Free College Education, Sort Of

MIT is making its entire course curriculum available for free on the internet. The only thing missing is the professor. Some of the classes that you can see have video, many have lecture notes and presentations.

The catalog has over 1800 classes and pretty much every topic area is covered.

They make a point that by using this site, you are not getting an MIT education. You're just using their materials:

MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is a web-based publication of virtually all MIT course content. OCW is open and available to the world and is a permanent MIT activity.

What is MIT OpenCourseWare?


MIT OpenCourseWare is a free publication of MIT course materials that reflects almost all the undergraduate and graduate subjects taught at MIT.

• OCW is not an MIT education.


• OCW does not grant degrees or certificates.


• OCW does not provide access to MIT faculty.


• Materials may not reflect entire content of the course.

You can read more in the FAQ.

Technorati : college, courseware, education, mit, university

5 Free Online Editors

Editors and word processors are personal things. Some people like command line editors like vi and others hate them. Some people want a GUI but want it to just sort of sit there, others want bells and whistles.

I like online editors because I use a lot of different computers. I tend to store text documents and source code on-line. That way it doesn't matter where I am, I always have my documents and source code available to me (as long as I have an internet connection).

Here are a few different editors (all available online) for you to try. I've run into quite a few editors (amongst other sites) that require MSIE. All of the links below will work with Firefox.

Big Huge Labs Writer - Nice, clean editor. Keyboard short cuts. Auto save. Simple, elegant. Distraction free writing.

Edit Pad - Very bare bones. Blank screen. Just start typing. If easy and free is your type, this is your editor.

Google Docs - Full featres, MS Office compatible, word processer. All the bells and whistles. Now with offline support.

Dark Copy - Another distraction free editor. Small area or full screen.

JavaScript VI - It doesn't get any more painful than this. If you hate VI, do not click this link. If you love VI, now you can access it from any computer.

Technorati : editor, free, word processor

More Free Books

I can't believe I haven't blogged about this as yet. It's been around for a long time.

Baen books has the Baen Free Library. Now, I wouldn't call this their A+ catalog. Most of these are more frequently seen in the bargain section at Barnes and Nobles rather than a best seller list but some of these are hidden gems. There are also some books from the masters: Norton, Bujold, Hogan, Lackey, Laumer, Niven, Pournelle, Saberhagen and Turtledove.

This site is well worth a look and a bookmark. Heck, download them and put them on your laptop just in case you get stuck in an aitport some where. It might be fun to just browse them and find a new favorite.

Technorati : books, free, sci-fi

Free Sci-Fi Books

Tor has opened a new Sci-Fi community called tor.com. How appropriate. ;-)

There are blogs, forums, etc but the most important thing is the freebies. Free books to be exact. Some really good ones too. Scalzi, Carver, Turtledove, and lots more.

There are also free short works available.

Right now there are mote free novels available than stories but I expect that ratio to flip in time.

Get'em while they're hot!

Technorati : free books, sci fi

Recommend a good, free HTML Editor?

This isn't related to my blogging. I use Zoundry Raven for blogging and am very happy with it. I am asking about HTML editors for a regular web site that I am working on.

I used Arachnophilia for a long time as my HTML editor. It's a robust editor, but it really is that, an editor. It's starting to feel a bit long in the tooth for me. I've decided to move on to a more CSS oriented WYSIWYG style editor. I used Dreamweaver many years ago but don't feel like dropping that kind of money on an HTML editor.

Right at the moment, I am using Amaya. While Amaya is free and supports CSS (to a degree) it has some very annoying issues. In general, like most open source, it feels somewhat incomplete. It also has a tendency to lose my background, icons, etc every now and then. Most times, resaving the file fixes it but sometimes I have to exit and come back. The worst thing though, is that it doesn't support SSI so my pages all look funky. Still, it's completely free and that's a bonus.

I loaded up Trellian Webpage and it looks promising. I played with it for a few minutes but haven't actually started using it. Two others I've downloaded but not played with yet are Aptana Studio and Evrsoft 1st Page 2000. The Aptana Studio looks good because it also does Ruby, PHP and Adobe Air via plugins.

