Planet Fellowship

Migrating to XMPP/Jabber (and AIM woes)

Matija "hook" Šuklje (blog) | 21:22, Saturday, 28 August 2010

Alright, so I've decided to finally drop proprietary IM protocols.

To some extend because promoting free software and open standards while at the same using proprietary protocols of companies that don't respect your privacy is a bit, well, let's be honest, hypocritic. On the other hand though because I've increasingly grown fed up with WLM/MSN/ICQ/YIM/AIM, their quirks and the inability to provide me with what I want.

I've already stopped using YIM and AIM with the rest following soon. What I've learnt from this so far is how very scary proprietary IM actually is. Since (for now) I still use Yahoo as my spambox e-mail provider, I just disabled the messenger component and it was very simple.

But when I tried to delete my AIM account, stuff got difficult. Brace yourselves, this gets pretty ugly! First of all, the general AOL's idea on how to "cancel AIM" is "just stop using it". The second odd thing is that they have more then one official help/support portal (yes, portal. it's big!). That being said the official help I found on how to cancel an AOL account was that if you're a paid customer, it's just a click away; if you're a sad sap who got the free account only to communicate to some other bloke on AIM, ...weeeeeheeheheheeeell, then it depends, maaaaaybeee you can delete it, maybe you can't. As luck has it, in my case (and in case of many people out there) my free account doesn't allow me to cancel it. A quick search on the aforementioned help portal says it could be because I have a child account. Which is kinda odd, since a child account, as I understand it, is a subaccount made by an adult person with their own full account and I can remember registring my account while already full age. Setting the problem aside that AIM just called me a bastard (= a parentless child), the problem stays that I cannot cancel my account. Of course, live (= phone, e-mail etc.) help is only available to paid customers. Well, I'm cooked there. I searched the web a bit and found out one of many self-help groups which lists a few solutions. For now I'm trying the contact-AOL-UK-and-hope-they-comply method, but if that fails — people report it fails more often then not — they go so far as to suggest to break AOL's ToS and wait for them to suspend your account and then not log in for half a year. ...bloody hell!?!?! The only half-way sure way I can get my AOL account removed is by contract breach?!? That alone should send shivvers down anyone's spine! And people are wondering why I'm against such things.

Below is the notice I'm sending to people on my contact list to explain why I am migrating and informing them of the benefits the XMPP protocol brings:

This is just a friendly notice that I'm leaving <insert_proprietary_IM> (and other proprietary IM protocols). If you want to keep in touch via instant messaging you can add my XMPP/Jabber ID to your contacts: matija [döt] suklje [ät] gabbler [døt] org or you can always send me an e-mail at matija [æt] suklje [doŧ] name.

There are many reasons why I'm switching to XMPP (Jabber) and here I'll list just a few of its advantages.

XMPP is:

• open standard — XMPP is the only IM protocol that is an internet standard and it's free software as well, so anyone can use, adapt or write from scratch their own XMPP client, server or other program that uses it.
• decentralised — so it doesn't matter on which server you are, you can always keep in touch with people on other servers, as is already true with e-mail (e.g. if you have GMail, you can just add my Jabber ID to your contacts, since GTalk is just Google's XMPP server); this also means you can chose any server you like best or even build your own and you won't lose the ability to chat with your friends. So you're not locked to just one provider.
• extensible and flexible — XMPP stands for Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, so you can easily use it to provide additional functionailty. E.g. people already use it to (micro)blog, get news and status updates, issue commands to remote computers, collaborate, play games over it and all sorts of stuff.
• security — the protocol itself uses industry-standard TLS and SASL for security and many XMPP servers pledge to never log your what you chat. That is not something you can expect from proprietary IM like MSN/WLM which stores whom you chatted with and what eternally (sic!). This is also a reason why even though you can use GTalk, I would advise you to chose a server that expects your privacy — Jabber.org and Gabbler.org are such examples, but there's many more. And since you can always build your own, you can be in complete control of your own data.
• can communicate with other IM — if you desperately need to use other IM protocols, you can just tell the XMPP server to forward the messages to and from your other IM accounts.

