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If you are in IT, you hear Open Source Software – OSS – all the time. This is better than Closed Source_, but alone it still doesn’t mean you can modify the code or install it on 2,000 machines for no added costs. Wikipedia article on Free Software Licenseslicence .

Terms like

• OSS – Open Source Software
• FOSS – Free Open Source Software
• FLOSS – Free Libre Open Source Software

have vastly different meaning today.

10 yrs ago, OSS was enough. Then commercial software started being released with the source code, but still contained the same proprietary restrictions. Many companies had source code licenses to C++ libraries from Rogue Wave Software. We could see how everything was implemented, but were not allowed to modify the code or the libraries to our needs. Often OSS is still commercial and requires payment for use.

FOSS goes another step. It adds free, as in cost, to the software. You can use it for free and you can have the code, but you may be restricted from modifying, distributing, or the number of systems where you run it. Lots of newer open core software projects use this loophole. They advertise FOSS everywhere, but retain significant restrictions.

FLOSS adds Libre, the Spanish term for Freedom to the discussion. This is what I prefer my software. Zero, or very low, cost. You are free to modify (or pay someone else to modify it). You have the source code and you can give it away and/or run it on 2,000 machines without any cost.

There are lots of different Open Source License Agreements for software. I’m not a lawyer, but I have read most of the agreements and think that I understand them. Always read the agreement and/or get legal advice on each license agreement yourself.

Summary of Popular Software License Agreements

Big, centralized, services like Facebook and Twitter are great when all your friends are there … until there is an outage. If you update or tweet constantly, you can notice when those tools are down. There are alternatives that are not centralized.

Identi.ca, A Twitter Alternative

The guys over at status.net have a free micro-blogging site (i.e. twitter clone) that is both centralized, but also supports federation. Federated services work like email does. Lots and lots of servers communicating using a standard protocol. If any single server goes down, that doesn’t matter, the exchange of ideas keep flowing.

Federation Is Good for Freedom

Had to reflash my Nokia N800 last week due to some sort of error. That fixed everything, however, it meant that I needed to reload all the applications – which is fine. It never hurts to reload the apps and wipe the trial’ed software off.

• Map Sources
• GPS Routes
• POI DBs
• Turn by Turn Voice Prompts

Maemo Mapper Sources

Anyway, the main app on this portable to me is Maemo Mapper a GPS tool. Previously, it was pre-configured to provide VE Maps, OpenStreet Maps, Yahoo! and Google Maps for street, satellite and hybrid maps. This time, only OpenStreet Maps was provided. I need to find how to add these other views.

• OpenStreetMap – Traditional “Mapnik” “http://tile.openstreetmap.org/%0d/%d/%d.png”
• Google Maps (street) “http://mt.google.com/vt/v=w2.95&x=%d&y=%d&zoom=%d”
  I hear that Google changes this from time to time.

Layers

Layers are maps which have transparency so they can overlay the map you are using and add additional information. For example to add Road and city names on Google Satellite or Google Terrain maps.

• Google Traffic “http://mt.google.com/mapstt?zoom=%0d&x=%d&y=%d”
• Google Labels “http://mt.google.com/mt?v=w2t.88&&z=%0d&x=%d&y=%d” (use with Google Satellite or Google Terrain for labels for cities, roads, etc., i.e. “Hybrid” maps.)

Download GPS Routes

There is good news. In my search to find those old map sources, I uncovered a fix to the routing by address. I never had this working before. It is really simple .

Maemo Mapper configuration as follows: Menu → Route → Download… and change the domain portion of the Source URL to http://gpx.geotags.com/ Leave the cgi-bin/gpx.cgi?saddr=%s&daddr=%s portion remains the same. It was good to see it work. Very nice.

POI Databases

Over the years, I’ve added a few Points Of Interest databases to the device. Chains of cheaper gasoline stations, my preferred fast food chains and Walmarts. You never know when you’ll need to buy something at a Walmart on a trip. I also have a list of over 1,000 waterfall locations. If I’m near a waterfall, it is nice to know it and stop when in the area. I need to build a list of hiking trailheads and parking areas.

Turn by Turn

flite is needed for a Synthesized Voice telling you to turn left. There are lots of dependencies that may not be easily achieved.

