GlitchNYC.com

Firefox Hits 100 Million Downloads

Congratulations to the amazing team at SpreadFirefox.com and the developers of Firefox. They've hit 100,000,000 downloads, and 1.0 hasn't even been out for a year.

We ran our NYTimes ad back in December of last year, when we had around 10 million downloads and the uptake has continued to accelerate ever since. Yes there have been several revision to Firefox, and updates are counted as downloads, but this is still a staggering number of people using and downloading a program.

If you're not using Firefox yet, go get it now. It's better, it's more secure (sick of spyware yet?), and it will always be free.

3:16 pm | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

Open Source Games Roundup 2005

Whew - so it's been over a year and a half since I last looked at open source games at glitchnyc.com and the landscape looks quite different than it did in early 2004.

In January 2004, I was wowed by:

• bust-a-move clone Frozen Bubble
• Tron light-cycle game Armagetron

• the obviously named Bomberclone

February 2004 brought:

• the Arkanoid clone LBreakout2
• lemmings clone Pingus

I would have liked to continue doing monthly spots on great open source games but the truth is that I've been too busy to play many games at all aside from killing time with my GBA on the subway.

One of the difficulties in writing this article is that there is no real resource for finding great open source games. What I'd love to be able to do is sort games by release date, user rating, and other measurements such as look+feel, gameplay, and addictiveness, but currently I have not found such a site. Happy penguin makes a good go of it, but you can't sort all titles by average rating or even really browse past entries. Ideally, I'd also like to be able to filter by titles that have been rated by 10 or more users so that the games rated "5 stars" by the developer or a single excited fan don't float to the very top of the list.

That said, there is quite a bit of development going on the open source game world, if poorly publicized. As with all open source projects, 90% of them don't really get off the ground and stagnate after the lead developer gets bored or hits a development hurdle. I'm a big fan of the SDL engine, which is the multi-platform, open source answer to DirectX. SDL has been stable for a few years now, and the games built on top of that engine which are the exception to the "90% rule" are starting to emerge.

I've found some fun diversions by browsing the games section of sourceforge.net, so without further ado, here's some new ways to waste time on your computer (be it Windows, Mac, or Linux).

Globulation 2

• http://glob2.ysagoon.com/

This realtime strategy game is part risk, part civ III, and part boogers

No really, your army consists of little red slimeballs which walk around and build inns, hospitals, cities, and more. The tutorials are a bit slow, so you might have better luck just starting in and figuring it out as you go, but I definitely had a fun hour creaming the blue army as my cities and armies grew to massive size.

Gameplay

6 of 10 - Too slow for my taste, but being able to give general commands and let the little units get to it was fun.

Visuals

7 of 10 - Fun colors and clean graphics, but nothing spectacular

Addictiveness

6 of 10 - When I have another hour to kill, I'll revisit this game

Armagetron Advanced

http://www.armagetronad.net/

Ride your light cycle, and trap other riders with the wall you've left behind

Everyone gets busy, and the lead developer of Armagetron had to take a year off developing the game, which brought about a new fork called Armagetron Advanced and a flurry of development activity. A year later, the lead developer is back and has joined up with the "AA" project.

The result is a much more slick game than I reviewed last year, and the online play has been tweaked and perfected. Battling against other players no longer depends on your luck in "making the turn" but is now back on solid strategy and good reflexes. To compensate for network lag in this precision timing game, when you're playing online, if you go headfirst into a wall, you get a short window of time to turn.

Turn the wrong way or fall asleep at the wheel and KABLAM! If you manage to tap out the right direction in time, you'll "just squeak in" and get another chance to go after your opponent. It's really addictive, and if I wasn't writing this article, I'd be playing right now.

Gameplay

10 of 10 - it does exactly what it should, and it's dead simple

visuals

8 of 10 - depending on the 3D card in your computer, this game can look anywhere from okay to fantastic. It's still simple colored walls trailing from a "cycle", but the cameras are intuitive and don't distract

addictiveness

10 of 10 - There's always someone better than you waiting online to whup your butt and teach you some new tricks. I think this game is as much fun as Unreal Tournament or Halo without the headache inducing jump-strafe-fire madness. Left and right are the only keys you really need to know, although the brake (back arrow) helps.

