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Just yesterday, I blogged about being having to use my Mac for a bit, because my Compaq laptop was in the shop. Today, my laptop came back.

Let me explain this in a little more detail:

• Wednesday evening, 7pm: I mailed my laptop to HP in California.
• Friday morning, 10:30am: My laptop came back. With the display – which was faulty – replaced.

This is the most incredible technical support / customer care service I have ever seen – bar none. They paid for two-way overnight shipping before 10.30am, kept me up to date via a website, underpromised and over-delivered. My next laptop, my next desktop and my next printer, scanner and every other gadget will come from HP. In fact, if they make it, and I need it, I’ll buy it from them.

I am truly, truly awed. HP++.

(Compare to: Nokia – “go screw yourself and your warranty too”; Toshiba – “no, your international warranty doesn’t work in Asia, HAHA!”; Apple – “what 90-day warranty?”; Microsoft – “your Xbox will be back when we think it’s ready to be back, and, oh, you’re paying one way”.)

EDIT: extraneous “a” has been taken out behind the shed and shot.

A few years ago, I had a debate with Stakface about the relative speed of operating systems. While my laptop is in the shop, I’m using my Mac as a main computer for the first time in… years? Certainly, A Very Long Time. And my first impression of multi-tasking in Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” is that it’s slow and unresponsive. To be sure, this computer is aging (what isn’t?), but even then it’s not quite three years old and acting much, much older. To compare my Toshiba laptop from 2002 running Vista to this Mac Mini from 2005 running Leopard would probably result the Toshiba winning the responsiveness award, even with half the memory that this machine has (512MB of RAM there versus 1GB here).

I find that while Windows has an unhappy habit of running very responsively 99% of the time, every half hour or so, Windows will find some background task that will suck away every single available computing resource and the interface will crawl to a halt. Surprisingly, no data really gets lost in the process, though. Vista in particular has a nasty habit of doing this more often, which I attribute to a combination of its resource hungry indexing engine and its pointless and ultimately futile DRM algorithms.

By contrast, Mac OS X feels slow all the time, but there are never really any surprising changes in speed. Whether it’s the Adium list in the background where animations are supposed to take five seconds and take between ten and 12, or whether it’s the time before switching applications, the interface as a whole feels sluggish. What is even more annoying though about this process is that occasionally when you switch applications – even though the menu bar has drawn itself and I’m waiting for the window to appear – data gets misdirected, adding to the frustrations. So my typing a space causes iTunes to stop playing, even though iTunes is no longer the foremost application.

Much like the screen wipes in Windows 98, where it would literally take several seconds for a minimized window to disappear and be replaced with the desktop, the Mac OS doesn’t feel like a multi-tasking OS. This perception is reinforced by things which happen in the background in Windows whereas they are modal in the Mac interface. For example: printing from the Mac usually brings up an application modal “Printing…” box, forcing me to stop working on the document instead of the Windows scenario where after you hit “Print” or “OK” in the Print dialog box, you can continue working, letting some background process handle the printing. It’s frustrating and irritating to have that happen, particularly if, like me, you’re trying to edit your new resume and make sure the alignment is okay on a piece of paper, which requires multiple little edits and reprints.

If you grow up with the Mac interface, I think most people find it responsive enough. Coming from Windows, however, the entire interface responsiveness philosophy feels wrong. Which brings me back to the debate I had with Stakface all those many months ago: small, occasional disruptions are excusable and even expected in Windows; consistent slowdowns are not. He believed it was more disruptive to have a sudden slowdown in performance rather than to just have a slow, consistent interface.

Different philosophies indeed.

I buy lots of IKEA stuff. Mainly, it’s because IKEA manufactures its things in single factories, so every piece of furniture they sell even here in the US meets European environmental standards which – unlike American federal standards – exist. Also, they are pretty darn durable. And while I can’t help but giggle at IKEA’s tax structure, I do appreciate that if something goes wrong, they make every effort to get it fixed.

That is, until now – and it may the most ridiculous problem any one could get stuck in.

My flatmate and I have a Lillberg sofa that she bought some years ago. It’s a very competent sofa that also doesn’t suffer the problem that most sofas suffer at the hands of our cats – i.e.: scratches and general destruction. However, one of the beams that supports the pillows has given up the ghost and snapped. Now here’s where everything takes a dive in to the surreal. Watch and learn:

1. IKEA does not sell replacement parts.
2. IKEA gives away, within reason, replacement parts for free during the warranty period.
3. The warranty period of this sofa line is 25 years.
4. Unfortunately, this sofa line is 40+ years old.
5. Thus we must prove that the sofa is less than 25 years old and within its warranty period.
6. For which we need a receipt. Which we don’t have.

