A few months ago I discovered the 750 words concept.

The idea is simple: Every day you write down 750 words on anything that comes into your head. It doesn’t have to be well thought out, or even well-argued. You don’t need to spell check it and you don’t need to proofread it. And it’s even better if you don’t read what you’ve written immediately afterwards, or even ever.

You also don’t need to show what you have written to anyone, so you’re free to write about anything you want to without fear of offence or embarrassment.

I write for a living. Every day I churn out thousands of words on one subject or another. So why would I want to add to that load with another 750 words?

Because it is liberating.

I write about anything I am thinking about at the time. I have no specific topic, I don’t have to justify what I put down, nor do I have to rework a paragraph over and over to make a meaning clear. It’s the opposite of what I do for a living.

The real benefit of writing 750 words, though, is that it is a way of clearing the head, a sort of brain drain.

That last term is perhaps the best description of the process and comes from Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way.

Morning Pages

I first came across Cameron’s book many years ago when it was lent to me by an artist friend. In it Cameron describes tools an artist can use to improve their creativity. Among them are what she calls Morning Pages. These are three pages of (preferably longhand) writing done every morning to free up the mind. I didn’t give it much attention the first time around but when I stumbled on the 750 Words version I became a fan.

I type my 750 words into a text editor and save them on my PC. The 750 Words site has a clever online tool that stores your notes for you and even allows you to do some clever analysis on it. I, however, prefer my daily ramblings to be stored offline.

I rarely re-read what I have written. That’s not the point.

Sometimes I think I’ve said something particularly clever in one of my 750 words and it may find its way into something else I write. But I most often simply close the document I’ve been writing into and head onto something else.

As a writer there is an additional benefit: It kickstarts my writing for each day, a sort of “warm-up”. A chance to physically and mentally get ready to write for the rest of the day.

At the same time 750 Words, or Morning Pages, are not only for artists and writers. Clearing your head of clutter, giving voice to innermost or suppressed thoughts, writing through a problem is a time well spent for anyone.

At the worst you could improve your writing skills.

Just about everything Apple does suggests the company lives in a parallel universe.

It’s only in this imaginary world, where normal standards don’t apply, that someone like Steve Jobs could get away with accusing Adobe of not being “open” enough.

In a public letter yesterday, explaining the main reasons for Apple excluding Adobe’s Flash from its products, Jobs wrote that Adobe’s Flash was “a closed system” and that the trend in mobile devices was towards open standards. He writes:

Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc. While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.

Just for fun, try and replace the words “Adobe” and “Flash” in that paragraph with the words “Apple” and “iTunes”. The irony is thick.

The irony may not have been intentional but the smokescreen no doubt was; a means to divert attention away from its own decidedly conservative approach to openness.

Apple goes out of its way to make sure that iPod and iPhone users have to use iTunes to manage their devices. And if you’re on Linux you don’t even have the, dubious, honour of using iTunes because a Linux version doesn’t exist. You also can’t simply manage your iPod through a file manager, Apple wouldn’t like that. Just because you paid for an iPhone doesn’t mean that you have the right to manage it the way you want to.

So much for open standards.

H.264: The new video wars

Its also interesting that Jobs, in a post about open standards, decides to use the H.264 video codec as an example of alternatives to Flash. Technology aside, H.264 is no better than Flash. It is a proprietary standard wrapped in so many patents that it is completely incompatible with the concept of open standards.

Simply replacing a bad proprietary standard with another, equally troublesome, one doesn’t make sense and is of no value in promoting open web standards.

Naturally it’s not really a surprise that Apple is one of the licensors of H.264, as is Microsoft, which has just announced that Internet Explorer’s HTML5 video tag will only support H.264. Opera and Mozilla, however, are sticking with the alternative, Theora, an open source and royalty-free video codec.

Restrooms or Restroom's? Even consistency doesn't seem to matter here.

Welcome to the brave new world of online media. A world where anyone with an Internet connection can be a journalist and bloggers are the new media rock stars. A world where readers can immediately deliver their own opinions, and usually do.

It’s also a world where basic grammar skills are apparently no longer needed.

I’m not particularly fascist when it comes to grammar but I do have some minimum standards. One of those is that I like writers to use apostrophes correctly. It’s a simple thing to get right and yet daily I see blog posts, Twitter messages, news articles and even advertisements with so many randomly used apostrophes that it feels that when the writer does get it right it is probably more by accident than by design.