Secret Maryo

http://smclone.sourceforge.net/

This Super Mario Clone will feel very familiar to anyone who ever owned a Nintendo

Super Maryo is an SDL powered Mario clone which does more than pay homage to the original. If this were any company other than Nintendo's material, they'd be looking down the barrel of a lawsuit right about now. Luckily Nintendo has been fairly tolerant of fan projects, providing they change the name of the project enough to not be a total rip-off.

I have a few pet-peeves with this clone, as the art seems a bit slapdash and the physics are a bit off from the original (most notably, Mario jumps quite a bit higher than he did in the original games.) I only got a chance to play through the first few levels of this one, but it seems like a fun throwback to have on your laptop.

I'm also excited to see the engines and code behind this one develop further and be available for use in new, creative side-scrolling platformers. Some of the best games ever were built in 2d, and frankly, it hurt my head less when the 3D camera wasn't flying around willy nilly trying to follow the action.

gameplay

4 of 10 - The controls react well, but I'd like to see the physics either match the original or be based on the real world.

visuals

5 of 10 - The hand-drawn feel is okay, but this could be a much better looking game. I feel like the graphics are a place holder while they get the rest of the game in place.

addictiveness

6 of 10 - I can't get enough Mario, so I'll probably play this one again, but I'd rather be playing with a joystick.

Scorched 3D

http://www.scorched3d.co.uk/

The classic DOS turn-shooter is back with great 3D graphics

Turn your tank with left and right, raise and lower your turret to aim, and increase or decrease power with plus and minus. All set? FIRE! Be careful though; if you miss, your enemies get a shot at you before you get another chance. There's tons of different weapons and levels to play here, and this is a great game for 2 or more players on a single computer or online.

If you can't see, hit the number keys to go through the different cameras. I would have certainly liked some of these key-hints in game. I'd say any game with more than just the arrow keys and spacebar to use should pop up an overlay with the keys when you hit F1 or escape, but that's just me.

Once you get the hang of it, the game is a ton of fun, and it can be a hoot to play with a bunch of friends online, taking aim at each other. If you've ever played worms, that game was actually a fun-filled clone of the original Scorched Earth.

gameplay

8 of 10 - there's a bit of a learning curve as you get adjusted to all the keys, but it's pretty simple at the core.

visuals

8 of 10 - lush 3d landscapes are an awesome improvement over the 16 color DOS game from 1992, but, at least on my comp, the frame rate was a little low. Maybe I shouldn't be running at 1400x1050 on my laptop.

addictiveness

9 of 10 - This is another one that keeps bringing you back. You can pick up this game and play a 5 minute set or play for hours and hours online. Scorched 3d is also a great game to play with a group while chatting.

Battle for Wesnoth

http://wesnoth.org/

Turn based overhead army command in a world of fantasy

I've actually played this game the most of all the ones reviewed here. Launched into different scenarios of war, you must summon troops, deploy them, and then complete your mission.

Part of the reason I've spent so much time on this game is the fact that it's too damn hard. Even on easy it takes me almost an hour to complete each mission, and I consider myself a fairly able tactician. I'd like to see my troops be a little more autonomous, and be able to build up to more and more challenging enemies and tasks, and I'm sure that as the game matures the balance between challenge and fun will settle out. There are already a considerable number of downloadable quest files which are a bit more fun than the tutorial mission. Anyone who enjoys risk will probably enjoy this game, but be prepared to sink quite a few hours in.

Gameplay

6 of 10 - the game does what it's supposed to, but it could really be a lot more intuitive. Right clicking on everything to select a menu is okay, but the troops should be able to think for themselves when not directly told what to do. It'd help if they weren't total wimps too.

visuals

8 of 10 - I actually really enjoy the looks of this game's top down perspective, and my complaints about the story-art were put to rest with the most recent revision. This game is really starting to look professional.

addictiveness

7 of 10 - Considering that I want to get back to playing this one and try to find a quest that I can actually succeed at, I'd say the replay value is pretty good, and it can only get better as more players and developers create quests.

