Standards and Grudges

Tuesday 31 January, 2006

Free Software Recommendations

Filed under: Technology — Steven A. Stehling @ 20:06

Free software is good. Free software that does the same job as expensive software is fantastic. I am a long time user and supporter of open source software. I’ve tried countless open source programs, including the software I use to write this blog. A lot of people will say that open source software can’t match the quality of purchased programs. Those people either don’t know better or stand to lose something. Most of the great programs out there are based on open source code or incorporate open source code into their programs. Here are a couple open source programs that stand out for being excellent alternatives for those on a budget or those that don’t care to spend excessive amounts of money on a computer program.

OpenOffice

This suite mimics Microsoft Office. It’s not as pretty, but it does the job. One thing that’s important to remember when using OpenOffice is to save files in a format that keeps the document formatting intact, but also makes the document readily viewable by others. Typically, those are Microsoft Office formats. For text files, that would be the .doc format. Just remember, when you want to save a file for the first time, click “Save as” and then click the “Save as type:” drop down menu and select “Microsoft Word (.doc)”.

OpenOffice is not just a text document program. You can use it to make Powerpoint presentations, spreadsheets and create HTML documents.

The OpenOffice program comes in versions for a variety of operating systems, including Windows and Mac.

GIMP

If you haven’t heard of Photoshop, you’ve been in a cave. It’s a great image utility, but it comes with a hefty price. GIMP stands for “GNU Image Manipulation Program”. GNU is an open source operation system based on Unix and the acronym GNU is a bit of a joke. GNU means “GNU is Not Unix”. But enough about that.

GIMP is a mimic of Photoshop. Just like OpenOffice, it’s not pretty, but it does the job. I’ve used Photoshop 6.0 and Photoshop CS, but those programs were installed on my old computers and when I bought my new notebook computer I needed an image manipulation program. I knew of GIMP for some time, but had never tried it. This was the perfect opportunity to do so. I’ve been using GIMP for several months now and I’ve never looked back.

That’s not to say that Photoshop is not superior. Photoshop does amazing things, but the average person doesn’t need that kind of power. They need a down and dirty image manipulation program to do the basic tasks, like touching up a photo, resizing, changing the file format, merging and cropping. GIMP does just that and more.

Although GIMP was designed to operate on the GNU operating system, they also make a Windows and Mac version.

A great resource to find other open source programs is SourceForge. SourceForge hosts countless software development projects and chances are you can find many programs to fill your software needs.

Enjoy!

Afternoon Walk Photos

Filed under: Photography — Steven A. Stehling @ 18:34

I decided to take a walk this afternoon and since I had my camera on me, I took some pictures. I wish I remembered to carry my camera more often. I spent a good amount of money on it, I need to get use out of it. It sat unused in my closet for most of January.

Bear with me, dusk was starting, so the light isn’t the greatest in some photos. I’m not looking to win awards for these photos, they’re just here to assist my commentary.

I don’t like how this fountain at West Washington is shaping up. I really don’t like the golden color. I hope they plan on at least polishing the bowl on top. It’s texture looks grainy, making the entire piece look cheap.

West Washington Fountain

By contrast, the pair of fountains at East Washington are much more pleasing.
East Washington Fountain

There are lots of television trucks at the Capitol. Is the big story the concealed carry veto override vote or something else?
Media blitz

Here’s the Majestic, which was subject of a recent Capital Times article and Fred Mohs hate. Are you going to Late Nite Catechism? I heard its uproarious. I have no idea what Catechism is about. Something to do with nuns.
Majestic

Speaking of Fred Mohs, here’s his house.
Home of Fred Mohs

And here’s the restaurant Muramoto on King St. I heard it’s really good, but difficult to find. You need to know the address to find it. As you can see, they don’t make it easy to take notice of its location.
Muramoto

Is this art, or an erector set gone mad?
Erector Madness

These always remind me of dragon teeth tank traps. Maybe they’re afraid of a military coup at the Capitol.
Tank Traps

On the right is the Chase building on the square. Down the street, on Wisconsin Ave is a new condo, retail and office building. Aren’t they a bit too similar? The pattern for the windows are nearly identical. Neither building is particularly ugly, but how about a little variety?
Conformal Downtown

Last, I’d like to share a picture of a dead squirrel I found on the Capitol lawn. For the sake of those faint of heart, you have to click more to view it.

