If you are like me, you probably spend 8 or more hours a day staring at a computer screen. The vast majority of the time I spend looking at a text editor (or IDE). However, most editors default to hard to look at black text on white background. I suppose this is because it looks more like ink on paper, but what you end up with is a bright (expecially with today’s high contrast LCD’s) white light with dark spots to identify the areas of interest. I have for a long time used Konsole’s ‘Linux – Colors’ schema to provide my favorite black on white look for console and vim editing. Recently I have been using KDevelop a lot, but Kate has no default white on black color scheme. So, I have created one and attached the files ~/.kde/share/config/katesyntaxhighlightingrc and ~/.kde/share/config/kateschemarc. If you copy the first to ~/.kde/share/config/katesyntaxhighlightingrc and the second to ~/.kde/share/config/kateschemarc , then you should be able to select the ‘kdevelop – black’ schema from the Settings->Configure Editor…->Fonts & Colors dialog in kdevelop. Hopefully, I will set up something similar in eclipse soon.
Slashdot had an article today pointing out that Virtual Box has made their project GPL OSS. This makes one of the first completely open source desktop virtualization solutions. I have been a fan of vmware, even though they are only partially open source, and their workstation product is rather expensive. I hav used Xen, but issues with display drivers make it difficult to use as desktop virtualization (though nvidia has said they will support it “some time in the future”).
You just bought a top of the line Dell workstation, why should you pay for the less than optimum operating system that you are going to delete anyway. Serge Wroclawski definitely has one a small victory for Linux users as he describes “How to get a Windows tax refund”
I just finished Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig. This is a well written and historically grounded argument about the intellectual property (IP) “wars” being waged between IP distributors, the “Big Media”, and pro public domain advocates. He contends that there should be a limit to the rights afforded IP owners and creators. He also believes that those limits and regulations should be structured in away as to provide an effective incentive to creators in innovators to produce IP, but at the same time they should not afford monopolies to any single distribution industry or technology.
Our current laws do not accomplish this. I was a music performance major in college before switching to computer science. I have worked as a musician, teacher, film projector operator, and computer programmer. In all of my career, all of my money has been made through either the creation or dissemination of intellectual property. It is in my best interest for my IP property to be protected, but it has also been my observation that it seems that the biggest beneficiaries our current IP protections were the distributors. Lessig provides a historical perspective about why the law and market forces have established this system, and how this system once was, and could be again, different.
I have always been an active supporter of open source software, and the creative commons approach to content creation. I have argued for OSS from a technical perspective (security, reliability, vendor neutrality, etc.), and a strictly social-lefty standpoint (collaboration, community, greater good, etc.), but this is the first time I have seen the legal and economic argument laid out this completely and strongly. This is definitely a must read for anyone in the business of intellectual property.