The Quake III Engine

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/20/1329236&tid=112

ID Games classic FPS is now free and open source

I'd be remiss not to mention this development in an open source game roundup. Quake III Arena, the game engine that has powered the last few years of great networked first person shooters is now available for anyone to build upon. The announcement was only made in August 2005 at Quakecon, but being able to build on top of such a robust, mature game engine is going to be a boon to the open source game community. I expect to see quite a few games based on the QIII engine by the time I get to the next OS game roundup. I've never been a great fan of First Person Shooters myself (I burned out on Doom and Heretic back in 1997), but fans of the genre will love getting to play this game again tweaked for their system (you should see what people are doing with Quake II, open sourced a few years ago.)

There's also the potential for this to power non-fps games like MMORPGS, much in the way the Crystal Space 3D project has spawned the game Planeshift. There's nothing playable to rate here yet, but I'd keep my eye on any derivative projects in the next few months.

Stacker Blocks 3D

http://stacker-blocks.sourceforge.net/

Tetris with beautiful 3D graphics

Who doesn't love Tetris? Who doesn't love beautiful 3D graphics. This is a rehash of a classic, but it's quite playable, and you really just can't mess up familiar falling puzzle blocks. If you like the game, this is a slick little desktop version.

Gameplay

7 of 10 - Plays just like the classic using the arrow keys. Fast response, nice grid and highlighted drop column make it hard to mess up.

visuals

8 of 10 - The 3D here is both tasteful and serves a purpose. Getting to see the sides of the blocks helps your brain put together what goes where and whether you're lined up with the correct column or not

addictiveness

8 of 10 - Come on. It's Tetris. This is one of the most addictive games on the planet

Open Mortal

http://openmortal.sourceforge.net/

This parody game fulfills one of my boyhood dreams

Mortal Kombat once ruled the arcade, packing kids around to see the real lifelike bloodsport controlled by joystick wielding, button mashing 13 years olds.

Mortal combat was obviously just a collection of images crudely blue-screened and then played back to match the action on screen.

We had a photo developer next door to the arcade in the mall where I grew up, and I always thought they could make a killing by taking the proper snapshots of you in different poses and then put them into a "skin" file to create your own custom Mortal Kombat.

That idea has finally come to pass, and you can play as any one of a bunch of nerds, dorks, and dweebs as they knock eachother about in true Mortal Kombat style.

Best of all, now that we've all got digital cameras, you can take the proper pictures and you and your friends can star in your own Mortal Kombat game!

Gameplay

5 of 10 - It's a bit clunky, and I don't know any of the combos yet, but it plays just like the original MK did. If it's going for accuracy to the original console, it's probably more like an 8 of 10.

Visuals

9 of 10 - Let's be honest. I don't love this game for the beautifully rendered 3D. I love it for the plethora of funny pictures, and the ability to add your own.

Addictiveness

6 of 10 - MK was one of the most influential fighting games of all time, and I'll certainly be back to this one. Once you get your own characters loaded in, I bet this is one hell of a game to have at parties! (Author's Note: it appears that some coding is needed to actually load the characters in. I'd be great to have a "character editor" much like the quest editors available for many games.)

Roundup Wrapup

Well, that does it for this Open Source Games Roundup. Thanks for reading, and hopefully you found at least one diversion in this bunch that suits your fancy. If not, check back at Glitchnyc.com in the next few weeks. There were a lot more games than I could feature all in one article, and I'll have another roundup on the way once I get some time to take them for a spin.

2:54 am | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

Love Song for A Web Server.

Modest at the time of its assembly, the little workhorse serving these pages is chugging away at 133 mhz. By comparison, the slowest desktop I would consider purchasing this year is 2800 mhz. Beyond that, it's got 128 megs of ram and a single hard drive. Not exactly what you would call robust.

Everything says it should have crumped or become obsolete ages ago, but it's biggest problem right now is not wanting to come back on without an fsck after a hard power outage. Between the influx of searchers from google images and the ever increasing traffic generated by simply being around for a few years and consistently writing articles, it's pushing over 50000 pages a month and at least 5000 unique visitors.

Not bad for a little 133mhz machine.