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Concealed Carry Veto Override Fails

Filed under: Wisconsin News — Steven A. Stehling @ 16:34

The veto override for concealed carry failed, I can’t say I’m surprised. A lot of people buy into the fear tactic that concealed carry will lead to a slew of gun fights. Yet the anti-concealed carry crowd has yet to produce an example of such in any of the 46 states that allow concealed carry.

Anyways, anyone know the open carry laws in Wisconsin? I think I’ll start carrying a Colt Model 1911A1 .45 cal in protest.

Google VS. Traditional Media

Filed under: World News — Steven A. Stehling @ 14:54

It’s well known that the traditional print media industry is struggling to find a profitable model in the internet age, but sometimes their efforts are counterproductive. A group of global newspapers is complaining that the Google News aggregator is violating their copyright and damaging their ability to compete for online advertising. The heart of their complaint is that Google News gathers the first few sentences of an article and displays it, with a headline and link back to the news source. They want to call that a copyright violation? It’s been well established that individuals or companies may use excerpts of copyright material. If Google was displaying the entire content of an article and not providing a link back to the news source, then I could see grounds for a complaint. These news media companies need to take advantage of services like Google News. Do you think the average person is going to visit the Alabama International Journal Gazette website? No, they won’t. But they might if they find a search match on Google News. Google News delivers traffic to news media sites. More traffic means more advertising opportunity. It’s up to the websites to take advantage of that traffic and maximize the chances that their content will appear on Google News searches.

But fine, they don’t want Google News to publicize their articles. That’s a simple fix and it doesn’t take the courts. There’s two things you could do. You could simply ask Google not to crawl and index your website. Google may honor that request, but they may not. The Google spider is a complex program and it may affect it’s efficiency to implement too many filters. Now if Google doesn’t honor that request or you simply don’t want to take that route, don’t let Google crawl your site. Set your sever configuration to deny access to the Google spider. You could do this for the entire site, or just some portions of the site. Just have your IT staff make it happen. If I, lowly internet amateur, can do it, then educated IT professionals can too.

Here’s what I would do. I would put all articles and photography in a subdirectory of the webserver. Chances are, this is already done. I would then set the HTACCESS in the subdirectories to deny access to Google domains. You could find the Google spider domains by checking the server statistics for the Googlebot user agent and then blocking domains it operates from. There’s nothing Google could do to get around this (except change their spider domain), because your server controls access to the content. The Google spider requests access to the content in the subdirectory and the webserver denies it. If Google changes their domain, you simply add the new domain to the block list.
I would only block Google from accessing the subdomains because you still want your website to appear on normal Google searches. If you prevent Google from accessing your entire site, you may prevent users that are specifically searching for your site from finding it on a Google search and most internet search referrals come through Google. If you prevent Google from accessing your entire site, you’re in effect preventing a majority of internet users from ever finding your site.

The fact that these news media companies have decided to use the courts is telling of how little they understand internet technology.

Sitting at Barriques

Filed under: General — Steven A. Stehling @ 13:54

So I’m sitting at Barriques, enjoying a coffee and a bowl of soup when I see something unusual, an Amish couple. Well I don’t know if they were actually Amish. They could have been something else similar, I don’t have the knowledge to tell the difference. It was just peculiar to see that in a downtown coffee shop with wireless internet and computers everywhere. I was tempted to take a picture of them, they sat directly behind me, but I didn’t want to offend. Do they have rules about being photographed? Damn my cultural sensitivity.

Ann Althouse might move in upstairs. I’ve seen her in Barriques once. She loves the place. I stayed at a distance, staring at her. Creepy?

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© 2008 Steven A. Stehling