So despite the fact that the warranty period is longer than the time I’ve spent on earth, I cannot get a replacement part for the sofa – because I can’t prove that it’s covered by warranty. And yes, we’ve offered to pay for the replacement part… no joy. For a 40cmx6cm piece of wood with four holes drilled into it.

Sigh. Ridiculous.

I’m going to do something which I’m not sure I’ll keep up in the long-term, but because I’m finishing nearly two months or so of reading, I figure I should. This is also going to be very long, so I’m going to snip the majority of the text after a brief intro here. So for those of you reading the RSS feed, many apologies; I’ll try to keep the snipped content posts to a minimum.

As you might have been able to tell given the content of my blog, I’m very interested in a few things: technology, economics, and good works of art, whether it be sung, or painted, or sculpted, or written. Naturally, like most people I know who have grown up loving science and technology, I enjoy a good sci-fi novel, and have spent this last year catching up on a decade plus of sci-fi that I have missed, either because I wasn’t able to get the books while I was living in the Philippines, or because I didn’t have the time while I was in college. This is a book review, but not so much a review of a specific book as a review of a series of book – specifically, Ben Bova’s Grand Tour.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been meaning to write this for a while, but I’ve not really had a chance to clear my mind long enough to type this up.

As many of you know I have a kitten named Gruszka who is about seven and a half months old. There are three interesting bits of behaviour that I’ve been trying to research for a while without any success.

First, Gruszka has a habit of taking stuffed toys and “washing” them. It’s fascinating to watch it, though because the N80 is too slow to start the camera or, really, do anything, I’ve never managed to film it. He carries the toy – either his skunk or his mouse – and dunks it into his water bowl. He then rolls the toy around making sure the entire thing is soaked with his paw. Then he picks it up, gently shakes it dry, carries it a little distance away, and licks it dry. Gruszka himself gets a bath about once a month and he still is utterly terrified of the water. Yet he seems very calm giving baths to his toys. He also generally gives the toy a bath when it is dirty in some fashion – either there is some dirt on it, or because it smells odd. What I wonder is – does he associate being dirty with having a bath or is this just a general form of play for him? And if it is in fact a form of cleaning, then how does he understand that I wash him for him being dirty?

Second, he has taken to saying “Hi!” outside my room or my flatmate’s room if he wants to be let in – it isn’t a squeak or a random meow; he very distinctly says “Hi!” until he gets food or attention or admittance into the room he is standing outside of. Does he associate the word as a greeting or does he just see me saying “Hi” to my flatmate or to other people often enough that he uses it himself? Or are we just hearing things that aren’t being said?

Finally, Gruszka seems to have adopted certain “words” – bits of sound – for individual objects and people. For example, I am “Mau-mau”, my flatmate is “mawii”, the other cat – my flatmate’s sleek Bombay – is “meh-eh” and food is “mi-ah”. I’ve tested this fairly consistently over the course of about two months now and he uses the sounds to call for those different things respectively. If he sees me, he says “mau-mau”, if he is seeking food, or when I am opening a can to feed him, he says “mi-ah” and so on. It’s something that I’ve been trying to document, but I’ve never come across any cat or dog that seems to use sound snippets so consistently to describe certain objects. Is this normal for those of you with pets?

So there you have it – some of my recent feline observations.

It’s hard to say what a Chumby is.

At the simplest level, it’s a hardware widget watcher. You know all those nifty little single-purpose applications that live on your Konfabulator or Dashboard screen or on the right side of your desktop? Those are widgets. And the Chumby plays an infinite loop of those widgets, based on the selections that you make online.

You’re probably wondering why on earth something like this could possibly be useful or helpful and – most importantly – worth your money. I agree: it’s likely not for you. But if you rely on widgets – like I do – to tell me the time, the local weather, catch up on blogs such as Slashdot and Engadget, read the news, see the latest lolcat, and so forth, then it becomes infinitely more interesting. I don’t have to actively seek out the news – the information comes to me. And that’s what the value proposition of such a device is – it’s a replacement for your alarm clock or whatever sits on the nightstand next to your bed and stays out of the way until you need it.

