Free as in Freedom

Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software by Sam Williams is also availabe on Project Gutenberg, other than on the original website.

An except from the Preface:

The work of Richard M. Stallman literally speaks for itself. From the documented source code to the published papers to the recorded speeches, few people have expressed as much willingness to lay their thoughts and their work on the line. [...]

For the readers who have decided to trust a few hours of their time to exploring this book, I can confidently state that there are facts and quotes in here that one won't find in any Slashdot story or Google search. Gaining access to these facts involves paying a price, however. In the case of the book version, you can pay for these facts in the traditional manner, i.e., by purchasing the book. In the case of the electronic versions, you can pay for these facts in the free software manner. Thanks to the folks at O'Reilly & Associates, this book is being distributed under the GNU Free Documentation License, meaning you can help to improve the work or create a personalized version and release that version under the same license.

The last time Richard Stallman was here in Singapore for some Linux related stuff, the local press reported that he charged a buck (which goes towards the GNU project) for every autograph.

Freakonomics

Today I shall devote this little space here to the book Freakonomics. As I had mentioned before, it is a GREAT book... so great that I requested them to send me a bookplate... and to my delightful surprise, they did so after a few months. So, to celebrate the success of Freakonomics's one year, I am doing a little promotion for them here.

He [Levitt] had an interview for the Society of Fellows, the venerable intellectual Harvard clubhouse that pays young scholars to do their own work, for three years, with no commitments. [...] Finally-disquietingly-one [a fellow] of them said: "I'm having a hard time seeing the unifying theme of your work. Could you explain it?"

Levitt was stymied. He had no idea what his unifying theme was, or if he even had one. Amartya Sen, the future Nobel-winning economist, jumped in and neatly summarized what he saw as Levitt's theme.
Yes, Levitt said eagerly, that's my theme.
Another fellow then offered another theme.
You're right, Levitt said, that's my theme.
And so it went, like dogs tugging at a bone, until the philosopher Robert Nozick interrupted. If Levitt could have been said to have an intellectual hero, it would be Nozick.
"How old are you, Steve?" he asked.
"Twenty-six."
Nozick turned to the other fellows: "He's 26 years old. Why does he need to have a unifying theme? Maybe he's going to be one of those people who's so talented he doesn't need one. He'll take a question and he'll just answer it, and it'll be fine."

Yes... that is Steven Levitt. [Read more about the above]

Overall, its a good book, thought provoking and fun. I hope they will publish a follow up book.

Flickr Photo of the Day: In the Realm of Soft Delusions

In the realm of soft delusions, originally uploaded by IrenaS. Strange, yet beautiful.

Btw, I still have many Windows Live Messenger invites left. Email HanWorks Research if you want them.

Webaroo

New Internet startup Webaroo has emerged from stealth mode! After gettings the news from Google News, I decided to check out the product... and my verdict is that its great. Essentially , Webaroo is a free service that scours a subset of the Web without a live Internet connection. (Read more about how it works)

The key, Webaroo says, rests in giving users "more bang for the memory buck". Using techniques similar to a search engine such as Google, Webaroo "crawls" the internet, selecting pages "with high quality, broad coverage, and small size".

More from Webaroo in the future:
* A web pack containing a million articles from Wikipedia
* More topics for web packs (current web packs are limited to certain cities and the FIFA World Cup)
* A service that will be able to store "the whole of the web" on a 40GB hard drive.
* The company also announced today a deal with Acer, the world's fourth-largest branded PC maker, under which the Webaroo system will come pre-installed on the manufacturer's machines.

Webaroo is a really ambitious service, co-founded by Rakesh Mathur [from IIT-B] (also a co-founder of Junglee, which was sold to Amazon before the bubble burst). This idea may be revolutionary, but I have no doubt about it becoming a very popular and successful service.

The add websites feature is really cool, except that they limited the link depth to 1 only. (It is something like HTTrack, with a powerful search function and maybe more efficient caching.) Currently, I am waiting for them to expand their web packs (which is like 256 MB each ... not really 'small size').

Breakdown of Webaroo
My initial analysis of Webaroo suggests that it runs like a server (on http://localhost port 1000). In addition, it appears to be made using MSVCPP (there is a file MSVCR71.dll in C:\Program Files\Webaroo\dist )and it uses Microsoft .NET Framework according to the section on System Requirements. It appears to use AJAX and also Python (python24.dll in C:\Program Files\Webaroo\dist), and according to the credits (from taskbar webaroo icon, goto about and then credits), it contains BitTorrent P2P software and lots of other stuff. There is even a link going to Webaroo sourcecode, which appears to be an invalid link. Looking at the general coding, I notice that Webaroo includes nifty.js and the 'frames' on the page seems to be AJAX based. Try saving a page or look at the source code. Also settings appear to be stored in XML files in the program files webaroo folder. And websites which you have added to content are stored in C:\Documents and Settings\Your_Username\Application Data\Webaroo\Packages.

The Art of Rhetoric: Ethos, Logos and Pathos

Rhetoric is the art of speaking or writing effectively.
According to Aristotle, rhetoric is "the ability, in each particular case, to see the available means of persuasion." He described three main forms of rhetoric: Ethos, Logos, and Pathos. Read more here.

Port25

Port25 is the website of Microsoft's Open Source Software Lab (OSSL). The website is named Port 25, after the SMTP port. Microsoft OSSL claims to be "located on the company’s main campus, the lab houses more than 300 servers, which collectively run more than 15 versions of UNIX and 50 Linux distributions." Recently launched, Port25 has attracted a large number of comments. Take for example, an article on explaining Microsoft's Open Source Software Lab (Part 1), has comments ranging from NetBSD is not a linux distro (contrary to wide the author writes), and also CentOS & NetBSD being "lesser known" distros, and half-positive comments such as:

I'm so happy to see Microsoft "trying" to get a glimpse of what Open Source is, because after all the censoring they've done, and the copyright laws they've created to try to stop users like us that love GNU/Linux from using it, they had to use something without paying for it. I'm pretty sure that those 300 servers with those 50 distros has been the cheapest investment ever.

There is also another post on why is it called Computer Science.

Tux Power!

Linuxaudio.org has released its first compilation CD of music by artists using libre software - Made in Linux Vol.1: Tux Power!
Get Tux Power! now! (free download)

Flickr Photo of the Day: Country Road

Country Road, originally uploaded by GazzaP.

Take Me Home, Country Roads.

Domain Names

Analysis of all 3.5GB of the .COM Top Level Domain zone file.
Of the 17,576 possible three-letter sequences (for .com domain names), every single one is already taken!
I can't believe that even after the Internet bubble burst, domain name speculations are still going on!

April Fool's

Google Circles looks for real... but its fake. Anyway, Google Romance is obviously fake. All of us know what is April Fool's Day, but what about its origin? And this year's list of April Fool's hoaxes include Robert Scoble leaving Microsoft for Google and The Economist's article in getting a pet dragon someday!