Microsoft Fear-Uncertainty-Doubt (FUD) video attacks on OpenOffice.org

To tell you the truth, I’m kind of agree with some points in this video even before it was published.

There are stories of organizations, school computer labs or home users that switch back to Microsoft Office after they have use OpenOffice.org. There is even a local (Malaysian) joke that poke fun at the amount of training and costs required to educate staffs to use OpenOffice.org which eventually exceeds the cost Microsoft Office Suite.

We have used a lot of open source software, libraries and components in our daily lives without realizing, In case of OpenOffice.org, I think the problem is just the process and familiarity with application. Microsoft has spend a lot of money to ensure every schools, university, computer labs used its products to educate our younger and future generations that eventually would be accustom to Microsoft branded products. It is a great business strategy, but the question is, who would benefit the most from this scheme?

Play Urban Terror, a free Counter-Strike like game on Linux

Right now I’ve been playing Urban Terror (or UrT), it is a First Person Shooter (FPS) game similar to Counter-Strike. The game was developed using the open source Quake III Arena engine and can be played under GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems.

You can download Urban Terror binaries from Urban Terror Official Website

The game is available for 32bit and 64bit platform and is tested on Fedora 13 and Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat) releases

Broadcom has released open source Linux Wifi 802.11n drivers

In a welcoming step, Broadcom finally released the the source code of its wifi (802.11n) Linux drivers under open source license. The source code can be found on the Linux staging-next tree at git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/gregkh/staging-next-2.6.git in the in the drivers/staging/brcm80211 directory. The open source drivers will support current chips (BCM4313,BCM43224, BCM43225) and it also acts as a framework to support future chips by Broadcom.

This can be considered as a significant move made by the company, as Broadcom chips are widely in use on laptops and netbooks in the market. Its competitor, Atheros, has already open sourced its drivers back in 2008, which in turn, made Atheros drivers much better supported on various operating system platform compared to Broadcom.

Previously, Linux users with Broadcom chip, have to rely on NDISwrapper utilities to enable the wifi functionality on their laptops.

[source][via]

DateDiff – A simple JavaME mobile app to calculate the day differences between two dates

There are times where I am required to calculate the day/month/year differences between two dates, which I found a little bit troublesome to do repeatedly even if it is just a simple estimate. So in turn, I created this mobile app to do the job, which greatly increase my productivity! Here i’m releasing the source code to DateDiff, which is coded and compatible with all JavaME phone:

DateDiff mypapit

DateDiff.jar – binary (MIDP 2.0)
datediff_src.zip (source code)

DateDiff is copyrighted by me, and is licensed under a BSD-like license, you can read the terms of use from the ‘About’ menu or from the source code.