Well, that's it from me. If you decide that a) this sounds good; or at least b) you'd like to keep in IM contact with me, here's a (non-complete!) list of XMPP servers where you can make your account: http://xmpp.org/services/ (Jabber.org is the oldest and most popular); and add me: matija [döt] suklje [ät] gabbler [døt] org

There is also a great number of clients (programs to connect to XMPP) you can use: http://xmpp.org/software/clients.shtml (I use Kopete, but chose whichever you like best; there's even web-based clients if you're in a cybercafe)

In case you got really excited about it, you can also run your own server: http://xmpp.org/software/servers.shtml

Cheers and hope to chat with you someday again,

Matija "hook" Šuklje

If anyone has done or plans to do a similar move, I'd be happy to hear about your experiences.

hook out >> hmmm, tea with honey's nice, but sadly honey usually overpowers the delicate taste of tea
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Getting “Windows tax” refund

Nicolas’ blog | 16:02, Friday, 27 August 2010

Buying a new computer with Windows (or some other system) maybe has the advantage of offering a usable operating system – not debating its quality here –, but the worse part is that it costs. A lot. According to certain cases, it can reach the same cost as the hardware, making the computer twice as expensive as it could be.

Still computers continue to be sold this way, and one could ask: how can that be? Well there are different answers, because of lobbying from Microsoft, fear of the vendors to propose something new… This leads to the current, unacceptable situation, in which one can hardly buy a computer without Windows or Mac pre-installed. Without knowing the separate prices of hardware and software too, and thus without getting the economic advantage of a free software solution (often at-no-cost).

However, this situation is not legal. Because this is practically called a “tying” case, the software being bundled, tied with the hardware, products should be sold separately. And a lot of cases, in the past few years, have shown that courts tend to agree with this. Many users, in France for example, have been able to get a complete refund of the Windows license, sometimes even of other installed software. As often, it has been harder for the first ones doing it, the companies would not want to do anything about it until sued… But with the phenomenon growing, the experience of users describing successful procedures, the practice has become easier.

This is not only the law, but a user freedom that’s flouted. And many users would probably think twice if the prices would be separated, like “what, this computer costs 300€ and I must still pay 100€ just for Windows”. This is a very good publicity for free software. Maybe a bit rough, because people will mix free beer and freedom. This is however no big deal: bringing more people to just know free software is definitely a good thing.

That’s why the FSFE should probably do more about it, advertise throughout the world. There already exist this page, which would gain from having more visibility, explaining the different procedures, giving advice about how not to pay for software you do not want.

Berlin Scrumtisch - open discussion

Isabel Drost's blog | 21:29, Wednesday, 25 August 2010

This evening the Berlin Scrumtisch took place in Friedrichshain. More than thirty participants followed Marion’s invitation for discussions on Scrum, wine and pizza at Vecchia Trattoria.

As there were several new participants, Felix started out with a very brief summary of the very core concepts of Scrum itself: Most important to know is the basic assumption of Scrum, that is planning ahead of time in a very detailed way is impossible. Defining goals and letting those who do the acutal work take the decisions on how to reach that goal is way easier and more promising. The whole process relies on fast feedback loops enabling developers and business people to run experiments on how to improve their work in a controlled environment.

Scrum comes with three roles: The development team responsible for delivering quality software, the product owner responsible for defining development goals that maximise return on investment and the scrum master as the moderator and facilitator who takes care that the roles and rituals are not broken.

Scrum comes with three plus one rituals: The daily standup (about 15min) used by the development team to get everyone up to date on a daily basis on everyone’s status, the Scrum Review and the Scrum Planning. In addition very important each sprint includes a retrospective that serves the purpose of improving the scrum team’s processes.

Scrum comes with three artifacts: The sorted product backlog of all user stories, the sprint backlog and the burndown chart showing the team’s progress.