This would seem simple if all it was doing was pushing out static HTML and images, but amazingly, all of the pages it's serving are dynamically generated, either by php or the blosxom cgi script. My photo archive is even tied into a database backend, something that anyone planning a web sever deployment will tell you you need extra processing, memory, and throughput capacity to handle.

Still going strong.

So thank you, little web server, for chugging away in my basement apartment back in 99 while I learned linux, for staying up years at a time even though something's a bit awry with your harddrive, and for making it through this steady ramp up in traffic. I promise I won't get you slashdotted, but somehow, I feel like you could handle it. Tough little guy.

You've even gracefully handled multiple domains, and running HomelessConnectNYC in a pinch seemed to be effortless for you. Nice work. (As an aside, my little server owes most of its success to the sleek and stable software that makes the most of its meager hardware, those bastions of the Open Source movment, Apache, MySQL, the Apache JAMES mailserver, and GNU/Linux.)

1:49 am | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

Mplayerplug-in: It Just Works.

Wow. I just realized something - I'm an Open Source Nut. I've graduated from Advocate to total fanboy. My walls at work have the Business Week with Linus in a Penguin Suit on it, the Firefox ad we put in the New York Times and two Oracle-on-Linux ads. My white-board even has a crappy drawing of tux on it.

That said, I'm still rational and clear-headed about using what works. Although I run Linux at home, I'm fully aware that Sara basically just puts up with it because she loves me. There's just too many times when it should "just work" and I've got to tweak things to make them do what they should. It's not quite ready for the average "mouse-only" user.

The main place where this is evident is surfing the web. Yes, Firefox is great, but on Linux, good plugins are hard to come by. Apple and Microsoft have a vested interest in keeping their media formats to themselves, and I don't think we'll be seeing Quicktime for Linux or Microsoft Linux Media Player anytime soon. Thankfully, Macromedia and Real are putting out fantastic plugins for Linux, so at least for now, their formats are easy to play. We'll see what happens now that Adobe has bought Macromedia.

Mplayer to the rescue for the rest

Last night I installed mplayerplug-in, which handles any media that the full-fledged mplayer handles (just about anything) and it's amazing.

Installing was as simple as apt-get install mplayerplug-in on Fedora+atrpms. Be sure to follow the "for firefox" directions at the bottom of the mplayerplug-in page)

With flash, realplayer (which is great on Linux now!), and mplayerplug-in, the browser finally "just works" on Linux, and I'm a happy camper.

Linux is one step closer to being seriously "wife" friendly.

5:24 pm | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

Open Source Fun With Inkscape and SVG

Okay, this is just going to be a quickie picture-tutorial, because I've got a very long text-based one coming out "any day now." Meanwhile, I just want to share the joy that is working with Inkscape.

For those that don't know, Inkscape is a free and open source vector image editor, much like Corel Draw or Adobe Illustrator. Vector editors differ from photo editors in that your drawings always remain a bunch of parts that get rendered, rather than being saved as pixels. For example, if you draw a circle, the file will contain information about the position and radius of the circle, as well as its color and outline rather than thousands of little dots representing the image.

SVG is the free, open standard for describing vector graphics and Inkscape is the best tool there is for creating and editing them. The fact that Inkscape is open source means that you're free to download it and share it with friends. If you have 45 minutes, download it and play along with this article.

First, get the program here. I don't normally recommend getting nightly builds intended for the developers, but the 0.41 build for windows is borked and the latest nightly appears to fix whatever problems it had. Just unzip it in a directory and run the inkscape.exe file.

Once you're up and running, download furboa3.svg. It's the final frame from my bit of fan art at my friend Colleen's web comic, Fluff In Brooklyn. (Take a look! It's stuffed-animals-meets-three's-company hilarity).

Now that you've got Inkscape and a bit of art to work with, lets look at what we've got. (Or at least pretend if you're not playing along...)

See more ...

11:52 pm | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

Banning "Bad Bots" in Apache Cuts My Web Traffic In Half

Well, it's a good thing I'm not advertiser supported, or I'd be severely conflicted over this. I just cut my web traffic numbers in half.