I know Twitter is not populated only by professional media and that many blogs are never intended to be literary gems but would it really hurt to use apostrophes correctly?

Often it’s the so-called social media gurus, the ones that are trying to sell their Web 2.0 consulting skills, that most often get it wrong. Do I really want a consultant who can’t get a few apostrophes right to tell me how to run my web/social media/whatever strategy? Not likely.

Admittedly, using apostrophes correctly doesn’t gain you much. You’re unlikely to be inundated with fan mail for using them properly. On the other hand, using them incorrectly raises questions about your skills, your ability to communicate, your attention to detail. In many cases you could be written off as an amateur even before the reader reaches the second paragraph.

Using apostrophes correctly is not hard. A few simple rules can make all the difference to your writing. Get it right and you can be judged on the quality of your work. Get it wrong and you risk being ignored.

A few simple rules

The apostrophe is only used in two instances: to show ownership (Bob’s ball) and to indicate missing letters or contractions (it’s late). The apostrophe is not used to indicate a plural (dogs, cats, cars).

Contractions

An apostrophe is used to join two words together and indicate missing letters.

I’m (means I am)
it’s (it is)
they’re (they are)
aren’t (are not)
don’t (do not)
we’re (we are)

it’s vs its

The difficult one here is it’s and its. It’s the one most people get wrong. It’s means “it is”. Its is possessive:

It’s the first release of the software. (It is the first release of the software)
The company has released its financial results. (They are the company’s results)

Possession/Ownership

An apostrophe is also used to indicate ownership:

Mark’s private jet (the jet belonging to Mark)
IBM’s servers
The computer is John’s
The boys’ books (the books belonging to the boys)
The Smiths’ house (the house belonging to the Smiths)

Do not use apostrophes to create a plural

Very often writers see a word ending in an ’s’ and, in a moment of panic, slap in an apostrophe. It’s simple, plurals do not need an apostrophe:

There are many CDs on the shelf (not CD’s) This is the one I see most often.
The computers have been delivered (not computer’s)
The boys play soccer (not boy’s)
The ISPs are involved in a price war (not ISP’s)

Naturally, being English, there are some cases where things are not so clear but in 99 percent of cases these rules apply.

So, there you have it: A (hopefully) simple guide to using apostrophes correctly. And I can now move on knowing I have played my small part in ridding the world of apostrophe abuse.

Ubuntu 10.04, aka Lucid Lynx, is now out in beta and after using it for almost a week it it’s worth looking at some of its highlights and lowlights. Bear in mind that this is a beta release so the final release could be a lot different to what we have here.

The new theme

The most obvious change in Lucid Lynx is the desktop overhaul. Lucid sports a new dark theme with “aubergine” accents. And it is horrible. After all the discussion and promises that a new theme was coming to replace the brown Human theme – it has been more than a year now – the new look is dark and unappealing. Perhaps it is just me who is graphically challenged but the lack of colour differentiation between window border, menu bars and panels makes for a mess of dark all over my screen. And the light theme is no better, except that it makes for a mess of light on the screen.

The new theme aside, there is much about Lucid to like:

MeMenu and Gwibber

Now Ubuntu users can be all social right from their desktop, thanks to the new MeMenu and the greatly improved Gwibber microblogging app. It’s not something I would have imagined to be an important addition to the desktop but having seen it in action it makes a lot of sense. Briefly put, the Social from the Start blueprint outlines Ubuntu’s plan to integrate a broad range of social networks into the desktop. It’s a big ask but with the work done by Ryan Paul on Gwibber it is starting to take shape. Gwibber now supports most popular social networking platforms including Facebook, IRC, Twitter, Identi.ca and Flickr. Together with Empathy, which supports instant messaging protocols such as xmpp, IRC, ICQ and QQ and so on, the Ubuntu desktop now supports almost all social networking platforms directly from the desktop. Tying the whole lot together is the MeMenu which sits in the top right hand of the screen and gives you an overview of all your social networks. It’s a work-in-progress but the intention is great and there is the sense that when bugs are ironed out and all features of the blueprint are enabled the social desktop is going to be a powerful part of Ubuntu.

