HTML5 Video and Mozilla

I’m going to skip the introduction and go right to the point: support Mozilla!

How? Use firefox and promote it.

Why? Because you want the web to be Free (not free as in “free beer” but Free as in Freedom). Because you value Freedom and knowledge!

Read these two blog posts:

HTML5 video and codecs by Mike Shaver, Mozilla VP of Engineering

Video, Freedom And Mozilla by Robert O’Callahan, Mozilla Developer

(originally via Slashdot)

If you use Firefox you are giving it a bigger market share and thus more power with content providers. After all, youtube would be worthless without viewers.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

What if a video site is online but no one can view the videos in it? Is it still a video site? Would it have any traffic at all?

I was planning on switching to chrome – after all, it is open source and firefox is slower, uses more resources and I prefer chrome’s UI in many aspects (but not all). However none of those things is nearly as important to me as keeping the web an open place and I believe in the importance of sites like youtube (we’ve all heard about videos on youtube documenting things like police abuse for example).

I’m no Richard Stallman and I not trying to turn anyone into Stallman but the choice between Firefox and Chrome is a close one to begin with. It’s not like I’m going to start promoting Linux (gNewSense at that) over OSX.

The iPhone SDK

It’s been months since I was insulted by Apple fanboys for saying that the iPhone needed an SDK and now Apple has officially released a beta version of the iPhone/iPod Touch SDK.

I can’t access developer.apple.com at the moment but Levi Figueira was kind enough to upload both screenshots of the pages and the PDFs of agreements involved during a twitter discussion with me and David Rodrigues (also read his post on the iPhone SDK in Portuguese).

The good news is apple provides the App Store to distribute your applications with the iPhone Developer Program and all you have to do is pay them $99 and 30% of what your customers pay for your app.

The bad news is that, from what I understood, there’s no other way to get apps on an iPhone, even if it’s your own apps on your own iPhone or if they’re Open Source apps.

The other good news is that if they’re free apps, they don’t charge the 30% (30% of 0 is 0 so…). So as long as someone paid $99 to be part of the Developer Program, they can put free apps on the Store at no additional charges.

The other bad news is there won’t be porn games on the iPhone I wonder if they consider hentai (Japanese eroge visual novel) games “porn”.

I think the iPhone Developer Program is a really Great Thing (TM), think Steam for the iPhone/iPod Touch but more open. I just wish it were “optional”.

A List of Open Source Games

A List of Open Source Games (wikipedia)

Many of these games are lightweight multiplayer and multi-platform (Linux, Mac, Windows)

Personal Picks:
Assault Cube
Armagetron
BZflag
FreeCiv

Must try:
OpenArena
Nexuiz

Rockbox

I switched to Rockbox on my old, trustworthy iRiver H340. In case you don’t know, Rockbox is an open source replacement firmware for mp3 players.


Advantages (I actually care about, i.e. not little games & apps):
– Themes. I’m using a DGT theme.
– Actually usable Database playing;
– Ability to play other music formats (FLAC comes to mind);
– Having an actually beautiful interface can’t be understated (themes again);
– It’s Open Source (which also means you’ll probably get new firmware long after the player manufacturer stops bothering with it.

In case you’re wondering, Rockbox was very easy to install, at least in my player. Despite the fact that the instructions look relatively long, the actually steps needed are quite simple and easy (though it might be a bit confusing figuring out exactly what you need to download). And it turns out it’s even easier to uninstall (just delete one file).

In case you want to do it and got confused or if you’re wondering just how easy it is but don’t want to read the full instructions, here are the steps:
(NOTE/disclaimer of sorts): this is a summary, read the full instructions at the rockbox website)

1. Download the firmware;
2. Download the firmware patcher;
3. Patch the firmware you downloaded (the .hex file) using the firmware patcher (duh);
4. Put the just-patched firmware file on the root of your iRiver H3xx player;
5. Tell the player to install the new firmware ([hold Navi] -> General -> Firmware Upgrade).

Pretty straightforward right?

[Updated: I forgot to mention the ability to play other music formats such as FLAC]

ModSecurity

I came across ModSecurity:

ModSecurity is an open source intrusion detection and prevention engine for web applications (or a web application firewall). Operating as an Apache Web server module or standalone, the purpose of ModSecurity is to increase web application security, protecting web applications from known and unknown attacks.

I read Introducing mod_security and I think I’ll try ModSecurity one of these days. The author also wrote a book – Apache Security. If I was currently runing apache somewhere I’d consider reading it. He also has a blog.

GTDTiddlyWiki

From the GTDTiddlyWiki Website:

GTD Tiddly Wiki is a GettingThingsDone adaptation by NathanBowers of JeremyRuston’s Open Source TiddlyWiki. The purpose of GTD Tiddly Wiki is to give users a single repository for their GTD lists and support materials so they can create/edit lists, and then print directly to 3×5 cards for use with the HipsterPDA.

The interface on this wiki is amazing, I’ve used it for a while and found it useful but not being able to access it with ease from the faculty where I spend so much time is a huge drawback. I looked at serverside tiddly wikis but either I was unable to install them or they didn’t look good enough. I’m thinking about using GTDTiddlyWiki with Unison so I’m abble to access and manage it from anywhere . Sounds like a good plan in theory I’ll try to remember to try it sometime later this week… guess I’ll add it to my GTDTiddlyWiki.

Open Source Licenses

This post together with the first comment pretty much sum my own opinion on the matter. I also think that all licenses should have a human-readable version like the Creative Commons (example) instead of just having the lawyer-readable legal code (example). Is the open source community made of lawyers? Off course not and most of the open source contributions have so far been made by individuals not companies. These individuals are usually tech people (programmers, system administrators, engineers, etc) who have no special legal expertise. It’s not that licenses are hard to understand, they’re usually not (well, at least not the ones I’ve read – BSD, MIT, part of the GPL – too boring for me, and a few others). It’s just a waste of time and raises the bar for people who are either new to the community or just want to make a casual contribution. It might even scare them initially.

Windows, Blogger, Mono, Tomorrow

With Windows XP SP2 out I finally felt like it was worth installing windows again. I deleted it about 2 months ago for a size adjustment to my main hard drive’s partitions. I tried to install it a couple of weeks after that but the patchs were so many I gave up. Yesterday or something I downloaded the new SP2 via bittorrent and today i did it: i installed windows. Remembering a news story about something called picasa and everyone’s favorite search engine I decided to google for it… one thing led to another and I ended up creating a blog…

Actually I’ve been wanting to create a blog for a while now but there really isn’t a single open source solution that meets the requirements – and i’ve tried’em all, including the CMSs (Content Managment System). Hopefully this will change soon but until then my blog will remain at blogger.com.

I could stop complaining and code the “Publishing Platform” myself like Filipe Carvalho (Chefax’s VP) suggested but I promised myself I would only code again in C# (bash scripts excluded) – what a lame excuse! It doesn’t seem likely I will learn C# anytime soon tough. I’ve been unable to compile mono and I don’t feel like trying too hard for now, too bad they don’t have slackware packages (those outdated external ones from the super-lame www.slackcare.com don’t count – i’m not downloading from there!). Maybe I’ll download the windows version in spite of always feeling kind of weird to code in windows.

Tomorrow will be a busy day, my uncle gets his new computer and I told him I would configure it and install a few programs (like Open Office) – he will drop it off at my house around 1 pm and I told it would be ready by dinner time, I also have to be at chefax early in the afternoon – I have no idea how I will accomplish this considering that I’ve been leaving at noon and arriving from the gym around 3 pm (just in time to buy lunch or cook something quickly) and slulmbering the rest of the afternoon….