Consilience

I just wanted to throw a quick shout out to Spitfire (launchpad profile) for being awesome and making me more productive by getting Tasque working again in Intrepid!

Apparently to get it working in Intrepid he needed to backport mono2, gtk-sharp2, and evolution-sharp. No small tasque (HA!) I’m sure. This also shows how well PPAs can be used by projects to keep their users updated with the latest fixes.

Thanks again to Spitfire for improving my productivity; I didn’t know what to do without Tasque telling me.*

Go out there and get your Tasque working again in Intrepid and be productive. And thank Spitfire while you’re at it!

* Slight exaggeration, but Tasque is one really useful pieces of software.

So, I’ve spent a little over a week setting up my new email consumption/creation system. As you can see from the title of this blog post, there are a few parts to it. Why would I do something crazy like edit config files for 4 different apps JUST to read and write email? Well, I wasn’t happy with Thunderbird (yes, I’ll try 3.0 when it hits the repos) and Evolution wasn’t at all what I wanted. I do have gmail so why not just stick with the web interface? Because I am wanting to do more self-hosted solutions for web apps. Also, since I have more than one account, I want different messages to be sorted different and archived differently.

In Thunderbird I had an extension that allowed me to press “y” and the current message would be “archived” to the gmail All Mail folder. This was great, but it only supported one account. If I was reading my work email in Thunderbird (which is also hosted by gmail) and I hit “y” the message would go to my personal gmail account’s All Mail folder, not the work account one. Not good (and a dumb limitation).

So, what email program allows you to have complete control over those types of settings? Mutt. And yes, (Al)pine also. But, I have friends local to me who use mutt so exchanging .muttrc files and such is easier and we can meet in person to share tips.

What I want to do with this blog post, though, is not convince you that Mutt is the best solution for you. I do want to, however, share what I did to set everything up for use with Mutt. In fact, all the rest of the pieces of this setup can work equally well with some like Alpine or even Thunderbird.

(since it is a long post, I didn’t want to spam your reader, click for the rest of it)
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Here is my predicament:

I take photographs with my new shiny digital camera (thanks to all your input on my previous post) and I use F-Spot to manage my photos. I love F-Spot; it does almost everything I want it to do. It tags photos, it takes care of organizing the files on my harddrive (folders are not a method of categorization for photos, tags are), and it even uploads them to my flickr account.

The thing that it doesn’t do is let me embed my choice of license into the photos. It does let me embed the tags into the metadata, so the base functionality is there.

I am a huge supporter of Open content licenses, specifically Creative Commons licenses [ed: Greg is employed by Creative Commons] and I would love to see the ability to set the license of a photo to something of my choice (eg: CC:BY-SA) and have that license info be a part of the image no matter where it goes. And hey, there is even a bug report/feature request for this: here.

My proposed Use Case:
Jane is your typical photographer who uses Linux. As a Linux user she is more likely to know about open content licenses such as Creative Commons licenses and also more likely to use such a license for her photographs.

Jane takes a bunch of photos and imports them into F-Spot. F-Spot lets her set the license for a group of photos to CC:BY-SA. She then uploads those photos to her website. She makes it clear on her website that all her photos are licensed under CC:BY-SA.

Now, when Yahoo or Google go indexing her website their spiders can programatically discern that those photos are licensed under CC:BY-SA from the metadata. The benefits of this information can be seen when searching flickr for Creative Commons licenses: no more worrying about infringing on other’s copyright when you use a photo. Another example is search.creativecommons.org which searches across multiple sites at once for CC licensed material.

All kinds of cool new automated things can be thought of with this information available within the file. flickr automatically displaying the correct license for a photo without you having to specify it; the same thing with personally hosted photo galleries; users of sites like wikipedia can more easily find images for their uses; etc. Also, now that license information will always be in that file so others who find it will know what they can and can not do with it without asking.

Are you also interested in something like this? Take a look at the information on this wikipage which outlines what you need to do to support this in the XMP metadata standard. The how of doing it is most likely not that difficult since F-Spot is already supporting the metadata standard. Or just subscribe to this bug report so you are kept up to date on its progress.

So, a part of being a domain-owning, server-space-using, web-software-running, open-source-promoting person one needs to periodically update software to latest versions and change software to meet ever changing situations and goals.

In short: I’ve made some changes around here that hopefully you have not noticed[0].

First – I finally upgraded to WordPress 2.7 (yes, a bit late).  What caused me to take so long? I wanted to change my installation method to using svn so I can just “svn sw” when  a new version is released. In doing so I ran into a minor permissions issue that was preventing me from completing the switch over, but thanks to my buddy (and sysadmin) Asheesh, all is better now. Do you want to have easy upgrades of wordpress via svn, check out this guide. It is a bit wordy and I never have liked their banner, but it outlines things in language for everyone.

Second – Blog Spam. Or more correctly BlogSpam. Since I do try to use Open Source solutions for my all of my needs (see my post on TinyTinyRSS) the use of Akismet was a little, well, sad. But, thanks to an Autonomo.us blog post I found out about BlogSpam.net (I love straight forward software names).

Basically it is a drop-in replacement for Akismet but it is Open Source and even complies with the Open Software Service Definition. So if you are looking to remove one more piece of proprietary software from your webpresence, check out BlogSpam.net. And for those of you who use Drupal there is even a BlogSpam.net plugin for that: check out the plugins page.

[0] – I had a minor hickup that most likely lasted from Jan 16th 3am to 3pm EST. During the re-install process I failed to copy back my .htaccess and thus none of the post were showing up since I use “pretty urls.” Sorry if you were trying to reach a post and couldn’t.