It’s a computer – but not a full computer. And, unlike any other computer I have ever seen, the Chumby is encased in a squishable leather ball, complete with plush toy-like stuffing with beads. It has a dead-easy control panel: you press the button and you get the control panel, where you can change channels, set clock info, connect to networks, set alarms and so on. There’s also a night mode which turns the screen to it’s lowest level of brightness. It is also pretty compact – about the size of two clenched fists put next to each other.

It’s also exceedingly open source. Based on a Linux kernel, the device those of you with experience with programming can completely rewrite the operating system. The administration website supports every combination of browser and OS I threw at it. The hardware itself is open source and hackable, with all the specs and even the schematics available online: it runs on an ARM processor clocked at 350MHz, and is coupled to 64MB of RAM and 64MB of flash memory for the OS; you interact with the Chumby using the 320×240 pixel touchscreen and a single button and the Chumby talks to the internet using WiFi. If you can create a Flash application, you can write a widget.

So that’s what a Chumby is and that’s what a Chumby can do. The problem is that it’s still likely very hard for most people to imagine why they would want one or what they would do with it. So if the notion of an alarm clock plus device that connects to the internet and tells you anything you could possibly want does not interest you, stop now. For the rest of you, here are my subjective thoughts on what I use my Chumby for and what I’ve found.

Chumby sets up the widgets in channels; by default there is one. To this channel I have a set of ten widgets: a clock, a moon phase widget, a weather applet, dedicated applets for Slashdot and Engadget, an RSS feed for a news site I frequent, a Flickr applet, a Facebook applet, a lolcat viewer and my Google calendar. I have also created a second channel called clock that only shows a clock that I like quite a lot. During the day, I leave the default channel up, and during the night, I switch it to and leave it on the clock channel.

Depending on your metric, this is either the most used or least used device in the house and I love it. It’s the least used because once I’ve set it up, I almost never touch the device – it sits pretty and does what I want it to do: display info. It’s the most used because it’s quickly become the primary way I find out what the weather is like, what the time is and so on. The highest compliment I have long felt I could pay a device is to call it a watch; the second highest is calling something a radio. The Chumby is a radio in that regard: to interact with it, you need to push buttons, but you never need to know the details of how it works – but you can dissect it and engineer it to fit your needs.

That’s not to say that everything is perfect. There are a couple of show-stopping glitches I’ve come across, both related to audio playback. The Chumby comes out of the box with the ability to connect to and playback music from iPods. However, I discovered that depending on how large the iPod is, it can take a while to load. An iPod Shuffle loads in a few seconds. A 30GB iPod can take a minute. My flatmate’s iPod 60GB took nearly ten. That’s a problem that according to the friendly developers over at the Chumby forums, is going to be fixed. One other irritating problem I discovered was that playback is uneven – some songs which sound just fine on other devices either have an annoying stutter or, worse, play very quickly and very slowly. Given that the significantly lower-speed and less-capable ARM processors in the iPod and other DAPs can playback video just fine, this seems to be a case of bad optimization in the library. Other than these small problems, however, the Chumby has done very well in its first week in my posession.

Finally, the Chumby suffers from a chicken-and-egg problem. Given that there are very few Chumbys out in the world, there aren’t that many applets available on the website – about a hundred, give or take – and a large number of them are from the Chumby development team. That’s not to say that there are bad applets out there – in particular, the RSS applet makes it possible to “create” a “new” applet with copy-and-paste simplicity. There are a number of useful applets already there, ranging from the 25+ clocks, to the half-dozen news sites, to calendars and so on. Yet, compared to the thousands of widgets that one sees in the Konfabulator, Dashboard and Windows Vista galleries, it feels spartan. The content will come – assuming there are enough Chumbys in the hands of enough Flash developers. Certainly, I hope that Chumby will offer a menu driven WebClip-style idiot-proof Widget creator by the middle of next year, but in the mean time, be aware that like the PS3, you’re paying for potential and it may behoove you to wait before buying such a thing.

For those of you interested in the Chumby, you can get the production hardware now, but be aware that the software that comes with it is still a beta-quality release. It’ll take time and bug reports to get it up to beauty and elegance of a watch. Fortunately, almost everyone involved with Chumby development is active on their online forums and very responsive to questions comments and concerns that you have. And yes – they take feature requests there too. There is already an active and growing community of developers, hackers and just plain old end-users on the forums as well.

