But enough about the details. On to my point.

So I am working on Budse by myself. I started the project, and it has been a one-man show the whole time. As an individual developer working on an open source project, sometimes I dream. I start to think big about people actually using it. Big dreams, I know. Haha currently I doubt it if anyone aside from me uses it. When I was coding and especially when I was deciding on how to license it, I thought that since it fulfilled my need it would be useful to other people as well. Maybe that’s not true. Maybe it is. It remains to be seen.

It is so easy to dream of becoming great. But maybe dreaming big isn’t such a bad thing. Maybe if I lost the ability to dream big, I would lose a little bit of who I am. So while I am currently unsatisfied with its use, I am definitely going to press forward!

But besides that, we can even have expectations about much more concrete matters. When we sit in the chair, we have that dreamy expectation that the chair will hold up our weight. If that expectation isn’t met, we sure aren’t too happy! And so it goes moment by moment with all sorts of things that we encounter.

More recently I’ve noticed how much people do this with things that they don’t understand. Or rather, I’ve noticed how this comes into play when people are dealing with those things that most of us do not fully understand. Things like televisions, computer programs, and automobiles will all sorely disappoint us when we expect them to work and they do not. But when we don’t know what to expect, and things work how happy are we?

When we try out a shortcut key and find that some programmer has made sure that shortcut key works aren’t we pleasantly surprised? Or when we go to a website, make a guess at what to do, aren’t we glad for whoever made it work just so?

I emphasize the computer software, but it’s obviously more.

Not the pirates that say, “Arggh me matey” or have a peg leg or even have a parrot on their shoulder. That would be cool, but I actually only know pirates in the modern day sense. You know the ones that illegally consume things like music, videos, software, pictures, or any of a whole range of things. Haha I can hear the groans already.

The digital age has made it infinitely more easy to exactly duplicate other content (which is related to why digital things are superior in quality to analog). With this, people have degenerated to outright stealing while not even understanding what they’re doing. Well I hate to break it to you, but wrongs committed unintentionally are still wrong.

While I have written that I think that Music Piracy Makes People Stupid, this issue is far larger than just music. Music is the best known, probably because it’s the area that’s most often violated. It is so much more widespread, though. So let’s get down to the real issue.

Breaking Down Piracy

1. Someone creates something for a purpose
2. Somehow it’s made available to other people (whether stolen, hacked, copied, or what) outside of the realm of the original purpose
3. You (or a “friend” of yours) gets a copy of said good and utilize it

Is that pretty much how it breaks down? Seems to me like the real issue is that the creator/writer/actor/musician/whatever did not intend for those in step 3 to make use of their creation. If I were a computer programmer and wrote a program to sell. And then if someone had illegally hacked my program that I worked to create to sell and gave it away for free, I’d be piping mad. If you were a photographer and had taken a picture for someone, but someone else had taken it and used it for a totally different purpose, you’d be up in arms. If you provided services (law, medicine, therapy, teaching, what have you) and someone took your service without providing payment, you’d see that something was immediately wrong.

So basically, since the creator didn’t want it (and who hopefully created a bulletproof license or end user agreement), you’re undermining what they’re doing. It doesn’t matter that you could create a digital copy of their song without paying for it and they’ll be none the wiser. Because in actuality, it does affect them. You should have paid them for that song. And you are now a pirate. But you don’t have to be!

Dealing With This New Ninja World

Is all lost? Far from it. Once you understand what it’s like to be the one being defrauded, you’ll see that something needs to change. And there is a solution! There are all kinds of answers! Maybe watch things that are actually released by the studios (try out Hulu), actually buy music (if you’re listening to music you can probably afford to pay for it) or try Amie Street for the whole indie scene, and possibly even catch up on some of my Favorite Open Source Apps.

Or you could just become a real ninja and then you’d care about arrows, ninja stars, and ninjato rather than swiping versions of old TV shows, Adobe Photoshop, and/or the remix version of Justin Timberlake’s latest single.

However this is not exactly what a lot of people want. Sometimes they want different partitions because they want different operating systems on the same computer, but more often it’s just because they want some kind of division between their data and their operating system, applications, etc. For more reasons, check out the purpose of partitioning according to wikipedia.

When you install an operating system for the first time, it has a partitioning tool that allows you to choose how you want to partition your new hard drive. Well often if you buy your computer retail then they’ve already set it up for you. But if you were to actually go through the entire process yourself, then you’d likely partition the hard drive with the operating system installer’s tool.

