If you've been an Open Source advocate for any significant amount of time, you've no doubt heard someone say, with a sneer in their voice, "You get what you pay for". Let it be noted, I really hate that cliche. It does make me think, however, about what you really get when you purchase the license to use a commercial operating system like Windows or OSX.

If your life is like mine, it's probably more complicated than it should be. There's that full time job, social events, and vacations to say nothing of various side businesses and their associated deadlines. The kids have Cub Scouts, soccer, and baseball. Since we homeschool, we have science club, field trips and play dates. And it seems that everyone we know has 2 email

When working with regular expressions in a shell script the norm is to use grep or sed or some other external command/program. Since version 3 of bash (released in 2004) there is another option: bash's built-in regular expression comparison operator "=~".

apt-get, up2date, yum, pkgtool, dpkg, rpm -- we have lots of ways to avoid compiling programs. For the most part, I don't think that it's because we don't like to compile programs, but rather because most of the modern package management tools take care of dependancies, versioning, etc.

The first time I played with Zenity, I recognized several potential uses for it. While I'm pretty comfortable with interacting with computers with a command line interface, I know many people are not. Zenity creates GUI widgets from a simple command line and can be used from any shell script.

All your phones, are belong to Google — an overview of Android, the new software stack created by Google for the Open Handset Alliance.

Extensions for OpenOffice.org Impress Extensions have long been written for OpenOffice.org Writer. However, the fact that attention is finally being paid to other applications seems a sign that OpenOffice.org is finally starting to develop an active extension-writing community.

James Gray continues his review of desktop Geographic Information System (GIS) applications with an introduction to the concepts needed to get started with the user-friendly, open-source Quantum GIS. Going Deeper into GIS: an Introduction to QGIS

Ok, confession time. I love webgen but the Geek Ranch site keeps getting more complicated. We want blogs, .... Or, put another way, the dynamic content keeps growing. I finally gave in and admitted we need Drupal. So, on to installing Drupal 6. No hosting location I work with has it on the

I remember when I was a Jr. Geek and could focus on one programming task at a time. Today, besides having all too many Linux-related tasks, I have an assortment of other things to deal with. This last week, one of my distractions turned into a new programming project.

After a slow start, add-ons for OpenOffice.org are finally starting to reach a critical mass. When I last wrote about add-ons for OpenOffice.org in September 2004, the examples were relatively limited, with extendedPDF the outstanding example.

Recently I have been grumbling about project management, accounting and organizational software in general. Basically, Gixia and I want to just build the Geek Ranch rather than be bogged down with overhead. The reality is, however, this is too big a project to do without some back-end organization. As I looked for specific packages for each item I was overwhelmed with

I hate accounting. The one accounting class I took in college proved that to me. The fact that I could get an A in the class by doing one homework problem and copying all the others during class was only part of the reason. But, it's related. I hate doing the same thing over and over and, to me, that is exactly what accounting is.

I love planning but I hate planning software. It's an interesting problem. When I am working on something alone I tend to outline the project, estimate each piece and be done with it. My estimates tend to be accurate and the project gets done.

This article provides an overview of Linux-based tools for Geographic Information Systems (GIS), including a quick take on the ESRI's ArcReader. Future articles will explore this and other individual tools in greater depth. The Story of a Map Lover, GIS User

The path to opening a Geek Ranch is not exactly straight. That is, each week there is one more strange thing that needs to be done. This week, it happens to be surveys. Not the measure the ground kind—we already did that—but the on-line ask questions kind.