Haz's BlogMore then just an average WordPress blog!

Well, I’ve been trying to look into it and this one quote is by far the best one I’ve seen on the matter (found here comment number 25):

Re: BUT..
by Xanthir, FCD – Apr 23rd, 2008 @ 1:11pm

Incorrect. The GPL states that you must release the source code to people you distribute the program to. If you never distribute it, you never have to share the source, and your improvements remain your own.

However, if you make an improvement to some GPLed code and then use that in your product that you sell, you *do* have to release the source code with it (along with your improvements). As noted by a previous respondent, that’s THE feature of GPL. GPL is a viral license that infects anything that touches it. The point is to eventually make virtually everything GPL, so that we return to the early state of computing where anyone could change any program they had to do what they wished.

This is why the Open-Source model is always overlooked! Everyone thinks, just because as part of the GPL you MUST release the source code, that Open-Sourced must be bad!

This is wrong and should be clarified to the media right now! Yes, you must release the code along with your compiled version, but that isn’t a bad thing. You only have to distribute the code to the audience that your distributing it to – I might be wrong on this statement though, but bare with me.

If, say, your creating some code for a business (bank) and by disclosing your work to the public could be a risk to people’s privacy (in this case money). Now, recreating the wheel is terrible. I know, I’ve tried to recreate code that’s already been out there for years and its hard work! Specially when doing it from scratch. Using the GPL as the licence, I could use Open-Source code, improve it and then sell my changes to the bank (but obviously provide my code with it). Since the program will not be used outside of the bank’s building, that code never needs to be released publicly – but any code that the bank doesn’t mind disclosing, could be sent out back to the community. For example I fixed a bug that people have been trying to work on for months, this could be then sent back and help the community forward.

Where do you see the bad side in this? If the bank later needs to adjust the code further, sure they could hire someone else – which could be bad – but aren’t they more likely going to trust the man who made it originally? Won’t his services, if they thought it was good enough, worth re-hiring for alterations? But on the other hand, it also means they can get a new set of eyes to improve their software further, and life would continue, bug fixes and code the bank again doesn’t mind disclosing could be sent back out to the community… etc… etc… life goes on, people are getting paid for their hard work, etc…

If someone thinks this is the wrong thinking towards the GPL, please do bring it to my attention, but as far as I’m aware this is what the GPL was made for, to make code viral and spread to everyone.

Edit:
Wow, I couldn’t of put this any better. It seems I am right in my thinking above. Read the quote found here, he uses references from the actual GPL licence website.

Edit, Edit:
Some news on a French police organisation that has switched from Windows to Linux (ubuntu no less).

– Everyday I like the Open-Source community more and more.
Haz

Has anyone tried any of the other software developments based on Mozilla technologies? I’ve just resently tested Songbird, and I must say it’s pretty awesome! It’s like having the best qualities of iTunes (which I hate with a passion, but it does have some great feats.) and WinAMP, mixed in with some of Mozilla’s great initiative. Also, there’s Mozilla Ubiquity – the addon that should rock the world of browsing, but I’ll get onto that later.

Songbird, is a media player – with addons! Bold statement Haz, I hear you say, but don’t we already have that? Do plugins mean nothing to you? Well yes, I know that, but still… power to the open-source! Besides, you forget I’ve converted to the dark side! Linux!

As standard on ubuntu, it has 2 media players (Movie Player, and Rhythmbox Music Player). Neither apeal to me much. I had to apt-get install VLC straight away for watching movies, and I’ve stuck with Rhythmbox Music Player for music – it lets me play music from Last.fm, and manages music with a library. Songbird seems to be a treat to the eyes (and the ears), it also brings something I thought was not possible… Firefox (or at least the gecko engine) browser integeration, and all things music all in one app.

I’ll put it into context, I didn’t think Ronald Jenkees would be a highly know artist. I mean he’s a YouTube guy who made his own album and distributes it himself via his site (and now amazon.com as MP3 downloads). But sure enough, his album was regnoised in the mashTape addon section at the bottom:

Now before you say hey that’s cheating, that isn’t in-built into the software!, technically it isn’t. I left everything as default during the install (not really an install on linux, but I digress), so unless you unticked it… you’ll have it as standard.

Anywho! As I was saying, mashTape! At first glance, it seems to pull information from the internet based on the currently playing artist/song. It shows information about the artist from [Last.fm | MusicBrainz | Freebase], Lists reviews from [Amazon], News from [Digg | Google News | Hype Machine | MTV Music News], Photos from [Flickr] and Videos from [MTV Music Videos | Yahoo Music | YouTube]. Those are default values obviously, configuratable in the Preferances. Also, bare in mind that I assume it pulls information from sources that has data which is why I’ve used | character, in programming you might know this as being the OR operator and this is why I’ve used it.

I’m currently looking into addons, because at the end of the day thats why you get an application with addon (or plugin) support. To customise it to your liking. Ones that have caught my attension so far are: Now Playing List (for the right panel) and FireTray (a system tray extension for linux). Themes? Oh yes please! I wish Foxkeh was ported to Songbird, but alas it isn’t yet (or maybe I haven’t looked hard enough yet). Either way, much everyone’s favourite browser, there’ll be something to tickle everyone’s fancy. Below is a picture of the addon manager in preferences:

One cool addon that also comes with Songbird by default is called “Concert”, and guess what that might do? Yep, it lists upcoming concerts based on artists in your library. Brilliant! Even more exciting is the fact that if you leave it to just show concerts based on your library, it shows the number of upcoming concerts in brackets, so you’ll always know if something new is happening! Sadly, I have only one artist in my library so it showed me this message:

BUT on the upside, you can set it to show all concerts coming soon in your area:

Okay, onto the next topic: Ubiquity for Firefox (addon).

