Diary of a Network Geek

I like being free and independent.

I like the idea behind Instagram, but not the proprietary nature of it.
I don’t like giving up my rights to work I create.   Even when it’s just a little photo of a little moment captured with my iPhone.  I dislike, as Nicholas Carr called it on his blog, “digital sharecropping”. And, of course, now the ads have finally started on Instagram, solidifying my discomfort with it.  Why should I let them profit from even the smallest amount of my work without compensation?

Well, now, there’s a new program called Pressgram, that’s a free iPhone app, which allows an Instagram-like experience, but uploads the photos to my WordPress blog. You can upload them to your WordPress.com blog, or, as I do, to my self-hosted WordPress blog.  Word has it that there is an Android version in the works, too.  It’s a new app, so there are some on-going refinements, but it really is a great start, I think.

Obviously, I’ve been using it here and at my other site, JKHoffman.com, so I believe in it.  Yes, it took me a little fiddling to get the setting just the way I want and to sort out a couple other things, but, now that I have, I think this is going to work just fine.  I can already see the difference in my site stats!
Anyway, worth checking out if you’re leary of another ad-supported system that lets you share, but not much else.

And becomes completely irrelevant.

Apparently, I missed this last month, but Six Apart is changing their license so that Movable Type will no longer have a free version.  Now, when it was Ben and Mena Trott running Six Apart, when they made a mistake with licensing, which I think they did back in 2004, you can understand and forgive.
Ben and Mena were like us, just two fellow geeks out there coding and blogging.  They came up with a great idea and everyone loved it.  But, then, money got involved and things got complicated.  They did things to make money, and, honestly, I probably would have done the exact same things.  When they first changed things to make the license more restrictive back in 2004, I was, I admit, outraged.  How could they betray us like that?  They were like us!  How could they throw this all over to just make money!  In retrospect, the question is, how could they NOT?

But, then there was WordPress.  Many of us made the jump, including me.  WordPress was a new way of doing things.  This Open Source thing was new to many of us and it was exciting!  Software that was mostly free that the community built!  People who were just like us!  Code geeks and blog geeks and graphics geeks all coming together to make cool things happen.  What could be better?  And, from my perspective, WordPress was easier to extend and develop for in many, many ways.  Also, it seemed to have fewer resource issues than the Perl-based Movable Type.  Better still, as I understood the license, WordPress would always be free and if it stopped being free, we could fork the code and make it free again.

Somewhere back in there, after the 2004 license debacle, Movable Type added an Open Source version.  They tried to get us back, but, frankly, for most of us, it was too little, too late.  After one license change like that, how could we be sure that it wouldn’t happen again?  And what about charging money to be part of the developer’s group who had access to the documentation you really needed to understand Movable Type enough to develop for it?  I know I couldn’t afford that!  Besides, as Six Apart got more and more corporate, I just felt like something else bad was coming, if not soon, then eventually.

Now this.
Well, it actually happened in July, but I just read about it on Mark Jaquith’s blog.
So, finally, after nine years, that other shoe has finally dropped.  Of course, a lot has changed in those nine years.  For one thing, I’ve gotten both married and divorced and am getting ready to be married again.  Interestingly, to me, Ben and Mena who started Six Apart have gotten divorced, too.  Ben still seems to be involved in the day-to-day development of Movable Type and related stuff, but Mena seems less involved.  I can’t imagine the toll their meteoric rise took on their relationship.  It must have gotten truly unbearable after a while.
You know, I hope they made out well.  Sure, this latest license thing is, I think, a final nail in the coffin of Movable Type, but, damnit, Movable Type also launched the blogging era in many ways, and paved the way for WordPress.  And, it was two people who started it.  Just two.  Two good people.

So, it’s sad, to me, to see how things have gone.  I’m sad to have been right about Movable Type all those years ago.  I wish they had proven me wrong.
But, with this, I think they proved me right not to trust the Movable Type license any more.  And, honestly, they taught me something about how to treat my audience and my customers.
And, yes, it makes me sad.  It’s the end of an era, of sorts.
I’m sorry to see you go, old friend.

I would imagine by now the few regular readers of this blog have figured out that I love both photography and free software.

I, personally, use Lightroom.  And, yes, I paid for it.  I’ve gotten used to it and I understand the workflow and I can get the little bit of editing I do to photos done that way.  But, I am always on the look out for software that I can recommend to people unwilling to make that kind of…
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So, this month, the theme has been free graphic software, more or less.

Well, as much as I love taking as realistic photos as possible and capturing the actual moment, I have to admit, graphic artists who start with photos and make them into more always impress me.  I’m especially impressed by those who create whole realities from nothing.  That’s one reason I backed the Kickstarter project The Tube Open Movie.  When they’re done developing this, now late, movie, the things…
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Last week, I shared my favorite free image editor, but this week, I’ve got a bit of software that’s every bit as useful and important.

But, really, it’s more than just a viewer.  This little gem can do every thing from slideshows to file format conversions to cropping.  It can even do some simple editing like sharpening or blurring.  You can choose to view all the graphics in a directory in thumbnail format, or scroll through them one at a time…
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I am a geek.

This may be self-evident based on the fact that I work in IT and maintain several websites including two blogs, but the implications of that may not be clear.
In software development, of which I have done very, very little, there’s a concept called “version control”.  In brief, it’s about keeping track of the latest revision of your written source code, so that you can revert, if necessary, to an older version for part of the code, when…
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I love OpenSource software.

I especially love it when it’s free. I love free extensions for OpenSource software I use on a regular basis, too. Microsoft Office isn’t the only game in town and people do develop for OpenOffice.

If you haven’t yet, check them out.

Okay, this is a little stale, but…
WOW! According to this press release on Adobe’s website, Adobe plans to acquire Macromedia via a massive stock purchase. The plan is for them to buy all the stock at the Friday 4/15 price.
If you’re not aware of these two companies, you’ve not been paying attention. And, the implications of them becoming a single entity is, well, massive. Adobe will, quite simply, become the largest graphics and design software company ever to exist. This will mean that one company will be responsible for Acrobat, Photoshop, Flash, and Dreamweaver. Think about how many top-shelf graphics and design programs that puts under the control of one company. That’s almost frightening.

Of course, it’s not the United States economy…

Rather, it’s India’s. Yep, that’s right, our outsourcing habit is really growing India’s economy. According to this article on AustalianIT, “Indian software company Wipro third-quarter net profit jumped 19 per cent from a year earlier to a record 2.74 billion rupees ($78 million)” and “Infosys, India’s second-largest software services exporter, reported last week third-quarter net profit jumped a better-than-expected 28 percent to 3.3 billion rupees ($91.3 million)”. But, you say, that could be due to any of thousands of market forces, right? Well, not according to the article. The article claims that Wipro is “…one of many software companies benefiting from a trend by US and European companies seeking to cut costs by outsourcing jobs to India to take advantage of a large, cheap pool of English-speaking graduates. ”

I think anyone who reads my blog on a regular basis is smart enough to draw their own conclusions about this. Instead of making further comment, I’ll just ask a question. If you’re an IT professional, how’s your personal economy these days? Could you have used some of that revenue?
Think about it.