For the love of Free & Open Source Software

This past week has been a deepening experience of Free & Open Source Software.

First, I loaded RockBox on my Sansa C250. This had three important results:

1. I can now play OGG and FLAC encoded music
2. I can now use a miniSD card larger than 2GB
3. The battery seems to charge better
   

I was ready to ditch the Sansa C250 for some newer MP3 player. I bought the Sansa on clearance about two years ago for some $35 (now you can get a refurb on Amazon for about $25 including shipping). The battery wasn't holding a charge for more than 30 minutes of use and it only has 2GB of internal memory. I mostly used it to listen to NPR on the bus (the Sansa C250 has an FM tuner).

Second, I've started working on a simple example for my dissertation. Since I currently don't have a license for ArcGIS (first time in 8+ years), I decided to use OpenJump to produce my figures. I just needed to draw some simple vector features and then manually generalize them. I like OpenJump because it gives me fine-grained control over vector features. For instance, it's easy to get a list of the node coordinates - open the attribute table and click the button on the left of the feature's attributes. Try to do that in ArcGIS... Sure, I could write some VBA to give me a button that does the same thing. But that involves writing some VBA code!

Next, I needed to develop a rough ontology for wetlands. I have TopBraid Composer on my system (still just in trial, but I can get a license through work). TBC is considered the creme-de-la-creme of ontology editing software. But I haven't used ANY ontology editing software and I couldn't find a good tutorial online (I've been told that TopQuadrant provides really good instructor-led courses - but I haven't been lucky enough to experience them). So, I downloaded Protege 4 and worked through the Pizza Ontology in the manual. There were some confusing points because the figures in the manual don't match the text - but it was better than anything I could find for TopBraid. I also installed a few difference visualization plug-ins to produce more spiffy figures (like the one on the right).

I've also shelved Google Chrome for a while. I really like Chrome but I have been missing my favorite plug-ins from FireFox - especially the Delicious plug-in. But what really turned me was a need to start encrypting and signing email. I'm a GMail zealot, so I wanted what FireGPG provides. First, install GnuPG. Then, from inside FireFox, install FireGPG. Generate or import your private key and viola - GPG encryption integrated into GMail!

Right now, I am guilty of using MS Word 2003 to edit my dissertation. I'd happily use OpenOffice (and even have it installed) if I felt comfortable with the markup features working transparently with Word - which my PhD advisor uses exclusively (in fact, I think I need to upgrade to Word 2007 - damned ribbon bar...).