Planet Georgia

Michael B. Trausch: The “Mono war” is getting very dirty and out of hand. It must stop.

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 03:31:05 +0000

Since 1996, when I was introduced to the concept of free software and the GNU/Linux operating system (in the form of Slackware), I started to take a look around and found myself amazed at what was the free software community then. Watching it build massively amazing pieces of software that are second to none in some cases, and utter crap in other cases. It makes no difference, however; the world of free software is amazing. It provides an absolutely amazing, wide range of choices that one simply does not have in the world of proprietary software, and it is my personal hope that it remains that way.

Of late, however, I am extremely disappointed in our community. Maybe it is because many people have started to come into it who do not always think critically nor pride themselves on the accuracy of their perceptions. This may sound arrogant, but it certainly is not written to be. There are many people in the world who do not seem to care to spend any significant amount of time thinking about problems anymore, and they are becoming more and more, everywhere you go. I am not disappointed that we have more “mainstream” types in the community, though. I am just disappointed that the process of critical thinking seems to be disappearing from the mainstream, where truth is whoever has the loudest and most pervasive advertising and marketing.

In my own personal experience, it simply is: many people make the very strong assumption that they are correct on their stand of a position without completely analyzing their own position; sometimes the position of a person is taken on faith that their friend(s) are correct in their assertions, or on faith that the past must be an accurate prediction of the future, or on faith that the marketing messages they see/hear/read daily are correct. When did we start to think in these terms? When did we stop contemplating things and arriving at a decision based on that independent contemplation? Why?

As with any polarizing issue, there is an entire spectrum of people. At either end of the spectrum, you have people who are extremists, or “die-hards”. The ends of the spectrum are often emotionally-charged groups of people who feel that their position is correct despite everything. At either end, regardless of the position being stood for or against, the typical belief is that the other side is inherently evil, inherently incorrect, or inherently otherwise undesirable. As one approaches the middle of the spectrum, what is seen is people who are more willing to consider the issues of both sides. By nature, these people are more prone to considering the situation in as much depth as is possible—perhaps discovering that their position was based on a flawed assumption or axiom—and (possibly) changing their mind. This is what consists of an open mind: not necessarily actually changing one’s mind blindly, but considering the facts of a situation and assessing their position based on the facts and merits of the arguments as they understand them.

An open mind is one that is willing to see the facts in the first place, not one that reacts with highly-charged word-slinging. Some days, I very nearly want nothing to do with the community, because of this highly-charged slinging going on. It is like we have become small children again, but not in a good way; not full of youth, vigor, excitement, curiosity. More in the sense that we are prone to pointless and emotionally-charged bickering and the use of strong dysphemisms when talking about Mono (such as Mono “infecting” things as if it were a self-replicating computer virus for any operating system that has runtime support for viruses installed by default), which just makes the community look like a bunch of uneducated 12-year old angry boys.

So, what is a fact? This is far too much to get into here, but it is probably sufficient for our needs to define a fact as “a statement which is as objective as can be, which is typically verifiable.” For example, it is a fact that Microsoft is a corporation, and it is a fact that I, Michael B. Trausch, am a natural person. If we cannot agree on this so far, it is best that you leave now, and spare both of us a bit of wasted time.

Patents

Now, as I understand it, the general position of the anti-Mono crowd is based on several vague arguments. Most of these arguments center around the issue of patents. The claim is along the lines of “Mono is subject to patents by Microsoft, and therefore must be bad.” Now, first, this statement makes the implicit assumption that the Linux kernel is not potentially the subject of patents (but, it is, and by Microsoft). Note that this threat is vague, and because of that, it cannot be worked around. Though, the community has proved time and time again that it can and will react to real patent threats efficiently.

In the context of Mono specifically, there was a patent application to cover .NET, which was rejected in part due to prior art. I have yet to find a granted patent—let alone an enforceable granted patent—that covers any aspect of the ECMA or ISO specifications that Mono seeks to implement, nor the Microsoft extensions to the BCL; it took me a long time to find the patent application, truth be told. Now, should I find one that may apply, I would take the time to check and send something off in the form of a bug report or a private communication to let someone know of the issue. That is precisely how free software can get around patents, in fact: volunteers such as you and I can help defend free software from patents by finding patents and pointing them out to the developers of projects we like and use. Then, those developers can make a choice: either remove the infringing code completely, modify the code to no longer be infringing but retain its functionality, or ignore it altogether. Free software projects can be forked and so if the developers take an action that others disagree with or simply do not like, one could fork the project and apply their own choice instead (presumably remove or modify the code as opposed to ignoring the potential patent problems).

