I've started investigating the software product Scintilla. I'm specifically looking into the mac versions of scintilla (cocoa and macosx inside the source tree).
After doing some work with both the cocoa and the macosx version, I truly appreciate how much extra "stuff" apple gives you with the cocoa platform.
In exchange for some control over how things work (ie certain tasks become automagical) Apple gives you really easy ways to implement saving/opening/multipleDocs/"dirty-alert" etc. It's really quite amazing.
I've managed to work on a few bugs for this software because launchpad-bzr is VERY VERY easy to to drive-by-contributions.
So far, I've contributed
- mouse wheel fixes (zooming more like firefox, horizontal scrolling no longer needs holding the shift key, no more zooming 'jumpyness' when using the magic mouse)
- makefiles to build the cocoa project and makefiles to build the sample application
Im currently creating my own Source code Text editor called CodeAssistor because there is a serious lack of light-weight text editing software on the mac.
CodeAssistor is actually pretty solid right now, and I use it for all my editing needs (C,C++,ObjC,make,txt... java is there too but sorta tacked on). The application is comparatively tiny, only 2.5MB (TextWrangler is 28.8MB, TextEdit is 16.3 MB, jEdit is 30.8MB) and blazingly fast. Unfortunately it lacks a Search feature (DOH!) which I totally forgot about when I was thinking about the UI and now have to figure out how to not make the program ugly.
What kind of text editor doesn't have a search feature? DOH DOH DOH. Thats why i have yet to release the software. A textEditor w/o search is just plain stupid.
Friday, April 30, 2010
Saturday, February 6, 2010
eBooks, music, and the DRM
Debate is raging about DRM enabled books throughout the Nerdverse. With Apple releasing a new ebook reader (iPad), which will soon be competing with the Amazon Kindle and the Sony eReader, blogs are abuzz with debate on the merits and flaws of DRM and eBooks in general.
On one hand, text is the -absolutely- easiest commodity to pirate on the internet. The internet was basically constructed to send text messages. Think about it, if the internet were created to distribute video or audio, it would have been named "television" or "radio" (respectively). Sharing textual information is primal to the Internet's nature. Now that eInk devices are being widely distributed, and with them the ability to easily consume stolen text, book piracy will shoot through the stratosphere!
I cant stress this enough; piracy of books is 100x easier to pirate than music, the only mitigating factor against absolutely wide spread book theft is that books lack a medium to consume the pilfered pirate gains. eReaders are this medium. The Amazon kindle is to books what the Mp3 player is to music.
DRM can protect against the impending rampant piracy. DRM can limit the majority of society to be unable to freely redistribute digital purchases, thus ensuring that the costs of creating artistic works is covered.
There are, however, some serious drawbacks to DRM for our societies general social wellbeing! DRM allows a corporation-which by definition, is solely dedicated to profits- to be a single access point to art. DRM allows a company such as Amazon to control what access YOU have to your favourite books. Amazon has already proven its 'culture controlling' power when it removed access to the novel 1984 from customers who had previously purchased it. This power provided by DRM technology is akin to giving a company the ability to remove everyone's Beatles albums!
For the record, there has never been a greater irony on this earth than a corporation causing denial of access to the novel 1984.
Even beyond corporations willful denial of access to art is the unfortunate but accidental ways DRM can cause customers to lose access to their purchased books. If amazon were to to suddenly experience bankruptcy and stop producing the Kindle reader, customers would lose access to their purchases once their Kindles wore out and were unable to be replaced. If all of society used Kindles rather than paper books, this would be a societal disaster akin to the bank implosions of 2007-2009.
My answer to the eBook DRM paradox- where it is a cultural necessary to limit access to media in order to ensure the continued creation of art, yet it is a cultural necessary to NOT limit access to media in case of irrevokable artistic loss and degredation of consumer freedom- is to establish a benevolent hegemony which righteously and judiciously oversees and controls the usage of DRM.
I suggest either the establishment of a government agency to be a central repository for DRM keys and DRM decryption, or some heavily regulated corporation to perform the same task. An entity similar to the public library system or Canada Post. DRM is sadly, a necessity. However it is necessary to remove the overwhelming power granted by DRM out of the control of profit interested companies.
Any thoughts?
On one hand, text is the -absolutely- easiest commodity to pirate on the internet. The internet was basically constructed to send text messages. Think about it, if the internet were created to distribute video or audio, it would have been named "television" or "radio" (respectively). Sharing textual information is primal to the Internet's nature. Now that eInk devices are being widely distributed, and with them the ability to easily consume stolen text, book piracy will shoot through the stratosphere!
I cant stress this enough; piracy of books is 100x easier to pirate than music, the only mitigating factor against absolutely wide spread book theft is that books lack a medium to consume the pilfered pirate gains. eReaders are this medium. The Amazon kindle is to books what the Mp3 player is to music.
DRM can protect against the impending rampant piracy. DRM can limit the majority of society to be unable to freely redistribute digital purchases, thus ensuring that the costs of creating artistic works is covered.
