Mike Oldfield - Tubular Bells (from the Exorcist)

Bebel Gilberto

Coming to Boston, Nov. 27.
I want to go so bad.

Essa garrota é demais...tão gostoza, e canta como um anjo...w0w...

NICE

The house in which we rent an apt. has been foreclosed (I may have mentioned that before). The bank was just here. They've offered us $2700 to move out my Nov. 5, even though we already have another apt. lined up and planned to be out by the 1st. YEAH!

binary message

01001001 00100111 01101100 01101100 00100000 01110100 01100101 01101100 01101100 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01110111 01101000 01100001 01110100 00100000 01110100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01101101 01100101 01100001 01101110 01110011 00100000 01101001 01100110 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100111 01101100 01101100 00100000 01110100 01100001 01101011 01100101 00100000 01101101 01100101 00100000 01101000 01101111 01101101 01100101 00100000 01110111 01101001 01110100 01101000 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01101101 01100001 01101011 01100101 00100000 01110111 01101001 01101100 01100100 00101110 00100000 01110000 01100001 01110011 01110011 01101001 01101111 01101110 01100001 01110100 01100101 00100000 01101100 01101111 01110110 01100101 00100000 01110111 01101001 01110100 01101000 00100000 01101101 01100101 00101110

A Layman's Thoughts on Freedoms and Open Standards

A layman's thoughts on open document formats, open source software, freedom of choice, freedom of information, liberties in general.

Consider, for a moment, where the world might be now, if, say, whoever first developed a means of written communication, written language, had copyrighted, this means of communication. I'd like to consider not only copyrighting his particular writing system, but, even more generally, the concept of symbolically representing reality in a written/graphical form.

Had the inventor of writing, if you will, demanded his rights in terms of the use of such a system, of course, anyone that wrote anything would owe him for use of this intellectual property. Thus, he would have a right to demand his fee for the conveyance of any information, of any nature, in a written form. This would mean, he would have control over any written communication. He would be able to control what information could be conveyed in writing, who could have access to that information, and, of course, he could demand payment for any and everytime information of any nature was conveyed in this fashion. Let me just clarify that by being a bit more precise, while summing up the entire situation in general:
He would have control over the conveyance of any information in written form.
He would control information.
Anyone with such power, of course, would have immense, if not complete control over public opinion and knowledge. I think we can agree that such control centralized in the hands of one person would be A BAD THING.
This individual could control religious thought, philosophy, the semination of scientific knowledge, etc., ad infinitum.

Now, consider even if Gutenburg had patented and copyrighted the printing press, and all printing of any matter would, again, be his to control. Or perhaps, say one person controlled all rights to the use of paper (papyrus), when it was invented, and, thus, could control any use there of and any matter that was printed or written on paper, etc. Control over any such process or media would put untold power in the hands of the individual possessing such power. I think we can agree that such control centralized in one person (or one company) would be A BAD THING.

Freedom of information, freedom of expression and freedom to learn are, and I believe this is a widely enough held notion that nobody will argue the contrary, ESSENTIAL freedoms.
Freedoms necessary to the advance of the human species, of knowledge, of culture and scientific progress.

This is why we need to have open standards for document formats, and why proprietary document formats are to be avoided. This is why we should not allow specific software vendors to monopolize the dispersion of information by allowing their proprietary document formats to become standard to any industry. Allowing them such control allows them control over that industry. They will have the ability to stifle choice of software use and will have control over the publication of knowledge.

In today's digital, information age, if one individual or one company has control of the file formats in which information may be shared, or if one company or individual controls all software capable of accessing information in said formats, that individual or company has control of all information.

This is why document formats such as Microsoft's .doc or OOXML, SDL's .ttx, .mp3, .wmp and other formats that are proprietary, and specific to one software vendor, are harmful, and to be not only avoided, but completely eschewed in favor of open document formats, such as .odf, and .ogg.

relevant links:
ODF Alliance
Oasis Open
Open Document XML
ODF at FSF
No Word Attachments

screenshot

I like to post occasional screenshots to proudly display my geek fu.

This shows me listening to Cabezones (awesome rock from Argentina) using mocp, on my Debian gnu/linux system, in a roxterm terminal, using the Ion3 window manager.
I'm just too co0l for words, really...

ughhh...heavy lifting

I'm sitting here downloading and backing up all the relevant materials for http://www.baldwinsoftware.com and http://www.photodharma.com and http://www.uuchaliceart.com, and I'm realizing what a load of work it is going to be to get them all back up and online and gro0vy once the domain transfers resolve, etc. For one thing, I have a lot of images hard-linked to various locations all over, including in the linguasos.org domain, which will be expiring, so I'm going to have to update all the links. I'm going to have to edit nearly every page on these sites. I've decided I'm more or less going to give http://www.photodharma.com a complete overhaul, anyway. It needs it. This is going to be a lot of work, and will take a while, so, I probably shouldn't have decided to get started on all of this right now, while I'm moving, etc., but, at the same time, I think I should have done it all a long time ago. After the initial heavy lifting is done, my online presence will be much simpler to manage, and, I believe, once I've done a bit of reconfiguration, these sites will come out more attractive and useful. My online presence has just been too scattered and schizophrenic for too long. Time to consolidate, simplify, and beautify the whole chaotic morass of scattered sites and disorganized links, etc.