Before I invest anymore time on this, I figured I would put the question out to you. What tool are you using for HTML development and/or can you recommend a good tool for me to try? It needs to support CSS and I would prefer some kind of support for SSI. Do any of the ones I already have fit the bill? Any better suggestions?

Thanks in advance,

LewisC

Del.icio.us : css, editor, free, html

ScrnShots - Free Screen Shot Hosting

LewisC's An Expert's Guide To Oracle Technology

This ain't no Flickr! Every blogger needs a place to host screen shots. Flickr is the best place for photos (IMHO) but they ask that all the images you post be photos (not that they're rabid about that). But now there's SCRNSHOTS.com. Unlimited screen shot uploads. You can tag them for easy searching. The photo below is a screen shot of scrnshots.com and it is hosted on scrnshots.com. How recursive is that!

It works pretty much like flickr. Take a screen shot and save it on your computer. Upload it, add a description and tags. Embed it using the provided html. They do ask that you link back to them which is the same thing flickr asks.

On the social side, I've found that people frequently comment on shots. It's fun to browse around and look at the shots other people are taking. I'm going to try to post at least one interesting shot per day and I'll try to comment on any interesting ones that I find.

I am very happy to have this available. I'm not sure what the financial model is for this. I'm hoping they don't disappear anytime soon. Flickr seems to be going strong, especially now that they got bought. Maybe google will buy this one.

LewisC

Free Floor Panning Software

I've started playing with a new online tool, Floorplanner.com. This is a really neat little tool. From the site:

Buying a new home, rearranging your room, or moving into a new office? You can save time and have more fun if you lay out your ideas ahead of time.

Floorplanner is the easiest, quickest, and best looking way to create and share interactive floorplans. Using point-and-click, drag-and-drop tools, you can make your floor plan in minutes, and rearrange it as often as you want. Then you can save, send, and print your designs to share them, or place them on your own website.

It's easy to use and works in almost any modern browser, no extra downloads required.

I haven't used it heavily but so far it works fine. The free version will only let you create a single floor plan. Since I ownly own a single house, that's not a problem for me. ;-)

You can upgrade to the Plus version. That gives you 5 floor plans. It costs $30.50 per year. That's about what you would pay for a comparable desktop version but a desktop version would give you unlimited floorplans.

You can also upgrade to Pro for $24.50 per month. That seems really steep to me even for a professional.

The free version is definitely worth a look though.

Clonezilla: Free Disk to Disk Transfer for Laptops

LewisC's An Expert's Guide To Oracle Technology

I wrote some time ago that I had bought a new laptop. My old one had died. I didn't need to transfer any files (couldn't actually, the hard drive was toast) but I had my backups so I didn't lose any data.

The one downside to the new laptop (which otherwise had awesome specs) was a 200GB 4800 RPM hard drive. After giving it a few months, I decided I had enough of it. Vista is not exactly a speed demon anyway but on that disk I was getting old waiting for it. I decided to swap hard drives and if Vista was still slow I would upgrade to XP.

So, I ordered a new 200GB 7200 RPM hard drive. It's a SATA drive from Hitachi (replacing a SATA drive from Toshiba). I got an excellent deal from TigerDirect.com.

My existing drive was partitioned into a 188GB C drive and a 12GB D drive. The D drive is a recovery drive that I don't need.

The new drive came yesterday and I installed it last night. Before doing so, I did a partition image of my C drive using Clonezilla.

Clonezilla is a replacement for Norton Ghost. It takes a bit by bit image of the hard drive and can write that image on a new drive. You download Clonezilla as an ISO and burn it to a disk. It's fairly small at about 80MB. It's a Debian Linux install with just enough Linux to work and a bunch of utilities.

From the Clonezilla website:

What is Clonezilla ?

You're probably familiar with the popular proprietary commercial package Norton Ghost®, and its OpenSource counterpart, Partition Image. The problem with these software packages is that it takes a lot of time to massively clone systems to many computers. You've probably also heard of Symantec's solution to this problem, Symantec Ghost Corporate Edition® with multicasting. Well, now there is an OpenSource clone system (OCS) solution called Clonezilla with unicasting and multicasting!