Sound control

Managing sound on Linux has always been a problem. With a choice of sub-par tools to manage sound users simply had to live with the iffy sound on Linux. The switchover to PulseAudio a couple of years ago promised to fix the problems with a single, integrated tool. But that too didn’t work. At least not until now. The new PulseAudio sound controls in Lucid are finally up to the task of managing a wide array of sound hardware as well being able to manage multiple input/output streams. Being able to manage and control the sound for each individual application radically transforms Ubuntu sound management into something worth using.

Software Center

I’ve been an Ubuntu user from its very first release and before that I used a number of other distributions. As a result I am completely comfortable adding and removing software using the command line and have had little or no time for various incarnations of the Ubuntu Software Center. In most cases they just seemed like a bad front-end to a perfectly good back-end process: apt/deb. But with Lucid this stream of sub-par software management tools has been broken. For the first time it actually feels that the Ubuntu Software Center is a truly useful tool. I still jump to a command line for reconfiguring packages and the like, but increasingly I am finding myself using the Software Centre for basic installation needs.

The new Software Center interface is neat and attractive and with only a couple of options is simple to use. The link between the Software Center and the Software Sources tool feels like a bad hack but at least there is an attempt to integrate that into the Software Center. The Software Center, after all, feels like a natural home for the Software Sources rather than having it lumped in with the many other orphans in the System-Administration menu. Perhaps soon it will be removed for good from the System menu.

Bluetooth support

No, not just Bluetooth support, but intelligent Bluetooth support. If you have Bluetooth enabled, opening the Downloads folder pops up a dialog informing you that you can receive files via Bluetooth into that folder. I confess that I have no idea whether this is new only to Lucid, but I haven’t seen it before. Nevertheless, it is a valuable addition and makes it much easier to shift documents from a phone to a desktop, for example. The preference dialog gives options to share the directory over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi and controls how files are managed. As smartphones become increasingly common, a plain-language approach to sharing files over a range of protocols is becoming increasingly important. It’s a potentially killer feature.

Speed, Ubuntu One Music Store, those buttons

A fresh install of Ubuntu Lucid Lynx is fast; just seconds to get to a usable desktop. I’ve noticed some slowdown if the driver for Nvidia devices is installed but as a whole Lucid is pretty nimble on its feet. Switching applications is fast and slick which makes using Lucid a pleasure. And the desktop as a whole feels a lot more polished.

The Ubuntu One Music Store has had tons written about it and now it is finally here. The only problem is that it doesn’t work at the moment if you’re outside of the US or Europe and there do still seem to be bugs in the overall system. It’s a great idea and is well integrated into Rhythmbox but without testing actual downloads it’s hard to form a verdict on its usefulness.

So much has been written about the decision by Ubuntu to move the minimise/maximise/close buttons to the left of the window bar (60+ pages of discussions on the forum alone)  that there isn’t much worth adding. Except that it’s a decision I can get used to. Mark Shuttleworth has said that the decision paves the way for new features to be added to the right-hand side. I have no idea what those could be but I’m willing to wait.

The Ubuntu Lucid Lynx Beta 1 release can be downloaded from the Ubuntu site. The final release of Ubuntu Lucid Lynx is planned for April 29.

Have you tried the beta release? Let me know what you think.

Patent threats from Microsoft against Linux are not new. But now that bastion of proprietary software appears to have a new, more insidious, strategy in its quest to undermine open source software. It is now getting its partners – companies that want to and need to be on its good side – to license Linux from it. On the surface it’s a crazy proposition but there is some method in this madness.

Remember, Microsoft already claims that Linux infringes on more then 200 of its patents and has struck a pact with Novell, a central part of which is that it won’t sue Novell’s customers for using Linux. For a while back in 2007 it looked as if Microsoft was readying for an all out legal assault on Linux.

But, had Microsoft sued Red Hat, for example, it would very likely have ended up in a courtroom and Microsoft would have been forced to explain exactly which patents it believes Linux treads on. That’s not an ideal situation for the company.

So instead of calling out Linux directly, Microsoft is now quietly getting partners to sign agreements that effectively endorse Microsoft’s claim that Linux infringes on its patents. The key is that Microsoft is going after partners that depend on it for their own survival; companies like Amazon and IO-Data, both of which have licensed Linux from Microsoft in the past few months.

Clearly Microsoft isn’t looking to go after the likes of Red Hat and have its hand forced in a court of law. In fact the company is already working on virtualisation with Red Hat and there has never been any mention of Linux patents in that agreement.