2 days ago I banned a whole bunch of bots from accessing glitchnyc.com to stop "referrer spam." Referrer spam is a way for morally flexible sites and site-affiliate programs to boost their traffic and google ranking by getting their sites into your web statistics pages. Many ISPs generate these statistic pages for their users, and I personally use awstats to generate my own.

To get their links into your statistics page, slimy site owners write an automated script, or bot, to visit your site hundreds of times pretending to come from a site like www.iFreakingLovePoker.com. (Note, not a real site, I don't want to link any of these !*%^#! sites any more here.)

Finally fed up with having 2500 "fake" visitors to my site every month screwing with my actual statistics, I decided to block all visitors with a referer* value that had any questionable words like poker, loans, and hold-em. To be sure I caught all of the sites and many I haven't even seen yet, I define the block-list using regular expressions to match all domains with these words in them.

(*note: "referrer" is misspelled as referer in the apache config file, so I will use the grammatically incorrect but technically correct version in any technical references that follow)

Now, these bots are all happily getting 403 Forbidden errors and regular users can still get my site! I'll have to do some upkeep to add new offending words when they show up, but thats as simple as adding a few more lines to httpd.conf (or .htaccess if I was on a hosted site)

Here's the sections of httpd.conf that blocks referrer spam for those looking to duplicate what I've done here.

First, I define a variable called bad_referers and add the RegEx's to it. Here's a sample:

Next, I block access to my site for those offending bots: (this is repeated for directory /cgi-bin/ and /var/www/html/)

To ensure that it's working, I add my own site to the list of bad referers and test. Surfing straight to my site brings the page up as normal, but clicking a link from my site to itself (which carries a referer value of http://www.glitchnyc.com) gives me a 403 Forbidden. Perfect.

To finish up, I remove my own site from the block-list and add some more keywords to match the rest of the spammers. Watching my logs, I still see the referrer spam, but now they're all getting code 403.

If you're trying this yourself, remember you'll have to restart apache to make the settings take effect!

1:06 pm | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

From Zero To Wiki In the Time It Takes to Eat A Burrito

Recently I've become pretty involved with The Wikimedia Foundation (the nonprofit organization which runs wikipedia) the wikimedia commons (where Ardvark lives) and wikinews.

I'm fascinated by collaborative writing and once you get familiar with using a wiki, they're really brilliant things. Even the syntax is elegant: to link to another article in a wiki you don't have to stop what you're doing, look up the link, make the href in your html, etc etc... All you have to do is wrap a word in double square brackets, and [[viola]] - it's now a link to the article of that name.

The first wiki I used was the AudacityTeam.org project wiki, and while I was using it I got the idea that there were massive applications for that type of communal collaborative environment outside the open source world. Instead of documenting and discussing an open source audio editor, we could be using the knowledge management potential of a wiki at Common Ground to develop our projects and staff.

I've been toying with the idea for weeks, and this friday I had an hour to kill while waiting for lunch and took the plunge.

Around the time my burrito arrived, I had found the source for wikimedia and was downloading it. I idly clicked away, going through the extremely easy and straightforward setup, and by the time I was done with my burrito, Common Ground had its very own wiki.

If you've already got a LAMP server, installing mediawiki is as simple as

• download
• untar
• point your browser to the directory you just made (which you may want to rename to just "wiki")

I was excited. Too excited, perhaps, but I love it when an idea comes to fruition so easily. I immediately began to tweak it to be CGC specific and added some starting point articles, happily double square bracketing any word that I thought should be filled in later.

The brilliance of a wiki is that those square bracketed words create red links, which means that there's no article under them yet. When a reader clicks on the link, it asks them to fill in whatever information they know. They write a bit and create more links, which invites more people to write.

The entire system is one giant open invitation to users to get involved and add their input.

I've now spent a big chunk of my weekend filling in what I know about Common Ground in an effort to get the ball rolling. There's a lot of writing to be done to really make this a useful tool, but I think there are a lot of people itching to take some ownership of the projects they work in, and sharing their knowledge and expertise is a great way to do that.

In interest of full disclosure, the burrito was from Burritoville, so that thing was HUGE.