But then, what if your hard drive is currently set up differently than you want? What do you do once your data is all over your drive? Well you have a couple of choices. You can either completely format (and erase) your hard drive and start from scratch. This is obviously not going to be your first choice if you have data on your hard drive already as that would involve backing up and restoring all of your data. That seems like a rather long process unless you’re having serious errors and really do want to start from scratch (which is sometimes the desired outcome). So the other option is to use some software to re-partition your hard drive while maintaining your data.

Norton PartitionMagic Replacement

Many people know about Norton PartitionMagic in order to do exactly this task. But after eschewing that (in my mind) expensive software, I would highly encourage everyone to check out the free and open source Parted Magic. That is what I used! It’s a LiveCD (which means that you download it, burn it on a cd, insert it into your computer, and boot off the CD. It utilizes the Gparted application for the partitioning duties.

It was a snap to use when I recently upgrade my Ubuntu installation from Feisty Fawn (7.04) to Gutsy Gibbon (7.10) (don’t you love the alliterative names, I know that I do).

In order to use just:

1. Defrag your hard drive
2. Download the .iso image
3. Burn to a CD as a disk image
4. Insert into computer
5. Boot to the CD (you might need to change a BIOS setting or two in order to do this)
6. Create, resize, modify your partitions and keep your data intact!

Oh and I grouped the applications into categories so adding up the number to 17 might take a little bit of mental math on your part. Then again, you could just take my word for it.

• Utilities
  1. Quicksilver – A very popular application that allows you to access a lot of things through a single interface. It allows you to treat things as objects, which is very cool and very useful.
  2. Virtue Desktops – A virtual desktop application that has cool effects. Unfortunately this project is no longer under development because of the impending Spaces feature of the next version of Mac OS X (Leopard). It’s still a good one, though.
  3. smcFanControl – Monitor and increase the speed of your fans. This is pretty useful to use on my MBP because even though it seems stable, it can get hot. I raise the fan RPM for higher load situations.
  4. Monolingual – On suggestions, I realized that there was unnecessary space taken up by localization files. Found this easy-to-use program that will remove the localization files for all of your applications! Saved a couple of GB.
  5. AppCleaner – When you delete things on a Mac, they give you the impression that you’re completely done. That there’s no hassle of “uninstalling” programs like in other operating systems. But that’s not entirely true. They will actually leave things behind. Use this free application to completely remove applications when you want to get rid of them!
• Productivity
  1. Open Office – This free cross-platform suite of office programs is great! This requires that X11 be installed as well, but in truth this is an excellent substitute for purchasing Microsoft’s suite. Check it out at least before purchasing MS Office for a large amount of money (compared to free).
• Web
  1. Firefox – The (now) ubiquitous open-source web browser is a must. I would try Camino (and I still might), but I love the extensions on Firefox too much at this point.
  2. Adium – The Mac OS X port of the popular Gaim (now Pidgin) chat client.
  3. CyberDuck – A great FTP and SFTP browser. If you don’t know what FTP and SFTP are, then you won’t need this, but if you do then this is absolutely a good application to look into.
• Programming
  1. Xcode Developer Tools – A necessary first step if you want to develop applications for Mac OS X. It’s an Integrated Development Environment that I’ve only tinkered with to make some sample apps but with which I fully intend to use in the future.
  2. Aquamacs – My favorite text editor (Emacs) lives as a fully native port to Mac OS X. Nice. Really, really nice.
  3. iTerm – Some nice features (tabbed sessions, bookmarks) to have on top of the default Terminal.
• Media
  1. GIMP for Mac OS X – The best full-featured, open-source image modification program I know. Needed to install X11 from the Install DVD, but that’s no big deal. Don’t think that they’re going to make a Cocoa version of this, but I just found GTK+ for Mac OS X so that GTK+ apps (like GIMP) can run the apps without X11. Maybe I’ll try to see if I can help out with that project…
  2. VLC Media Player – This media player can handle anything and everything (okay almost) that you throw at it.
  3. iRecord – Going to (haven’t yet) use this program to schedule and use my MBP as a Digital Video Recorder through my cable box. What does that mean? Hopefully being able to record HD content to my MBP! VLC is necessary for this task as well.
  4. Audacity – An excellent program for recording and modifying audio. Pretty necessary for me right now since I’m in the process of digitizing a good-sized vinyl record collection.
  5. Handbrake – A DVD ripper. Never used, but have heard lots about. Will be useful if I want to watch a DVD without taking the DVD with me.