The nifty thing about patents is that in general, a software patent can be worked around if what is patented is known. If Microsoft has one way of doing something and patents it, and someone else comes up with a different way of doing the same thing, the latter cannot be affected by the patent granted to the former. A patent covers a process, not a result. This means that if Microsoft (or someone with enough time) were to identify the patents that the Linux kernel potentially infringes, the Linux kernel hackers would then have enough information to work around the patent. The same goes for any free software system, including the Mono runtime and associated development tools which are licensed under the GPL and MIT licenses.

Given the nature of software patents and what they represent, for any country, state, city, or locale which holds software patents to be valid, it is accurate to say that any software, both free and proprietary, are subject to unintentional infringement of somebody else’s patent. There is no way around this except to rally together to change the laws in your region. There is no easy out of that. For more information on that, head on over to the End Software Patents Web site.

In some regions, such as here in the United States, patents on software are either in extreme danger or disarmed completely. Currently in the United States there are several tests which a patent application must pass before being granted. A patent cannot be granted for a process that “claims ‘laws of nature, natural phenomena, [or] abstract ideas’”. Also, “a mathematical algorithm alone is unpatentable because mathematical relationships are akin to a law of nature”. Addtionally, a patent must be for something non-obvious and is not prior art. The Supreme Court is taking the case. Personally, I am awaiting that decision eagerly, as it is a chance for the Supreme Court to clarify its previous rulings and reinforce the “machine-or-transformation” test, which would spell the end for many different types of software patents, particularly those purely on software itself. Here is hoping.

Patents and the Agility of Free Software

Free software has long been something that has been attacked in one way or another by one movement or another. Early on, you paid a great deal for the hardware, and wrote most of the software yourself. People traded software, and somewhere along the way, there was rise to proprietary software. Not strangely, Microsoft’s rise was in this era. I am sure that some of you cannot even imagine this—and others of us have forgotten this—but there was once a time when there was a great majority of proprietary-only software available for common computers. Linux was only started in 1991 for the 32-bit x86, and BSD was (as far as I am aware) never ported to the pre-32-bit x86 systems. Most of those ran Microsoft’s DOS. There was “freeware” around, but that was really still proprietary software in many ways. You could get free software from bulletin board systems with source code and be permitted to modify and redistribute it if you looked around hard enough.

It amazed me to see the sheer amount of free software that was available when someone handed me a set of operating system CDs—for free—and said “check this out.” I had heard of UNIX before then, but nearly always in this capacity like it was far too costly to ever acquire or run at home. The machine I was running on at the time had DOS and Windows 3.1 on it, and I would get software either via bulletin boards (rarely) or more frequently going to the store. I never was able to modify my system, or fix anything that was wrong with it in software. Suddenly, though, there was this system that I could install that came with source code, and I could modify it in any way I pleased. I was like a kid in a candy store.

The GNU project, which has sought to implement a UNIX-like system, and the Linux kernel, make a hell of an operating system. There is, today, a very large amount of software that is BSD, GPL, MIT/X11, or otherwise freely licensed that we can use, modify, fork, experiment with, study, and expand on. Free software is about those things. It does not hurt us to have free implementations of various things that would otherwise be proprietary, because part of the reason to run free software is the fact that it is itself free.

Alas, it seems that many people think that the reason to run free software is because they hate Microsoft. Indeed, that is one reason that a person could choose to run a free operating system. And there are many to choose from; hundreds of Linux distributions (both with GNU and alternative userland components), a handful of BSD systems (FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and others) and a handful of other free operating systems such as MINIX, ReactOS, or Syllable. However, for those of us who use free software because we love it, that is not (necessarily) the reason. Indeed, many of us also have feelings for Microsoft ranging from neutral to blazing hatred for their software, common business practices, or both. These people argue against Mono because they think that it means that Microsoft is somehow “infecting” the free software world and they already ran away from such an “infection” in the world of proprietary software. By this point of view, there is a great deal that such a user can never use, such as the Web. Since they continue to use technologies “infected” by the influence of Microsoft, that must not be their primary motivation.