There are, however, some serious drawbacks to DRM for our societies general social wellbeing! DRM allows a corporation-which by definition, is solely dedicated to profits- to be a single access point to art. DRM allows a company such as Amazon to control what access YOU have to your favourite books. Amazon has already proven its 'culture controlling' power when it removed access to the novel 1984 from customers who had previously purchased it. This power provided by DRM technology is akin to giving a company the ability to remove everyone's Beatles albums!
For the record, there has never been a greater irony on this earth than a corporation causing denial of access to the novel 1984.
Even beyond corporations willful denial of access to art is the unfortunate but accidental ways DRM can cause customers to lose access to their purchased books. If amazon were to to suddenly experience bankruptcy and stop producing the Kindle reader, customers would lose access to their purchases once their Kindles wore out and were unable to be replaced. If all of society used Kindles rather than paper books, this would be a societal disaster akin to the bank implosions of 2007-2009.
My answer to the eBook DRM paradox- where it is a cultural necessary to limit access to media in order to ensure the continued creation of art, yet it is a cultural necessary to NOT limit access to media in case of irrevokable artistic loss and degredation of consumer freedom- is to establish a benevolent hegemony which righteously and judiciously oversees and controls the usage of DRM.
I suggest either the establishment of a government agency to be a central repository for DRM keys and DRM decryption, or some heavily regulated corporation to perform the same task. An entity similar to the public library system or Canada Post. DRM is sadly, a necessity. However it is necessary to remove the overwhelming power granted by DRM out of the control of profit interested companies.
Any thoughts?
Monday, April 20, 2009
Sunday, March 15, 2009
An Upgrade in RAM
So I Upgraded my RAM today... 2->4 for $60bucks... not bad I thinks. Im running VMware with windows(2GB ram) and linux(1GB) right now...
All three systems are running basically as fast as when I had 2GB, however I am running 2 vms at once now... something I didn't do before. Im going to try LFS again and time what 1SBU is now that I can dedicate lots more ram to the VM:)
All three systems are running basically as fast as when I had 2GB, however I am running 2 vms at once now... something I didn't do before. Im going to try LFS again and time what 1SBU is now that I can dedicate lots more ram to the VM:)
LFS - pt3
So I restarted using EXACTLY what the LFS book says (not using up-to-date gcc or kernel) and I've gotten to the second recompilation of gcc... build broken
Im making slow but steady steps... thank god for VMware and the ability to roll back, I'd be lost without it.
Im making slow but steady steps... thank god for VMware and the ability to roll back, I'd be lost without it.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Linux From Scratch - pt 2
So I've started to compile binutils... time to extract(unzip) binutils is:
extract time:
real 0m18.281s
user 0m6.703s
sys 0m12.316s
time { make && make install; }:
ERROR on compile... ROLLING BACK
2nd try
problem: needed to log out-log in to lfs after setting .bashrc
extract time:
real 0m18.967s
user 0m7.1003s
sys 0m11.503s
configure time:
real 6.68s
user 1.14s
sys 3.246s
time { make && make install; }:
real 3min 1.46sec
user 1m10.925s
sys 1m45.680
Cant build glibc going to give up for today... try again later.
extract time:
real 0m18.281s
user 0m6.703s
sys 0m12.316s
time { make && make install; }:
ERROR on compile... ROLLING BACK
2nd try
problem: needed to log out-log in to lfs after setting .bashrc
extract time:
real 0m18.967s
user 0m7.1003s
sys 0m11.503s
configure time:
real 6.68s
user 1.14s
sys 3.246s
time { make && make install; }:
real 3min 1.46sec
user 1m10.925s
sys 1m45.680
Cant build glibc going to give up for today... try again later.
Linux From Scratch
Im trying to install Linux from scratch on VMware Fusion. This is the first time I've done LFS so we'll see how it goes.
Right now Ive booted the LiveCD, created my partitions on /dev/sda and am in the middle of downloading all the required packages. I'll keep you up to date :)
One change to the packages Im downloading is the gcc compiler... Im downloading 4.3.3 rather than 4.3.2 as 4.3.3 is the latest stable release, command options should be the same as 4.3.2, and I'll always have this nagging desire to recompile everything with the newer gcc if I dont do this... we shall see if this is a mistake
another change is that I am going to use the 2.6.28.x kernel rather than the 2.6.27.x kernel listed.
I took a snapshot after I dled all the packages (before patches)... more in my next post
Right now Ive booted the LiveCD, created my partitions on /dev/sda and am in the middle of downloading all the required packages. I'll keep you up to date :)
One change to the packages Im downloading is the gcc compiler... Im downloading 4.3.3 rather than 4.3.2 as 4.3.3 is the latest stable release, command options should be the same as 4.3.2, and I'll always have this nagging desire to recompile everything with the newer gcc if I dont do this... we shall see if this is a mistake
another change is that I am going to use the 2.6.28.x kernel rather than the 2.6.27.x kernel listed.
I took a snapshot after I dled all the packages (before patches)... more in my next post
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