Why should this Free and Open Source Software be as good as professionally created commercial software from Companies like Microsoft? How can it be ...you know professional when there is no direct quality pressure by a customer or a marketing department and no financial need to write high quality software?

Well... where do home computers come from? Where were the first off the shelf computers used?

What has this to do with software?

Oh.., stay with me for a moment.
Well in the beginning of *ahem "the digital revolution", the military used mainframe computers. Those were built when needed, mostly for a single purpose. Similar in the academic field. Scientific institutes built mainframe computers (often by themselfes) and users could ask for time slots on them to perform calculations. Later the users just got terminal access and the assignment of computer time happened automatically controlled by an operating system.

Off the shelf computers were used in the entertainment industry very early. But game machines and paddles didn't have an operating system or a software stack, as we understand it today. They ran the same program all the time, or had interchangeable circuit boards (game cartridges) for selecting a game.

So, the early real off-the-shelf computers where used in the financial anvironment.

Yes... now that you say it, it's natural. Computers could execute financial calculations by the score, so the owner could serve large quantities of customers. This ability should be worth a lot of money.

And Microsoft was born out of this environment. In the financial sector, surrounded by people thinking in terms of money and products. The number of tasks a financial institution has to perform is limited, so they would barely need to tailor software to new or individual purposes. They are also used to charge contractors with anything out of their immediate business, so they wouldn't write software themselfes. The concept of buying off-the-shelf software for off-the-shelf services was fitting this environment.

So shouldn't that be the same for me?

Well... it did certainly not fit the needs in the scientific world. Scientists discover new problems and new tasks by the hour and they have to adjust their software tools and create new programs all the time. Also they all share the same curiosity and do not compete in the same way as classical commercial companies. Although they do compete and they are powered by commercial interests. The competition takes another form because the number of inventions and discoveries is unlimited other than the number of markets and customers a company can exploit. The more knowledge scientist share among each other, the more options they gain to continue their individual work. They think of software in a fundamentally different way.

Free software was born out of this environment, and as you can see, this doesn't mean that it is less professional or less sophisticated than proprietary comercial software. It doesn't even mean Free Software although available at no charge is less comercial. In the end a developer is getting paid for writing software not for selling copies. If you need to adapt even Free Software to your needs you will have to pay a developer to do so.

But you say Free Software comes from a scientific environment and I don't feel like a scientist.

I said Free Software fits the needs of a scientific environment to perform new tasks every day.
The quesion is: is it good enough for you, to use a product off the peg?
Or:
Are you an artist who wants to create novelty?
Are you an entrepreneur seeking to provide new offers?
Are you an individual doing your special kind of work in your special way?

(insert your answer here)

I keep getting invited to barbecue partys. Summer is awesome! Did the first barbecue at my new place yesterday with a vegan, a vegetarian and another carnivore like myself. So we had all kind of funny soy stuff on the grill, which didnt taste bad at all, the meat was also great.

When it was getting to cold we moved into the flat, which is in the basement (awesome!) and placed the grill on the window sill, which is on plane ground outside.

Great to know that the neighbours are cool with everything. Gotta prepare a salat for the the party i'm invited to today.

Everytime you write a website in Python, a bloody Tomcat dies. Use more Python!

Everytime you swear, god kills a fucking kitten!

I am reading waaay too many webcomics, here is a list of them (in alphabetic order):

• 909 Sickle
• Abby And Norma
• Abstruse Goose
• Diesel Sweeties
• Extraordinary
• FlakyPastry
• Geek Hero Comic
• Girls With Slingshots
• Johnny Wander
• Least I Could Do
• Legend Of Bill
• Menage a 3 (NSFW!)
• Mudtown (NSFW!)
• oglaf (NSFW!)
• Questionable Content
• Rip and Teri
• ShortPacked
• Snowflakes
• Something Positive
• SupernormalStep
• The Fart Party
• UserFriendly
• XKCD

Dear Blog,... hmm... well...
Today I continued writing my micro-CMS. I added an editor function, which enables me to write blog entrys in the browser. A browserplugin signs the text in the input form using gpg and the CMS recognizes the signature, so I can edit my blog without needing a classic login for authentication. Maybe I will write more often this way ;-)

Microsoft
Your ignorance. Our income.

This quote of wisdom and perception replaces a std{vista rant} which I find awkward now.

I came across a really cool movie quote recently:

The printed page is obsolete, information isn't bound up anymore. It's an Entity! The only reallity is virtual. You're not jacked in, you're not alive.

The line was spoken to the oldfashioned school librarian by a stereotype hardcore computer nerd in an episode of "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer" ("I Robot... You Jane", Season 1, Episode 8). The Series was produced in the late 90's when the internet was still fighting it's way into public perception.

Unfortunately I cannot provide the audiofile for legal reasons, of course not.

Inkscape SVG-File Sometimes I'd like to accidentally leave my homework somewhere on the bus, just to scare people. What you see opposite is actually not a black hole bomb but, well... a deterministic finite state automaton, which accepts binary numbers, divisable by five. But of course you recognized that yourself ;-)

Simple, eh?

Addendum 2009-5-26
Because some people asked me for it, here's the task:
Construct a deterministic finite state automaton which accepts all binary numbers divisable by five. The low-order bit is read first.

I've done the task three hours before the deadline and I do not insist, that this is the best solution. If you send me your smaller automata (under GFDL or CC-by-sa or any license with even lesser restrictions) I will put them on this site too. I will even inkscape the first automata you send me.
paul.h@o2online.de

PS: Yes, thats my actual e-mail-address, you got a problem with that?

Upgraded my homeserver today from an old Ubuntu LTS to Debian Lenny. Hack, the installer is beautyful!
I've been delaying the upgrade for a while now because I was really frightened to screw my software RAID- and LVM-setup. But that didn't happen. The installer perfectly detected the md-RAID as well as the LVM-Partitions and included everything in its nice partition setup tool. There were no problems booting the system with the whole setup. That was different from Ubuntu where I had to tinker around for a week to get the thing running.

Excelent work by The Debian pals.

Something funny happened to me today. I was sitting in a public train and beneath me sat a young man and a woman, they were talking about her computer. He mentioned that she would also need an operating system on her new machine, and asked what she's going to install and she answered that she doesn't care so much about that topic and will probably "just install an Ubuntu or something". He gave her a confused look and in an attempt to make her insecure about her excelent choice he began talking like: "but there is nothing you can run on it", "nobody uses it anyway", etc..., heard it a thousand times.
Before he could really get into it I raised up from my seat produced a flyer of LinuxWorks! and gave it to him wordlessly. Man, you should have seen his face.

Got another one! ;-)

Recently I had to listen, once more, to anxious and uninformed worries concerning the use of wireless network technology. I do not generally think that electromagnetic radiation is harmless in any case, and I believe that everyone should come to own conclusions about the pros and cons of radio technology. Therefore I want to support people in thinking about WIFI radiation for themselfes by giving a commonly understandable explanation of the technical part behind this ecological discussion...

Read more...

I just reloaded my Website... have fun!
(well.. actually now I'm still hacking around)