Frank's Notebook

Free Software

October 12th, 2008

“Creativity and innovation always build on the past. The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it. Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past. Ours is less and less a free society.”

I am supporting free software whenever possible and you’ll easily find me rejecting something just for it is related to commercial software. I find commercial software rather inflexible, sometimes awkward to use, hard to maintain and by using it I put pressure on other people to use the same system. Its restrictive nature does limit its use and improvement. It sets limits for people rather than allowing them to expand the system and adjust it to their needs.

Free software is the ideal platform for my research work. I can easily share my software and other people can learn from it and improve it. Free software allows and encourages modification and improvement. Furthermore it cannot be restricted, i.e. other programs using it and modifications of the software have to remain free. The use of the software is not limited by restrictive copyright or even patents.

Projects driven by the prospect of some gain or reward have a tendency to be optimised for that reward rather than for the project’s purpose. The reward becomes the major drive and replaces the initial motivation of the project; assuming there was one. One could actually say that this alienates the developer from the product by certain kind of rewards. For software it means that it is written for commercial success rather than for high quality and often these are contradictory goals. This, as well as the basic idea of free software, is not limited to software.

For more information on free software see the GNU project. I am currently using various GNU/Linux platforms running the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. Also see the dotCommunist Manifesto.

Categories: Software | Tags: FreeSoftware | No Comments

EuRo99

May 18th, 2008

These are some of my pictures of the total solar eclipse taken in Bucharesti, Romania at the 11th of August 1999. They have been taken with a Nikon F70 and a 300mm Sigma lens on slide film with a quite improvised setup. To publish them on the WWW the the slides were copied to a print film and the prints were scanned. There are also two pictures of the partial phase.

For more images see Kevin Smith’s Outer Space – Inner Space site.

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SETI@Home

May 18th, 2008

SETI@Home is a scientific experiment that harnesses the power of hundreds of thousands of Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data. There is a small but captivating possibility that your computer will detect the faint murmur of a civilization beyond Earth.

I am running the SETI@Home client on a number of computers at our lab at Cardiff University and at home. View my personal statistics at the BOINCStats site. You might also want to visit the home page of the SETI Institute. The likelyhood of finding an intelligent civilisation may be small, but it is worth searching for it. However, I am convinced that earth is not the only planet in the universe with intelligent life. This is just too unlikely and life in general may be more common in the universe than initially expected. The real question is whether a civilisation can survive long enough to allow it to contact another one.

Categories: General | Tags: seti | No Comments