hasn’t been terribly easy to upgrade. We use KnoppMyth, and I never really took the time to learn the upgrade procedures. But, of course, that’s the problem. You shouldn’t have to learn a procedure. These are computers, they should just do the work for us.

NOTE: I just visited the KnoppMyth site, and discovered they now have auto upgrade for the current release. It will upgrade from release 3 or 4 to the latest software. Unfortunately, you still have to do the backup yourself. I’m puzzled as to why that should be the case, I think it would be a great enhancement of MythTV/KnoppMyth, if the whole automation procedure were automated. When KnoppMyth is installed, it could set up a separate partition on the hard drive and use that for backup, or allow you to specify a network drive, or USB hard drive.

One thing we dearly miss about the MythTV is the commercial skipping. We can fast forward through commercials with TIVO, but with MythTV, the commercial skipping was so accurate, we rarely ever had to mess with it. When there was a problem, it was fairly easy to go in and manually cut out the commercials.

Another thing we miss from MythTV, is the ability to do our scheduling using a web browser over the local network. MythWeb is one of the best features of MythTV, I believe. It seems very silly that TIVO makes you use the rather cumbersome, by comparison, on screen scheduling, when they could easily set up the same kind of thing that MythTV has.

TIVO itself uses open source software. They use Linux for their operating system. In fact, since the TIVO boxes are sold at such a low price, some people are using TIVO boxes to construct low-cost network appliances.

I will admit that TIVO has a pretty nice interface. The program suggestion feature is nice, too. If you want a DVR that isn’t any hassle, and you’re willing to pay a monthly fee for it, TIVO isn’t a bad deal.

If you like a bit more of a challenge, a lot more flexibility, and complete access to the source code, MythTV is your answer. They both have their places.

One of the nice things about FreeMind, if you’re a technical sort, like myself, is that the latest version, currently in beta, supports scripts written in Groovy, a powerful scripting language that runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). This allows you to extend the capabilities of the software quite a bit. One group has developed a way interface FreeMind with a project tracking system, so they can use mind mapping to brain-storm solutions and generate estimates.

Since the program is written in Java, I’ve decided to join the developer team and see if I can add a few features I’d like to have. They mostly have to do with improving the utility of scripts and improving the user interface.

At the same time, I decided to go ahead and change my blogging software to WordPress. I’ve heard good things about it and my wife uses it on her own site.

I will do my best to restore most of the old stories I had on this site, at least the ones that are worth keeping around, like the recipes and how-to guides.

As far as news goes, I’ve been busy. I’m still working on my novel, its working title is now The 24th Chromosome. It’s about a genetics researcher who discovers something quite extraordinary buried in the Human Genome. So far, the story is being well-received by my writing group.

Now that things are working well here, again, I should be posting more frequently.