Now, as Glyn Moody points out, the most recent piece of the puzzle comes from Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft’s intellectual property chief and a lead player in Microsoft’s ongoing patent strategy. Gutierrez’s blog post about the current Apple-HTC patent spat is interesting for a number of reasons. The most obvious is the question of why Gutierrez even bothered to pen the post. Obviously the ongoing Microsoft battle with Google (the real target of Apple’s suit) is the most likely reason for Gutierrez’s interest. But read the whole thing and it starts to look like a warning, to mobile phone makers in general and software developers in particular. He writes:

“In the next few years, as the IP situation settles in this space and licensing takes off, we will see the patent royalties applicable to the smartphone software stack settle at a level that reflects the increasing importance software has as a portion of the overall value of the device. In the interim, though, we should expect continued activity.”

In short Gutierrez is saying that software is a key part of the value of smartphones and Microsoft is all about software and patents. he’s also saying that the company is ready to claim its “royalities”, even if this requires “continued action”, much like the Apple-HTC suit.

Microsoft is not threatening Linux directly but, as a increasingly important player in the smartphone market, Linux is going to be in the firing line. Much like the Apple-HTC suit is not really about HTC but rather about Apple vs. Google, Microsoft will go after mobile phone makers that ship Linux-based phones. Those without patent portfolios equal to Microsoft’s will be forced to bow to Microsoft and license Linux from it, implicitly endorsing Microsoft’s claim over Linux.

Gutierrez finishes with the caution: “Apple v. HTC was not the beginning of this process, and it isn’t the end of the story either.”

That we can be certain of.

Taken By Trees has a new album out which mixes Pakistani Qwaali music with Swedish pop sensibilities, an unlikely but mostly successful combination. East of Eden is the follow-up to 2007’s Open Field from Taken By Trees, a project of Victoria Bergsman, ex-frontwoman of The Concretes, and includes the fantastic, mood-setting To Lose Someone. Recorded in Pakistan with Sufi musicians, itself the subject of a National Geographic documentary, East of Eden is an intriguing album. Watch the Waves, on the band’s website is also worth a listen although a little more poppy (pop-y?) than To Lose Someone.There’s not much of a video to watch here, but the song is worth it.

Despite widespread opposition the South African government has signed into law the Films and Publications Amendment Act 3 of 2009 (PDF). Published in the Government Gazette on August 28, the act is a wide-reaching amendment that is ostensibly designed to clamp down on the publication of child pornography but in fact introduces a range of powers to the Film and Publications Board (FPB) that may not be as benign as they seem.

I’m certainly no lawyer and I am very definitely not in favour of any form of child pornography, but reading the legalese contained in the act leaves me with a sense of foreboding. In particular the act paves the way for what the Freedom of Expression Institute (FXI) calls “pre-publication censorship and self-censorship” by establishing a requirement for non-recognised publications to have content approved by the FPB prior to publication or face up to five-year’s imprisonment or a fine. The newly-amended section 16 says (paraphrased) that “any person may request that a publication be classified if it (among others) degrades a person, constitutes incitement to cause harm, advocates propaganda for war, incites violence or advocates hatred based on any identifiable group characteristic and that constitutes incitement to cause harm”. Exempt from these regulations are those “bona fide newspapers” recognised by the Press Ombudsman.

Essentially this means that everyone else is responsible for submitting anything that might seem “offensive” under this act to the board for approval before publication, a situation which is almost certainly unworkable. The sheer volume of submissions would surely swamp the board.

Nevertheless it ought surely to be of concern that there exists a law which could be applied (even randomly) against publishers that fail to submit content to the board. Right now we live in a country with a mostly benign leadership but this may not always be the case. The very public and ugly spats over the ANC leadership over the past year give some indication of the potential for things to change very quickly. It’s also worth remembering ANC spokeswoman Jessie Duarte’s vitriolic attacks on the media earlier this year.

I worry that this type of legislation in the wrong hands could go horribly wrong.

Today I announced that I am closing Tectonic. It’s been a lot harder to do this than I ever imagined it would be.

I made the decision to close Tectonic some time back but have managed to stay the final execution for as long as possible. But eventually I could put it off no longer.

It’s been almost ten years since I started the site and in that time the site has dominated my life. The site was always more than merely a source of income. It was a place for me to express my ideas, it was a place for the open source community to gather and share ideas, it was a place to advance the interests of free and open source software.

