James Purser's weekend answer

What is it about F/OSS that attracts you?

That’s easy: the Lego™ factor. I can build whatever I want to, very quickly. I can take something another person has built and alter it, very quickly. I can see how anything is put together, both to check its functionality and to pick up better techniques for my own work. I can quickly and easily swap parts and sub-assemblies for testing and improvement (or for “political” reasons).

The absence of red tape helps a lot, too. I don’t have to bend my mind around deliberately-obtuse licencing rules or get financial clearance before adding more users or processors to a server. I don’t have to find a hologram or a serial number for each and every software component before installing something, nor type (or mistype) sixty-digit codes into rego screens to get stuff working.

Comments

Leon RJ Brooks said…

And this attracts you to F/OSS? (-:

I prefer Mandrake, but also drive Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat and SuSE fairly regularly. The vast majoirty of difference is in the details, not in the principles.

For example, URPMI, Aptitude, Yum and so on all achieve the same end, with varying degrees of clumsiness and polish.

16 October, 2005 19:10

new life for an old (FTX) PSU, improved life for one human

the LEDs on this 5m strip happen to emit light centred on a red that does unexpectedly helpful things to (and surprisingly deeply within) a human routinely exposed to it. it has been soldered to a Molex connector, plugged into a TFX power supply from a (retired: the MoBo is cactus) Small Form Factor PC, the assorted PSU connectors (and loose end from the strip) have been taped over. the LED strip cost $10.24 including postage, the rest cost $0, the PSU is running at 12½% of capacity, consumes less power than a laptop plug-pack despite running a fan. trial runs begin today.

boundaries

pushing the actual boundaries of the physical (not extremes, the boundaries themselves) can often remove barriers not otherwise perceived. one can then often resolve an issue itself, rather than merely stonewalling at the physical consequences of the issue.

every-application-is-part-of-a-toolkit at work

I have a LibreOffice Impress slideshow that I wish to turn into a narrated video. 1. export the slideshow as PNG images (if that is partially broken — as at now — at higher resolutions, Export Directly as PDF then use ‘pdftoppm’ (from the poppler-utils package) to do the same). 2. write a small C program (63 lines including comments) to display those images one at a time, writing a config file entry for Imagination (default transition: ‘cross fade’) based on when the image-viewer application (‘display,’ from the GraphicsMagick suite) is closed on each one; run that, read each image aloud, then close each image in turn. 3. run ‘Imagination’ over the config file to produce a silent MP4 video with the correct timings. 4. run ‘Audacity’ to record speech while using ‘SMPlayer’ to display the silent video, then export that recording as a WAV file. 4a. optionally, use ‘TiMIDIty’ to convert a non-copyright-encumbered MIDI tune to WAV, then import that and blend it with the speech (as a quiet b

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