Entries from August 2002 ↓

One of the amusing bits of scenery that they have built at Disney Sea is a replica of part of the Giant’s Causeway!

My new camera has a USB port, and it uses the USB mass storage protocol to allow the computer to access the files. Protocol standards are great: it’s a pity all developers don’t read them, especially when they are developing a product that implements the protocol.

I connected my FinePix to my ThinkPad, they said hello, then Linux got confused.
I asked what the problem was, and Linux told me that FinePix was answering all the questions strangely: there was extra bit where there should not have been extra bits.

I asked the Google-monster if he’d heard about any similar problems and it told me about Linux and a Sony Clie who seemed to be having the same conversation. The solution that worked there was to ask Linux to just ignore the extra bits and hope they didn’t matter. I tried this, and FinePix and Linux have been best of friends ever since.

I don’t know for sure who caused the proble. Being a Linux fan(atic) I tend to believe that the Linux hackers got the protocol right, and my other USB mass storage devices seem to agree with me. But that isn’t really the point: if I hadn’t been using a Free OS, I couldn’t have fixed the problem in 20 minutes, and my new camera would soon be full of images that I couldn’t access.

I’ve just bought a Fuji FinePix F401 digital camera in Yodobashi Camera Shop in Shinjuku.

Shinjuku is a mad place! I’ve been told that Shinjuku train station has over 3 million people pass through it during rush hour. If only 1% of these people bought a camera from you, you could make a lot money. That’s probably why there are so many people selling cameras at Shinjuku. Or maybe they’re all just crazy.

Karen and I were sitting in the BMI lounge in Belfast reading an Internet
magazine that described XML as “an open source language”. This annoyed me more
than I expected, possibly due to my lack of sleep. “Stallman is right” I said.

The Open Source movement was started to ‘rebrand’ Free Software to make it more
acceptable to business and give it a name that was less open to confusion.
“‘Free’ is frequently misunderstood to refer to price and not freedom” was their
complaint, so they choose what they thought to be a less ambiguous name: “Open
Source”. RMS didn’t like this because it stopped people talking about freedom.

“Open Source” has turned out to be much more open to misinterpretation and
misuse than “Free Software”: many people, including the authors of the article
that sparked this rant, believe that something is open source if you can read
the source code. Yes, “Free Software” was slightly ambiguous (in English; the
translations in most other languages were not ambiguous at all), but the term
could be simply clarified with phrases “Free as in ’speech’, not ‘beer’”; “Open
Source” is much more difficult to explain.

So, again I say “Stallman is right!”. He may be a fanatic, but without him we
probably wouldn’t have Free Software by any name. He takes a lot of abuse for
wanting us to talk about “Free Software” instead of “Open Source”, and asking us
to accurately describe our favourite OS as “GNU/Linux” instead of just “Linux”.
If RMS annoys you, good: he’s doing his job. RMS, keep up the good work!

This time tomorrow we’ll be on our way to Japan. I think I’ve got everything I need. I’ve started to write a schedule for the holiday; I hope to finish it today, but that will never happen.