However Scrum is just a framework - it tells you more on the goals, but less on exactly how to reach them. It should serve as a basis to adapt one’s processes to the project’s needs.

In the usual meetup planning phase we collected potential topics for discussions and ranked them by voting on them in the end. The topics proposed were:

• Applications of Scrum for non-software-development projects.
• How to convince teams of Scrum?
• Awareness of the definition of done.
• How to integrate testers in a team, extended by discussing the values of cross-functional teams.
• How to be a tech PO.
• Adding agile/XP to Scrum.
• How to keep the team on focus.
• Decision making in self organising teams.
• Bonus HR in Scrum.

The topics rated highest were on raising the awareness for the definition of done and on decision making in self organising teams.

Definition of done

To introduce the topic, Felix repeated the goal of Scrum teams to deliver potentially quality - ahem - shipable software. The problem of the guest and his co-workers was described as follows: Teams have definitions that are inconsistant not only across teams but also within teams.

Ultimately the goal of the definition of done is to enable teams to produce shipable software. One option to make the team aware of the need for better quality software might be to make them feel the pain their releases cause. It does not help to dictate a company-wide definition of done: It’s up to the team to define it. However to learn more on what shipable means the team must be allowed to make mistakes. They will fail - but learn from that failure as soon as they feel and see what gets influenced by their mistakes. As a resulst, they will refine their definition of done.

As the person to make happy in Scrum iterations is the PO, this could mean that the PO simply does not accept features, after all he is the one to define what shipable means. One factor that is a pre-condition for teams to be able to learn is to keep them stable. Learning needs time - teams need to be allowed to evolve. If yesterday’s team does not feel the pain their mistakes caused just because the team does not exist anymore or has been reconfigured - how would people be able to learn at all?

Decision making in self organising teams

The person proposing this question has the problem that in his teams some developers turn into leaders dictating the way software gets implemented. Other team members rarely join into that discussion and close to never take decisions. The result are endless discussions w/o real results.

The first idea that came up was for the Scrum Master to act as moderator. Marion came up with the proposal to use well known mediation techniques. She promised to share the links - would be great to have them published on the Scrumtisch Berlin blog as well. Thilo mentioned there are courses on mediation and moderation that can help him play that role.

As for long discussions: Felix mentioned a few typical patterns (or anti-patterns) that tend to lead to developers discussing endlessly:

• Fear: fear of punishment for taking the wrong decision usually leads developers to avoid decisions altogether. Fix for that would be establishing and open culture that allows for failure and that enables people to learn from failure.
• Striving for the 100% solution: Developers are not used to incremental thinking and try to solve all problems at once. Fix would be to teach them they get time for refactoring and are thus not punished for adhering to the YAGNI principle.
• Personal conflicts in teams can lead to the described situation as well and can only be fixed by double-checking the team configuration, potentially changing it.

There is a very good book by Cohen on “Succeeding with agile” that has a whole chapter on what makes a good Scrum Master. Checking these properties against your chosen Scrum master might help as well.

When discussing this topic we soon discovered one problem with the team configuration as-is: Scrum masters used to be system architects or senior software developers - that is, highly respected, influencial people. Maybe simply re-configuring teams might help already.

Thanks to Marion for organising the evening - and thanks to all attendees for your questions and input on discussion topics. Looking forward to the next edition of the Scrumtisch.

Disclaimer: I usually just take notes on an old-fashioned paper-notebook, typing stuff into the blog after the meeting is over. Only reason I do it the same evening is the goal of keeping the list of draft postings as short as possible.

Hacked my Drupal into acknowledging Flattr

Matija "hook" Šuklje (blog) | 12:40, Friday, 20 August 2010

Well, I'm not very proud of it, but I got the Flattr button working somehow. I've added the static button to the theme's template, so it shows on every node.

OK, technically it's not pretty, but to be fair, my current Drupal install isn't either (that's also the reason why Drupal's Flattr module doesn't work for me in the first place).