Can patents have an adverse affect on software systems, when software is permitted to be patented? Yes. Look at the story of compress and gzip. The reason gzip came into being was because of a patent on the LZW compression scheme that affected the compress program. In that case, free software’s answer was to replace the algorithm with a new one, instead of modifying the original one. Either option would likely have been acceptable. Also look at FreeType, portions of which has code that is covered by patents owned by Apple Computer, and the solution to getting around them is disabiling them in the default build, letting people who have the lawful ability to run that code enable it manually, themselves. The community has ways to deal with and work around these things.

If there comes to light a real and specific patent threat against the Linux kernel, against the GNU core utilities, against the Mono runtime or against a piece of free software yet-to-be-written, the answer will be much the same; for something as large as Mono, a modification to circumvent the patent would be done. For something as small and replaceable as compress, a new program with a new or thought-to-be patent-free algorithm would instead be written. Potentially even, resistance would be a viable method, such as is the strategy of the EFF’s Patent Busting Project.

“It’s From Microsoft”

The other major argument that I often hear (or read) is that “Mono is from Microsoft”. Even if it were true, it is an argumentum ad hominem, which is a deceitful and fruitless argument tactic. That said, Mono is not “from Microsoft”. It is also not “from Novell,” as it was created prior to Novell acquiring Ximian.

More than one person on the Internet has quoted the following sentence given by ECMA as an answer to a query on the CLI:

Ecma does not have anything to do with possible licensing of .NET. But Microsoft is one of our members, so I have asked them whom to contact there – if anything is needed, what I just do not know.

This statement is factually correct. However, most people stop there and fail to apply their critical thinking skills—which we all have and are capable of using. ECMA indeed does not have anything to do with the licensing of .NET. .NET is Microsoft’s implementation of the ECMA and ISO standards that comprise the CLI and the BCL, including the runtime environment and the IL engine and the C# programming language. It is not the standard. .NET is distributed under a typical Microsoft EULA, with some permissions for redistribution (as is the case with many of Microsoft’s runtime libraries). Along the same lines, ECMA does not have anything to do with the licensing of Mono, which is licensed under the GPL and MIT licenses. They cannot answer questions directly pertaining to either. In short: ECMA can say nothing of an implementation. Consider this, if you asked about DHCP, and they said, “We have nothing to do with the licensing of ISC DHCPd,” it would be the same; DHCP is a protocol, a specification, and ISC DHCPd is an implementation.

This is a simple case of either the wrong question being asked, or someone along the “telephone” chain misunderstanding the question and/or rephrasing it to become incorrect. So the correct answer to the wrong question came back out. This is life.

Mono was started by the same programmer who co-founded the GNOME project (a GUI implementation), and who wrote Midnight Commander (a free software and enhanced reimplementation of the old Norton Commander program from the days of DOS), both of which are licensed under the GNU GPL, Miguel de Icaza (see the History section of the Wikipedia article of GNOME and the MC FAQ, § 10.1). This was quite some time before Ximian was acquired by Novell. Now, I am not saying that everything de Icaza has written or worked on is absolutely awesome—that would be a flawed assumption. He is an intelligent programmer and a competent leader, but that does not in and of itself mean that everything he has done has been perfect. However, GNOME, Midnight Commander, and Mono each stand on their own merits. Mono is to .NET what Midnight Commander is to Norton Commander: a free software analog to the other product which is not identical and in some (if not many) ways demonstrably superior.

In case you were caught unawares, here is a list of other technologies that Microsoft has had (at least) a part in creating or spreading: the HTTP/1.1 standard, HTTP Digest Authentication, SOAP, WSDL, Sender ID, MADCAP, DNS SRV, PPTP, many variants of the BASIC language, and many more. Many of the developments that they have put time and effort into over the years, we still benefit from today. Is Microsoft a bad company? Generally, it seems as such. But they are a company, not a person. Even still, like people, they can not be inherently good nor evil, even though their actions can be one or the other. Are they always bad? No. Are they always good? Certainly not. Are they incapable of being productive? No, they are capable of helping, even if their primary motivation is to help themselves first.

A Digression on “Law”

Freedom is something that we all must use, and pay for, or we lose it. Some of us have never had it and have to pay a price to gain it. Admittedly, this section is apt to largely only accidentally apply to non-U.S. regions of the world, so if it does not apply to you, skip it.

In the United States, we have this funny thing: we have the right to vote. On leaders. On issues. In some states in the U.S., people can even be the legislators, given sufficient motivation. This is called citizen’s initiative. Some states have both direct and indirect citizen’s initiative. But at the federal level of government here, what we have are representatives.

