The importance of rewards

A reason to reconsider money as the source of creativity (and as a consequence, the importance of highly restrictive intellectual property rights regimes):

Studies Find Reward Often No Motivator – GNU Project – Free Software Foundation (FSF)

There is an old joke that nicely illustrates the principle. An elderly man, harassed by the taunts of neighborhood children, finally devises a scheme. He offered to pay each child a dollar if they would all return Tuesday and yell their insults again. They did so eagerly and received the money, but he told them he could only pay 25 cents on Wednesday. When they returned, insulted him again and collected their quarters, he informed them that Thursday’s rate would be just a penny. “Forget it,” they said – and never taunted him again.

This is from on interesting article on GNU.org about rewards and motivation. According to the article, intrinsic motivators can be far more important than extrinsic motivators (like money, prizes, etc.)

Setting up OpenOffice 2.0 on OS X

There are two versions of OpenOffice for OS X:

• The official X11 port that uses Apple’s X11 to present OpenOffice as it appears on a Linux or Windows box. This port is a bit snappier and uses the latest codebase. However, it’s more difficult to install and use and isn’t well-integrated with other OS X apps.
• NeoOffice, which uses Java to display a slightly modified version of OpenOffice that looks more like a native Aqua application. This port is slightly more sluggish and it uses an older version of OpenOffice. However, it is much easier to use and integrates well with other Mac applications, uses Mac fonts by defaults, etc.

Both are extremely stable and have roughly the same features. The purpose of this post isn’t to argue about which is a better approach to OpenOffice on the Mac. Instead, I want to show — clearly — how to get a good working installation of OpenOffice via X11, since some of the documentation is buried.Installing:

1. Download and install Apple’s X11 (mount the DMG and double click on the package)
2. Download OpenOffice for X11 and install by dragging OpenOffice.org 2.0 into your applications folder.

Now installation is technically complete — you can open the application by double clicking on its icon, which will automatically open the X11 server.

However, by default, Mac fonts will not be used in OpenOffice.org. To extend the font selection, download and install Fondu — the open source font converter — by double clicking on the package. With Fondu installed, OpenOffice.org 2.0 will automatically attempt to convert as many of your fonts as possible from the Mac format to TTF, which it can use.

Note: It is also possibly to manually convert fonts using Fondu. From the Terminal, use the syntax:

fondu path/fontname

and Fondu will create a TTF file of the supplied font.

Even after Fondu has been installed and your font library has been extended, the fonts may not look 100% right on the screen. This is because X11 treats fonts differently when printing than when displaying on screen. However, any printed file or exported PDF should look fine.

Custom keyboard shortcuts in TextWrangler

Ha! I finally figured it out. None of my web or documentation searches revealed the answer, and I had almost given up. If you have an AppleScript that you want to assign a keyboard shortcut to in TextWrangler, go to "Window: Palettes: Scripts" to turn on the scripts palette, which contains a "Set Key" button.

Why is this important? For example, I can now use TextWrangler as my LaTeX editor without sacrificing any of the convenience of TeXShop — I set up some custom AppleScripts that will send my TeX, R and HTML files to the correct programs. This is a nice feature because TextWrangler is such a powerful editor, and I write code enough that I actually need that power.

Another reason to use open-source software

There’s a dialog. A bunch of people wanted to be able to add YouTube snippets on their WP.com blogs — so they added the feature. I got jealous and wanted to add Odeo clips, so they said they’d look into it. When NeoOffice changed to the latest version of Java, I noticed some font and speed issues and reported them. And they got fixed. When was the last time you emailed Microsoft to tell them that there software was buggy and they fixed it?

How to maintain an entire website for free

UThe internet is an amazingly effective information resource. Using nothing but online resources, I have learned LaTeX, R, Unix and advanced SAS programming, to name a few. I have also downloaded amazing, free and open-source applications that I use every day. But why are all of these things available for free? Because content creators — those passionate enough to spend their free time researching, writing, programming or consolidating information — love to share the product of their work.

But if you're anything like me, you really don't want to spend a lot of money on what it essentially a hobby. With the scope of free web applications available today, however, you don't have to spend money to run a nice-looking site.

Site hosting
A traditional website is comprised of a splash page with navigation to the site's different webpages. These pages are often coded in plain HTML. However, the WordPress blogging software is so close to a content-management system that it can be used to create what is essentially a "static" webpage with its content posted in chronological order. The WordPress software is free and open-source, requiring only a webhost that supports PHP and MySQL. However, such hosting can easly cost hundreds of dollars per year. WordPress.com is a free, hosted blogging service that uses a multiuser version of the WordPress platform.

The limitations of using WordPress.com rather than hosting your own blog or static website include:

* While there are many themes to choose from on WordPress, you can not change themes or use your own custom theme. However, you can change the categories (subsections) that your page has, as well as the other websites to which you link. (You can use custom templates on Blogger, but you can't use well-integrated categories, which makes Blogger less well suited for operating a full-fledged website.)

* Your website will be a subdomain of WordPress.com, for example, dataninja.wordpress.com. You can purchase a domain name (like dataninja.info) and have it redirect to your WordPress.com blog, but that costs (just a little) money, and I'm going for a strictly free ($0.00) setup.

It's extremely easy to add new content to your page if you're using WordPress.com. Just sign in, type your new page into the rich post editor, select the category(ies) under which it will be posted, and click on publish. It's much easier than hand-coding the HTML.

File hosting
If you webpage won't have any downloadable files, then you're already done. On Dataninja, I wanted to share PDF files of tutorials on performing certain tasks and custom AppleScripts that I wrote to integrate research applications on Mac OS X with readers.

