The reason is that I hands-down completely beyond a shadow of a doubt prefer to use Claws Mail. And not a lot of people get that, since the default look of Claws Mail is… pretty terrible, to be honest (see this article from cyberciti.biz to see the default Claws layout). I find, however, that with a bit of cleanup, it is very good and even pleasant to look at; and it has some very good features to make use of. So this little piece is actually intended as a answer to people who ask me how I can use something as horrible as Claws. It is entirely my opinion, and if I am the only person in the world who has this right, I am also the only person in the world who knows that you  are wrong when you say I am.

Now: Maybe I should just show you the design I am going for, to make it clear:

This is simply a series of settings to be made, none of which are particularly advanced, but make a great difference.
I should also note that part of the reason I am doing this is that I have an aging Thinkpad which will do a resolution of 1024×768. This is adequate for a lot of things, but it means that an application like Thunderbird looks terrible nowadays, because the text spacing and the huge attachment field leave so little space for the actual message. As you see, this setup allows me to use all the information in the email, and though the font is a little smaller, it still allows for comfortable reading.

None of these concepts depend on each other, so the order is of minor importance. The easiest will probably just be to go through it as the options come in the Preferences panel. In other words, start with going to Configuration > Preferences.

• Receiving – These are sensible defaults to me, but I ask it to check email every 8 minutes. Obviously you can set this as you prefer. I don’t set it to check mail on startup, because I often just want to find a detail in an email, and the interface will get quite unresponsive when fetching mail. On the other hand, it fetches mail quite quickly compared to other mail clients.
• Sending – Never get into this much, except I ask it never to send return receipts. I hate people asking me for a receipt.
• Writing – I keep the default setup.
• Templates – Ah, now there is something for people to get into. I don’t actually use these – I use a signature, which is defined elsewhere – but you will note the Information button at the bottom, which offers a lot of data that could be entered into a template. I have occasionally fiddled with the reply template, because a well-structured reply makes it pleasant, but – this is up to you. Also, as with many other things, Claws will be able to make a user-input template and include information from external applications – which make the customization options quite extensive.
• Wrapping – I check them all and have it wrap at 72 characters – for when people have mail clients which will keep you text in one very long line, if you don’t make it wrap. So, that’s a wrap.
• Spell Checking - Well… I kill it. We have too different vocabularies. Actually, now that I am in the States and almost all my email is in English, I might turn it on, but in Danish, spell checking is cr… unsatisfactory.
• Text Options – Ah, now we get into the meat of it, visually. A lot of what you can see about the email can be defined here, in “Display headers in message view”. These can be quite extensive. I like to be able to see which client the email came from, for one thing. Here, you can also change the distance between the lines. I leave it at the default two pixels, but when I was using an 800×600 machine, I reduced it. And of course, I make it render HTML as text. While it is possible with one of the Claws Mail plugins – more on those later – to have the client render HTML, that is just so wrong in general, that I like to keep it text; and it does a very good job of extracting the text from the HTML.
• Image Viewer – I let it show images, and reduce them to make them sensible to look at. I allow printing, since I would never print an email unless the point was to get everything in there. Which happens a couple of times a year, so I don’t lose a lot.
• External programs – Guess how this works. I have set the very nice medit editor as my default, but I have never actually come across anything that opened in this editor, unless I ask Claws mail to use the external editor to compose emails.
• Colors – The Color Labels tab is very nice, it allows to set the colors to use, though I usually don’t; I do like the second tab, though, discretely named “Other” – this is where you can set the URL color and, for those who do a lot of newsgroups, colors indicating the quotation level. This can be a powertool for some people.
• Summaries - This is one of the places where the action is, when it comes to clearing up the interface. You see how there are three columns in Claws’ Folder list on the left? They take up quite a lot of space – but you can do it differently. So under “Display message number next to folder name”, choose “Unread and Total messages” and under “Displayed Columns”, press the “Edit” button. In the interface which comes up, remove all but “Folders” in the “Displayed” column.
  If you press OK at this stage and come back to the Claws interface, you can see how those very space-consuming fields have been replaced with a summary next to the folder name.
  A bit down the page is another thing which makes quite a bit of uncluttering difference: Date Format. It is set to display month, day, year, weekday, hour and minutes. If you take the weekday out here – which you usually won’t need when you go back anyway – you get a bit of extra space. Again, the “Information” button will tell you how to get the info you want shown. I use %d/%m-%y %H:%M – which would be a European notation, Americans would go %m/%d/%y %H:%M – this will will keep it neat.
  Here, you can also select which message lidt columns you would want to show. There is a ‘mark’ column and a ‘status’ column. I like to have these – to see what I have replied, forwarded etc. – but if that makes no difference to you, you can take them out. I usually put in the “Size” field as well, and for some that would be enough of an indicator to take out the “Attachment” field.
• Fonts – This is the other primary place which makes a big deal. In other clients, it is problematic to get it to reduce all the font sizes in the interface. Here, Claws will let you reduce the font size for Folder & Message lists and the message font itself. One of the main problems in the message list is how the data “sneaks up” on the next column. I set “Folder & Message Lists” to Sans 8 and “Message” to a monospaced font size 9 – monospaced because people sometimes drop in ASCII in the emails, and it will look terrible if the font is not Monospaced. I usually use Liberation for that.
  After doing this, you will probably want to adjust the width of the columns in the message list, but you should be able to get decent spacing.
• Themes - Here is where you get a major facelift – not so much in functionality, just prettier. You can get other themes on the Themes section of Claws-mail.org – I use the one called “elementary” to get some more contemporary icons. Download the tarball, untar it, press “Install new”, navigate to the theme folder and okay the selection – the theme will be installed. As you select it from the list, press “Use this”, and it will be your default afterwards. You will want to go back to the main screen to see how great a difference this actually makes!
• Toolbars & Other sections I don’t touch. I don’t remove any of the functions from the toolbars.
• I do, hovewer, change to icon view. In the main interface, I choose View > Show or Hide > Toolbar > Icons Only. Once more, that gives a bit more space to work with. Here, you can also remove column headings – in case you feel confident that you know that the column list is a column list, the date is the date et cetera. I suspect most people would.
• There is a search field between the message list and the messages. When you need it, you need it – and it is quite powerful – but when you don’t, you don’t. It can be folded up simply by pressing the folder with the magnifying glass. More space.
• One last thing, which you may notice, or you may not at first. After a while, the vertical scrollbar in the Folder column started annoying me – it is there regardless of whether it is needed or not. I quickly discovered that the frustration is not uncommon for setup fetichists or people with small screens (or those of us who are both), and that this is possible, though in a bizarrely difficult way (okay, not for BASH monkeys, but considering how many things can be done in the Claws interface, it seems strange that they have not included this).
  It seems one has to edit the settings file of Claws Mail manually. So one has to open ~/.claws-mail/clawsrc for editing and look for the line that says “folderview_vscrollbar_policy=0“. If you change the value to 1, it will automatically resize – and disappear if it is not needed.
  Now, there is one thing to be aware of about this: Claws will save the default setting if you make this change while it is still running! So you will want to shut Claws down, then edit the file. When you open the application again,  the scrollbar should be gone.

