Red Sweater Blog – Open Source Obligations

The problems that result from a false sense of entitlement.
I don’t want to give people the “holier than thou” feeling, but my opinion is that when someone gives the fruit of their labour away for free, the things you say to them should consist of constructive criticism and lots of ‘Thank you!’s, nothing more.

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Craig Hockenberry: The Rise and Fall of the Independent Developer

In this blog post Craig Hockenberry comments on the latest developments in the software licensing and patent business.

What he writes makes me angry and very sad, because broad software patents like the ones Lodsys possesses will lead only to less diversity and less quality in all software markets. Patent trolls like Lodsys are like bullies; they go after the small developers first and don’t take on the bigger companies because know they’ll lose.

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Shout-out: "Pleco" Chinese Dictionary for iOS

A quick shout-out to the makers of one of my favourite applications for the iPhone and iPad.

I’m approaching the end of my time in university, studying Sinology and Business and this application has been of great help along the way.

Anybody who needs a reliable Chinese-English (English-Chinese) dictionary should try Pleco. It’s a universal application with tons of useful features in a well thought-out user interface. The entire application is modular, so you can add features to perfectly suit your needs. Their forums provide great support for anything Pleco-related and the staff is always open for suggestions and feature requests.

Some of my favourite features are:

• A highly customisable flashcard system.
• Live-OCR (Optical Character Recognition) for Chinese characters.
• Full-screen handwriting recognition.
• Stroke order diagrams (especially useful for long form characters).
• And last but not least: Amazing dictionaries, some of which aren’t available in digital for anywhere else.

The last thing I want to mention is, that they offer substantial student discounts.

FOSS Patents: Two more lawsuits against Lodsys

Great reporting by Florian Müller on the ongoing Lodsys-Patent-Trolling-Case.

This is my favourite part of the post:

OpinionLab is the first company to sue Lodsys not only under patent law but to additionally make demands under rules against unfair competition and tortious interference.

Those additional allegations are tough, and beyond a merely declaratory judgment, OpinionLab seeks injunctive and monetary relief. In other words, they bring claims that pose a significant economic risk to Lodsys.

I’m looking forward to see this patent troll have his ass handed to him.

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The Future of NetNewsWire: An Interview With Brent Simmons and Black Pixel’s Daniel Pasco

I greatly admire Brent Simmons and his work. NetNewsWire has been my goto RSS reader since I switched to the Mac a little over three years ago.
Even though Reeder has replace NetNewsWire for me on the Mac, iPhone and iPad, I still have paid licences for each version of NNW; they’re my backup solution.

I’m excited for the things to come, in case of NetNewsWire in the hands of Black Pixel and Brent Simmons’s next projects. 

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Sometimes I want to hit myself with a shovel

This is one of these situations. I signed up for Pinboard.in, a bookmarking service, that’s hellishly fast, very flexible and most of all; simple.

I was looking for a service that allowes me to save and organise links on certain topics efficiently. I need to do a lot of web research for four different term papers and for my master’s thesis.
The recent del.icio.us kerfuffle brought Pinboard.in to my attention again — I remembered having read about it a while back, but I didn’t know when and why.

It took me 10 minutes to get through the feature list and the ‘getting started’ material to realise this is the service I’m looking for.
It then took me five more minutes to sign up, paying the $9.25 for the service.

The bookmark archiving feature requires a subscription, which costs $25 per year and I will upgrade to an archival account soon.

Now, why would I want to hit myself with a shovel?

Well, while I was sifting through my old bookmarks in Safari today, deleting unnecessary old stuff, I found a bookmark with this title:

Very interesting new bookmark service ‘pinboard.in’ for currently $1.50

Generously Pinboard.in reduces the price of the first year of the archival account by the the amount of the initial subscription fee, so I will not loose any money;

But OH MY GOD could that service have saved me time and work had I subscribed back then.

Behold! Cloud Sync for Things is coming.

Users of Things have waited long for a solution to keep the Things databases on their Macs and iOS devices in sync, without having to be on the same WiFi network.

This has obviously proven to be a more difficult task then the nice people of Cultured Code initially thought it would be, but they’re making headway.

And they’re doing so displaying a healthy sense of humour — which I like in any kind of company, because it demonstrates the ability to be self-critical.

Don’t miss out on the little goodies at the bottom of the post.

Even in its limited state, this almost gave me a tech-gasm

Reeder for Mac is now available for download