RMS and Philosophy of Free Software
Last Friday I got once in a life time opportunity to participate in a conference where Richard Stallman (RMS) did the key note speech. If you do not know who is RMS, he is the father of "Free Software Foundation" and he is the one who started GNU project. He is a really interesting guy.
From that key note speech I got to know about four freedoms related to free software.
0. The freedom to run the program as you wish.
1. The freedom to study the program's source code and then change it so the program does what you wish.
2. The freedom to distribute exact copies to others, when you wish.
3. The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others, when you wish.
Other than that I learnt that it is note fair name popular open source OS "Linux" as "Linux". It has to be corrected GNU/Linux since Linux is only the kernel where GNU project developed all other components required for the OS.
ZOTERO, Ultimate Research Tool for Students
As students we have to do lot of research on various subjects. when we go researching stuff in the Internet, sometimes it can be very difficult to keep up with the information we come across and keep them organized. Before I came across this wonderful tool Zotero what I did was save all important web pages, PDF documents, etc... in one folder and later open one by one and read them. When I'm writing a report on something this opening one by one and reading it can be really annoying.
But with Zotero all this can be done very easily. This Firefox extension can keep everything very organized. Zotero can save files, PDFs, images, links, and snapshots of web pages along with the citation.
Here are some of the other features that Zotero has to offer:
- Automatic capture of citation information from web pages
- Storage of PDFs, files, images, links, and whole web pages
- Flexible notetaking with autosave
- Fast, as-you-type search through your materials
- Playlist-like library organization, including saved searches (smart collections) and tags
- Platform for new forms of digital research that can be extended with other web tools and services
- Runs right in your web browser
- Formatted citation export (style list to grow rapidly)
- Free and open source
- Shared collections
- Remote library backup
- Integration with Microsoft Word and other word processors
- Access your library from anywhere via the web
- Advanced search and data mining tools
- Recommendation engine and RSS feeds
- Wide variety of import/export options
Eclipse's Local History Saved Me ...
Today while I was working on our "Financial Planing System" project I replaced one simple code fragment throughout the project. That ruined how the application works. Since I've changed nearly 20 source files correcting would have been a nightmare.
But fortunately, Eclipse is keeping track of the local changes done to source file. Because of that I've been able to replace the changes I did using that.
You can compare the changes you have done very easily.
This is a really cool feature to have, specially if you are not using source control system. Even with source control local history can be very useful.
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