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Playing bridge
Thanks to GNUBridge I could play a few games of contract bridge last weekend, for the first time since my student years!
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Lessons from Sharp Zaurus
There are areas where free software community fails. Not for technical reasons or lack of resources, but because of management and strategic planning incompetence. Once I got an idea to get a Linux handheld. There were two models available at the time: Sharp Zaurus and Nokia tablet. The Nokia tablet didn’t have any keyboard so…
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Future of the Web: Total ignorance?
Several years ago I complained to a web shop web master about invalid character coding information in their web pages. I was told the invalid information was there intentionally so that the pages displayed correctly in a broken web browser which was used by 97% of their customers. At another occasion I took seriously call…
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Erik Naggum dead
Erik Naggum has died a month ago. This last action of him initiated another (hopefully the last one) naggumic flamewar on comp.lang.lisp. No surprise. His contributions, their value and his human behavior were discussed. For me, his major contribution remains his arguments about Common Lisp that enlightened me about that programming language. I discovered that…
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OpenStreetMap contributor
I made my first small contributions to the OpenStreetMap project. I think making free maps is important and it’s a lot of fun. When you buy or use a proprietary map, it’s usually limited in its use, imperfect and you can’t customize and improve it. A free project can change this. My first impressions about…
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Smart phones
My old mobile phone becomes a bit unreliable, so I look for a new one. Perhaps a smart phone would be useful, but I’m not interested in proprietary and virus prone OSes without available source code and lacking good development tools and community support. Given these constraints there are at most two options: Google Android…
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File system crash
I’ve recently experienced root file system loss. This happened after my keyboard had stopped functioning due to a hardware problem and I had turned off the computer by the power button. Apparently some random process had happened on the disk and while most data survived the file system as a whole was seriously damaged and…
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Please sign the Petition to stop software patents in Europe
Software patents make serious danger to all computer users, software developers and generally anybody who has something to do with computers and computing devices. I’m not going to elaborate on that topic here, you can find information about it e.g. on the web pages of Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure. The important thing is…
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Two anniversaries
There are two nice anniversaries in the end of this year. The first one was 50 years of Lisp and the second one is going to be 15 years of Linux on my desktop computers. Lisp was the second (after FORTRAN) real higher level programming language. During the years Lisp has brought many important pioneering…
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Another udev discovery
After very long time I’ve finally found how to make my two USB keyboards and mice accessible under constant file system names. Here is the trick: ACTION!=”add|change”, GOTO=”keymouse_end” SUBSYSTEMS==”usb”, ATTRS{bInterfaceClass}==”03″, ATTRS{bInterfaceProtocol}==”01″, ENV{ID_CLASS}=”kbd” KERNEL==”mouse*”, SYSFS{idProduct}==”0067″, SYSFS{idVendor}==”0458″, SYMLINK+=”input/mouse-genius” KERNEL==”event*”, SYSFS{idProduct}==”0067″, SYSFS{idVendor}==”0458″, ENV{ID_CLASS}==”kbd”, SYMLINK+=”input/keyboard-genius” KERNEL==”mouse*”, SYSFS{idProduct}==”071d”, SYSFS{idVendor}==”045e”, SYMLINK+=”input/mouse-ms” KERNEL==”event*”, SYSFS{idProduct}==”071d”, SYSFS{idVendor}==”045e”, ENV{ID_CLASS}==”kbd”, SYMLINK+=”input/keyboard-ms” LABEL=”keymouse_end” I can boot without…