8:30 pm | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

Fantastic Wireless USB NewsForge Article

I just ran into a great article on NewsForge about a topic that I've been asked about twice in the past 2 months:

Can you use connected to a wireless network from Linux

The answer is a bit complicated, as many of the newer commercially available cards and USB adapters are unsupported, and sometimes even certain models of a specific card will use a different chipset depending on whether they were made this year or last.

Luckily, netgear's cheap USB adapter (the MA111, available for $15+ on ebay) seems to work well. I got myself 2 just to have them if I need them.

Once you get the little adapter, setting it up can be a bit tricky. There are a few manual steps to go through, but the newsforge article sums up what you need to do nicely.

1:43 pm | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

Firefox Ad Ran In Today's NY Times

So many people came out in support of the full page Firefox ad in the New York Times that they couldn't fit all of our names on one page. So today, the Spread Firefox team ran a mammoth 2 pager (pdf) featuring all of our names, a giant Firefox logo, and user testimonials.

Very cool. The press around the ad is worth it alone but the positive impression this will make on CIO's, business leaders, and "Joe user" when they see this ad is immeasurable. I'm proud to have been a part of this, and I've got the ad on my wall at work with my name highlighted. It's at once the coolest and geekiest thing I've ever had on my walls, and that's coming from a guy who's had anime murals and wall scrolls all over his room.

If by some chance you're still using Internet Explorer - Firefox 1.0 is here. It's time to see what you've been missing!

5:10 pm | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

Missing the SingleWindow extension in FireFox?

If you're among the many people that have started using Firefox, you've probably noticed that links from other programs open over other pages that you already have open or open a new window entirely. This can be annoying if you didn't want to navigate away from the page that was open in Firefox, and middle clicking the link in your other programs doesn't open a new tab.

I've found it much more helpful to have links from all programs, as well as links that are programmed to open in "pop up" windows, open in new tabs. The SingleWindow extension filled this need until very recently, but mysteriously stopped working in 1.0

It turns out that Firefox 1.0 incorporates that functionality natively. Here's how to turn it on.

• In Firefox, open a new tab so you can keep this page open as well.
• In that new tab, enter about:config in your address bar
• change browser.tabs.showSingleWindowModePrefs to true (you can type part of the name of the configuration item in the Filter: box to quickly reduce the list)
• go to Tools -> Options -> Advanced
• Under Tabbed Browsing, check:
  • Open link from other applications in: a new tab in the most recent window
  • Force links that open new windows to open in a new tab

Firefox will now open a new tab for just about everything! You may also want to check "Warn when closing multiple tabs" so that you don't accidentally lose all the pages you had open by clicking the wrong thing. To avoid this, also try to get in the habit of middle-clicking the tabs to close them rather than clicking the red X.

Also, if you're running Firefox on Linux, Middle-clicking on tabs doesn't close them by default. To change this: In about:config set middlemouse.contentLoadURL to false. This is less "correct" on unix, but it will make Firefox behave more like it does on Windows.

4:38 pm | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

A Link to the Past

I started work at Common Ground just over two years ago, and one of the first things I did was install a LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) Intranet server running PostNuke. Until last week when I took the server down to put a new harddrive in, it had never been rebooted. It had run for 465 days without crashing. Hell, it had run for 465 days without being touched.

Logging into the desktop was strange. KDE looked ugly, Mozilla took forever to start, and the Redhat Package Manager desktop app crashed more than it ran. The fonts were jaggy and applications seemed boxy and mismatched, and it just generally looked like crap. I remembered, briefly, what Open Source used to look and feel like, just 2 years ago.

I'm an Open Source advocate. I say that freely and without hesitation, but that does not mean I am an Open Source zealot. As an IT professional, I've been keenly aware of what the problems are with Open Source applications and Linux, and what strides we needed to make.

When I first experimented with Linux back in 1999 (on this very machine serving Glitchnyc.com, no less) "Open Source" was synonymous with a web server, an OS for servers and supergeeks, and a clunky browser with too many parts. I remember when downloading an Open Source solution meant you probably had to put up with a crappy interface, half-there functionality, and lots of compiling and hand-tweaking.