Now, we can write letters to our representatives and ask them to consider and raise certain issues at the federal legislature on our behalf. This of course does not work if only one of us does so, nor does it work if only a small handful of people from a certain district were to do so. It would have a significant effect, however, if many people from many districts—and in many states—were to do so. This is the power that we have as Americans to craft the laws which apply to our land. This can, of course, be used for both good and bad laws to be created. This is why we have courts. It sounds terribly basic, but it is something that we all seem to forget that we can do sometimes, or that we only think of to do for especially major atrocities. No, it is something that we can do for many things. Patent law is one of these things. If we want to assure ourselves that patent law goes away, we have a limited power to make that happen, through our representatives. Let us not forget that.

However, there is a more important set of law that we also forget about, which does not apply in any singular territory or state: actual law. That whole process that builds common law, case law. Now, I am not saying that it is okay to just blindly disobey law. But law is not crafted through the idle state of society. There are provisions in law for certain things—affirmative defenses—to make otherwise illegal things legal precisely because nothing is purely black-and-white. There is no law that says that it is unconditionally wrong to kill another person; it is not murder if you are absolutely required to kill in order to defend yourself, for example. Changes to law to add affirmative defenses sometimes occur as part of a realization that a law prohibited too many things, and laws are written, amended, and tried in courts all the time to try to find gaps or holes in the law and refine them, through new legislation or through new case law. Therefore, an action that may be illegal by statute is not necessarily illegal if there is some reasonable cause for it not to be and that reasonable cause is noted by a court or a body of legislation (such as Congress).

On some level, everyone knows this. Many people commit wanton acts of copyright infringement and do not even think twice about it, because they do not perceive it to be wrong. Some people only “pirate” copyrighted acts that are of a certain age, seeing codified law on the length of copyright as invalid and refusing to recognize it. After all, whose definition of “wrong” are we working with? There may be consequences for such actions, and people more or less accept that when they commit the action that they know to be wrong, at least as far as law is concerned. But there are certain things that, if disregarded entirely amongst an entire population, have a funny way of finding themselves to disappear from the law, either because the law is dropped from the books or because the executive branch of government no longer bothers to enforce it.

Conclusion

Before patently (ha, ha) screaming against Mono’s inclusion in various distributions, be that Gentoo, Ubuntu, Debian, Slackware, or $YOUR_DISTRO_HERE, think about something: Why?

Mono is no more inherently dangerous than any piece of GNU software, the Linux kernel, the various BSD-derived operating systems, or any other piece of free software. All software amounts to very specialized applications of mathematics; data is input, transformed, and output in every system. That does not matter if the data is bytes to a sound card, a stream passing through a compression program, a cryptographic encryption or hashing system, an application-layer protocol, a network-layer protocol… whatever. It does not matter. All software has risk of infringing on a patent. Not even proprietary software is safe against software patents held by others, even when the author of the softare and the backer of the legal team behind it is as wealthy as Microsoft’s.

There are certainly issues that we all—as a community—need to get together and work with. Development is not the only thing that people can do in the community. However, spreading FUD is not helpful, and it seems to be catching on these days. Are we not the very same community that worked to debunk Microsoft’s FUD, now wasting time and resources that would have better gone into the development of software, the maintainence of Web sites advocating and supporting free software, the documentation of user software and development APIs, or research on various aspects of the software (including trying to fish out potentially infringing patents and helping the community by bringing them to light)?

Freedom is not free. If you care for free software, you can help. Are you good at reading highly-obfuscated documents? If so, you could help the free software world by reading patents and trying to document them and where they apply. Are you good at reading source code? You could work together with the patent-readers to audit code and find things that are potentially covered by patents and alert someone—presumably a developer for that project, whatever it is—to the specifics so that the issue can be further investigated and dealt with in some way. Likewise, there are a ton of other ways that people can help free software to grow, help new free software projects to mature, help old ones to be maintained and/or documented, help contribute CPU cycles, disk space, or network bandwidth to projects that you care about (especially the ones that are independent and not under the umbrella of the Free Software Foundation, the GNOME Foundation or the Linux Foundation).

Yes, you can help free software out, even if you cannot fix bugs. Just help, don’t hurt. Those who are hurting us as a whole, the ones who are making us look like immature preadolecents, are doing the free software community a mighty disservice. So what if you do not like a particular piece of free software on your system? If you do not like it, remove it. If you do not like it being in your distribution, then change distributions. Do something about it. If you actually want to discuss it, then fine. Find a forum to house a rational debate on the issue. Short of that, this pointless war—like we Americans’ wars on terror and drugs—really needs to stop. After all, “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” so let us not fall.