Academics have probably heard of the Endnote application, a program which will access databases of academic journals and allow you to generate your own bibliography; it will tie in to applications like Microsoft’s Word, so you can use it while writing papers.
Endnote is well known, but it is a closed application, and JabRef has the advantage of using the BibTeX format, the bibliographical subset of the LaTeX typesetting system. More on LaTeX another day – I already wrote about it and about BibTeX in the recent LyX article. For now, JabRef.

A reference management application is a logical product of geeks. Practically everyone who does programming professionally has gone to university or college, and it is only natural to use a computer to track your reference materials. When people start programming, they will want a target for their efforts, and reference management is so obvious that one can wonder why there isn’t more! But of course, it does require a certain effort to keep going – and there has to be a community around it. Projects like KBibTeX, Pybliographer, Zotero and OpenOffice.org’s built-in Bibliographic all offer functionality like this.

JabRef is a Java application, which from the beginning makes it cross-platform – and it has a very usable interface. Though there is quite a lot of scepticism towards Java – many people consider it quite clunky, and many java applications tend to be sluggish – JabRef is actually quite responsive.
There is an issue of personal importance to me, because I have a degree in Russian language, history and literature – it has to use Unicode correctly. When I used JabRef the first time, it did not, but now it does – and the feature set has expanded as well, making it an interesting tool.

The following screenshots can all be found in a Jabref gallery in the gallery section of Written and Read.

This is the main screen. I have loaded a small bibliography file featuring an article and a stack of books. As you can see, Unicode is supported, as the article is in Russian.
Curiously, BibTeX itself doesn’t actually support Unicode with LaTeX, but so many Unicode-supporting application can parse and use a BibTeX file that it is still useful to be able to make a Unicoded file.
As you see in this overview, it is possible to associate URLs and files with the bibliographies. This is quite handy when you use JabRef to manage materials relevant to the entry which you have stored locally. I usually link the books to their OpenLibrary entry, but obviously it is useful to track reviews, criticism and the like.
In the second screenshot, I have selected one of the entries, and the data of this entry are displayed below. Now, this is not all of the data – there is considerably more on this book – but it is possible to customize what is shown in this field. It is very useful to be able to see what you want to know.

Now, for the fun bit: To add a new entry. For this example, I will be using Bonvenon en nia mondo, an Esperanto book by Bent Jensenius.

Here is the sequence – when you want to add a new entry, press the green plus symbol on top, and a list of possible material types pop up. In this case it is a book – but the fields are different if you choose an article instead, so this is just to form an impression.
In the second screenshot, you can see the basic fields. Once they are filled out, you can press the magic wand on the left, and JabRef will generate a BibTeX key for you – the unique identifier for this particular entry. The last two are additional information. I was a bit surprised that there wasn’t an ISBN field, so I usually add it as a comment. Of course, it is possible to add it as a regular field, and maybe it is just to get ahead of the many types of identifiers.

As you see here, the program ties in to various databases, where you can fetch additional materials – when you have looked up a piece of documentation, you can add it as another JabRef entry.

