FLOSS

No, I’m not talking about that stringy stuff I should be using after every meal. I’m talking about Free/Libre Open Source Software. This is the “Free as in freedom” type of software, such as Firefox, Wordpress, and Ubuntu. I’ve been a big fan of the FLOSS concept since I did a research paper in college and discovered for myself just how much good this licensing structure is from a business and social responsibility perspective.

Cigar Box Guitars

After many years of frustration and general lack of progress learning to play a normal guitar, I stumbled onto the Cigar Box Guitar movement and picked up a new addiction. Plans, support, and inspiration are widely available in this “open source musical hardware” community and it’s really easy to get started. I’ve built a couple decent sounding guitars and some associated equipment now, and learning to play has become a much more attainable (and enjoyable) goal. My past and current CBG projects are kept up to date on my profile over at the Cigar Box Nation.

Linux

I was already familiar with Firefox as a solid open source product, so I decided I to learn more about running “this Linux stuff” as a next step. I tried out a handfull of different Linux flavors and was amazed at the quality, capabilities, and excitement I found. After practically leaving computers all together due to career burnout, I was surprised to find myself interested in mucking around with software again. I was especially impressed with the Ubuntu family of Linux distributions. The community support was such a great experience that in a mere four weeks of working with Kubuntu 6.06 I completely wiped my Windows partitions from all my home computers and haven’t looked back!

I’ve tried several Linux distribution packages since then, and Kubuntu remains my current favorite. It’s proven to be a great product with a very supportive community. I’m currently running Kubuntu 8.04 on an HP TC1100 tablet for the mobile experience, and Kubuntu 9.04 on a Shuttle XPC SN68SG2 as my development workstation and home server.

Ubuntu

In many ways I still feel I’m getting my feet wet in the Ubuntu community in terms of giving back to the group that has given me such a sweet operating system and desktop environment.

I’ve done some work with the Ubuntu Documentation/Wiki Team to clean up and better categorize all the user generated documentation in the various Ubuntu related wikis. Roaming the WikiToDo list of simple documentation items that need attention is a great way to learn about Ubuntu.

Wordpress

Like many folks, I’ve fallen in love with Wordpress. I use it on this site, on my personal blog, and for several commercial projects as well. As a blog and content management platofrm it’s the bees knees. Every time I have a question or need it’s easy to resolve with a simple run through the amazing variety of plugins. On the rare occasion a plugin doesn’t do the trick, a quick dive into php or css source is a simple experience in most cases. For more info about Wordpress sites I’ve been involved with, check out my portfolio.

BookMooch

Another “open” project I feel strongly about is BookMooch.com – it’s a community for freely sharing books of all types. I always have a few books listed, and shipping overseas is not a problem at all. Books shouldn’t sit on shelves all lonely and neglected. When you’re done reading, send it to someone – it’s a great form of cradle to cradle recycling.

KSmoothDock

I put together the website and documentation for the KSmoothDock project at http://ksmoothdock.sourceforge.net/ in 2007. With the advent of KDE4 I don’t know if KSmoothDock will continue forward into future versions. If it does, I’ll be giving the website and documentation an overhaul.

I did work up a KSmoothDock Install Guide for Kubuntu 7.04 through 6.06 that is still relevant to anyone using some of these older (and very stable) Kubuntu versions.

AutoLisp

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away… I used to be a professional draftsman and LISP slinger working in early versions of AutoCAD. Some of my stuff was published in Cadalyst back in 94 and 95. This was before these newfangled online magazine sites allowed for downloading code, and people had to type this in by hand or get the refernece floppy disk for the issue. I was particularly proud of a some 3D variable axis scaling algorithms using matrixes that I wrote in R10. These functions started showing up in the base AutoCAD product around R14. It would probably take me weeks to get back to that level of math proficiency now, but it did give me an appreciation for the type of coding that game and graphics programmers deal in every day. Very cool stuff.

Rants and Rambling

Every once in a while I throw out my opinions and personal milestones to “the great wall of white noise” that the internet blog-o-sphere has become. Those mindless ramblings can be found on my personal blog at Whirled Wind.