The greatest problem that Chumby can run into is a shortage of truly compelling and interesting content and Chumby’s development team has so far avoided that by stepping up and coding their own applets. The device itself is well thought out and engineered and is truly idiot-proof (at least, so far, the universe is *not* winning). If you’re in the market for a new alarm clock – stop and take a look at the Chumby. If you use and love widgets – stop and take a look at the Chumby. And if you like gadgets – this is pretty much a no-brainer: this is one of the best you can get. And for the more technically minded, the Chumby has solid design, solid software, a responsive development team and is open-source – you cannot ask for more.

This was one of the harder posts to write, because there was so much I wanted to say, and no idea how to go about saying it. I wanted to write about the promises that Microsoft made about Longhorn, the codename for Windows Vista while it was in development, but I realized that (a) no one who reads my blog really cares about this sort of stuff; (b) I’m no where near authoritative on the history of Windows; and, (c) it was going to make this long entry longer still. In short, there was no point in writing the entry in that fashion, so this post is a recounting of one technically-minded end-user’s experience with Windows Vista. The problem, of course, is that it is anecdotal, and so things that work perfectly with my combination of hardware and software may break with someone else’s combination. Case in point – I’ve not had too bad a time with Vista but my flatmate is close to tossing her laptop out the window. The main differences are relatively minor in terms of both hardware (I have a Core Duo Intel laptop and she has an AMD Turion X2 laptop, I have twice the RAM, and we have different chipsets and thus integrated video setups) and software (I use Office 2007, she uses Office 2003 and she uses ZoneAlarm, not the built in firewall). Yet the differences in expectations causes grief to her, but a pass for me. So here is my entirely subjective post on how Vista and I are getting along two months after I started using it on a regular basis.

I had a peek into the Vista reliability and performance monitor and the event viewer to see whether there had been crashes while I wasn’t looking and was pleasantly surprised. In fact, going as far back as the installation date, I discovered that the system has been fantastically reliable, according to Vista. True, I have had an index of as low 3.47 and my current index is 6.16, but this indicator is wrong for two reasons.

First, many of the crashes are the same program crashing many times when I tried to repeatedly do the same thing and saw it as crashed. So this includes programs like Stata which I can cause to crash just by breaking a long list of data and it includes my rather stupid attempt to start bash without setting up the path to include the Cygwin directory. It was bound to fail, but it took me three attempts to understand why it was crashing, bringing my computer to the absolute low of 3.47 so far. So the indicator is lower than it should be because Windows docks whatever the penalty is for a program crash thrice instead of acknowledging that three crashes in 30 seconds are likely caused by the same problem.

Second, Vista’s reliability monitor doesn’t take into account the niggling little frustrations that persist even after tweaking settings to make applications work. For example, iTunes has a nasty bug that if it is started with another window full-screened, it appears as a black smudge against the desktop. Stata, which I need to use on a day-to-day basis for my work, is brutally warped and horribly difficult to use, even when desktop composition is off and I am in the non-Aero Windows Basic scheme. Starting Excel 2007 without opening a file results in a window where the status bar floats ontop of the menu bar. And the problem is – how does one even begin searching for such a problem (and solution) on the internet? What I describe as a smear, someone may describe as a black window; where I see a warp, someone may report a drag-drop problem; my floating status bar maybe a scaling issue. So the indicator is much higher than it should be, because it accounts for proper application failures that are reported to the log, but what about the annoyances and irritations?

Moreover, in my experience, Vista has some version 1.0 flaws that are glaring in their obviousness – so much so, that it’s a wonder it wasn’t picked up in testing. Indeed, I reported some of these myself when I was testing Vista. For example – automatic updates routinely downloads several updates, installs them, restarts your computer, and promptly you find more updates waiting for you. My flatmate has no end of trouble with this particular issue and it begs the question why you rarely saw such problems on Windows XP. I see a similar problem with Ubuntu 7.10 “Gutsy Gibbon” in that there are often updates every few hours, but this is understandable, given: (a) software comes from many sources and is not controlled by a single releasing agent like Windows Update; and, (b) very infrequently is a restart required.

Finally, a word about the much maligned user access control (UAC). Unlike many people, I have not got tired or angry enough at UAC to remove it. I think there is a good argument to be made to leave it off for the first couple of boots while software is installed en masse (as is the norm when one sets up the installation the first time) – and I have made that case before. But it is not the be-all-end-all time consumer that Linux fans make it out to be, and nor is it as intrusive as Apple would have you believe. What I find annoying is that quite often there is no information provided as to why the UAC requested elevation. Sure, I understand that I ran a setup program – but why did I just get three separate UAC prompts? One should have covered a generic installation – so why were there three? Am I unintentionally allowing one genuine program and two pieces of malware to install, or are there three separate geniune programs? This lack of clarity is what causes problems for me, not that the UAC exists in the first place.