JabRef opens an internal window to access the materials.
I would actually have expected it to use a browser window, but the way it displays it keeps the workflow consistent – and you don’t have to wait for a browser to load.

Now, musician and music teacher Jon Kulp alerted me to the fact that JabRef has some pretty powerful powerful export options.

He has used it to generate a materials list for his Beethoven class, and I very much like the layout. It is easy to use, and the Javascript links to fold out abstracts & reviews improves the overview of the page.

Getting into this export method, I have removed my Aigaion installation keeping track of the literature mentioned here; it just seems that much easier to export the data and upload. The data file is available here, and the resulting library file is linked on the right of this page – as the index.html file of library.writtenandread.net.

Okay, so I know things have been getting a bit technological around here lately. But I can assure you there is quite a bit of literary review in the works, so for those more interested in that genre, you won’t be disappointed.

KDE has, however, for a very long time not been my favorite; Xfce is, and especially with the release of Xfce 4.6 featuring the excellent Thunar as default file manager. A pronounced weakness for GTK2 applications slowly turned the app selection in that direction – Firefox, Claws Mail, Gajim, Filezilla, Medit, Abiword and so on.
As it turned out, there was one particular application which could not easily be replaced – and that was K3B. I noticed this impressive CD/DVD-writing app early on (Mandrake 9ish, I think), and for the longest time, it was simply the best tool for the task. It was, I believe, the first project I supported financially (before I started supporting promising projects under being developed rather than well-established projects with proven results; but that is a different story). K3B extended functionality over time, and in my opinion, it has only become stronger.

Now – what this also means is that this is the application that forced me to install half of KDE even if I didn’t need it for anything else. When I would fire up K3B, there were two approaches to it: Either taking ages to do it, because it had to go looking to call a number of KDE components – or I should call those KDE parts when starting up Xfce, which means startup would take longer _every_ time. Not hugely, but – noticeably. I should add that I have an old Thinkpad which is not particular potent in any other field than battery life. A low-powered laptop with a fairly new 9-cell battery will give me about 5 hours, which is of more use to me than a potent machine. A tradeoff.

Of course, I have tried other applications for the job as well. At an early stage, I used Xfburn – which was so immature that I quickly gave up on it. Later, Gnomebaker; little use for that when I had to hunt down Gnome components to make it play along. I used Graveman, which is quite usable and intuitive, but which has some design decisions which, well… it just annoys me. Not much use as a review, I know, but a personal statement.

And so, when I recently had a recommendation – a discussion on Identi.ca on elements of Xfce – I started looking into Xfburn again, and I installed it to see if it could help me repress the thought of Graveman. I can only say that it was a very positive impression – considerably different from when I tried it the first time.
Having said that: I should note that 9 out of 10 times I use a burning application is to burn an ISO image file which Unetbootin won’t put on a USB stick. I don’t really make audio CDs anymore – I have nothing to play it on; I used to make such CDs for teaching materials, but I don’t teach anymore. Considering backups on CDs and DVDs is just so much more expensive than the alternatives.

I will occasionally burn a couple of individual files of there is something I want to send to a friend – say, family pictures they will want to keep – or if a file is so huge it will take me ages to upload it with my somewhat limited connection.
I believe many people share my approach to optical media. But sometimes having an app to do this can be handy, and I have found it in Xfburn. It is quite easy to install on Slackware, as most of the dependencies are installed by default; so there are only a couple of things to install alongside the Xfburn Slackbuild.

The interface is all business. Not a lot of penguins here. It is not possible to select what you want here like in K3B… because all features are represented. What you see here is what the application will do. So no reason to unclutter anything.
Note the shortcut to the Home folder. Usually this will be where the user will have the data Xfburn is going to work with. While there is a reference to the remaining file tree, so it can be accessed if necessary, focus is on /home.

First example, the obvious choice: Burning an image file.
You will see most of the ordinary functions you would expect – although I would like it if Xfburn could verify an MD5 checksum like K3B can. This is a very useful feature, particularly for someone with my user profile. It is filed as a feature request.



Burning, burning, burning.

Most basic information clearly presented.

Creating a new data CD is simply dragging & dropping files. It is possible to create folders as necessary. In the corner a field to enter the name the finished CD/DVD will display when inserted.
As you will know from other applications for this purpose, the bottom progress bar will indicate how much space is reserved on the CD or DVD; options are 200, 650, 700, 800, 900 MB CDs and 4.3 and 7.9 GB DVDs.
Note that there are several tabs, so one can work on several projects. I do not have the hardware to determine if it is possible to burn using several drives at the time – if you have any experience with that, please share!

It is also possible to create audio CDs in what people used to call “a regular CD player”, although I guess those are on their final stretch… you know what I am talking about. Xfburn uses Gstreamer to access the audio files. I can verify that it works with MP3, Ogg Vorbis and FLAC files – since that is all I have. I would imagine it will support whatever the Gstreamer plugins can handle.



Options in the Preferences section are limited.
It is simply basic settings for the place to cache the files during transfer along with the setup for the drive(s?) being used.





