I’ve been asked to present at a campus Earth Week event on open source software, the environment, and social justice. As with the “9 Cool Web Apps Post“, I’ll be using this post as a kind of handout that people at the talk can go back to. I hope off-campus readers will get something out ...
It’s like noble medics offering to heal the wounded enemy…for free. Gotta love open source. ...
Story here. Read on to the end. Ken (the author of the post and the open source advocate in the story) reports about a conversation he had with other members of the attacker’s party. This conversation happened after the attack. The discussion reveals something interesting about the technical support strategy that underlies tech support for machines ...
Last week I wrote about the Open Office 3.0 note feature. If you have students submit papers electronically - OpenOffice 3.0 is a big improvement - because you can type notes and comments that appear in colored bubbles in the margins. The problem is that in OpenOffice 3.0 these comment bubbles appear outside the printable margin. ...
Here’s a reason for academics to be interested in OpenOffice 3.0 - It has a much improved notes feature. Recent version of MS Word enables users to include notes in the margins. I rely on that feature a lot to write up comments on papers from my colleagues or my students. MS Word always had a ...
I’ve been going on and on about how wonderful I think the open source movement is, but not everyone is so enthusiastic. One of the biggest obstacles to the open source movement is whether or not there is a viable open source business model - How can you make money on software if you’re giving it ...
So, three things have happened that should have open source software enthusiasts excited. The new Ubuntu is coming out soon (OK, that’s not news - but I had to mention it) OpenOffice 3.0 was released yesterday. It was so popular the website crashed! Check out there website - they’re still running super-downgraded version to control for demand. The ...
Ubuntu’s newest version will be released at the end of October! That will also mark my 6 month of being almost entirely Windows free! I’ve decided to do my part in helping promote Ubuntu by posting their countdown on the blog here. I’m also posting a list of some of my favorite posts related to Ubuntu and ...
Stop using Endnote. Thomson Reuters, the maker of Endnote, is suing Virginia over Zotero. The claim is that the makers of Zotero reverse engineered Endnote to make Zotero. However, it doesn’t look like that’s true. It looks like Zotero allows users to use their own Endnote file and save their bibliographic information back as an Endnote file ...
I’ve been ranting enough about switching to Ubuntu for professional reasons, that I thought people interested in those posts might be interested in some of these items that I’ve come across today. Here’s a fun list that should be of interest to Linux lovers. This is kind of funny. Dell has discovered a loophole to give ...