Apple is really doing their best to make me hate them right now. This just irks me something awful:

They called the head developer of Cheese and ordered him to cease and desist.

Cheese is a Photobooth inspired application. I wholeheartedly admit that. But was it really necessary to call up the poor guy and strongarm him into getting rid of the app?

I have multiple problems with this. First thing: Cheese isn't even an Apple program. It could conceivably run on Apple's OSX (we'll get to why this is in a moment...it's another point). But, fundamentally Cheese is a part of GNOME Linux. This type of application crossing has long been done between operating systems. Examples: Windows Media Player, iTunes, Banshee; Outlook, Apple Mail, Evolution; Internet Explorer, Safari, Epiphany/Firefox; MS Instant Messenger, Apple Chat, Pidgin; I could keep going forever.

And now the reason why it really hacks me off that Apple is doing this--they use a ton of Linux/BSD code to begin with. This is the reason why Cheese will run under OSX...because OSX flat-out uses a BSD Open-Source Kernel. On top of that, consider all the things that Apple has "developed" that really came from Linux-land. You know their whole new "Spaces" thing. Yeah. We've been doing that in Linux since the 90s. Apple's fancy Print Server? Taken code-for-code from Linux. In fact, they recently just bought the company that has been maintaining the code. I didn't worry about it much then...but now. I'm not so sure.

Oh...and how about his one. Safari? Their fancy web browser? Taken from the KDE developers. Code-for-code.

So, after using Open Source Software to basically make your operating system, now you're going to pick on a poor student who made a program that does basically the same thing as your Photobooth App. An application that uses a webcam to take pictures. Wow! There sure was some genius thinking there...I can see why that would be worth of a patent! /sarcasm How big brother can you get?

This is just ridiculous. And one more reason why I will absolutely never buy any Apple product again. After all, the one Apple product I did buy (an iPod), I ended up not liking at all...and I replaced it as soon as I could with an excellent Cowon iAudio player. (60 hours of battery life...no lie! along with crazy codec support...FLAC, ogg, mp3, aac, you name it. Oh yeah...and it can play videos as well. Oh...and did I mention that it is compatible with Windows, OSX, and Linux out of the box? Oh, and it has a built in Radio. A built in Microphone. And Line-in recording. And it's cheaper. Yeah. It's that good.)

I really hope that GNOME or the FSF will help to fight this. I don't really care all that much about Cheese. It's not really functionality that I was absolutely pining for. It's more just the principle. And that's what OSS is all about.

A quick entry put here mostly so that I can remember it, not really for public consumption...unless you have the same problem. :)

I use F-Spot to keep my thousands of photos organized. In a few weeks, Ubuntu is going to release a new version of their OS, and rather than doing the simple upgrade, I've decided I would like to try out a clean install this time. The difficulty with a clean install is that I will be losing my F-Spot database, with all my helpful tags and albums.

Now, I could just re-import all my photos...but that would lose my tag hierarchy and take a while for me to get things all nice and organized again.

As it turns out, it is possible to copy over the F-Spot database. It is located in the following location:

/home/{homefolder}/.gnome2/f-spot/photos.db

Copying this over, along with your Photos directory is not hard. As it turns out, though, if you simply copy your Photos directory over (using drag-and-drop), it does not retain the creation date for the files, so the new F-Spot will not be able to align your copied database with the copied photos.

Luckily, the commandline is to the rescue, and you can simply perform an "archive" copy, which retains all the file metadata, to copy over your photos along with your photo database.

It's as easy as the following:

cp -a {Photos} {New Location}

Sweet.

While out in the pasture, doing the unspeakable deed (see below), I came across this bold fellow. He let me get pretty close to snap a few pictures of him before he jetted off faster than my 4-wheeler could follow. (Not that I chased after him, mind you.)

Ever since Watership Down, I have a huge soft-spot for rabbits. Not those pansy little cotton-tailed white balls of fluff that you might see in the pet shop. No...the real, solid, lightning-fast hare of the wild.

If you recall a few weeks ago, I said I would be reviewing open source programs that can be used to replace their typical proprietary equivalents. I wanted to do about one review per week.

I'm still planning on doing this, and I have the idea for the first review already churning. Unfortunately, in order to do a proper review, I've decided that I need to use the software I am reviewing for at least a week, so there's going to be a 1 week delay with the first review.

To give you a brief preview, I decided for the first review to look at music management and playback software. You know...like iTunes and Windows Media Player. There are many open source alternatives, so that's what we're going to be looking at next week. :)

One of the jobs I don't like doing on the ranch:

Poisoning the prairie dogs. :(

I know it's necessary. The prairie dogs pretty much destroy the pasture, and it's dangerous for the cattle. (Not to mention the diseases they carry). But, gosh darn it, they're kinda cute. And I just hate killing things in general.