Now, there is one thing I have been thinking about… take a look at this screenshot. Does anyone but me find it slightly excessive with 3 different ways to access the same few functions? Menu, toolbar and half the front page? Though it is possible to disable the toolbar, so you will only see the buttons on the lower part of the front page.



With this comment and the request for an MD5 check: As you see, a tool for a very specific purpose, which the application fulfills. As an Xfce user, it is very nice to see a well-integrated tool.

As you see, Xfburn integrates well in Thunar, making it possible to send image files to Xfburn, and files and folders can be added to a new data CD. Both are available from a right-click context menu.
A small trick: You may note that it is not possible to use Thunar to send audio files to create a new audio CD.
Xfburn does support this, however, with a command line switch. “Xfburn -a” – an abbreviation of “xfburn –audio-composition” – followed by file and/or folder names will open an audio composition window with the relevant files.
When something like that is supported, it is a good opportunity to make use of Custom Actions in Thunar. Custom Actions is a feature where to customize the right-click context menu based on file types or folders. As an example, I have an option when right-clicking on audio files to enqueue them in the Audacious play list. As long as there is a commandline option, Thunar will help you.

As you will see in these screenshots, I create a new custom action to call “xfburn -a” on the hightlighted files. If I call the function, an Xfburn window will open up with a new audio project.
This gives you an impression of what can be done with Thunar Custom Actions – expect an article on my favorite personal tricks later.
This is a good reason to use Xfce, the same as choosing Firefox for the extensions: There a are a lot of functions which could be useful, but which are not built into the system – what is created is a framework to make it easy to extend your system with the functions you would like.

Over time, I have had some experiences with partitioning, and there is one thing which I come across very often, but which has bitten me so many times I think it deserves dishonorable mention: The thought of recycling a /home folder among various distributions and various versions of the same distribution.
On the face of it, /home/yourname holds your files, and there is no place like ~ and all that. It does, however, merit a closer look – because /home holds all of – or at least most of – your settings.
What this means is that if you have an Ubuntu installation with a separate /home partition and then install, say, Fedora, those two will share the home folder, and if you are like me, you will use the same username to identify yourself. In other words, you will be using the same /home/yourname.
This means it will try to use your settings files when it comes up. All these files may be hidden, but they will influence the setup of the desktop you are logging into – any program which is also in you new distribution will take settings from the old one. This can be color schemes, to take a more harmless example (though I can not without pain imagine using Fedora, Mint or Opensuse with purple hues) – but you may come across a versioning conflict that will break your existing config files.
Though these things rarely happen, the potential for trouble is considerable.

And so, I have concluded that the best for me is to keep an individual storage partition. I put it on /mnt/storage, but that is of less consequence. In /mnt/storage, I have my library of texts, documentation and stuff I have written myself; I have my collection of audio: Audiobooks, podcasts and music; I have my collection of scripts; I have my collection of videos; I have my “Installers” folder with a collection of downloaded ISO images I need more than once, tarballs of certain drivers I need and the like. I have my collection of images, which is everything from screenshots over webcomics to my son being born. And there is my “Workshop” folder containing my half-baked scripts, my .po folders from the software projects I maintain translations for.
Once I install a new distribution, I create symlinks to my stored files in /home. And so, /home/morten/video to /mnt/storage/video will point to /mnt/storage/video, /home/morten/podcasts/ will point to /mnt/storage/audio/podcasts et cetera.
What this means is that my /home/morten will be unique for this distribution installation, but the files I need will be accessible regardless of what I have chosen to boot – the settings in the /home folders will not influence each other. If you have some more sensitive files, say, your script folder, you can make it read-only, so it is always available, but you can’t break it without concentrated effort; but that is a general consideration, not influenced by your partitioning.
There are, of course, several approaches to this issue, but I find this solution to be simple and functional.

Lately, I have been reading Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman, the autobiography of the physicist Richard P. Feynman – in the sense Feynman told the stories, and Ralph Leighton wrote them down. This book has been on our shelves for quite some time, as I gave it as a Christmas present to my wife a couple of years ago along with a biography on Albert Einstein (did I mention that our son recognizes Albert Einstein?). The dog ate the Einstein biography (true story), but spared Mr. Feynman.

There are a couple of themes that keep recurring. Curiosity is one – Feynman’s desire to explore the world is this incredible hunger that puts him in the most peculiar situations. I resist the temptation to list all of the examples, because part of what makes the book interesting is the way you can never really tell where it goes next. I will say this, though: He seems to apply a scientific method to the world around him. The very first chapter tells about young Richard falling in love with fixing radios. His enthusiasm is apparent from the first paragraph of the book:

When I was about eleven or twelve I set up a lab in my house. It consisted of an old wooden packing box that I put shelves in.

He goes on to telling about how he would set up a lamp bank in his laboratory, playing with bulbs in serial or parallel connection and making switch systems.

Also, from the start, Feynman is quite a trickster and almost gets into trouble. His electrical experiments set off a small fire in the house, which he manages to hide from the parents. He discovers that his radio will pick up a radio channel with a show all the children listen to – an hour before they usually listen to it! And he will join them afterwards to make clever comments about what next to expect in the plot… and the first thing he describes from his time at MIT is stealing a door and hiding it; later, he finds out how to open the safes at Los Alamos to demonstrate their inadequate security – an amusing parallel to how Steven Levy describes in his classic book Hackers the later practice at MIT of picking the locks because everyone should have access to information, and a computer shouldn’t stand around without being used – and of course, the similarity is that it is not just a practical consideration, but also a brain game. A challenge that, once encountered, can only be met and resolved accordingly.

