1. 24 January 2006

    1506 days ago

    Richard Stallman | Freedom Fighter

    Profile on FSF crusader, RMS.

    Says Perens, “He’s entirely consistent and uncompromising, and I think the world needs someone like that.”

    Kjell Olsen1506 days ago

  2. 06 December 2005

    1555 days ago

    Intellectual Prosperity

    The consequence of treating ideas and thoughts as if they are tangible property are the very destruction of science and education and the elimination of individual rights and freedoms.

    Kjell Olsen1555 days ago

  3. 07 September 2005

    1645 days ago

    Reduce the risk, hire from open source (Loud Thinking)

    Who cared about his GPA (or if he even went to college)? Or that he lived in Provo, Utah? Or how many years of experience he had programming? We didn’t. It’s simply unnecessary to rely on secondary factors when the work is available to extract values for the five variables listed above.

    via Kjell Olsen1645 days ago

  4. 08 August 2005

    1675 days ago

    What Business Can Learn from Open Source

    It’s not that Microsoft isn’t trying. They know controlling the browser is one of the keys to retaining their monopoly. The problem is the same they face in operating systems: they can’t pay people enough to build something better than a group of inspired hackers will build for free.

    That is one of the key tenets of professionalism. Work and life are supposed to be separate. But that part, I’m convinced, is a mistake.

    via Kjell Olsen1675 days ago

  5. 21 July 2005

    1693 days ago

    Wikisource

    Wiki* is tremendously neat. I (heart) free information.

    via Kjell Olsen1693 days ago

  6. 19 July 2005

    Agile Web Development With Rails

    Dave Thomas, et al.

    1695 days ago

    I’m a little late catching the bandwagon, but I didn’t buy the (beta)book for a few weeks after it’s release. This is a spectacularly detailed book on the rails framework, capturing the simplicity of setting up a rails application in it’s tutorial followed by quite a dense summary of the different aspects of rails quite in depth.

  7. 25 June 2005

    1719 days ago

    how i learned to stop worrying and relinquish control

    Perhaps the most brilliant thing Flickr did was to provide an API that allows developers to hook into it seamlessly. This meant someone could create a free tool that lets me move photos directly from iPhoto to Flickr. This newfound ease of upload increased my Flickr usage so much that I needed to buy a Pro account. So, get this: Someone else did the work, and Flickr got the money. All because they levy so little control.

    Web applications need to relinquish the control, be open and user driven.

    via Kjell Olsen1719 days ago

  8. 23 June 2005

    1721 days ago

    Mike Clark's Weblog

    Rails kicks butt.

    In much the same way that the web took off because of “View Source”, Rails is taking off because it lowers the barrier to entry and holds nothing back.

    Having learned html and css by viewing the source, I can say that rails works much the same. I love open source, and it makes doing things for a kid with little programming experience like myself a piece of cake.

    via Kjell Olsen1721 days ago

  9. 09 June 2005

    1735 days ago

    MIT OpenCourseWare

    I’ve never actually taken a class here, but fantasized about it lots.

    a free and open educational resource for faculty, students, and self-learners around the world. OCW supports MIT’s mission to advance knowledge and education, and serve the world in the 21st century. It is true to MIT’s values of excellence, innovation, and leadership.

    How about intro linguistics?

    Kjell Olsen1735 days ago

  10. 13 May 2005

    1762 days ago

    Plutohome.com

    A real sweet looking framework to automate and monitor your house, really incredible looking. Mostly a wrapper for OSS projects (AsteriskPBX for telephony, Xine for media viewing etc), it ties everything together and even lets you control everything from your bluetooth symbian mobile device (!!). The software is open source, and they also sell hardware thats plug-n-play.

    In many cases, a Pluto DCE device is just a thin wrapper for another open source project. The wrapper’s job is to launch the open source project with the right parameters, forward incoming commands to it, and fire DCE events in response to triggers within it. We added DCE wrappers for the projects Asterisk (pbx telephone switch), Xine (media player), Linphone (SIP software telephone) and Motion (surveillance video capture). In most cases, no modifications to the open source project were needed since the project already contained a mechanism for feeding it commands. cite

    Wonder what kind of overhead it takes? POS out of the basement, or does it need top of the line… This just makes me drool:

    By allowing these various projects to work together seamlessly, many new features and benefits are now possible. For example, if there’s a security breach in your house, the lights and TV’s in the house come on automatically using our home automation DCE device interfaces, and the security pn pad appears on all the Windows webpads and PDA’s. After 30 seconds a menacing video plays for the burglar using Xine, while the surveillance cameras monitored by Motion feed a live video to your mobile phone over GPRS. Hit ‘Talk’ on the phone and Xine suspends, passing control to Linphone which makes a call using Asterisk to your mobile phone with the audio piped through the stereo so you can shout at the intruder and let him know you’re watching him from a remote location and calling. To the end-user, it works seamlessly, like 1 cohesive whole, but in reality, what Pluto did is enable a bunch of existing applications to work together. cite

    Pluto specifically decided to sacrifice revenues from software sales, focusing its sales efforts exclusively on embedded solutions, so that it could work more closely with the open source community and develop a general-purpose platform that makes it very easy for programmers to build upon. cite

    Check out all these sweet looking modules, and the documentation home.

    via Kjell Olsen1762 days ago

  11. 1762 days ago

    MisterHouse

    A nice looking X10 interface in perl, which kind of sucks, but it’s cooler then a GUI based client.

    via Kjell Olsen1762 days ago

  12. 09 May 2005

    1766 days ago

    Master Lock Combination Cracking

    Ten minutes and a little know how, and you’ve opened yourself a master lock. Neat.

    via Kjell Olsen1766 days ago

  13. 11 December 2004

    The Personal Intelligences

    Launa Ellison

    1915 days ago

    This was a fairly interesting book to read for me, because it was written by my teacher during a sabbatical she took while I was in her class. I’m sort of surprised I’m not mentioned more then the time or two I was, lots of my old friends are in there. Regardless, it’s really interesting to go back and read about two of the best years of my education ever from a very different perspective.

  14. Also somewhat recently

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