In just the past 2 years, I've watched the open source software landscape mature so quickly it's almost unbelievable. The Gimp finally got GTK 2 support and went from a quirky, ugly tool to a slick, pro-level photo-editor, both on Windows and Linux. The two major Linux desktops, KDE and Gnome, went from interfaces that looked like windows 98 on a bad day to rivaling XP and even Mac OS X in sheer sexiness. Installing and upgrading programs has gone from has gone from ./configure && make && make install (and pray you've got the right libraries installed) or rpm dependency hell to point-n-click with apt and synaptic. Mozilla has completely reinvented itself and stripped the browser down to the 4 meg work of art that is Firefox, and Thunderbird, its solid mail counterpart.

The list of amazing applications continues to grow: Scribus gives desktop publishing apps such a run for their money that *someone* is quietly trying to squash work on the win32 version. Audacity handles audio like a pro, and is getting multi-track support the upcoming version. OpenOffice.org is pushing Microsoft out in more installations than anyone cares to talk about, and Inkscape is far and away the easiest vector drawing tool I've ever used.

Do I think Linux is ready for prime time? I don't know. I think there are a lot of hurdles there, but I do know this: Open Source software is ready for prime time. The Desktop application stack is here, and it's cross platform. I'm using the same programs on Windows at work and on Linux at home, and I love it.

Pretty soon, what OS you're running just isn't going to matter, because you'll know all the best applications in both places.

2:12 pm | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

Great Open Source Games

I've just completed a long article on the current state of open source software in general that will post tomorrow morning, but I wanted to split this small piece on games out into a separate post. Without further ado, I give you 4 great Open Source games which play on Windows and Linux.

• Battle for Wesnoth

• http://www.wesnoth.org
• The Battle For Wesnoth is a turn based strategy game. Aside from the default quest being quite entertaining and extremely challenging, there is also a lively community producing tons of downloadable quests and additional graphics.

  Game-play is straightforward and fun, and figuring out how many troops to recruit, how to use them, etc, has kept me up late quite a few nights recently.

• Liquid War

• http://www.ufoot.org/liquidwar/
• This one is the most original games I've played in years. You really just have to play it to understand it, but you control an army of tens of thousands of units, which move towards your cursor. Lead them in the right direction, and they'll surround the enemy and win. Leave their back or flank open, and you're in hot water. There's so many troops, they really do flow like liquid.
• JDuplicate
• http://jduplicate.sourceforge.net/
• JDupilcate, a Java-based scrabble clone. Would be great if more (any) people were on their server to play against.

• Neverball
• http://icculus.org/neverball/
• Neverball, which is a clone of Super Monkey Ball. If you've never played it, it's like Marble Madness + one of those wooden labyrinth games you had as a kid on speed. Very addictive. Be warned that this is 3D on SDL, which means you'll need either a modern graphics card or a really beefy CPU to make it run well

1:22 am | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

SharpDevelop GNU .NET / Mono IDE

We're developing a small in-house database application again here at CG, and due to the fact that we're a nonprofit, we simply can't afford to migrate the whole organization to Office 2003 just to make my life a little easier while coding.

Working with Access 2000's "access project" link to mSQL is far superior to developing a straight access database, and as a quick and dirty Rapid Application Development platform it really does get the job done. The problem is that this is now a very old, VB6 based platform, and the rest of the world has moved on to vb.net. There were so many quirks and problems with the VB runtimes that the whole system was scrapped in favor of the .NET shared runtime and a new vb compiler.

Fed up with things simply not working the way they should, I went in search of an alternative to Microsoft's wildly expensive Visual Studio.net.

After a few minutes of googling for "Mono IDE" (mono is the GNU implementation of the .NET api) I came up with a few choices. For windows, which I use at work, the most mature seemed to be SharpDevelop, so I took the plunge.

I've worked with many IDEs over the past 7 years, and I don't think I've ever been as impressed with one as I am with SharpDevelop. It's quick, light, and smart, and the GUI development tools are right on the money. So far I've hit 0 bugs and effortlessly went from a little HelloWorld form to an MDI (Multi Document Interface) design complete with windows-style professional looking menus and functionality.

If you've been waiting to try out .NET because you don't have a copy of Visual Studio, download SharpDevelop now.

As a quick aside - VisualStudio comes on 4 CDs and loads your system with MSDN docs, the .net runtimes, and loads of other stuff you don't need.