I’ll probably have another post about getting interested in setting myself up with programs that will help in utilizing cross-platform applications. Let me know if you have any others to add, and I’ll consider using it if it suits me. Found any of these to be useful and you hadn’t heard of them before? I’d love to hear (and I’m sure the developers of the applications would too!).

You don’t have to be a software developer to appreciate ideas that will make your life easier or better now, do you? So don’t be scared if you’ve never heard the terms, just think about the ideas.

Anyways, these are just a few of the ideas that I’ve thought were useful:

1. Leave lots of notes (well-commented code) - Just as in coding, you (should) know what you’re doing at the exact moment that you’re doing it. However, how many times do we do something and then either leave it undone or pick it up again at another time. A prime example of this are those leftovers in the fridge. You threw them into the refrigerator last night after dinner just to get things cleaned up. Then you go get some groceries, put them in, and happen to push those leftovers to the back of the shelf. You find a tupperware in a few days and you are not really sure what it is or how old it is. A good comment from yourself when you had put it into the fridge would help you quite a bit right now wouldn’t it?
2. Let objects perform functions that they were intended for (object-oriented programming) – How big are the toasters with lcd screens? How much do you want a pot that has a handle with the temperature as well as a clock, an alarm, and a remote control? Sure you could scoff at such ideas, but in reality it’s much more efficient to use objects for their intended purpose. When objects have specific functions, you will immediately know what object to use when it comes time to perform a particular task. Don’t try to open a bottle with a screw driver, you can get diseases from the rusty nail that you were screwing in the garage the other day. Don’t use the same sponge to clean the counter as the dishes that you eat off of for the same reason. Using objects for purposes other than their intended one can not only make you look cheap, it can introduce errors that you would not have thought of. Also they’re better than huge, all-encompassing programs/objects because when some part of it breaks it is easier to fix and there is less loss of function. The television with speakers, a subwoofer, a built-in dvd player, a vcr, audio receiver-like capabilities and numerous other parts is more likely to be completely useless if one of those parts breaks than individual components, is it not?
3. Fix when needed, upgrade when necessary (don’t get left behind the ages with nasty-to-maintain code) - When something breaks, you have choices. You can get it repaired to the state that it was before or you can upgrade and buy something. So I guess you have a few choices in what to buy as well. You can buy used or new. In software development, there are many tools that you can use. There are code editors, programming languages, and many other tools. There is an unfortunate tendency for some, just as in life probably, to hold on to the old tools and languages simply because that’s how it’s always been. Sometimes we need to take a step back and re-evaluate the state that we are in and whether it is worth it to move on to something bigger and better. It’s not worth it to keep that old junker of a car if the repair costs cost more than a brand new automobile.
4. Understand how something works rather than specific tasks (similar to concept programming) – Do not limit your knowledge to specifics. Understand the driving force behind the specifics and then the specifics will become clear. This is a rather basic idea that translates to all types of fields. However, in my opinion, it seems to hold a lot of weight in the programming world because there are very many different ways to express the same idea. Notably, programming language choice can very easily decide how a particular goal will be achieved. In the real world, if you want to program a VCR, it is much more useful to understand what you’re doing (setting a timer and settings on the VCR in order to turn on and start recording) rather than simply memorizing the sequence of buttons to press in order to set the timer. It’s going to be pretty tough if you suddenly purchase a DVR and you don’t really understand what you’re trying to do with it.

Somehow they assume that you are not doing anything important. They don’t save the status of anything nor do they give you the option to opt out completely from automatic restarts. There’s a fine line between doing things for the benefit of the user and annoying them to no end such that they want you to just quit what you’re doing.

It annoyed me before, and it continues to do so. You’d think that someone at Microsoft would get annoyed with it and change it, huh? I guess they don’t get annoyed. They’re too busy being litigious.