He describes a difficult youth. Even when he gets older, he has his problems with women. At MIT, he puts great thought into the right way to just walk past the girls. And, of course, the physical awkwardness that seems associated with the natural sciences – often discarded as prejudice, and yet repeatedly confirmed – is summed up in a side comment on sports:

I was never any good in sports. I was always terrified if a tennis ball would come over the fence and land near me, because I never could get it across the fence-it usually went about a radian off of where it was supposed to go.

This actually makes for an interesting contrast and again, a good reason for reading this book: In most of what Feynman comments on in the book, he is confident bordering on (and sometimes beyond) cocky, but he is also extremely honest about his weaknesses and fears as a human being, which makes the book a very personal and charming read. As he describes how he conquers his challenges, he mixes some rare insights with a human story. He does get married, but his first wife dies from tuberculosis in 1945 while he is working at Los Alamos, and this chapter is very personal. He marries a second time in 1952.

This honesty is a recurring feature as well. He descibes being in Brazil to teach, and he encounters an interesting phenomenon: That the students on the face of it seem to know the curriculum completely, that the questions they are asked are answered in full – but when he starts asking them questions with scenarios, it turns out that they do not know the answers; and he discovers that they memorise everything without actually understanding it! And that is how they perceive learning. Of course, he tries to promote the inquisitive mind, genuine curiosity and debate about the topics, but it turns out that each student is so deeply trained in never admitting doubts, confusion or mistakes that the idea of a study group is discarded beforehand.
Feynman spends a lot of time on this, and he never fails to stress that it is his curiosity, his need to understand, that has brought him far and will bring him further – and being honest about what he doesn’t understand, and what is not yet understood in general, is a necessary part of that.

For the same reasons, he comes across as rather harsh when he is asked to be on the board reviewing schoolbooks. Not only does it very soon become clear that the other reviewers are barely skimming the books in question before giving their recommendation, it is also clear that the books are of an appalling quality and completely unfit for, you guessed it: Stimulating curiosity and creativity. He also rages against the politics of it: When one of the publishers offering the books at an earlier date, another does the same – and at a reduced rate! So, Feynman concludes, it seems that when you push the timeframe, the books become cheaper as well!

There is one interesting point where it is clear that Feynman is a product of his time. I have already mentioned Los Alamos, so perhaps you know – he participated in research for the army during the 2nd World War and cold war that followed – and actively encouraged his fellow scientists to do the same. As a result, he takes part in the research in nuclear weapons as a patriotic duty and is present at the nuclear detonation of the Manhattan project. While his personal opinion seems to go a bit back and forth on this, this biography contributes an interesting personal portrait of people like Oppenheimer who were involved in this research, and whom history has not only been kind to. There is also an interesting description of the clash of cultures between the army way and the academic approach.

Feynman’s curiosity is expressed in a different form – namely, his eagerness to examine other areas. In Princeton, he visits classes of other fields like biology and philosophy. In a series of discussions with a friend, an artist, he concludes that their lack of agreement is based on the fact that the artist does not know science, and he himself does not know art. So he sets out to learn drawing – and learns it with the help of his friend, and also painting – and suddenly he has a small business on the side selling paintings!
His interest in music also comes across – he learns to play drums quite well during his time in Brazil and gets to play with local bands; this also earns him some interesting friendships over time after he comes back to the States. In the time before he goes to Brazil, he learns Portugese, and spending some time in Japan, he learns some Japanese. Confronted with the riddle of Mayan hieroglyphs, he goes into deciphering an archeological find, a Mayan calendar.

I could say that Richard Feynman eventually ends up winning the Nobel Prize, but that would not be fair. While he certainly finds the discoveries that earn him the prize important and fascinating, the prize is of less interest to him and does cause him to get more attention than he wants and, one might say, the wrong kind of attention: The attention you get because you are a Nobel Prize laureate, not because you are an interesting or otherwise relevant person. As you will see, this rubbed against his view of the world.

This book was first published in 1985, a few years before his death in February 1988, and in the time after his death, what I find about him is mostly his literature, the materials he has written for teaching and, indeed, popularizing physics, and he is said to have been especially proud of being awarded the Oersted Medal for notable contributions to the teaching of physics.

The book is partly educational for the scientific content, the historical description of how certain discoveries came about, interesting portraits of great scientists – and partly a human story of an occasionally very shy and occasionally very extroverted, but always inquisitive person.

Bibliographic references are available from the Open Library page on this book.

The request raises some issues. On one hand, the device – the Intoxilyzer 5000EN – is employed by the police and should as such be subject to scrutiny by the public. On the other hand, the company behind it is a private entity which reserves the right to deny access to the software source on the basis of trade secrets apparent if the code is made public.

