Alright, I admit it, up ‘til a couple of weeks ago I was still running Windows 2000 Professional. In my defence, I have been using all the free software I could on Windows—primarily Open Office, Firefox and Thunderbird. I was a bit reluctant to go through all the trouble of migrating across to a GNU/Linux distribution for two reasons. First, because my PDA and stereo bluetooth headset require software which doesn’t run on Linux. Secondly, I was a little intimidated by having to go back to using a command line after so long just using a GUI.

Professor Donald E. Knuth doesn’t need an introduction: he created TeX (a powerful typesetting system) and METAFONT (a program to design fonts). He also designed a font family, called Computer Modern, which is the default choice of TeX.

While developed and supported with the best of intentions, Linux is still based on a wide range of different applications and systems working together. From the free software perspective this is its power; many people working together to produce a top quality operating system.

I’ll admit right up front that I am something of a regular expression junkie. Years before I even knew such a system existed (before the days of the internet) I wrote my own regular expression system to handle the needs of a free-text database management package. Today, we are all familiar with regular expressions in Perl, sed, awk/gawk and even in “user” applications like email and word processors.

We all know that the typesetting of Free Software Magazine is entirely TeX-based. Maybe somebody don’t know yet that Prof. Donald Knuth designed TeX, and did it about 30 years ago. Since then the TeX project has generated a lot of related tools (i.e., LaTeX, ConTeXt, , and others).

You are a system administrator for a small company—the captain of the firm’s computers. Doing your job well means that you may sail through the seas of information technologies unhindered, in short, the company’s IT infrastructure will stay in place. Should you mess up you will find that the email has stopped working, the web surfers are stranded and you have pinned your ship on the reefs and rocks that scatter the virtual world, or in other words, the company will not be functioning well and you be burning its money.

Free software is fast becoming the standard in quality software. It’s now possible for anyone to find a quality, free replacement for almost any proprietary program. In many cases, the free program is better than its proprietary counterpart.

In this article I’m going to look at a staple application of many user’s lives. No, not a web browser, but an IRC client. Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is a simple, but effective, way for multiple users to communicate with each other in an environment that most likely equates to your local bar.

If you haven’t paid attention, the World Wide Web has been changing dramatically over the past few years. It used to be that if you wanted to create a web site, you either had to learn the basics of HTML, or spend a few hundred dollars on a web development tool. Or hire a designer to put one together for you.

When I received the first email from Tony asking me to set up the typesetting subsystem for Free Software Magazine (FSM), I was proud... and terrified. I have spent the last six years of my life using LaTeX and, ultimately, TeX, to typeset single articles, songbooks, my thesis, CV’s, flyers, and letters. Even though my knowledge of the companion packages and classes was pretty good, the first thing I thought was: “How is it possible to compose a whole magazine, article by article, and at the same time build the table of contents (ToC) in the same way as the composition of books?” The problem is that every article has a title, a subtitle and one or more authors: all of this information has to be placed neatly in the ToC. Even after a bit of research, I was still wondering: “Will I be able to do a proper job?”

In this article I will describe an experience I had that began with the failure of some RAID5 disks at the Hospital of Pediatric Especialties, where I work. While I wouldn’t wish such an event on my worst enemy, it was something that made me learn about the power of knowledge—a deep knowledge, which is so important in the hacking culture.

In summer 2004, OrganicaDTM’s design team discussed a project in a typical production meeting when suddenly a new idea arose. Somebody said that as we used free software daily in our business, we should be involved in a deeper way with free software community and should find a way thank their members for their efforts. We all looked at each other, knowing that that person was right. But how? We had helped in some free software projects in the past with translations and programming of add-ons (Postnuke, Xaraya, Gnome, etc.), but we were designers and we wanted to help with something related to our field.

Material products are getting “smarter” in that more and more of the value of a material product is contained in the information it carries, rather than in its material substance. R. Buckminster Fuller called this process “ephemeralization”[1], and it is one means by which the economics of matter—predicated on the conservations of mass and number—are becoming sidelined by the properties of information. Furthermore, both the capital and marginal cost of making products has trended consistently and rapidly down as manufacturing tools become both cheaper and more versatile, so that the capital cost of an object is increasingly not in the capital equipment required to manufacture it, but in the effort required to design it.

In a world where people wish to protect their work in any way, there are plenty of licenses [5] that protect the rights of their work, while still allowing it to be shared.