//TODO: insert Apple fanboy snide Justin Long-type remark

//TODO: insert Linux fanboy superiority over all remark

//TODO: insert over-arching peace and love to all remark

1. They are free. How could you want to pay for software when you can have it legally for free?
2. It’s more agile (updated more quickly) in general.
3. It supports freedom and the opportunity for anyone to get into the software market simply by having a good product.
4. They are built by a community that by definition is giving and supportive.
5. If I wanted to, I could try to understand the code on my own. Now, I don’t because I don’t exactly have all of the time in the world to understand the source code of applications that are extremely complicated (why would I be using them if they weren’t complicated). Nevertheless it’s rather comforting to know that I could.

Anyways, enough of why I like them. Here are some of my favorites!

1. Firefox – the now ubiquitous web browser has come out of the open sourcing of the Netscape Navigator. It is a “modern” web browser with pretty much full support for web standards. Plus I love the extensions that you can add on at will. Someday I’ll write a post of my favorite extensions. But in any case, it’s standards-compliant, customizable, and supported by a huge community of developers and testers.
2. Open Office – an awesome replacement suite for your office needs. It has all of the programs that you would need if you’re a Microsoft Office user. It supports more formats than MS Office does, and it is instantly easy to use for anyone who has used any office productivity program.
3. AmaroK – this is an awesome music player. The only drawback is that it’s only available on Linux. It is an iTunes-like player with integration with a myriad of services including automatic lyric retrieval, last.fm synchronization, and wikipedia integration for information about the artist that you’re currently listening to! They’re starting work on porting this application to other systems, but this would be a huge incentive for any music lover to go to linux.
4. VLC media player – plays pretty much any format of media that you can throw at it (with the exception of the closed Real media). It’s lightweight and it is on any platform that you could have!
5. Pidgin – recently renamed from GAIM because of a settlement, this is an instant messaging program that supports lots of different protocols out there. And that means that you can replace all of your chatting programs with this single program. Its looks are similar to other projects, but it surpasses them in features.
6. GIMP – the Gnu Image Manipulation Project is a full-featured replacement for your image editing needs. It can even help you make your own passport pictures. Photoshop is ridiculously expensive. People always cheat and install illegal copies. This is a great replacement for pretty much everyone out there. You can even make it look like Photoshop with Gimpshop!
7. Ubuntu – this platform is obviously getting more and more recognition. I could have stated that I like Linux, but I do in fact just use Ubuntu. There is a huge community, and it’s growing quickly. It is a really easy operating system to use (familiar enough for anyone who has previously used an operating system) with some very good hardware support. It plays nice with older hardware (the server that this blog is currently hosted on was originally running Windows 98, but now runs quite nicely on Ubuntu).
8. Apache – on that note, the Apache software foundation is making some really awesome server software. It powers quite a lot of the Internet. It’s easy to set up and there is lots and lots of documentation out there for its use.

I guess that was basically split up with the top half being the more “usable” programs that everyone would want to use while the end was geared more towards specialized uses. Nevertheless, I think that everyone out there could stand to try out the products coming out of these software projects. Even if you decide to use your commercial program (which is not a problem if it’s better and more for what you need) then that’s fine. But for lots of people, especially those with illegal software, you might want to try out these programs. And then you should read Music Piracy Makes People Stupid for a longer post about why I think that cheating, stealing, etc is so despicable. And then you should own up, repent, and go sit in the corner. We can all sit there together while we think about what we’ve done.

There are a few things that I’ve recently realized are inconsiderate browsing habits. To start off with, you must know that for the Firefox browser, there are programs that can be installed called Firefox extensions. I’d like to use a couple as examples of some of the browsing habits that are inconsiderate. However, it must be noted that they are not the actual habit, but they are rather a means to an end.

1. Adblock and Filterset.G Updater are both super extensions that are often the first that I’ll install when I have a new installation of Firefox. Basically they attempt to take the ads out of your Internet browsing experience. And they work very well. Adblock will basically filter out anything that you you specify. It is as easy as right-clicking on an ad and adding it to the list to be blocked. However this takes a long time to build up a reasonable list. Luckily it also allows you to use some pattern matching (similar to regular expressions) to allow you to make your list useful in a shorter list. Basically it allows you to match multiple things with a single pattern.

   This is not easy for most people. So in comes the Filterset.G Updater! It uses a master list that someone else has taken the time to create. It will match almost all of the ads that you would have normally encountered. Of course some sites are good enough to get around this. Nevertheless it leads to a pretty ad-free browsing experience that is incomparable to one filled with pop-ups and more ads than content.