Unfortunately, the debate has been somewhat obscured by a sidetrack into an open source versus proprietary software issue. While this is understandable – and more on that later – it is not actually a question of signing over the rights to the code, but simply to allow perusal of the code to ensure that no-one receives an unjust verdict. A commenter on Ars Technica posting under the name xoa suggests that it is unacceptable that this type of device is a “Black box”, an undocumentable analysis engine, and that all such devices should be developed openly and source should be placed in the public domain for inspection.

It is hard to come to an end-all conclusion on this discussion, since it squares a company’s private property against a public demand for – and right to – insight in a technological process which has the potential to influence many lives. But the discussion is important.

Interestingly, as an aside into the open source discussion, Eric Raymond argues in his classic work on the open source development model The Cathedral and the Bazaar that it is in the interest of the company – he mentions as an example producers of graphics cards – to release the driver source code, since this partially outsources the development of the driver and makes little influence on the development cycle, since by the time the competition has been able to reverse engineer the product, the producer will have moved on the next generation of the product. While I am no expert on breathalyzers, I suspect that the breath analysis market is somewhat different from the graphics cards scenario.

But the discussion is relevant, as has also been made clear by the debate around electronic voting machines. The potential for a democratic deficit is a very real and relevant concern, and it should not be dismissed. Contrary to the breathalyzers, the customer base here is clear – and in this case, it is the right (but perhaps not immediately apparent to be in the interest?) of the consumer, the state, to be able to submit the source code for review along with the election results. This is not much different from a right to a recount of votes on paper. In this otherwise technologically advanced country, a pencil mark on a piece of paper remains the method of choice for the citizen’s submission of a vote for referendums and public elections – to avoid the black box, the mystery method, between the voters and the result.

Something similar can be said to apply to medical equipment, but this is the (mine) field of patents, secret methods and methodology, proprietary software and hardware specifications locked down to an extreme extent. Still, one might argue that the source code of the software and the hardware plans of a medical device performing diagnostics or even treatment should be subject to peer review to ascertain that safety protocols have been followed and potential hazards taken into account -  if nothing else, then post mortem in order to examine the cause of the fatality and to avoid further injury. Obviously, only a select few scientists would have the knowledge and abilities to assess this question, a highly specialized combination of medicine and informatics.

I shall finish off with a quote by a representative of the natural sciences, a mathematician to be more exact, who has taken the consequence of scientific accountability and, as the project leader of the free software application TeXmacs, Joris van der Hoeven presented the following conclusions:

As a mathematician, I am deeply convinced that only free programs are acceptable from a scientific point of view. I see two main reasons for this:

• A result computed by a “mathematical” system, whose source code is not public, can not be accepted as part of a mathematical proof.
• Just as a mathematician should be able to build theorems on top of other theorems, it should be possible to freely modify and release algorithms of mathematical software.

However, it is strange, and a shame, that the main mathematical programs which are currently being used are proprietary. The main reason for this is that mathematicians often do not consider programming as a full scientific activity. Consequently, the development of useful software is delegated to “engineers” and the resulting programs are used as black boxes.

A lot of people who have published articles in academic journals will know the LaTeX markup language. This is particularly used in the natural sciences as LaTeX is extremely powerful for creating formulae and reaction diagrams.
Lyx is an attempt to bridge the gap between WYSIWYG – What You See Is What You Get, applications like Openoffice, Abiword, Microsoft Word and the like – and LaTeX, which, while creating some very elegant print-quality documents, is not particularly easy to get into. I have worked with LaTeX from time to time, and it takes quite a while to wrap your head around. LyX is not a text editor – in the sense that it is not just intended for entering text like you would do in an application like Vim, Emacs or the infamous Windows Notepad; the focus of LyX is to create documents ready for printing. Like LaTeX, it makes use of typographical conventions of using no more than a certain number of characters on a line to enhance readability, inserting spacing of a certain size in the text and so on. This makes for beautiful and very readable documents, but it also means that it restricts you to those conventions. For some, that is very challenging; if you are used to formatting freely, it can feel like a restriction.

The screenshots here are using LyX on my Slackware Linux laptop, but LyX is also available for Microsoft Windows, MacOS X and even OS/2. You can get it from the LyX download page. LyX is Free Software published under the GNU General Public License 2.
As a final note before I move into the main review, I should say that I am a linguist and writer, not a mathematician. This means that I will be focusing on what one will be using for document preparation, not the mathemagical features. For those interested in this, there is a brief mathematics intro on the LyX walkthrough. It seems to mostly use LaTeX syntax for that. LyX is quite well-documented for professional linguists, however – there is a dedicated LyX for linguists page.

As you see, the main screen is not much different from a lot of text processors. The interface can be accessed by using a mouse, but one will notice that holding the pointer over a button will show both the function and the keyboard shortcut; so the people behind the application encourage keeping your hands on the keyboard, which makes for less interruption in your work and less strain, which is a constantly increasing problem.

LyX follows the main principle of LaTeX, which means that the first things one does is define which kind of document it is – article, book, letter – and there are certain designs included as pre-defined article types to match the requirements of various journals or institutions.

