Belligero Productions

Ubiquity: xkcd Archives

Thursday, 11 September 2008 12:55 Jason

This may be fairly simplistic command, but for how often I turn to the comic, I figured it might be useful for others beyond just myself. If you're running Ubiquity, you should be getting a link to subscribe to a command. If you just want the code, it's in this JavaScript file.

This command allows you to search the xkcd comic archives for whatever you enter.

Last Updated on Thursday, 11 September 2008 12:57

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Project Potentials

Tuesday, 09 September 2008 11:04 Jason

Spellcheck Extension for Arbitrary Web Pages

This is the first I'd find interesting to do, and would likely use myself. Coding HTM, you're usually not doing it in an editor with a spellcheck, so it look unprofessional if there is a typo.

Modify Firefox to handle files downloaded to Temp more appropriately

This is an amazin idea, and again, something I'd find infinitely helpful. Quite often one needs to download a file, then decide if they want to keep it or not, whether they know much about the filesystem or not.

Add DTrace probes and scripts for Mozilla code base

Not much i can say about this one, but it just sounds like something that would be interesting to do. It being *nix-only is a bonus in my mind, and having to put little probes throughout the code would make it a lot easier to get a general understanding of the codebase, while actually addin something useful.

Last Updated on Tuesday, 09 September 2008 22:55

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Reflections on Cathedral and Bazaar

Wednesday, 03 September 2008 20:14 Jason

After reading through the article, I can now see why the Linux kernel has so many releases as rapidly as they do, and why many packages on Ubuntu are updated as often as they are. When making any code, I have always been at least somewhat open, but still leaning more towards the Cathedral style than the Bazaar style. Now that I've read it, and have an understanding of the idea behind the bazaar-style development, I think that I might go and try something similar with a PHP-based idea I've been toying around with for a little while now.

In the epilog to the article, he mentions that Netscape was planning to release their source code, and he couldn't tell which way it was going to go: really good or really bad. I think we can tell now which way it went, seeing as Firefox has about a 43% market share for internet browsers. one interesting thing to note, however, is Google's new browser, Chrome, and the fashion its taking.

Firefox has gotten to where it is by initially following the Cathedral model (Netscape) then becoming Bazaar, and getting a ton of features and enhancements over the years, and has essentially defined what any good browser needs to be successful. Chrome, on the other hand, has just been released open-source, and would appear to have been developed Cathedral-style, and despite this, has many of the features Firefox offers after many years of Bazaar, plus many you need to install a plugin to get.

It is too early to tell right now whether Google will turn Chrome into another Bazaar, and if they do, where it will go, but we can at least see that given enough time, both models of development will work, and will often achieve the same end. However, what bugs lurk behind Chrome's chrome have yet to be revealed, and how many of them can be squashed via Bazaar, or kept hidden via Cathedral.

And an article I feel everybody should read, especially if they're considering switching to Linux, or have recently decided to give it a try: Linux != Windows (http://linux.oneandoneis2.org/LNW.htm)

Last Updated on Thursday, 04 September 2008 00:05

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A Paperless World

Saturday, 06 September 2008 02:02 Jason

Reading Steve's entry on "You Can't grep Dead Trees," it got me thinking about how little I use paper-based media anymore. This point was driven home when I went to my Shakespeare & Film class, which is the only class I have this semester where we actually need to purchase a book. My first thought was to look on Project Gutenberg and see if I could find a copy. While I could, I figured it was better to get the edition he told us to, just to make sure everything was the same.

However, the point here is that there is more out there that conforms to the idea of Freedom than just software. Project Gutenberg, for those who don't know, is a collection of books that have entered into the public domain. You simply search for a book, and if somebody has entered it onto the site, you can download it in whatever form suits you best. Personally, I usually get them in the open source Plucker format, so I can just throw it onto my Palm Pilot and read it anywhere. There are more limitations (namely that you cannot edit or alter the original book, unless simply fixing errors), btu you can still freely distribute it to whoever you want, however you want, as long as the copyright information is kept intact. Recently read "The Time Machine", "Frankenstein", several Sherlock Holmes stories, and have "Dracula" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"that I need to go through at some point, all for free.

Then you have any piece of art released under the Creative Commons licensing scheme: It's usually art (pictures and such) but with one of several types of licenses applied, which can be nearly identical in function to many OS licenses. While not always identical, the basic idea of freedom of use is supported and continued, and allows licenses to be applied to a much broader range of subjects than, say, the GPL could be.

What else can you think of that follows the same principles, but doesn't involve source code or binaries, per se?

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