I read Freddy Martinez's blog post about not bashing Windows and started writing a comment, and realized that it was much longer than his initial post, so I figured I'd just post it to my own blog, since I don't post here enough anyway.
Like Freddy, I have capitalist ideals. When people were telling me about Linux a few years ago, I had the hardest time comprehending how a free operating system could even get off the ground. There are a couple things to consider.
Firstly, I realized that free human interaction naturally and rightly includes both selfish competition as well as selfless collaboration. I've realized that the bottom line is freedom, not so much capitalism, if we are to define capitalism as selfish competition within a free market. (If you define capitalism just as a free market, that can also include the selfless collaboration if you think about it). So, people often get a lot of things done in the name of selfishness, as they're rewarded for their work with money. But people also can also accomplish a lot in a collaborative environment, something I was too naive to recognize back then. As much as human nature can be selfish and may often require capitalism to accomplish anything, there is also a nicer side of it. Remember that we have friends and families. As it is, capitalism and communism coexist peacefully, in a sense. (Yes I do consider free software somewhat of a a form of communism, and since there no regulations and nobody's forced to do anything it doesn't bother me). I heard a funny thing one day. A family should work like communism; from each according to his/her ability, to each according to his/her needs. Honestly, the only reason to hate communism is if it a) forces people into it (government imposed, particularly) or b) doesn't work. Free Software is free market communism, and so far it seems to work, and I think it's fantastic. Though, to be honest, I'm still pretty surprised it works as well as it does, but I think I'll grow to understand it eventually.
Secondly, and hopefully not completely nullifying the first point, Linux does make money, and as long as it's Free to the users and developers, I'm pretty sure it even has Stallman's blessings. Think about this, there's a utility that company A and company B both want. They could both invest the effort to make it, or they could both spend half the resources to make it together. Now, as the tool improves over time, the companies will patch it. Would it make sense to keep the patch for themselves? Not so much, because they would then have to keep patching each new version as it came out. Might as well submit their patch so it gets included in new versions. They make the software freely available (rather than secret between their two companies) so that Companies C and D come into the picture and start using and improving it further. Still, in a way this somewhat fits the communal view. I think it's similar to committees formed by multiple companies for their mutual benefit. (Yes the RIAA is a communist drone and must be stopped)
Sunday, July 1, 2007
Saturday, June 30, 2007
taking Simple Notetaking to ridiculous ends
Anybody that knows me well enough knows that I'm very slow to change my habits. When I feel comfortable with a certain process, I feel rather uncomfortable changing it. This is particularly true when it comes to using a convenient tool, God forbid that ti has a GUI, that does a bunch of stuff for me. Instead, I do things in a very mundane and unsophisticated manner with the future (realistically far future if ever) intention to establish a more sophisticated system myself. I'd rather know everything my tools are doing, I want all interfaces to be transparent, so I can integrate everything as I want whenever I want. It's through those barriers that I broke to finally try Tomboy.
Tomboy, a Gnome app, is a pretty great tool on it's own if you're not crazy like me. It's a simple wiki-esque note taking system, automatically saves, nice keybindings and quick workflow (albeit with a few problems with key bindings, at least on my Dvorak keyboard). The big selling point is that you can make links to other notes by their name. Any text in any note (other than in the note's title) that is the name of another note automatically becomes a link to that note. It's a simplified Wiki with no "edit" screen, for a sped up work flow.
It's good for my psychotic note taking practices, however I never tried it because I wanted a more integrated, database-based thing, where I could easily move note items around, generate lists as I want them, etc. I was using vim and text files until now (and have like 100 files left to manually import, thankfully I found a python script for copying a file from standard input to the clipboard), figuring I could more easily import to whatever it is that I wrote more easily with text, but Tomboy uses XML so it's not too bad, even if I still ended up going that route.
Fortunately my issues aren't too important anyway, because Tomboy has plugins. Herein lies the heart of this post. Now I can still make any sort of integration I want. It's nice because instead of starting from scratch and making some crappy program that'll end up losing all of my notes, I can start from something relatively stable and very convenient.
Tomboy is written in Mono. It's pretty funny because the plugin files are .dll files. But it's still GTK. It was easy enough to build a sample plugin. I envision myself making a ton of these before I'm done. I also hope to describe the API on this wiki page. At this point the only documentation is the code for the existing plugins.
Why does a note taking program need plugins? Well, there are plugins available for integration with Evolution, Trac, and Gaim. Simple stuff like that which allow you type links that will activate things in those programs.
I plan to do a couple like that, but hopefully I can eventually realize the whole of my note-taking psychosis. It would be nice to integrate it with some sort of calendar support. Some sort of automation of listing things in a certain class would be nice too. This is more database-esque behavior, so I may think about integrating it with some sort of database. Though the newest version apparently supports tagging, perhaps that's a good enough platform.
I guess that's the end of it for now. I'll let you know when I make some plugins.
Tomboy, a Gnome app, is a pretty great tool on it's own if you're not crazy like me. It's a simple wiki-esque note taking system, automatically saves, nice keybindings and quick workflow (albeit with a few problems with key bindings, at least on my Dvorak keyboard). The big selling point is that you can make links to other notes by their name. Any text in any note (other than in the note's title) that is the name of another note automatically becomes a link to that note. It's a simplified Wiki with no "edit" screen, for a sped up work flow.
It's good for my psychotic note taking practices, however I never tried it because I wanted a more integrated, database-based thing, where I could easily move note items around, generate lists as I want them, etc. I was using vim and text files until now (and have like 100 files left to manually import, thankfully I found a python script for copying a file from standard input to the clipboard), figuring I could more easily import to whatever it is that I wrote more easily with text, but Tomboy uses XML so it's not too bad, even if I still ended up going that route.
Fortunately my issues aren't too important anyway, because Tomboy has plugins. Herein lies the heart of this post. Now I can still make any sort of integration I want. It's nice because instead of starting from scratch and making some crappy program that'll end up losing all of my notes, I can start from something relatively stable and very convenient.
Tomboy is written in Mono. It's pretty funny because the plugin files are .dll files. But it's still GTK. It was easy enough to build a sample plugin. I envision myself making a ton of these before I'm done. I also hope to describe the API on this wiki page. At this point the only documentation is the code for the existing plugins.
Why does a note taking program need plugins? Well, there are plugins available for integration with Evolution, Trac, and Gaim. Simple stuff like that which allow you type links that will activate things in those programs.
I plan to do a couple like that, but hopefully I can eventually realize the whole of my note-taking psychosis. It would be nice to integrate it with some sort of calendar support. Some sort of automation of listing things in a certain class would be nice too. This is more database-esque behavior, so I may think about integrating it with some sort of database. Though the newest version apparently supports tagging, perhaps that's a good enough platform.
I guess that's the end of it for now. I'll let you know when I make some plugins.
Monday, May 7, 2007
This is my tech blog
This is where I will start posting about technical things that are on my mind. It will eventually be aggregated to www.chicagolug.org/planet/ with other members of the LUG.
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