Acts of Volition

Open Source software is regularly criticized, often fairly, for lacking in ease-of-use and polish. When a developer wants a new feature - he can add it to the software, and if it gets checked-in by the project owners, it will be there for all to use. The obvious fault with this model is the now …

Having enjoyed Laurence Lessig’s previous book, The Future of Ideas, I was looking forward to his latest book, Free Culture. The text of the book is available for free online. While I have read long works from my laptop LCD, this 352-page PDF file didn’t seem very appealing on screen.  •  I … read more »

The future of development on the Linux desktop is being debated and deliberated on the weblogs of key developers this week.  •  If you are interested in computing platform decisions and open source software, then you may be interested in the debate. However, even if you are not at all interested … read more »

Having been living in Linux for a while (and to a lesser extent, Mac OS X), I’ve had to learn a bit about the ways of the command line. As someone who’s only other experience with a command line interface was with DOS (with which I was about as adept as one could be), I was skeptical of the value …

For the last few months, I’ve been using Fedora, a Linux distribution, as my primary operating system along with the Gnome desktop environment. Linux as a desktop platform still has lots of weaknesses, but I’m generally pleased and am very much looking forward to the progress planned in the next …

Microsoft is being criticized by Amnesty International for supplying “goods and services” to China that was used to violate human rights. Cory Doctorow, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (and an excellent sci-fi author), brings an interesting perspective to the situation.  •  Microsoft states …

One of the many great things about the Mozilla Firebird web browser (go get it now if you aren’t using it), is a decision the developers made early in the project. In order to keep the application simple, fast, and elegant — any features that aren’t essential or may be limited in appeal to a … read more »

Update: Luna Blue Theme (v0.3) for Mozilla Thunderbird is now available.  •  I’ve prepared an update for the Luna Blue theme for Mozilla Thunderbird. This update will work with (and only with) the latest Thunderbird 0.4 release. If you haven’t updated to 0.4 yet, it’s worth it … read more »

I’ve been using and enjoying the products of the Mozilla project more and more lately. I’ve been hooked on Mozilla Firebird for a while, and my recent Mozilla Thunderbird theme was my first real contribution (if you could call it that) to the movement.  •  I’m very interested in the success of the …