Edited at 2009-06-22T05:13:51Z to fix a typographical error.

Nick Ali: Congrats to Dan and Smita Trevino!

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 17:53:02 +0000

Congrats to Dan and Smita from the Florida LoCo on their first baby, Ishaan!

Justin Burris: Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-06-21

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 07:56:00 +0000

@callahad Or into something not OSX or Windows at all ‘Linux on the desktop’? in reply to callahad # lawl reach me at http://www.facebook.com/justinburris # This nokia N97 ad makes me wonder what the company’s marketing department is really thinking http://bit.ly/11hQF9 # @iamtooamazing Dude the N97 is amazing. That commercial is not, watch it with sound [...]

Ubuntu Podcast: Ubuntu Podcast Quickie #7 20 June 09

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 17:10:16 +0000

One Hundred Paper Cuts, Ubuntu Global Jam, Empathy to replace Pidgin, no more Mibbit on Freenode, new Hall of Famer: Adi Roiban, Ubuntu Satanic license issue.

Click on the ‘Podcast’ to the right of the video to see our weekly podcasts.

One Hundred Paper Cuts, Ubuntu Global Jam, Empathy to replace Pidgin, no more Mibbit on Freenode, new Hall of Famer: Adi Roiban, Ubuntu Satanic license issue. Click on the 'Podcast' to the right of the video to see our weekly podcasts.

Nick Ali: No more Mibbit on Freenode

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 18:01:07 +0000

Mibbit has been a pretty popular way of getting on IRC networks, like Freenode, where Ubuntu related channels are located. The Ubuntu Georgia US site had a link to use Mibbit to join the LoCo channel and the Ubuntu Podcast live stream page had it embedded.

Oh yeah, Mibbit gets abused quite a bit too.

As JonathanD blogged, Mibbit is no longer allowed on Freenode. Unfortunately, Mibbit might be the default IRC handler in upcoming releases of Firefox. Either way, you can use and embed http://webchat.freenode.net if you need web irc access.

Still, these tools are important to get people to participate in the community. For the upcoming Ubuntu Open Week, individuals will be able to click on a link and have webchat.freenode.net loaded up in a new tab with #ubuntu-classroom-chat (where participants can ask questions) and #ubuntu-classroom (where the sessions will be run).

Michael B. Trausch: Getting AllTray to 0.7.4dev

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 15:57:55 +0000

So, the next milestone for AllTray on the path here is the 0.7.4dev release. This milestone is already in Launchpad with bugs associated with it, of course. There are a few iffy things on that list, though—things that either I am not entirely sure about how to implement or things that I am not sure can be implemented. Some things—the “minimize to tray when I click the Close button on the window manager” functionality, I think aren’t a good idea, but I cannot seem to find a better way to do it.

For example, it would be nice if “close” still meant close, but I could create a new button on the window decoration that was “Go to Tray” or something. Most windows have three buttons, the minimize, maximize/restore, and close buttons. But there doesn’t seem to be any way to pass a message to a window manager and say “hey, can you add a new button to your decoration for this window?”—and I don’t want to have to have window-manager specific code in AllTray if I can avoid it. The primary goal is to work, out of the box, with as wide a range of (standards-compliant) desktop environments, system trays, and window managers as possible, on as many UNIX-like systems as possible. All hope of that goes away if AllTray starts doing things that depend on a particular window manager or a particular desktop environment. We already use libgtop so as to remain portable even though we need to rely on some platform-specific (e.g., non-POSIX) behavior.

So, why do I think it’s a bad idea to change the behavior of the “X” button on the windows? Because generally when I click that button, I want the window to go away completely. I want to close it. Not get it to go to the tray. That said, I did come up with an idea for an alternative. Instead of overloading the “X” button, why not change the behavior when the application’s are minimized? Say, for example, you run Firefox in AllTray. When you minimize Firefox, AllTray sees this and finishes putting the window into the tray for you, removing it from the taskbar. I think that this is more intuitive, and makes more sense. I would, of course, like to hear feedback on that.

There are other bugs there that do not seem feasible and they will wind up being closed; for example, adding menu items to a window title bar’s context menu? As I understand it, this just cannot happen. Even if I were able to manage to find a way to do it for Metacity, I’d have to find another way to do it for gtk-window-decorator under Compiz, or Emerald, or KWin, or OpenBox, or… well, the list goes on, as long as there are window manager choices. This means that bugs 311908 and 347173 are likely to be closed today (unless someone has some fantastic idea that I have overlooked that would make implementing these possible).

