Blackmoor Vituperative

I took some time and wrote up a recommendation for people who still use Microsoft Office. It’s easy to criticize people still using Microsoft Office, but perhaps they really don’t know why they should migrate to OpenOffice.org. I hope that this detailed recommendation helps them make the best decision.

It is imperative that businesses eliminate all unlicensed software. Migrating from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org offers a cost-effective alternative to purchasing additional licenses of Microsoft Office. In addition, migration to OpenOffice.org offers significant benefits, such as cross-platform compatibility, increased security, and more reliable access to archived documents. Migrating to OpenOffice.org also provides a more user-friendly upgrade path than migrating to Microsoft Office 2007, because OpenOffice.org uses a standard, familiar user interface.

(from Recommendation to migrate from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org [PDF])

Michael Widenius, the original creator of the MySQL database system, announced in a blog entry on Thursday that he has left Sun Microsystems and is launching his own company. He is unsatisfied with the direction of MySQL development and believes that he will be able to make more meaningful contribution to the software from outside of the company.

[…]

It’s unclear how this move will ultimately impact the MySQL community, but it seems likely that the outcome will be positive. Widenius clearly wants MySQL to have a stronger community focus and is also still committed to making technical contributions. The departure of the project’s two cofounders in the aftermath of the acquisition doesn’t reflect particularly well on Sun, but it probably won’t have any direct impact on the company’s business interests or MySQL development efforts.

(from Unsatisfied with direction, MySQL creator leaves Sun, Ars Technica)

As a friend whom I know by the name “Eridah” recently said (speaking on behalf of Apple), “We can’t simply use iTunes as a file manager for a device, oh no. That’s too complicated for our userbase. No we have to only allow syncing. And only with one computer. And if you plug it into another computer IT WILL DELETE YOUR SONGS.”

iTunes sucks. So, if you have an iPod (as I do), what do you use instead?

First, replace the firmware in the iPod with Rockbox. And make sure you get some fonts and themes for it.

Then, use MP3 files, the most widely supported format for digital music. Everything under the sun supports MP3. It’s not that I think MP3 is the best format for digital music (there are formats with better compression, or better music fidelity, or both). But it is widely supported, and at 192 or more kbps, I can very rarely hear any difference between the original CD and an MP3.

Finally, use MediaMonkey to organize your MP3 files.

An old friend asked me if there is something he can use with his iPod instead of iTunes. Check these links out:

MediaMonkey (Standard — the Gold version costs $20)

RockBox

If you use Rockbox, be sure you get the fonts and a couple of themes.

A quick list of what books I am reading right now, or intend to read in the near future:

• Characters & Viewpoint
• Description & Setting
• Dialogue
• How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy
• Learning Nagios 3.0
• Manuscript Makeover: Revision Techniques No Fiction Writer Can Afford to Ignore
• Plot & Structure
• Practical Subversion
• Warriors & Warlocks: A Mutants & Masterminds Sourcebook

I need to read more fiction. I will start looking at novels or short story compilations after I finish with this stack.

The T-Mobile G1 will receive a number of minor software improvements in January 2009, according to http://www.googleandblog.com.

(And no, the apostrophe is not a typo.)

Remember Worlds.com? The 3D pioneer is still around and they’re ready to sue. In fact on Christmas Eve, the company sued NCSoft, for violating patent ‘690, a system and method for enabling users to interact in a virtual space.

NCSoft’s games, such as Dungeon Runners, Guild Wars and Lineage, are all said to violate the patent. And NCSoft is just the start. World.com’s IP lawyers feel that they have a “very robust patent,” reports Virtual Worlds News.

(from Worlds.com patent litigation could ripple through virtual worlds, ZDnet)

Even if patents on software were not inherently absurd (and they are), this is a patent on something which had been widely implemented and had even appeared in movies decades before Worlds.com applied for their patent in 2000. Even EverQuest was using virtual avatars for a year prior to Worlds.com’s patent application. Surely the USPTO had heard of EverQuest? How clueless could they possibly be? What technologically illiterate boob signed off on this?

I have a follow-up on my migration from from Outlook to Thunderbird. I had selected GCALDaemon to keep our Thunderbird calendars in sync with each other, but in use this had a few problems. For one thing, every time GCALDaemon synced, it would freeze Thunderbird. This was annoying. Further, there was some kind of permission problem regarding new calendar events: once created, we couldn’t modify them. This was really the deal-breaker, and why I started looking for an alternative.

So I have uninstalled GCALDaemon and replaced it with the Provider add-on for Thunderbird. This has its advantages and disadvantages. For one thing, it is considerably easier to install than GCALDaemon, although the instructions provided by bfish.xaedalus.net help make it even simpler. On the other hand, it has one drawback which GCALDaemon does not: it has no offline cache. This means that when we don’t have an active Internet connection, we won’t have access to our calendars. However, this is rarely the case, so it’s a drawback I am willing to accept.

So far, everything has gone really well.

I am so sick of the Digital Rights Mafia and the media robber barons depicting ordinary consumers as “pirates“. A college student who buys a CD and then shares it with her friends is not a pirate. A single mother who earns $15,000 a year who uses an unlicensed copy of Adobe Photoshop to eke out a living is not a pirate. A gamer who pays good money for Bioshock and then hacks it so that it won’t install a rootkit on his computer is not a pirate. Have they violated a license? Maybe, maybe not — but they are definitely not pirates.

• Pirates hijack ships at gunpoint
• Pirates kill people
• Pirates hold multimillion dollar cargos for ransom

Enough of this “pirate” bullshit. Enough.

I have wanted to get away from Outlook for a number of years now — ever since I dumped Microsoft Office for OpenOffice. So why haven’t I? For the first few years, it was simple expediency: there really was no functional alternative to Outlook. Then, it was convenience: between myself and my spouse, we keep the calendars and address books of three or four desktop machines synchronized by hotsyncing them through my Palm. For the last few years, this task was not feasible with Thunderbird.

However, I recently got a T-Mobile G1, and with its ties to Google, I thought surely that I would find some way of replacing Outlook while still keeping our contacts and calendars all in sync. As it turns out, I did, thanks to some very clever programmers.

Contacts

First off, I installed Thunderbird, Lightning, Enigmail, and gContactSync, and set up Enigmail to use my GPG keys (I won’t go into all of that here, but the Enigmail folks are very helpful getting that up and running).

I then needed to import our contacts from Outlook to Thunderbird. That was fairly simple. I set up gContactSync to synchronize our contacts with Google, and that was that — for the contacts, anyway.

Calendar

Setting up our calendars was a little more complicated. First, I needed to get to get our calendars into Google Calendar. I exported the calendar to a PST file, and then attempted to upload that file to Google. Every time I attempted this, it failed about mid-way through. I kept having to delete the items from the Google Calendar and start over. What finally worked was exporting specific date ranges. I did it year by year, and then individually imported each of those PST files to Google Calendar. This worked perfectly.

Next, I needed to synchronize Thunderbird (actually Lightning) with Google. The way I chose was to use GCALDaemon. GCALDaemon is a cross-platform application that keeps a local iCal repository on your computer, and then periodically syncs that with your Google Calendar. Then, you point Thunderbird at the local iCal file, and there you have it: synchronized calendars.

Once I had my laptop set up, it was very easy to set up our other computers the same way, as well as setting up the G1 to connect to the same Google account (I do not use Gmail for email, but that does not prevent using a Gmail account’s address book).

At last, after far too many years, I have eliminated Outlook from our desktops. The last remnants of the Old Republic have been swept away.