   The inconsideration involved is this: websites need those ads as a source of revenue. Although I’ve only realized much of this by having my own site, it does make a lot of sense. Many sites that you read are free to use. However, they often need some income in order to stay free. It costs money to host a website (sometimes a good deal of it). When you’re browsing a site with ads, it is similar in idea to watching television with commercials. Television uses the revenue that is garnered by having commercials in order to create the content. Merely by the fact that you’re watching the show (and subsequently in some way affecting the Nielson Ratings), you are allowing the television company to charge more for their commercial time.

   Advertising on the Internet works similarly. I’m talking specifically about Google AdSense because I have experience with it, but this valid for almost all other advertisement programs. There are a couple of ways that users help support a site monetarily through their advertisement program.

   1. Viewing an ad. Simply by viewing an ad with the content, users are helping out the site because many ad programs will allow advertisers to purchase space that ends up paying per view (or impression in AdSense speak). The more views a site gets, the more it gets paid.
   2. Clicking on an ad. This is definitely applicable for all advertisement programs out there because nearly all of them will pay a site publisher (those producing the content for a site) based on how many clicks that an ad gets. There are a number of ways that a publisher might put ads on their website, but that is another matter entirely.

   What does this mean for you? Well I don’t know what it means for you. But for me it means that I will try to browse in a way that supports the website. As I use the Adblock extension, I can easily do this by

   1. Clicking the Tools menu
   2. Going to the Adblock item
   3. Click Whitelist this page or Whitelist this entire site

   Whitelisting a site means that you have given that site priority to not have anything blocked by Adblock. To undo this, on the whitelisted paged you can follow the same procedures as above. On top of whitelisting pages/site, you might consider clicking some ads. Don’t think that you’re giving your life away because ads are getting better and better nowadays. Very often they are related to the content that you’re reading (for contextually-based ad programs). So don’t avoid ads like the plague, they do some good by monetarily supporting sites that you are enjoying for free.

2. Fasterfox is another extension that highlights some inconsiderate browsing habits. This extension will basically tweak the Firefox settings to give you a faster browsing experience. This seems very cool because it helps you out as the end-user.

   However, this is actually fairly inconsiderate some of the time. The way that this extension works is that you can set how much tweaking you want the extension to do for you. At its extreme, it will prefetch (follow the link and load the page before you actually click on it) pages, open multiple connections to servers, and more. Obviously this puts more a load on the server than is necessary because you will not always click every link in a page nor will you absolutely need to load a page 1 second quicker. By putting an extra load on the server, you are unnecessarily making it harder for the server to serve its content to other people who might want it.

   Now, this does not affect low-traffic sites like my own because I could happily handle way more traffic than I currently do. But it does affect higher-traffic sites because they are already closer to being pushed over the edge. And that is just not nice. Other variations of this inconsiderate browsing habit are constantly refreshing pages for no reason, etc.

3. Utilizing Digg is actually somewhat inconsiderate because it often results in a Distributed Denial of Service. Without going into too much detail, this is basically when lots and lots of people will simultaneously access a site and overwhelm its ability to serve pages. This means that either some hardware will go down or people who actually would like to visit a site will not be able to because they are stuck behind everyone else waiting for the page. Granted, I participate in using Digg, but it still can definitely be an inconsiderate browsing habit. Consider using caches that have been made of that page. Hopefully most sites that get dugg will be able to handle the traffic and will actually benefit in some way from it (I try to find good ads to help them out with if I like what they have to say).

In the end, you just basically have to think about how your actions affect others and not just yourself. Apparently, that’s true for life as well.

<edit>
After I thought about it a bit, I wanted to add this little bit. By writing this entry I am by no means asking you to support my site though my advertisements. That would be underhanded as well as a likely violation of the Terms of Service for using their programs. But I think that people don’t really know about all of this. So read my entry, but I want what you do with this information to be up to you. But at least now you know.
</edit>

Last night I was upgrading to Feisty so it was taking a lot of the bandwidth away from my connection. Thus it would be hard for people to have snuck in and successfully got back the pages that they were looking for without timing out.

And then sometime early this morning, my home DSL connection somehow died. And I didn’t realize this until I was at work. And that meant that nobody was physically around to restart everything. Ah the downfalls of hosting your own site on a home connection. It was pretty good for quite sometime. I didn’t need to restart (and renew my IP address) for possibly a month or two? That’s pretty good. Well at least for me anyways.

Anyways, back to our regularly scheduled program!