Brad Peters: Ghostbusters: Short but fun.

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 14:32:10 +0000

I had been excited about this game ever since it was announced, as I’m a big Ghostbusters fan. This was one of the few games I actually preordered (60.00 for a video game is pretty crazy) and when the day came, I left Gamestop happy as could be. I got home, popped the game in and off I went, busting some ghosts, wandering through levels and generally having a lot of fun.

I have the PS3 version, having gotten rid of my Xbox360 since it had just been sitting and collecting dust. From various reports on the ‘net, this version has less-than-stellar graphics, but to me it still looks pretty darn good. I played through the game in only two sittings, amounting to around 6 hours or so of game time, short by any standards. I was pretty disappointed to find that I just dropped 60.00 on a short game.

Even with the short single player campaign, there is a multiplayer mode (well, unless you have the PC versoin), which I tried out last night. There are ranked and unranked games, along with a couple of different modes. I didn’t notice much lag, and it seemed to go pretty smoothly with 4 people simultaneously. It did raise one issue: I need to get a headset for the PS3. I do have an old Motorola bluetooth headseat around somewhere that I could use, according to what I’ve read.

At any rate, Ghostbusters is a lot of fun, but the single player campaign is rather short. I’m kicking myself for buying this right out of the gate. Had I known it was so short, I would have waited until this hit the bargain bin.

David Tomaschik: Bozeman, Montana uses the Constitution for Toilet Paper

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 01:19:30 +0000

The city of Bozeman, Montana has decided that all applicants for city jobs must provide them with the usernames and passwords for social networking sites, forums, and chatrooms that the applicant participates in. This fits into the category of things I think are hoaxes until I read it a few times over.

From NetworkWorld: http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/42819

Brad Peters: Life with Emacs: org-mode

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 14:30:14 +0000

I’ve finally found what I’ve been looking for as far as notes / organization at work goes. I discovered org-mode for Emacs while I was researching and testing some ways to keep me organized. I had gone the wiki route previously, but I found that the dependency of a database and browser just didn’t suit my “have it when / where I need it” ideals. Sometimes, I have to log into my work machine from home, and forwarding my X display can be painful. Since a lot of the time I was using Lynx to view pages anyway, I figured I would opt for a more text-based approach. I’ll go into how I’m using org-mode, but for further information, please check out the website.

Timesheets
I have to keep track of time I spend working on various things. Usually I used a pad and paper for this, but a lot of the time I don’t want to have to stop, write something down, then jump back. I have a timesheet.org file open in Emacs during the day so that I can switch to the buffer and enter my time. I use one headline per week, and create a table for the time. It works out nicely because now I have one file with my timesheets. I started this about a week or two ago, but I have no plans of entering all of my old time here.

Scripts, Utilities and others
Throughout the course of the day, I’m using a lot of different tools to get my work done. Sometimes I’ll discover something new and helpful and I’ll want to keep the command around for future use. For that, I have a scripts.org file to keep things organized. For customer information, right now I have one big customers file, but I think I’m going to start splitting that out into separate files soon.

The thing I really like about org-mode is being able to collapse the various levels. It keeps the information I don’t need right now out of my way while at the same time keeping everything in text form, so I can read it anywhere. I know I’m not harnessing the full power of this mode, but it fits my needs and perhaps it might fit someone else’s needs out there as well.

Jon Reagan: Any Guesses?

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 02:57:04 +0000

Any guesses as to what I am running now? It’s PCLinuxOS 2009! So far I am really liking the new system. As usual I had to do some visual overhaul to make it look better. For whatever reason the default themes never look good on my desktop. I’ll probably get around to writing a review here in the next couple of days.

Posted in PCLinuxOS Tagged: PCLinuxOS

Michael B. Trausch: … and, back to WordPress.

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 15:56:55 +0000

So, I’ve gone back (for now) to the WordPress blogging engine.

My primary reason for this is because it was a bit of a pain to work with BlogEngine.NET, and I simply could not work out all of the kinks. As much work as WordPress is to maintain, it is at least easier than BlogEngine.NET.

I’m going to leave it at this for now. I can’t find another system that I’d be willing to try out, and I don’t have the time to write one that I’d like (nor patch WordPress or BlogEngine.NET to fix what I’d like changed about them), so this will have to do for now. Oh, well.

