Vinayak Hegde

USB pen drives have become cheap (8GB < INR 1000) for organizations to hand them out on occasions with company logos. I have 5-6 of these already. At the recent Google Developer day, Google handed out 2GB USB pen drives as goodies. I was trying to put it to good use by installing Bootable Linux on it. However, after several failed attempts to install Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex and boot using it, I gave up.  The problem was incompatibility between my Thinkpad and the USB drives. Some combinations do not work for USB booting .

I looked at portableapps site and decided to give it a spin. Portable Apps are applications that can completely run from portable devices and use it as a data store. This was a great help for  me as I keep moving between machines fairly frequently. I downloaded the installer and installed the portable apps. The installer is small and you get most of the apps you would typically use. You can also download more apps from the portable apps website. It has a nice launcher (shown above) that appears in your system tray as soon as you plug in your drive.

The portable applications are currently open source software as they are easy to customize and unencumbered by proprietary licenses and restrictions for distribution. Next time you need to do a presentation and do not want to disconnect some else’s laptop, you can just use your USB drive to make that presentation. All the software you need will be right there. The website also has several simple games as well.

Next I downloaded Stellarium from Portable apps Gallery and installed Stellarium which is an open source planetarium application which simulates the night sky at any location on earth. Now I can run Stellarium from any machine when I go stargazing. Pretty cool huh ? . Picture 3 above (click to enlarge) shows how the sky will look (looking west) today night.

I have been using Wordweb for over 2 years (on different laptops). It has a good dictionary which includes pronunciation and usage information. While looking up “pabulum” from a NYTimes Guy Kawasaki interview it gave me this message.

“You have been using wordweb for over a year. Please remember that you may continue using this free version only if you took at most four flights (two return flights) in the last 12 months and you do not own a SUV. If you do not qualify you must uninstall this program or order the pro version, otherwise this is software theft. Al users also benefit from the extra features of Wordweb Pro”.

There is a weird sense of fairness in this message – “If you can afford it, please pay up or uninstall”. The software author is banking on the fact that if you can afford to pay for it and don’t pay for it then you have a sense of guilt. You would just pay up to clear your conscience. But I am not sure how that equates to software theft. The user (in this case me) has not pirated the software or got it off a warez site, so a message such as this is disconcerting.

The Jargon files by Eric S Raymond defines guiltware as

A piece of freeware decorated with a message telling one how long and hard the author worked on it and intimating that one is a no-good freeloader if one does not immediately send the poor suffering martyr gobs of money.

Nevertheless, Wordweb is a good software and I don’t mind paying for it. I wish however the software author would not send me on a guilt trip. What do you think ?

PS: Then there’s beerware and postcardware as well Read the rest of this entry »