After having defined the environment, you simply continue to define your text as you write it – as title matter, author, chapters. The system defines the layout as you go along, and it takes full advantage of LaTeX functions like footnotes and cross-references, margin notes for making overview of the text easier – and of course the various lists, such as table of contents, list of figures, list of tables etc. All things which can be har getting into with LaTeX, but is integrated in the LyX interface.

It is possible to insert a bibliography from a BibTeX file. This is the bibliography format associated with LaTeX, but LyX gives you additional options for manipulating the data. The BibTeX article in Wikipedia has a good example.

Actually, the area of bibliography is one of the places where LyX really shines; it is one of the places you can see that the system is intended for the academic community. The whole intention of these systems is to use some fairly simple files, mark them up to indicate what is to go where and then leave the system to output the materials in the format you want.
Lyx will import your bibliography file for reference. Using the citation manager, a citation for the relevant source will be inserted as an endnote. In this way, your bibliographical notes will be kept up to date as you move them around, add or remove. It is quite likely you will not want to use all the books you have been reading underway in your work, and this way the list will be kept correct – and formatted as your article or book style dictates it should be.

What you see here is the basic text editing window. As you see, the text indicates the features inserted there.
Personally, this reminds me of the Reveal Codes feature from WordPerfect. Again, more practical than LaTeX because it still keeps the text readable.

There are some very basic – and I believe this to be intentional – graphical effects. It is possible to insert images (extremely less complicated than with LaTeX), lines and boxes. The program is focused on text and text-derived graphics, which means that the functions for making tables and diagrams are well-equipped.

As I mentioned earlier, LyX has quite a bit of documentation, but this is not limited to the website. As an interesting approach, a lot of documentation is included as LyX files, which means that you can read the documentation as well see it in a final formatted version after processing it. Since LyX creates files for print, it focuses on export to print-oriented format. There are buttons on the toolbars for creating and updating DVI, PDF and PostScript files.
And so, the documentation documents also serve as example files.

If you are working on a thesis or a longer project, try out LyX. The application is quite powerful compared to the system resources it requires, and it scales remarkable well for very heavy documents, also working quite well with pulling in external documents. I have edited a very heavy lab manual for a biomedical conference with a lot of graphs and hi-res images on a fairly low-specification machine.

Though hardly the best illustration – colorful screenshots are not exactly the prettiest in this kind of environment – this article is available as LyX-file and PDF. Inserted images are screenshots 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.
Quite a bit prettier with the first couple of chapters of my BA thesis – in LyX and PDF format.

What triggered this question (and yes, I shall elaborate) was reading Hackers by Steven Levy (more about it in the Wikipedia article). In this classic, Levy tells the story about the original hackers and their love of technology, hacker ethics – the open access to create elegant solutions. It is also the tale of people obsessed by technology for the sake of technology.
I consider myself a part of the open source & free software community. I am not a programmer – and judging from my programming abilities, it is for the best if I don’t try to contribute – but I have written documentation, reviews, helped people use the software and translated both software and the accompanying documents.
Now, reading this book brings up a question, which is surprisingly rarely asked: Why are we doing what we do?

I mean, obviously people get jobs where they write software. Nothing strange about a developer writing server software being employed by IBM, Novell or for that matter Red Hat itself. But that is the people who do it for a living. How about the rest of us? Personally, I am a geek of office software (also often referred to by the unholy misnomer “productivity software), which is due to my profession, but there is a wide gap between this interest and the concrete tasks I use such software for.
In a recent discussion thread in the Linux Outlaws Forum it was brought up what people find most positive about the FLOSS world. As always, the answers were divided into technical merits and community. If one was to ask Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon, I have no doubt from the opinions he voiced on numerous Lugradio broadcasts that it is the personal relations, the community feel, that makes the difference. I recognize that the community makes it interesting, that you build up a network of people with similar interest. But you would experience the same with model railroad enthusiasts, and they would never attach the level of importance to model railroads that the open source and free software movements attach to development. If any of you have ever taken part in a discussion about software licensing or people marketing the software simply as cost-free, you will know what I mean.

So why is software development important? Again, there are straightforward reasons for that – it is useful. I like to send email, that is handy. As I write this, I am using an open source operating system (Slackware) based on a free software (Linux) kernel to access the open source (Apache) server running a free software operating system (Debian Linux). As you see, this is WordPress, released under similar conditions. So it is nice to have. But important?
If one stops to see the more philosophical approaches to the topic, it is impossible to get around Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation. If you look at the GNU Philosophy page, you will see what RMS is about. A classic text is The Free Software Definition. This text will outline how proprietary software is ethically wrong – in other words, Stallman raises the question as a moral one. The authorized Stallman biography is aptly named Free As In Freedom: Richard Stallman’s Crusade for Free Software. But he is a remnant of the culture described in the abovementioned Hackers – Stallman is mentioned in the book – for whom software and technology have an intrinsic purpose and point, and the focus on releasing source code is a product of his academic upbringing: A mental excersize, an accomplishment should be published for peer scrutiny.
Another important piece of literature is The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric Steven Raymond. This other classic defines open source, but more as a methodology and an economic model. The economic model is elaborated in greater detail in The Magic Cauldron. To summarize, the point is to redefine the production of software from a product model to a service model. The logic is that since only a very small part of the industry is engaged in developing software for publication and packaged sale, it makes more sense to engage in creating a collective software infrastructure and selling support and services instead. It is a logical extrapolation of the hacker ethic that it should not be necessary to invent things more than once. And so, after building or extending a piece of software, the code of the program or the changes should be released as well.
One of the interesting aspects of Raymond’s model is that he is quite vocally a capitalist. Stallman has also from time to time had to stress that giving away code is not based on left-wing ideals; but Raymond argues for liberty, and one of the main points of the Cathedral and the Bazaar is how a society based on a bazaar model is more rational than the top-down controlled administration.as examplified by the building of a cathedral. Raymond’s approach is based on a meritocracy, that the more efficient and competent service provider will be the successful one.