Joshua Chase: Video Dual Core during afterparty @ South East Linux Fest

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 12:19:21 +0000

I had a blast at the South East Linux Fest. I will be posting several videos, and thought I’d share some footage I shot of Dual Core, an an awesome nerdcore band that was there pimping their music.

Enjoy.

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Justin Burris: Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-06-14

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 07:56:00 +0000

@ReubenRiggins Dude that part with Agent 355 pissed me off in reply to ReubenRiggins # @ianboyte @ReubenRiggins How is EA the good game company now? in reply to ianboyte # @insertcotku if you call chillin doing something, then yes in reply to insertcotku # @insertcotku s&s eh? in reply to insertcotku # @ReubenRiggins that countrys leaders have more [...]

David Tomaschik: SELF - Community-Based Technology Centers

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 20:34:23 +0000

This presentation discussed the benefits and future of Free IT Athens and other community-oriented technology centers.

They provide free/low-cost computers, computer training, and other technology support for underprivileged and low-income citizens in Athens. They refurbish computers to both prevent them from ending up in a landfill and to enable children and adults to gain knowledge and the benefits of the use of the Internet and computers in general.

On July 18, ALE, the Ubuntu GA Loco, and Free IT Athens will be holding a joint event to visit the Free IT Athens venue and donate equipment for refurbishment. I hope to be able to join them and help in these goals. I may, by then, have a couple of machines that could be used for this purpose, which is good for the environment and for the community.

FreeLinuxPC.org was also discussed with similar goals and ideas as Free IT Athens. FreeLinuxPC.org is also trying to build computer labs for low-income areas, some with standalone systems, and some with thin-client systems. FreeLinuxPC, in its long-term vision, wants to provide organization and information to organizations like Free IT Athens and others with similar goals.

Finally, the Gussie Greene Community Technology Center has similar goals, but has its own identity. This is a top-down approach to addressing the digital divide in South Carolina.

David Tomaschik: SELF - Vendor Booths and BoF: GPG

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 20:24:00 +0000

I missed a couple of hours of speakers, but hopefully they'll post the videos of it online. During that time, I visited the booths a bit more, and got into some interesting discussions. I found out about The Linux Link Tech Show, a weekly live podcast talking about Linux related issues. I talked with int eighty from Dual Core about their music, and his appearance on Hak.5. I also spent a bit of time talking with the Zenoss Community Manager, and I'm going to propose switching our monitoring at work from Nagios to Zenoss. It's significantly more powerful and robust, and I'm sure I'll have more to say after giving it a try. On top of all this, I talked with the guys from Free IT Athens. They refurbish computers for, and provide training to, the underprivileged citizens of Athens, GA.

I also attended a Birds of a Feather session for a GPG keysigning. Hopefully that will improve the web of trust for my key, as well as the keys of others. It's also something I'd like to organize for ALF or an ALE meeting. Having independently trusted keys strengthens both the web of trust and the usefulness of GPG.

Nick Ali: Live from Southeast LinuxFest

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 15:36:54 +0000

Live streaming from the Ubuntu Podcast booth at Southeast Linuxfest. Great turnout. We are hoping to do some interviews later today.

To watch the live stream, click here.

David Tomaschik: SELF - DMCA and Copyright Law

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 14:43:25 +0000

Presentation by Wendy Seltzer <firstname@lastname.org>

DMCA
-Section 512 (ISP Safe Harbor, Notice, Takedown)
-Section 1201 (Anticircumvention)
1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act
- +20 years to all copyright terms (existing and future)

Betamax exception: Technology used primarily for non-infringing purposes should not be seen as infringing even if some infringing use occurs.

McCain posted clips of interviews on YouTube, networks of original videos filed DMCA takedown notices, resulting in removal of his clips. Lawsuits under 512(f) to remedy false takedown claims.

Google shows that links have been removed per DMCA as well as publication of DMCA complaint via Chilling Effects. These complaints include the original links to the content, as the DMCA requires specificity in filing a takedown complaint.

Similar to Chilling Effects, MIT runs a site known as YouTomb which attempts to track videos removed as DMCA violations. In this site, you will find both legitimate and abusive uses of the DMCA.

The French HADOPI act, struck down by French Constitutional Court (Internet Access is key to exercising basic human rights), said that 3-time violators of copyright should have their Internet access shut off and be banned from getting a new ISP account.

