XML Finland, Pt 2

I'll be presenting at XML Finland on November 10. Looking forward to it already.

Google Plus

Yesterday, I started my browser and found that Google had added You+ to the far left on www.google.com. Being the geek I am, naturally I joined this initiative. Google Plus immediately reorganised my Google settings and all of a sudden, my Blogger page is nowhere to be found. I had to go back to the previous Settings version to find it.

I'm all for change, but I don't like this type of change.

Me and XML in Stockholm... Again

I'll be talking about XML, modularised documentation and such in Stockholm on December 7. The event is a one-day course organised by Dokumentinfo (link in Swedish).

XML Prague 2012

Speaking of XML conferences, XML Prague 2012 has been announced and will take place a month earlier than the last few times, on February 10-12. The venue is also new, a good thing since the last two events were sold out.

Looking forward to this one already.

XML Finland

XML Finland 2011 will be held on board a cruise ship on November 9-10. Looks like fun, so I've submitted a presentation. Wish me luck.

Roland D-50 Key Servicing

I serviced my old Roland D-50 today after noticing problems with the aftertouch of two keys. It seems the key contacts need yearly mending to work--I took the whole thing apart about a year ago, cleaning all 61 keys and their contacts.

Here's a useful web page for those of you who have a D-50 in need of servicing.

Flight Sims

There is a terrific open source flight simulator called FlighGear. It's freely available for my platform of choice, Debian Linux (and a number of others, including Windows and Mac OS X) and it's quite mature these days, so naturally it's what I run when I want to fly a plane these days. When I still had a Windows partition that worked, I have to admit I quite liked Microsoft's classic Flight Simulator, but my Vista partition doesn't work all that well and anyway, Microsoft killed off the sim a year or two ago. FlightGear is a more than adequate replacement.

Today I learned that somebody is marketing an older FlightGear version under a different name (Pro Flight Simulator), charging around $50 for a DVD or download and promising free lifetime updates. Of course, there is no (easily found) mention of FlightGear anywhere on their site, and I doubt the source code is easily available, either.

It has to be somewhere, though. See, FlightGear is GPL software, which basically means that you can do whatever you want with the software (including selling copies of it) for as long as you also make available the source code. I think GPL lists a few other conditions as well, but the idea is that software should be free (as in speech).

So what these people do when ripping off free software is most likely not illegal, merely unethical. To further firmly establish themselves in the gutter, they have produced a number of blogs and fake reviews to market the product, seemingly without any shame; do a Google search if you are interested, but I won't help their cause by giving you a direct link.

Read all about the scam at http://www.flightgear.org/flightprosim.html, and download a FREE copy of the latest version if you are interested in flight sims. Or just spread the word.