Clonezilla, based on DRBL, Partition Image, ntfsclone, and udpcast, allows you to do bare metal backup and recovery. Two types of Clonezilla are available, Clonezilla live and Clonezilla server edition. Clonezilla live is suitable for single machine backup and restore. While Clonezilla server edition is for massive deployment, it can clone many (40 plus!) computers simultaneously. Clonezilla saves and restores only used blocks in the harddisk. This increases the clone efficiency. At the NCHC's Classroom C, Clonezilla server edition was used to clone 41 computers simultaneously. It took only about 10 minutes to clone a 5.6 GBytes system image to all 41 computers via multicasting!

I popped the Clonezilla disk in (I used the Clonezilla Live disk) and rebooted. Linux booted up without any issues. It asked some questions about my hardware and we were on the way. No networking was installed as far as I can tell. I didn't need any though.

I cloned my C partition to an external Maxtor 500GB USB drive that I normally have hanging off my network for extra storage. It's definitely not the fastest disk on my network but it works great and is easy to use. Clonezilla recognized both my C and D drives and the USB drive with no special prompting from me. Clonezilla creates a repository on the target disk to store the images.

Clonezilla took about 3 1/2 hours to write the 148GB that I had on my existing C drive. I blame the USB drive, not Clonezila, for the amount of time it took.

Anyway, once complete, I popped out the old drive and installed the new one. I booted up but this time I did not have the USB drive plugged in. It told me when to plug it in but I may not have been fast enough or something. It seemed to recognize the drive but then hung at that point. I rebooted with the USB drive already plugged in. It recognized the drive and proceeded to the restore.

The Clonezilla restore failed on the first attempt. Because I only did one partition and not the entire disk, I had to choose to have Clonezilla recreate the MBR. It worked when I changed that option. The restore went faster than the save. I forgot to write the time down but I think it was 2 to 2 1/2 hours.

I booted back into Vista and it did a disk check. It said the $shutdown$ (or something like that) file was invalid. After the check disk it finished booting up. Once I logged in, I got a message that Vista had installed new hardware (a Hitachi disk drive) and had to reboot. I did and when it came back up, I was back in business. Sweet!

I checked and had a D drive but it wasn't formatted.. I went into the Vista disk manager and removed the D partition. I then extended my C partition and I am now using the entire disk. I have had no issues at all.

I was afraid that moving from a 4800RM to a 7200RPM drive might cause me some heat issues. I left it on over night running some mindless tasks for me that do disk access. I woke up this morning and checked the temperature. It's actually running cooler than the 4800RPM drive. I have no explanation for that.

My second fear was that Vista would require me to revalidate my install. Not a fear really as it's just calling a 1-800 number and getting a key to enter. Didn't happen though. I'm apparently still genuine.

I plan to buy a USB enclosure for the old drive. It works perfectly fine, just kind of slow. I can use it for backups and such. Any suggestions for a good enclosure?

I have noticed a significant increase in speed in Vista. The copy is a bit by bit copy so the file fragmentation level should be the same. My disk performance score went from 4.5 to 5.4. My overall score stayed at 3.5 due to my video card (NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS).

All in all, I am very pleased with my purchase and the results. This is the first time I have used Clonezilla but I will definitely use it again if I need it and I would recommend it to just about anyone (that has somewhat of a technical background).

LewisC

Technorati : clone disk, clonezilla, copy disk, data transfer, free software

Sauerbraten, It's not your mama's cabbage!

I recently ran across the 3D FPS Sauerbraten. All I can say is "Excellent!" Completely free and open source, Sauerbraten is first person shooter with it's own style and graphics.

In looks it might have a little in common with Quake but that's a stretch really. The creatures that you fight are fairly unique looking.

The one complaint that I might have is not enough ammo for my weapons. I have that complaint for every FPS I play though so it;s not a biggie.

The performance is amazing. With no tweeaking at all, I was running at about 60fps.

The game has multiplayer support but I haven't had the opportunity to try it out yet.

An added bonus is a work-in-progress RPG called Eisenstern. Eisenstern is a parallel project using the same game engine. I played it for a while and while it's still rough, it's kind of fun and mindless entertainment. I was able to kill the golem but not the dragon.

If you're into RPGs or First Person Shooters, you owe it to yourself to give Sauerbraten a chance.