Anticircumvention: If there is a technological measure intended to protect copyright, it is an independent violation of the law to break that measure. Sharpies for copy-protected CDs? Lexmark claimed the chip in their toner cartridge constituted an "effective technological measure" to prevent production of 3rd party cartridges.

MPAA claims that videorecording a TV set constitutes an acceptable analog alternative to using software to circumvent DVD protection, and thus DeCSS and similar technologies should not be allowed as an exemption under DMCA. This comes from the same group that has fought for laws prohibiting bringing a videorecording device into a movie theater. (Recorded by Timothy Vollmer, video of video of video on Vimeo)

"Sorry, you can't interoperate with that with Free Software." Anti-consumer features embedded solely in hardware and proprietary software. Free software would make users able to increase the usefulness of their DVDs and other media, but would potentially allow for infringing uses of the system.

Authors of DMCA probably did not realize impact of anticircumvention provisions, nor realize the potential power of FOSS in the realm of media. Congress is also probably not aware of the nature of the Open Source software running the rendering clusters involved in producing the movies, the servers distributing the content and trailers and other information, and many other components necessary for their infrastructure.

In closing: Monorail Kitteh now stops @ Library.

David Tomaschik: SELF - Initial Impressions

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 13:40:51 +0000

I'm currently at the first annual South East Linux Fest (in the opening keynote) and I'm really impressed with what they put together. It's not huge, but it's really impressive and really professional. I'm very impressed by the conference badges, the bags, the turnout, and the arrangements. I think there's a lot from this we can take away for the Atlanta Linux Fest, especially promotion-wise. ALF is in about 3 months, but that doesn't mean we can't get some things together.

Handing out conference schwag doesn't seem like a big benefit, but giving these things out to attendees will foster a more professional image for speakers and vendors, and provides attendees something to take home to remind them about the conference for the next one. (Delayed returns, yes, but returns nonetheless).

Increased promotion is a no-brainer. Organizing (and possibly funding) increased promotion can pose a problem. Some ideas: break up promotional methods, areas, etc. Start attaching conference stickers to Ubuntu CDs being distributed. Find out about placing signs at Frys, Microcenter, and maybe game stores (even the DND style game stores probably have a decent overlap with the Linux community). Also, academic institutions -- signs at universities, especially around their Computer Science departments, are likely to attract attention.

Perhaps most importantly is to build an 'image' for a conference. SELF has a very distinctive logo, and the logo is present on their website, their conference materials, and the badges at the conference. This provides cohesiveness and prepares a brand for the conference.

Some thoughts to think about, and I'm sure I'll come up with more as we progress through the day.

Nick Ali: Smithsonian Trip

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 19:54:00 +0000

This past weekend, the wife and I headed up to Washington DC to visit her side of the family. To take a break from doing family stuff, we visited a couple of the museums at the Smithsonian. I remember going as a kid and having an awesome time. No matter how old you are, looking at seriously old bones is always fun!

Click on the image above or here to see the video.

Justin Burris: Message Droid - An android SMS replacement

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 00:23:15 +0000

I am beginning work on Message Droid which will be a program designed to replace the default android SMS program. Some key features I would like to include are Delayed Message Send - Send this message at 8 a.m Intelligent message retrieval - Don’t retrieve all 400 messages between a contact and I Group messaging functions The goal is to [...]

David Tomaschik: Automatic PPA Key Installation

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 18:47:31 +0000

I often use a number of PPAs on one or more of my systems, such as FreeNX, Firefox dailies, Chromium dailies, etc. I do like to use signed packages, even if they're automatically signed, but manually installing the PPA keys is a bit of a pain. The Source Guru has a solution.

Justin Burris: Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-06-07

Sun, 07 Jun 2009 07:56:00 +0000

@Josh_Harper Duuuuude the end of season 4 is craaazy in reply to Josh_Harper # Oh wow data in ‘in theory’ is so awkward # @SLCKat what have I done now? in reply to SLCKat # @SLCKat What can I say, I’m a recommendable guy in reply to SLCKat # @SLCKat I put that I was in a relationship, you [...]

Justin Burris: Android Game Development - TimeQuake

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 09:55:24 +0000

This summer I promised myself that if I managed to land an internship, I would work on a full featured Android application. While the internship is not set in stone quite yet, I’ve began work on my first real Android game, going to be called TimeQuake. The plan is for it to be a turn [...]

Nick Ali: Ramblings about UDS Karmic

Thu, 04 Jun 2009 16:01:14 +0000

To see the video above, click here.