Streamload offers 25gb of free file hosting. Unlike other online file storage services, Streamload is fast, and does not require users to log in to access your files. You can upload files and move them to your "hosted" folder, which will give them a unique URL to which you can link from your WordPress.com blog.

Update: Google Pages offers 100mb of free file hosting with no (apparent) restrictions on file types. The hosting is very fast with an Ajaxy upload interface. You can't FTP in, of course, but such are the sacrifices of the free website owner.
Combining WordPress.com and Streamload, you can easily operate a fairly rich website at absolutely no cost. Naturally, if you have special needs that are not met by these free services, you may want to consider purchasing hosting. But this setup (or similar setups using alternate services) will enable many to share their work — the printing press of the future is costless (well, it's supported by optional add-ons and advertising revenue).

New WP Themes

Silently, a new theme — Contempt — was added to WordPress.com. It’s based on Kubrick and in general it looks nice. But it has two problems: the headers on the navigation pane boxes aren’t well-centered and the bullets look awful. For some reason, the designer chose to use the “o” character, instead of just setting list-style-type to circle. It just doesn’t look quite right.

On the other hand, Toni got it’s color options added — blue, green pink and gray. I really like this theme — it’s stylish, simple and elegant. I only wish it had a search box.

More on the evils of PowerPoint

Wired 11.09: PowerPoint Is Evil

At a minimum, a presentation format should do no harm. Yet the PowerPoint style routinely disrupts, dominates, and trivializes content. Thus PowerPoint presentations too often resemble a school play -very loud, very slow, and very simple.The practical conclusions are clear. PowerPoint is a competent slide manager and projector. But rather than supplementing a presentation, it has become a substitute for it. Such misuse ignores the most important rule of speaking: Respect your audience.

The main problem with PowerPoint is that, although it offers a tool in which effective, professional-looking presentations can be created, it also makes it too easy to create poorly designed presentations. A good presentation should either:

1) Use bulleted lists to outline major topics, but not present all of the information. In other words, the presentation is only a prompt for the speaker; most of the actual content is presented verbally.

2) Present complicated information one topic at a time, one slide at a time. That is, each slide should represent one point on an outline. This way, important information doesn’t get tucked under the nth subpoint way at the bottom of a slide and graphs, tables and other graphics aren’t obscured by textual information.

If your impulse is to include every single piece of information in an outline format, you want to write lecture notes, not a PowerPoint presentation. Consider writing a set of notes separately and using a presentation that follows the sketch of the notes, but doesn’t cover them point for point.

An old article on OSS

I just found an old Economist article about open-source software. Much of the article has to do with simply describing what it is and how it works. But there are two passages that give insight into how OSS is economically sustainable:

Most open-source projects are organised in much the same way. Their members are motivated mainly by fame rather than fortune; it is considered a coup to write a “patch� that passes the peer review of fellow developers and gets incorporated in the next release. And most open-source projects are governed by a “benevolent dictator�, an individual with exceptional programming, organisational and communications skills—such as Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux.

and

Ironically, it is IBM, the hackers’ original arch-enemy, that has gambled the most on Linux so far. Big Blue recently announced that it will spend $1 billion on Linux this year because it really wants the program to become a computing standard. It is doing this because it sees itself mainly as a provider of e-business solutions, and because a standard operating system would make it much easier to integrate them, explains Irving Wladawsky-Berger, IBM’s man in charge of its Linux operations.

The point is that the success of big OSS projects like Linux and OpenOffice depends on (1) enthusiastic developers that are willing to work, in part, for fun and prestige and (2) businesses realizing that having this software around — software that sets up standards, like OpenOffice’s ODT — is valuable for them, because they have easier integration and more standardization, and donating money to those developers.
Out in the open | Economist.com

How to add categories to your Blogger blog

I used to use Blogger for my personal weblog, but switched over to WordPress.com because (a) I wanted to have categories and (b) unlike most bloggers, I didn’t want to be able to edit my template — I thought that I was becoming too concerned with how the blog looked and forgetting about how it read.

So the main feature that Blogger has over WordPress.com is that you can edit templates. WordPress.com, however, offers categories, password protection, better file uploading and wysiwyg editing, and, of course, open source coolness — and it doesn’t stamp anything garish at the top of your blog (like the navbar). And if you want all of those features as well as customizable templates/themes, your probably a pretty serious blogger. In that case, you should consider forking over a modest sum for a webhost that offers PHP and MySQL and do a custom WordPress install on your own server. I’ve done it — it’s really easy and well documented.

Anyway, I just skimmed Freshblog’s complicated three-part series on adding categories to Blogger blogs using a combination of del.icio.us and javascript. I’d like to add my own tutorial on adding categories to your Blogger blog:

1. Switch to WordPress

That pretty much covers it. My one-step process will solve all of your problems. And if you’re doing a custom install, you can even import all of your old posts.

When open-source is better

Sometimes open-source software isn’t as good as commercial software, it’s better — at least with respect to certain needs. For example, OpenOffice does just about everything that Word will do, but it has a much nicer equation editor, and it’s spreadsheet app (Calc) does a much better job of exporting to CSV. For smaller datasetes, R has a lot of the power of SAS, but it makes it much easier to handle things like finding residuals, performing regression diagnostics and making graphics. And LaTeX — for long, structured documents, there is absolutely no competition.

Of course, all of these apps have their drawbacks — OpenOffice is big and slow, R chokes on big datasets, LaTeX is a bit complicated to use properly. Still, the commercial apps have drawbacks too, and they’re often worse. I think the reason why some open-source apps are so suited for particular tasks is because they have been written by people with a genuine need to perform those tasks. Less features are added, but the really important ones always are, and they’re implemented very nicely.