Thoughts on FLOSS Weekly Episode 91: Boycott Novell

Last week I listened to the most recent episode of the TWiT podcast, FLOSS Weekly and their guest was the current person behind the Boycott Novell group Roy Schestowitz. Now beyond the name I have no real idea what the purpose of the site is and during the interview, Roy's responses made it seem like it was just "Microsoft is evil." with plenty of talk about him being personally insulted and slandered. At no point did he come out and say, "This is what our issues are: A, B, C. And this is what we want to happen: A, B, C."

Jono's focus on the issue of spammers being something that Roy should be dealing with all the time confused me and detracted from the interview. Really all Roy should have to do is have a disclaimer page and when he finds out a community is being infested by one of these spammers then he can contact those that run it and ask them to publicise the disclaimer that these people are not to be listened to. However it seems that

I spent the next couple of days browsing the site and sitting in the chat room. Within a couple of hours of loggin in Jono appears to this welcome.

twitter	Hi, jono.
twitter	I saw where you called me a spammer.
twitter	Fuck you.

http://boycottnovell.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/irc-log-19102009.html

When Roy came on an hour and a half later there was no rebuke but instead complaints about people pretending to be him and general apologistic I can't control what other people do stuff. He should have kicked him and told him off, even better would be an apology but not required.

So from someone who started off as pretty apathatic to the BoycottNovell idea I've moved to they're a bunch of muppets point of view due to their actions as a community.

Capsuleer 2.0 Review

My short review. Great app, works smoothly and it's free. Throw the devs some ISK if you like it though.

Now for the longer one. Capsuleer is an EvE Online related iPhone and iPod Touch app. At its most basic it allows you to track your skills and what you're training within EvE. The user interface is a bit spartan at the moment with only three icons working with space free for many more. The developers have said that more functions are going to be added in the future.

Adding a new toon is easy to do as you just eail yourself a specifically formatted link and your API details get added. After getting the latest info from the EvE servers your current skill queue is then within a couple of clicks with easy access from there to more information about any skill in the queue. The ability to also check the Attributes and Implants of your clone is a nice touch.

Capsuleer also contains a skill browser that displays all the skills you've trained and highlights the current skills on a char's skill queue. The skill inforation page is nice as it clearly shows the description, attribuites, prereqs and training times for the skill in question. There is also a default char with all skills to level 5 that you can use to see all the skills but as all skills are at level 5 no training times are shown. This is the biggest downside I have in day to day use with the app but it isn't a very big one.

Another nice feature of Capsuleer is the built in ability to subscribe to the blogs in the Eve blogroll and the tracking of the CCP Announcements, devBlog and Patch Notes. The best bit of this I've found owning an iPod Touch is that the entries are downloaded to local storage so that it is possible to read the entries without a network connection. One small downside is the lack of support for images on the blog so if you want to see them you have to use Safari to read them.

The final neat side feature is the Server Status. Capsuleer checks the status of TQ and Singularity and the MOTD.

On the whole I'm impressed by the quality of the app and the smooth user experiance that makes using it quite enjoyable. If you own an iPhone or iPod Touch and play Eve then Capsuleer is a must have.

Capsuleer Home Page -- http://capsuleer.evesuite.com/