Can't wait for Drupal 7 to come out, get myself a PlugComputer and migrate to it.

...actually can't wait until I get that done, with the state of my DB this should be quite an ugly ordeal :\

hook out >> taking a nap to cure the headache, then working on a text to finish my application for that legal counselling job
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Got Flatt'r'd

Matija "hook" Šuklje (blog) | 11:33, Thursday, 19 August 2010

There we are then. I've created a Flattr account and wired this whole page with it.

Flattr is by far not the first micropayments system, but it has momentum, sane enough ToS and PP and is being used quite a lot already by other free software and free culture advocates and creators.

Well, I could go on about the theory of micropayments, why it is a step in the right direction etc. etc., but I won't.

In short, if you like anything, Flatt(e)r it/me and if I like anything I'll Flatt(e)r it/you.

Update: I can't get Flattr plugin for Drupal to work (probably my fault), so until then please flatter me via imFlattrd.

hook out >> ran out of Darjeeling tea :\

Konqi the dragon - the tale begins

Mario Fux | 06:54, Wednesday, 18 August 2010

So this shall be the start of a tale or a long story about the little dragon Konqi and its adventures in our (or his) world. But first a preamble.

As you probably read in my former blog entry I did a schooling to be able to teach in the primary school and in general I like or better love kids and people who are from time to time childish ;-). And I’d like to improve my english language skills (I’ll do another course in autumn as well). So there is no better possibility to train than writting in this language. In the next time I plan to write on a rather regular basis about the smaller and bigger adventures of the little dragon Konqi. It should be or become a story or tale for kids that means if and when you have, know or own some of these beings tell them this story. or let them read it. Young human beings are still honest and very critical and they will tell you or me if they like it or not..

In the same way as I’m interested in your comments (about the content, about the grammar or orthography (errors ;-)) I’m interested in the opinion of your kids. And there is another thing I’d like to mention before I start to tell you about the life of another little being: What’s a good tale without good and nice pictures and paintings? So if you’re in some way talented or you are one of the few KDE artists (Nuno, Alexandre and all the others and you’ve some spare time send me an email (fux at the KDE server DOT the mandatory TLD org) and you could be the first who gets the newest report about Konqi’s life. And probably and with some luck the next part of the story has a nice little painting besides.

Oh btw, Krita would be the perfect tool for your fantasy. And there is only one rule for the paintings: Konqi must be green! And now let’s fly to another far away part of the world …

Once upon a time there was a little dragon called Konqi. He was rather small for his kind but more than anything else his heart was good. Konqi grew up in a land far away in the mountains near a nice little village inhabited by human beings. This village was surrounded by a dense coniferous forest and several small rivulets which ceased in magical little ponds. Some of the rivulets had its sources high in the mountains others started just somewhere in between the numberous tall trees. In the steeper areas of the forest there were some caves. Most of them were deep and never entered by a human being, others were just the right place to hide when a sudden summer rain began to fall down to earth.

And in one of these caves, certainly one of the more hidden ones, the little dragon Konqi lived. He was still in his childhood when one day he decided to walk over to the big hill and check what’s there behind this big little rock. After his breakfast, which consisted of berries of the forest, mushrooms and some tasty leaves (Konqi was not one of these dragons who liked to eat up other beings or earthlings), he packed some food for lunch, closed the door of his cave and took the stick which was leant to the rock in front of his cave. It was already at this moment when he first had the feeling that this day would become one of the more thrilling of his long life.

After some minutes of walk through the dense forest he had to cross the first little river. At this place the trees stood not that narrow so that the sun could throw its beams till the ground and there were some white little flowers which enjoyed the warm light of the sun and the soggy neighborhood of the rivulet. Konqi took a break sat down and drank some of the river’s water to refresh himself. He was not really cautious in doing this even though he heard stories about some bewitched waters in the forest. But they must be much deeper in the forest and at places much darker than this beautiful place. And actually it was not the first time he took some of this water.