SharpDevelop is 5 megs, most of us already have the .net runtimes (if you don't you can get them at WindowsUpdate) and google works a heck of a lot better for me than MSDN ever did.

3:57 pm | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

Firefox Ad Support Miracle

Less than one day ago SpreadFireFox.com made the appeal I featured below. Their ambitious goal was to reach 2500 donations (each of $30 or more) in 10 days.

As of 10PM EST tonight, they're 3 people away from their goal. With 9 days left, we might be able to run the ads in the 10 most widely distributed papers in the US. The support is amazing. It makes you wonder how many other projects have armies of people waiting and wanting to help in any way they can, even if they can't program.

10:27 pm | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

We're Taking Out A Full Page Ad!

The Open Source community is banding together around 1.0 the release of the first true mainstream desktop application to come from our combined efforts. I've watched Firefox grow from a fledgling project based off of the monolithic Mozilla Browser into the premier web browser for security, speed, standards compliance, and ease of use.

Even technophobes who try Firefox out are quickly won over by the tabbed browsing and pop-up and spyware protection. It really is a world class user application, and it's about to become the #1 browser in the world.

To help it along, we're taking out a full page ad in the New York Times. I say "we" because I've already made my pledge. Join me, and contribute to the biggest event in open source software uptake since apache won the server wars.

10:10 am | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

Support FireFox

My inner geek is screaming out the need to buy this shirt. My love for FireFox is multifaceted.

First, I love the fact that it's open source.

Second, I love the fact that it kicks the Microsoft equivalent, Internet Explorer's, ass. How did I ever live without tabbed browsing?

Finally, I think the artwork, both in the default theme for FireFox and in this logo, are both slick and superb.

If only the logo was just a tad smaller, I would already own this shirt, and I'd be showing my support all over Manhattan.

Watch as my sensible self and inner-geek do battle! Will I buy the shirt out of support, or will I make a donation and spare my wardrobe.

11:37 pm | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

The Gimp for Windows

The Gnu Image Manipulation Program for Windows 2.0 is stable and released today, (following the source code release a few days back) along with a fresh version of GTK+ 2. It's free and the installers are super-simple, so all of you still running on Microsoft OSes get downloading! You'll be glad you did!

If you're installing on Win95/98/ME, please uncheck the WIMP theme option in the Gimp installer options to save yourself some headaches. Also, be sure to install the version of GTK+ 2 that's on that page as well.

My little logo guy at the top right of glitchnyc.com was done on an early beta using paths and selection masks, which allow you to do some basic beizer curves and point-to-point selection. Very cool.

1:36 pm | permalink | /technology/opensource | 0 writebacks |

Why Adobe Should be Worried

The Gimp hit 2.0 today. I've been using the betas on both Win32 and Linux for months, and they're awesome. The main problem with The Gimp was its use of the archaic GTK tooklit, and Gimp2 finally makes the switch to GTK2.

The result is a cleaner, more consistent look and UI which finally ditches the "Lefty mouse cursor" that drove me nuts.

Gimp 2 is still lacking when put up next to Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro simply because vector layers are absent where they have been integrated into the professional products.

The slashdot discussion of this brought up the fact that if you need vector imaging, there's many Open Source options. Following one of the links, I discovered the popular sodipodi, and I think I'm in love.

This is what Corel Draw used to be for me - a simple, page oriented, vector design system. Node editing, beautiful text rendering, beizer curves.

As near as I can tell, Sodipodi is everything Illustrator SHOULD be without all the crap. Gimp is getting very close to rivalling photoshop, and is already better for certain applications.

They're both written on GTK 2 and are cross platform across Win32, Linux, and OSX, so are developing quite a fan-base of people who run one desktop at home and another at work.

All it would take is for an enterprising group of developers to sew together Gimp and Sodipodi (perhaps switching interfaces when working on raster or vector layers?) and we would have an open source tool that took the graphics design world by storm.

Mark my words, in 3 years Adobe will be screaming the same sort of "Foul Play" junk that SCO and Microsoft are now.

2:53 pm | permalink | /technology/opensource | 2 writebacks |