lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

I hate bloggers who think they can change the world just by blogging about $RANDOM_THING. Reminds me of armchair activism.

In his essay describing why people should use the term "open source" instead of "free software", ESR says that the term "free software" is ambiguous. Specifically, the term Free Software can be interpreted as "Software you can get for zero price". Unluckily, this is a bug in the English language itself. In Hindi, we have the words "Mukt" or "azad" which accurately describes the spirit of the Free Software.

At first glance, "Open Source" seems to have overcome this problem. However, this term too is open to being misinterpreted. Most people believe that "Open source" means that you have access to the source code. For example, Sun has made the source code Java available for download. Does it make it Open Source ? No, it does not. To be identified as Free or Open source, a software should grant its users the freedom to can read, redistribute, and modify the source code without any discrimination against persons or groups. The type of license that Sun provides is "look but don't touch".

Robert Scoble shows another mis-interpretation of the term "open source". In his blog post he says:

Open source has become a metaphor for things done in public view with public input. Actually, [Microsoft is] a leader here. Check out Channel 9. It's the first step along the road to open source marketing.

What he describes will make the project transparent, but not open source.

Though the term "Free Software" is ambiguous, it is still better than Open Source. At least

I can say "free software", and by free I mean Mukt

I prefer the term Free Software over Open source

Got myself "Advanced PHP Programming" by Schlossnagle. I started reading it last night, (currently on chapter 3 - "Error Handling"). Excellent book, with clear and good examples. The examples are culled from real life. In chapter 2 (Object Oriented Programming through Design Patterns), he explains how Design Patterns can be applied when making websites. It was one of those "aha!" moments. This is a book I have been looking forward to lay my hands on for a long time.

One complaint though (with the Pearsons's Low Price Edition of this book) is the pathetic quality of figures. It looks like the pages have been photocopied from their original color print.

Wordpress has a nifty feature for fighting comment spam. It allows you to blacklist certain words (like Viagra, casinos). Any comment which has those words (either in the URL, comment body or email) is held for moderation.

However, this method is not perfect. For example, the default word list does not contain the words "poker" or "anti-wrinkle cream". I use a combination of Bloglines (my feed reader) and my "Comments RSS" feed. I have subscribed to my "Comments RSS" using Bloglines. This enables me to keep an eye on what comments have been posted on the site.

An aside: Interestingly, I have seen that the spammers target the articles which are older rather than the ones that are fresh. (i.e. my posts of November receive more spam comments as compared to the December ones). I guess, the idea is that once the articles have been moved off from the front page, not many users bother going back to the archives.

Whenever a new comment appears on the blog, I can either respond to it (if it is legitimate comment) or in a quick glance check out what new words the spammers are linking to. Add the new words to the Wordpress's blacklist, rerun the comments through the new blacklist, remove the comments that have been trapped and you are back in business with a spam-comment free blog.

One of the methods used by normal humans to send other (normal humans) on the "guilt trip" is to use the cliche "every time you do THIS or THAT god kills a kitten. Please, think of the kittens..." For an even bigger guilt-trip, you can use "every time you do THIS , somewhere a kitten gets run over by a Monster truck. given not ten minutes ago to the five year old girl standing by the side of the road, spattered, red, and crying as she fumbles with her inhaler" (Thanks to Brian Bilbrey, member of The Answer Gang for the picturesque description )

Frankly, the whole killing of the kitten part leaves me rather unmoved. Having lots of free time on my hand lately, I thought of things that would send me on a guilt trip.

• every time you do THAT, your email id gets harvested by Mr. Joseph Adisa of Lagos, Nigeria
• every time you do THAT, Microsoft issues ten critical updates
• every time you do THAT, some clueless bastard says "Linux has less viruses because it is less popular " (my veins are throbbing just writing this)
• every time you do THAT, some luser says "IE is better than Firefox since IE supports advanced features like ActiveX"
• every time you do THAT, someone starts building a new Linux distro

I know I am not normal

I had gone to visit my village for the ocassion of Chhat. Some of the conveniences that I had started taking for granted were missing. It made me appreciate how easy city life is and how hard a rural life is. However one thing that stood out was the ubiquity of the mobile phones.

Yesterday I attended a meeting of a few fellow-geeks. The points that make a geek gathering different from normal people's gatherings are

• The idea of the meeting was conceived on an IRC channel
• More time was spent on planning what to do, than the time spent on actually doing
• People kept referring to each other by their IRC nicks
• Pictures were taken using a mobile camera
• After the geeks had a shot of beer/vodka, they started debatng the OO capabilities in Python, history of python, squeak and other obscure topics.
• And of course, how can I forget the debate on which CMS rules - mambo/Drupal or Plone

An evening I enjoyed a lot