Finishing his rest he packed up the blanket he had been sitting on and started off into the darker part of the forest. Ten minutes later Konqi then found a place where a lot of different mushrooms were growing. But as he already had enough of them in his bundle he decided to continue his walk over to the big hill. Then after a nice morning walk through denser and clearer parts of the forest he arrived at the hill at around midday. But before he had lunch he wanted to investigate the new side of the hill. ‘New’ because he never before was this far away from his home cave. This was also an area where almost no trees grew.

On the other side of the hill the further area looked exactly the same and so he decided to continue his journey after a short lunch in the hot sun. "Why not take a few more steps away from home?" he was thinking. Just as he was taking his first step of this new part of his trip he perceived a gentle voice almost inaudible. First the voice was just gentle but then suddenly you could recognize fear in it. For the shortest of a moment he continued in lowering his foot to the ground but then suddenly and abruptly its motion was frozen.

And why Konqi’s motion froze so suddenly and who the owner of this gentle and silent voice was you’ll probably find out in the next week at this place. Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoye(d) it.

Apache Dinner DUS

Isabel Drost's blog | 19:10, Tuesday, 17 August 2010

the evening after FrOSCon - that is on August 22nd 2010 at 7:30p.m. CEST - a combined “FSFE Fellowship meetup/ Apache dinner*” takes place in Tigges in Düsseldorf (Brunnenstraße 1, at Bilker S-Bahnhof). Given it doesn’t rain, we’ll be sitting outside.

Would be great to meet you there for tasty food, interesting discussions on Apache in general, as well as projects like Lucene, Hadoop or Tomcat in particular. Anyone interested in either the FSFE or Apache is welcome to join us.

One personal request: Somehow, Rainer (Kersten, FSFE) talked me into preparing a talk on what the ASF is all about - would be really great to have more people around share their experience.

See you in Düsseldorf

EURO2012 qualifying: preparing for day #2

Guido's blog (Free Software) | 13:20, Tuesday, 17 August 2010

waiting for the matches (cc-by click for source)

As announced in a previous posting, I’ll compare the participating countries of the UEFA EURO 2012 in regards to Free Software usage and Open Standards. On September 3rd, the next qualification matches will take place. And it is going to be a busy day: 22 pairings. so, we’ll have to look at 44 countries…

The highlighted fields indicate that there is currently no data in the Fellowship wiki. So, these countries will loose for sure if it stays that way. If you know why they should win instead, please feed the wiki!

New FSCONS 2010 web button

Sam's blog | 15:27, Monday, 16 August 2010

I’ve published a new badge/button for attendees of this year’s Free Society Conference in Gothenburg. I added it to the new promotional materials page of the FSCONS.org website. Expect some leaflets to follow soon. Enjoy!

Greetings

Nicolas’ blog | 12:32, Monday, 16 August 2010

Hello and welcome everyone,

This blog will give you some information about my job at the FSFE. I started on August the 16th and will be here for a whole year.

Actually setting everything up, I will then be good to do real work!

FCron in practice — my fcrontabs shared

Matija "hook" Šuklje (blog) | 14:25, Sunday, 15 August 2010

I've already stated my allegiance to FCron, but after using it for quite some while and writing an article or two about it already (see Publications subpage), I think it's time I shared my fcrontabs.

Since FCron is such a nice and vertisable command scheduler, I can depend that everything's going to get done even though my laptop is not up 24/7.

fcrontab -e systab lets me edit my system fcrontab (note: systab ≠ root's fcrontab):

# All FCron notifications are e-mailed to normal user
MAILTO=hook
 
# Updates 'slocate' in 'man' every day.
%daily,nice(7),random,mail(no) * 10-14 makewhatis -u
%daily,nice(7),random,mail(no) * 16-18 updatedb
 
# Once a month (as soon as possible) my Portage tree is updated and the results e-mailed to my normal user's account.
%monthly,nice(7)mail * 16-23  * eix-sync; emerge -DNuvp world
 