In truth it was mostly the last three and was never really the income generator hoped for and it required countless sacrifices and compromises on my part to keep it always ticking over. I’m not unhappy about those sacrifices because I always got so much more out of the chance to run Tectonic than I would otherwise have got. Increasingly, however, the sacrifices became harder to justify and, frankly, the rewards were not abundant enough to make it seem worthwhile each and every day.

All things have their time. Personally I hope that Tectonic made a small difference over the years by giving a voice to the free and open source community. Hopefully it made a difference by raising issues that many other publications simply ignored or were unaware of. Hopefully it made a difference by helping the free software community grow just a little bit stronger.

Over the past week I have received a number of emails, phone calls and direct Twitter messages asking if I, and Tectonic, were okay. Obviously my lack of new content on the site over the past couple of weeks has not gone unnoticed. I appreciate all of these calls. It’s awesome to know that I only have to stop doing what I do on Tectonic for a few days and loyal readers are already asking after me.Thank you.

I have no intention of abandoning free and open source software. I started Tectonic because of my passion for free software and I will continue to promote it at every opportunity; it may just take a different form from a news site.

Closing Tectonic is sad but it also opens up new opportunities. The demands of running the site often made it difficult to pursue new ideas, something that I hope will now be possible. Tectonic has taught me more about online media than I could ever have hoped. Hopefully I can now put that knowledge to good use in new projects, some of which are already in their formative stages.

I started this blog more than a year ago with intention of using it a base to talk about all of the projects I work on, about the things I do, think and see and the plans that I have. Embarrassingly, in the 18 months since I started it, I have posted just three things, this post included. Clearly I am either a lot more lazy than I would like to admit or I have been too busy doing other things. I suspect it is the latter because during the same time I have posted hundreds of articles on Tectonic, written a good year’s worth of material for MyBroadband, experimented with new projects like OpenZA and done the usual freelance work.

Much of that is about to change, however, as I plan to enter yet another new phase. Over the past six months I have been taking stock of the things that I have done and the things that I still do and I am now fairly convinced it is time for some changes. Nothing radical like dumping IT in favour of being an organic farmer (though that does appeal at times) but rather a slightly revised focus and some new projects. Which means, sadly, that some existing projects might well have to come to an end.

This may well be part of a mid-life crisis – I turned 40 recently – but even so, it now feels right to be wanting new stimulating opportunities. Over the years I have invested huge amounts of time and money in projects and ideas, many of which still don’t make me anywhere near a decent living. Which is not to say that they haven’t been immensely rewarding in so many other ways but doing this has meant I have always either had more than one job at a time or I have had to juggle a hundred things to make ends meet while still pursuing new projects and ideas.

Eventually, however, dodging bullets and constantly careening from one place to another gets tiring. It also doesn’t use my skills to their best advantage – or build on their breadth – which is where I think I should be aiming right now.

In just under three weeks I will be be moving on, again. For the past 18 months I have been the chief-sub of Business Report, the South African national business daily newspaper owned by Independent Newspapers. On top of this I was running Tectonic and doing my best to keep my head above water with the Telecommunications Action Group.

Eventually, the unsociable hours, the time not spent with my family, and the never-ending work took its toll and I was forced to make a decision. It was probably inevitable. Tectonic and Tag could be a full-day’s work on any given day; adding another eight hours of intense, deadline-driven daily newspaper action to the mix and something had to give. And so, a couple of days before the Easter long weekend, I resigned and I am planning to leave formal employment at the end of April.

Well, not entirely. I have a rather enticing contract that I am looking forward to, to keep me mostly occupied in the coming months. I don’t want to say too much now because the announcement will be better made when I get down to work. Except to say that I will still be writing technology news as well doing some news editing. More in the coming couple of weeks.

With the remainder of my time I am planning to spend a bit more time building up Tectonic and helping, where I can, with the growth of Treevolution, which is fast becoming a fantastic source of environmental and scientific news. Along the way I will be looking for work doing writing, website building, editing and graphical work (so keep me in mind).

On the one hand I am looking forward to the relative freedom that being mostly freelance will offer. On the other, I am well aware that freelancing is not all about lounging around in your pajamas until noon before heading off for a long lunch. For almost five years before taking my current job I was a freelancer and it has its stresses; and sometimes those stresses are a great deal worse than the ones experienced while in full-time employ.