If you haven’t heard about it already, well then you should click the link and watch the videos. It’s basically trying to make browsing more intuitive, more language based, and being able to display/use/manipulate data the way you want it. Rather then me rant on, watch the videos and you’ll see for yourself.

I’ve known about Ubiquity for about a year, but they’ve finally made a prototype of it! If your interested, give it a try. Head on down to the Mozilla Addon page for Ubiquity. I’ve currently installed it myself, and need to restart my browser to try it. So this is me signing off, and I hope you enjoy my findings/review.

Songbird Images:

[View with PicLens]

Remember I said I has something interesting that I wanted to blog in a new post, well here it is…

Wouldn’t it be cool if we could have our desktops and applications (along with files), on the go. Picture this; you’ve just went to your best friends house, you start discussing that new cool program you’ve been using at home. As luck has it, you’ve forgot to take your laptop with you (or even your pen-drive!). Then you think to yourself… “oh wait didn’t I download and store it onto my desktop!”

Now if you said this aloud to your friend, their first reaction would probably be hit you on the head and tell you that you don’t have that with you. Well this is where you could grab their hand before they do it and say, “wait!! Did I say desktop? I meant webtop!”. Thats right, you heard me, a webtop. Like a desktop, but on the web.

It seems to be the new direction that the web is slowly taking seriously, creating applications that work anywhere, and on any platform. And why not! If you only need to develop something once, and instantly know that you won’t have to port it to make it work on another platform, then so much the better. The developers are happy, as they can work on their favourite machine to make the applications, the customers are happy because they know that no matter what that application will work out-of-the-box on their machine (sorta speak). Its a win-win situation.

Anyways, I’m rambling as usual. Enough talking gibberish, and lets get down to business. Here is what I’ve just uncovered: Web Desktops (or webtops). They’re basically fully working desktops that work straight out of your browser using the usual plugins you already have installed (Flash, Java, etc).

When I say desktop (webtops), what I mean is a fully working environment much like your own computer will be running to view this page. They tend to have things like text-editors, storage medium of some description, word processors, messengers, etc… So when I say webtop, I basically mean an operating system built and designed to run on any ‘usual suspects’ browser (Firefox, IE, Safari, Chrome, Opera).

Examples! I think its time I showed you some examples of these. I’ve talked too much. Here are some examples, I’ll review them later once I’ve had time to truely play around with them. The one I’ve used is called “DesktopTwo“… when I first read that title I initially though to myself “god that’s so corny!”. But surely enough, it is what the title says… its your second desktop. In all honesty I could and talk about what it has and what they do all day long, so instead I’ll list down the features and let you try them out yourself:

- Gives you 5GB of FREE storage – to store all your lovely data online.
- Have a text-editor, for writing that quick bit of info down.
- Instant Messenger – which I must point out lets you access the MSN, Gmail and Jabber networks.
- Email client.
- Address book.
- Calander.
- Blogger application – to create a blog account, and start bloggin’ to your newly created “blog_username.blogtwo.com” blog.
- Website editor – which I assume they give you your own website too (albeit on a sub-domain much like the blogger).
- MP3 Player, now I know it tries to search your hard drive for MP3. But I’m unsure if it means your virtual hard-drive or the physical hard-drive of the machine your accessing the website. I couldn’t get it to work, but what do you expect for a piece of software which is still in beta. You might have more luck with it then me (bare in mind I’m using a linux-box).
- RSS Reader.
- Access to their message board through a fancy custom-built application.
- OpenOffice.
- …and other cool stuff.

All-in-all, definitely worth a try. The only beef I have with it, is that it’s designed to run on IE7… but it seems to work on my Firefox 3.0.7 on ubuntu 9.04 (beta) without any hiccups.

Overall, I’ve enjoyed discovering this gem, and many others like it seem to exist. I only tried this one, as it was the first one I saw. There are other one’s, some open-sourced and downloadable for your own server, some use PHP / Ajax mixtures, and others use Flash. I’ll list them down for you in a moment. Give them a try and give me your feedback on them.

- DesktopTwo
- eyeOS
- G.ho.st
- Cloudo

Please check the terms and conditions of each of these sites before using them exclusively. As you never know what they might be doing with your data once you’ve stored them on their servers. Just thought I’d point that out to you all before anyone tries to blame me for anything in the future.

Enjoy my discoveries people on the internets!
Haz

I’d first like to point out, this is the first time I’ve ever used WordPress, in all honesty, and so far it was a breeze to install. No one likes a long and complicated install for a web application.

Anyways onto the juicy stuff, who the …. am I? I hear you ask. Friends call me Haz, and I’m currently a student studying Foundation Degree in Computing (second-year). You may, or may not, have noticed from the title that I like coding. What better way to start a new blog then with the usual starting point of “Hello World!”

The reason I made this blog I guess was because I’ve been diving in with software development for the web (web applications or rich internet applications), and well in a small way WorldPress is a web application – so what better than to start there? Also means that anything I find of interest I can quickly blog it down for all to see, and even for myself to come back to it later on. Plus one of my tutors, Phil Emerson, has mentioned WordPress a fair bit and usually anything he likes I seem to like too – so I thought I’d give it a go!

Alright, just found one thing that’s bugging me so far with WordPress… the WYSIWYG editor seems to be two steps behind my typing. I’m sure there will be a way around that.

I’ve got a few things I’d like to blog down, but I feel that deserves its own post. Thanks for stoping by and I hope you enjoy reading things I shall be putting on here in upcoming days (or even months or years!).