As I said, this is methodology. It answers the question Why do it like this, if you are doing it – but not Why do it?

Of course, it is tempting to look to socialist ideology for an answer to this. In traditional socialist productivity, the problem is that the amount produced is usually smaller than the amount needed, and the distribution calculation is complex. If one is talking about code and software development, nothing is lost, nothing is wasted and everything can be replicated as needed. If one was to apply a parallel, it would be like everyone contributed only a single brick, but everyone would receive a house. So in software development, a socialist collective approach may be more efficient than when it comes to manufacturing produce.
While it seems less than likely that the open source and free software movements are a huge group of left-wingers, this model at least suggests a motive for putting in the effort.

An interesting suggestion is the philosophical approach suggested by Danish philosopher and technology commentator Tor Nørretranders. In his 2005 book The Generous Man (Det generøse menneske), Nørretranders suggests a darwinistic model for generosity and art. His often-mentioned example is that of the peacock, which has a huge tail which seems to serve no particular purpose and is, in fact, a hindrance for survival. The point is signalling a superior level of strength and surplus of resources, a display of creativity simply for the purpose of doing so.
Now, this seems like a viable explanation, particularly since software development requires a level of craftsmanship which would allow a developer to – dare I say: Show off the size of his tail?

See the gallery for Kindle shots.

As for the content: They have certainly taken an interesting approach to integrating the gadget with the Amazon website. Included in the gadget is an unlimited access to the Amazon Kindle store online – which means that I can switch on the built-in wireless function and surf the Kindle store over Amazon Whispernet without having to attach anything else.
Surprisingly, they have not given into the temptation to lock the system down to Amazon-only text files. Maybe that is the lay of the land these days – that you can’t lock something like this to a single format, if you want to stay succesful (and aren’t Apple). It is certainly possible to use open formats and, even more surprising, use Whispernet to access eBooks files from other sources, most notably FreeKindleBooks, which offers a catalog of freely available books as an eBook, using which it is possible to download the book files on to the Kindle. These are from the Gutenberg project, an impressive project which collects electronic versions of books which are out of copyright. They scan the books and proofread the scans, crowdsourcing the effort using Distributed Proofreaders, where I have also contributed. The Gutenberg is an impressively massive text collection, and it is a beautiful that these materials are available; since these are materials out of copyright, there is a huge corpus of classics there.
Having said that, I have been shopping in the Kindle Store. I bought The Definitive H.P. Lovecraft – an anthology – for $0.99, which is quite affordable. I also bought an H. G. Wells Collection for $1.64, which I can just manage. The only book I got approaching full print price was The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross, a writer I find myself increasingly fascinated by; and that one only set me back around $7. So the pricing is okay.
Actually, there is experimental support for MP3s on the Kindle. What this means is not entirely clear – I have not used it, but I have seen people use headphones with it on the subway. Whether it adds the music files to the library or how it works remains to be seen.

Interestingly, the Kindle has also lead to an interesting debate about the ownership of one piece under different media, which was covered on the Litopia podcast in the episode All the King’s Men. From the almost-amusing-but-not-quite department, there has been heated discussion about offering readings, versus having the Kindle do it for you. This was mentioned by the EFF, as one would expect, but also featured in a piece in the New York Times by Roy Blount jr, as the president of the Authors’ Guild. This is actually a very open-ended discussion of the technology offering what a human used to do.
The Free Software Foundation has an ongoing project called Defective by Design, who did a feature on the Kindle, which they like to call the Swindle due to the DRM (Digital Rights Management) features built into the machine, and the fact that the books purchased on the Amazon Kindle shop can’t be transferred to another one, as you would be able to do if you gave a printed book away after reading it.
It is quite possible that FSF goes into this application a bit more, because the Kindle, in fact, is based on Linux. In the enclosed product documentation – enclosed as in included on the Kindle – there is licensing texts of the included components. Of course the Kindle is not by a long stretch an open device – it is not the thing you can just modify – but still, it is interesting to see the Linux kernel deployed in an impressive mainstream product.

So, what is the conclusion?
That this is actually a very, very sweet device – elegant application . The ePaper concept means that it is possible to look at the screen in much the same way as regular paper – it is not like a laptop where the angle decides whether it is possible to view it or not. Also, the power is used the first time the text is displayed on the screen; this means that even though the appliance isn’t using energy, the text remains displayed on the screen. Fascinating. It was a great gift.