In all, excluding the irritations and such, I’ve had an acceptable experience with Vista. I think the problem is that Windows XP, especially towards the end of my installation was fantastically stable and very, very usable. It was indeed “good enough”. There was no compelling reason to upgrade, and that made it hard to sell Vista on the technical merits.

Ultimately, I suspect that Vista’s legacy will be similar to that of Windows 95. Like Windows 95, Vista introduces new concepts and substantially retools the interface not for usability’s sake, but because it’s needed to sell the product. The next version of Windows, Windows 7 will likely be the success story that Windows 98, and more recently, Windows XP was. In the meantime, while you could do better – but you could also do worse. Now if only I could get the irritations solved.

It used to be that in WordPress (which I use as the content management system for this site), I could just enter a new category name while I was entering a post and have it automatically selected. For some reason, this is no longer the case in the newest version of WordPress which I installed a few weeks ago, and so I can’t really tag things properly. Given that’s the case, I think I’m going to have to switch to tags instead of categories, which is a shame, since it’s harder to keep that organized (just look at Engadget’s tagging system for an example of the mess it creates). I’ll go back slowly and convert the older posts too, but if anyone has any ideas for how to get the new category box back in the post writing layout, now would be a great time to tell me.

In other news – I’m almost caught up with my blogging. I wrote about FOSS as insurance, and I am almost done with my Vista post. This leaves my Halo 3 review and my Chumby review. I can’t really do justice to the Halo 3 review until I play the game through on a harder setting and I don’t want to do that without playing it with a friend of mine. So it’ll be a while. perhaps as much as a couple of months, depending on fast we can complete Halo 3 on legendary. The Chumby review will be up this week; it’ll be a bit of a work in progress that I’ll keep updating, because the experience is very different depending on your usage scenario and availability of widgets.

Then I have to think about what post comes next. A good place to be.

Particularly if you’re hawking a product like the Sony Reader or the Amazon Kindle.

I don’t know what the selling model seems to be for a device like this – particularly in the case of the Kindle which sells for $400, and books cost $10 a piece. Let’s look at the competition for a device like this: dead trees in the shape of a cuboid, selling for approximately $Free to $6.99. Perhaps $30 for a hot new hardcover from a small-town bookseller. And there are no upfront costs to the buyer. The model I’m presuming that they are trying to emulate is the music selling business, where tracks can be bought and stored on a digital audio player (DAP). Two major problems:

1. The pricing is completely off – you usually pay less for a digital download than the associated physical plastic disc like a CD. In this case, not only are you paying a higher rate for the same content (wrapped in unsharable DRM, of course), you’re also paying the very high barrier to entry. To be sure, you pay a higher upfront cost to get a computer and a DAP, but given that most people who are likely to use a DAP already have a computer, this cost is amortized over many different activities, leaving the cost of the player, which can range from $20 to $500, against the $300 of the Sony Reader or the $400 of the Kindle.
2. The success of online music stores and services has been driven in no small part because of the ability to download songs ala carte. So instead of buying the $15 bundle of ten crappy songs and two good songs, you can spend $2 to purchase the two good songs and forgo the $10 loss of the bad songs. Books aren’t like that – you’re not going to buy chapters 1-12, skip chapters 13-18 and buy chapters 19-25 at $0.25 a chapter. Books are bound together because it’s hard to follow the story if the chapters were served ala carte. By contrast, magazines are salable by article, and were the Kindle or the Sony Reader offering the ability to purchase articles ala carte, this would likely be a very successful device, particularly for people in the sciences or for college students with slightly larger budgets.

So, in short, it’s hard to see this having much success outside a very, very small niche. The sad thing, of course, is that publishers and technology developers will take note of the failure of such a device and conclude that there is no market for a relatively inexpensive e-ink based book reader and shut down further development. Instead, consider what the problems truly are for a device such as this and work to fix them:

• DRM – making digital books, unlike real books unsharable. Options: don’t implement DRM (really the only viable solution in the long-term), enable DRM that allows books to be “passed on” and read by one person at a time, just like a real book.
• Pricing – given that we’re not paying for physical resources, and given that most books are in digital form as it is to be typeset, there is no reason for digital books to cost more than their physical counterparts. $2 is a fine price for digital books, $3 is tolerable. Anything above that is a fleecing
• More uses of the device’s strengths, less of its weaknesses – given what the device does (books), there is no reason to cram in a music player. Most people who are likely to buy this device will have at least two music playing devices with them anyway – DAP and cell phone. There’s no reason, in this instance, to deploy a music player; if and when devices such as a book reader become ubiquitous and cheap (say, less than $50), it makes sense to use a book reader as a music player. On the other hand, the devices (particularly the Kindle) is capable of much more:
  • The aforementioned ala carte journal or magazine subscriptions.
  • The ability to read long documents in Word, PDF and other formats in an open fashion.
• More bookish. The Sony Reader excels at being a tiny size, and by looking like a very thin hardcover. The Kindle looks positively clunky by comparison. Neither, however, is designed to be as portable as a book. To succeed, it needs to be roughly the size and shape of a paper back – something that can be tossed in a bag or carried in a pocket without bulging or poking out. The N800 is such a form factor – and it may be worth designing a device which uses a form factor. I, for one, have always thought that an electronic book reader should be the size of a mass market paperback (4.1″ x 6.8″) and thinner, with buttons on the reverse (think about how you hold a book). It should be as simple as possible, like a book: maybe a toggle switch for on-off at the top, buttons to go next and back on the reverse on both sides and a select button. That’s it – nothing more complicated or sophisticated.

A few days ago I had a major scare with my phone, and I was convinced it was the end of the line for my scratched up, but otherwise good shape Nokia N80ie. I started my emergency research for a new phone, making sure to avoid Nokia after my unbelievably bad experience with them. That, coupled with my recent desire to be standards compliant such that I could switch platforms or applications at any time, made me look at almost every major mobile platform – BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Palm OS, iPhone and, of course, Linux.

As luck would have it, I got the problem fixed after recalibrating a few things. However, the scare made me reevaluate my dependence on certain platforms. For example, I have used Series 60 as my primary mobile platform for almost four years now. Similarly, I have depended on Windows as my primary OS for nearly as long as I have been using computers. My first Windows was the Windows 2.0 derivative known as Windows/386, in fact. Having been on Microsoft platforms for as long as I have, it makes it difficult to switch not because I’m scared of Linux, but because it gets in the way of my productivity.

Should something go wrong in Windows, I know where to find out what the problem is, I know where to go to fix the problem and experience has taught me what is most likely to go wrong. These ties are Microsoft’s true network effects and the reason they can put out a service pack every five years and expect everyone to pay up. By contrast, I can get Linux working without any troubles and I can fix small problems and determine incompatibilities, but I don’t have the faintest clue what to do if something goes seriously awry. A reasonable person would expect that knowing one OS inside out should be sufficient.

It is not. You see, there’s something very important about desktop Linux and Linux platforms like Android.

They are insurance.

They are my insurance that should Microsoft do or be forced to do something that is absolutely reprehensible, then I want to be able to pick up and leave. Suppose a government agency decides that a backdoor should be left to allow unfettered government access to my personal files – then I want to be able to switch to an OS which has the benefit of the “many eyes” approach to security. Or suppose Microsoft decides to switch to a subscription OS service – so that you pay, say $100 for the OS media, and then $120 a year to use the OS. Quite aside from the unacceptably transient nature of this relationship (c.f.: MLB switches its DRM provider), I want to be able to switch to an OS that cannot extort money to provide me with access to my computer.

That’s why I started this year by making a pledge to use more FOSS programs in my every day life. Back when it was called Phoenix in 2002, I started using Mozilla Firefox. This year I started using Thunderbird and Pidgin. And I switched to more open, better defined standards. At the beginning of this year, I used Outlook to store calendar information in its proprietary Outlook store, stored messages in its proprietary PST format and so on. Today I use Thunderbird to keep my data in the universal and open mbox format, and use the Lightning extension to keep my calendar in the universal and open iCalendar format. I used to use Trillian to send instant messages and mainly in MSN. Now I use Pidgin and mainly message using XMPP. My music used to be in a variety of formats, including DRM’ed WMA and AAC; now everything is MP3. I don’t use Ogg because I’ve yet to come across a Ogg-playing client for half the devices I use, but should Ogg support come out for my devices, I’ll convert my music as soon as possible. Next year I plan on using OpenOffice more extensively. And replace my reliance on Stata by using R.

These changes also make it possible to switch operating systems more easily moving forward. These applications insure against vendor-lock when it comes to my data. And FOSS applications are insurance against vendor-lock on applications.

If you’re willing to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars a year on insurance of your physical property, it makes common sense to insure against vendor-lock for free, or for the price of a few hours of your work-week.