Sometimes you don’t need the best quality or performance from a device, you just need it to work good enough for a purpose. I wanted a cheap NAS for my home network that supported 2 USB connected storage devices. No high performance needed, just easy access to disks over the network. No RAID.

Usually that would mean going online and looking for a PogoPlug or some other cheap device. Then I realized that I already had the device I needed. Western Digital TV Live HD Media Player

Western Digital TV Live HD Media Player as a NAS

Network Attached Storage is NAS.

Most people buy a WD HD TV Live (or the newer Netflix enabled “plus” version) to playback media to an HDTV. It does that fairly well over HDMI at 1080p. Not bad for $50 (or $90 for the plus version). Because it runs Linux inside, it probably does other things well too. It is completely silent, so having this device connected to the bedroom TV is acceptable. Having it in your living room also works.

Sometimes having some information is good. Sometimes it is frustrating. For me, the Certified Ubuntu Hardware Catalog is the later. None of the video cards I own is on this list. Zero. It isn’t like I’ve purchases non-mainstream cards. I guess they don’t want to bother with official support for cards costing less than $100?

What are these cards that aren’t worth support?

• nVidia 220
• nVidia GeForce 7300 SE
• nVidia GeForce 7600 GS

I retired the Diamond 128MB adapters and the nVidia Ti4400s a few years ago.
Also the VirtualBox Graphics adapter isn’t listed either, but since it is a virtual graphics adapter, I suppose that is to be expected.

At least this list of supported hardware isn’t as short as the list from VMware for their ESX and ESXi product lines. Also known as the HCL – Hardware Compatibility List

We all know that Richard Stallman thinks Cloud Computing = Careless Computing. I tend to agree.

Here’s a funny-to-IT-people video that explains much:

Video Link

Scott the Storage Guy wrote a little blog post about the offsite storage options now that Mozy has removed their unlimited plan. Crashplan was his winner. It supports Windows, Mac, Linux and Solaris, nice. Seems there’s a 15% off deal for former Mozy clients.

I use Firefox – whatever version that Ubuntu 10.04 LTS pushes. I don’t do beta testing – that is for the younger crowd.

Today, I found another extension that I’ll probably enable for shopping, but disable the rest of the time.

InvisibleHand

InvisibleHand is a browser extension that watches as you shop on 20-100 websites and suggests alternative, cheaper places to purchase the same item. When you finally get to a specific item page, it looks for that same item on all those other websites and show you where you can find it cheaper. It isn’t perfect, but WOW! For some items, you’ll see over 50% savings and for others, just a few dollars. Some of the suggested cheaper websites are not places that I’ve shopped before and for a few dollars, I’d probably go to NewEgg or Amazon first. Still, when Amazon isn’t priced right, seeing a $30 savings another company I’ve heard of before is nice. I found that most of the time, the alternative was exactly the same item, however, once it suggested the wrong model device, so definitely check that the suggested alternative really is what you want.

An article on Microsoft Trained Brain Syndrome that spells out some interesting points.

Still Need MS-Windows – Probably

Sadly, even if you do change to Linux for your daily use system, you’ll still probably need a Windows machine to run some software like TurboTax or the latest games. That’s just fine. If you don’t game, run Windows inside a virtual machine. If you do game, partition your drive with 60GB for Windows games – buy you’ll want to plan on 15 minutes and a reboot before playing so you can patch the system.

You’ll Prefer Linux

More and more you’ll find yourself in Linux and being happy about it. Trust me.

• You’ll be happy with the central OS and Application patching that Linux distros manage for you.
• You’ll like the added security because malware and spyware isn’t written for Linux.
• You’ll love all the free software that just works – 30K titles the last time I looked.
• You’ll love the really easy backup software that just works for either local or remote backups. Taking hourly snapshots is extremely easy.

Some days I feel like a broken record. For the last 5+ years, ever since USB v2.x has been available, people have been spending WAY TO MUCH to have an inferior portable hard disk. We won’t get into all the reasons that you’d want an external hard disk here – just know that they are fantastic. Also, we aren’t talking about the flash memory kind, rather the spinning HDD kind.

Here’s What You Should Know About Portable HDDs