It looks like Massachusetts’ Attorney General Tom Reilly is the lone wolf in continuing to fight Microsoft’s monopoly.

“Massachusetts on Friday appealed a U.S. judge’s decision accepting the settlement, which its attorney general criticized as a ‘loophole-filled deal’ that won’t affect the software maker’s aggressive practices.”

Link, but doesn’t everyone have a warm spot for the lone wolf?

Are they just going to bang their head on the wall here?

Convertion of Ellen Feiss’ SWITCH commercial into an full ASCII movie, powered by QuickTime.

She doesn’t look stoned in this version.

Tim Perdue is back. The original developer of SourceForge has been busily building, or fixing, where VA (Research|Linux|Software) cutoff or leftoff with its previously open source code. And, the end result is waaaay cool.

I am seriously pumped about this app. GForge is a fork of the previously open source code “alexandria” that ran SourceForge. From the GForce website: “… the GForge functionality is important not only to the Open Source community, but to the wider business community. Since VA has not released the source in over one year, despite their promises to the contrary, a fork was necessary to ensure a viable open source version of the codebase.”

Sure, it’s cool that Tim has picked up where others have failed in continuing the open source version of SourceForge, but GForge goes way beyond what the code was.
The installation has been simplified, the foundries “..* and related nonsense have been removed.” As Tim alludes to on the GForge site it’s made for your own boxen.

He states that a lot of the “hacks” (believe me there were serious, in a convoluted way, hacks of the old code) and optimizations have been removed from GForge. This can only be good since the original SF code was made to operate for 500,000+ users. Or at least it does now.

Getting the code to this level is great, but GForge is better than just that. Aside from the easier install there is optional mailman, jabber, and Python support. All this and a much improved GUI.

Welcome back Tim and thanks for the gift.

I feel that one of the most promising developments (pun not intended) in the open source world is the meeting of mac and *nix minds to create an new generation of OS software. Reliable and simplified use? Yes. YourSQL is the finest example of this merge I’ve seen thus far in an application.

Take it for a testdrive & see if you won’t agree.

So, I’ve had my ibook for close to seven months now & I just got around to putting, or ‘activating’ PHP and MySQL on it yesterday.

I have a few boxen around here so it was never a priority. I also don’t travel that much. And with the proliferation of high-speed a connection has become the platform. That’s another post.

So I got down to it yesterday and here’s what I found:

Ironically the first thing that the Apple Internet Developer site does is point you off site to a helpful one.

Think about this. Here is a big company that instead of trying to cover up or dismiss an incompatibility “Note: There is an known incompatibility between PHP 4.1 and MacOS X version 10.1.2.” it steps up to the plate for the users, says there’s a problem and not only helps insure you can get around it, but tells you that Joe Blow hacker (Marc) in this case has a fix!

This sounds not like a company, but a member of a community. Hats off.

More instruction on what I did here.

An interview with Justin Simoni, author of Mojo Mail. Not as well known as Mailman, Mojo Mail is a more accessible mailing list manager for most people with only cgi-bin access. Justin tells us how he got started with Mojo Mail trying to make a more artistic and aesthetically pleasing majordomo over a pot of coffee and from scratch learning Perl as he went.

Is there finally prior art for Mickey Mouse?

From the original report: “Our Mickey Mouse is 700 years older than Disney’s and we will get it legally examined.”

Can we call copyright law and implementation absurd yet?

What do you make of this one?

I find myself in awe of under-bloated ideas and simple solutions of late.

One such solution is called dnotify. Strictly for Linux, it works like TripWire, though not limited to security, monitoring directories for changes and then executing a command. Though not as robust as TripWire for securing your linuxboxen, it sure is a cool way to keep tabs on your users if you’re waiting for one of them to work on a project or maybe upload a particular file.

Related link: http://News.OSDir.com

News.OSDir.com’s first scoop!

New Halloween Document released to Eric Raymond and published this morning. Read more.

Related link: http://OSDir.com

It’s probably an appropriate day to revisit the topic of voting via internet. In the US anyway.

After coming home and wondering if your chad had been hanging or pregnant check out GNU.FREE, a java app designed for internet voting.

Perhaps if you’re the salesman type you could pick up where this app’s author has left off. He got a little frustrated with trying to sell the idea. I’m not sure that he was trying to sell the idea of internet voting as much as using ‘free (as in freedom)’ software, both are important from the standpoint of a transparent process.

Here’s some light reading on the subject from the California Internet Voting Task Force.

Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World.

Was yesterday’s decision a disappointment to you? It shouldn’t be. Legal decisions won’t save you from yourself.

Let me start by saying that I’d have liked Microsoft to get a little kick in the derrier just for all the wasted time I’ve spent having to deal with their OS, and the comedy of errors that it is. But, that is another article.

This commentary is about power & whether this legal decision was going to save you from the Goliath that is the Microsoft jauggernaught. It never was.

Microsoft doesn’t force you to buy anything as much as you’d like to believe they do. Yeah, yeah, Word(tm) docs, yeah, yeah, upgrades. You choose to buy this stuff. You alone. Microsoft is not at the box store holding your wallet and leading you to the counter. You do this all by yourself.

A couple years ago I stopped my self delusion when I decided to learn Linux. Yes, it was hard back then. But, since when does convenience have to do with freedom of choice? I changed what I did because I didn’t like what I was choosing to subject myself to.

I stopped using Word, I stopped using Windows, I stopped playing games (at the time, I actually just lost interest) because if I chose to continue with those activities I was going to subject myself to that pain, but it was at my own doing. So, I stopped.

This was harder to do then than it is now. There are plenty of options for you. You must simply choose them. And that choice doesn’t come with the steep learning curve it used to.

I’m speaking with reference to desktop computing next since this is the environment most folks are in: The new Apple OS, OS X, is the perfect and easy way out for you folks. It has all the functionality in products that ‘it’ has, except OS X works well. If you really want to go all the way, take up Linux. There is still a bit of a learning curve, and Linux Distributions are still, to my chagrin, shipped with cruddy applications that have no business in front of a buying customer (Redhat and Mandrake), but there are -a lot- of working desktop apps there for you.

There is no lack of options anymore. The problem is now choice. There are so many. But the biggest choice for you is to simply make the ultimate. It’s easier than you think and these alternatives are by no means a charity cause. They have developed into extremely capable and incredibly serious contenders in the desktop environment.

Choose not to give your power to Microsoft. The alternatives are strong and you’ll be pleased.