# Once a month (on a random day in the second half of it) some general cleaning of the Portage tree; again e-mail of results.
%midmonthly,nice(7),random,mail * 16-23 * eclean-dist --destructive --nocolor; eclean-pkg --destructive --nocolor; eix-test-obsolete detailed

And here's my normal user's everyday stuff, accessible by fcrontab -e:

# Twice a week the weather report gets printed automatically and an e-mail notifies me when I can take it from the printer or whether there's been a problem
%weekly,mail * 06-23 sleep 500; wget <a href="http://www.yr.no/place/Slovenia/Ljubljana/Ljubljana/varsel.pdf" title="http://www.yr.no/place/Slovenia/Ljubljana/Ljubljana/varsel.pdf">http://www.yr.no/place/Slovenia/Ljubljana/Ljubljana/varsel.pdf</a> -O /tmp/vreme.pdf && lpr /tmp/vreme.pdf && echo "Weather report printed." || echo "ERROR: Weather report *not* printed!" ; rm /tmp/vreme.pdf*
 
%midweekly,mail * 06-23 sleep 500; wget <a href="http://www.yr.no/place/Slovenia/Ljubljana/Ljubljana/varsel.pdf" title="http://www.yr.no/place/Slovenia/Ljubljana/Ljubljana/varsel.pdf">http://www.yr.no/place/Slovenia/Ljubljana/Ljubljana/varsel.pdf</a> -O /tmp/vreme.pdf && lpr /tmp/vreme.pdf && echo "Vremenska napoved je stiskana." || echo "NAPAKA: Vremenska napoved *ni* stiskana!" ; rm /tmp/vreme.pdf*
 
# Using curl magic to automatically send updates to Status.net; I don't need e-mail notification of that ;)
%nightly,mail(no) * * curl <a href="https://identi.ca/api/statuses/update.xml" title="https://identi.ca/api/statuses/update.xml">https://identi.ca/api/statuses/update.xml</a> -u johndearheart:<password> -d status='GNU John Dearheart → !discworld'
 
%daily,mail(no) * * curl <a href="https://identi.ca/api/statuses/update.xml" title="https://identi.ca/api/statuses/update.xml">https://identi.ca/api/statuses/update.xml</a> -u dwtrivia:<password> -d status="`fortune discworld pqf -n 128 -s`"' → !discworld'

Note 1: I prefer to use the %*LY commands to define cronjobs, because they fit my needs the most. FCron itself uses all sorts of ways how to define the time when a cronjob should be executed — from strict date+time (like in "normal" Crons) to intervals and even defined by uptime.
Note 2: Of course, in the last two (f)cronjobs the passwords were censured ;)

I hope this whet your appetite and you'll be anxious to try it and find your own way of how to make your life easier with FCron :]

hook out >> doing "schoolwork" for my potential new legal counselling job
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Scrumtisch August Berlin

Isabel Drost's blog | 16:26, Saturday, 14 August 2010

Just seen it - the next Scrumtisch Berlin has been scheduled for 25th August 2010 at 18:30 Uhr. So far, no official talk has been scheduled, so please expect two topics on Scrum and its application to be selected for discussion according to Marion’s agile topic selection algorithm.

Please talk to Marion Eickmann if you would like to attend the next meetup.

Trying to use only free/libre licenses under Gentoo

Matija "hook" Šuklje (blog) | 08:47, Friday, 13 August 2010

I decided as much as possible to use only free/libre licensed software etc.

So I changed my /etc/make.conf appropriately:

ACCEPT_LICENSE="-* @FSF-APPROVED @FREE-DOCUMENTS"

This is relatively strict setting, but I chose it because I want to see exactly how many and which ebuilds I need for normal use that are not fully free.

So far here's the roughly categorised statistics of my install:

   3 /etc/portage/package.license/emul
   3 /etc/portage/package.license/fonts
  10 /etc/portage/package.license/games
   3 /etc/portage/package.license/internet
   5 /etc/portage/package.license/media
  32 /etc/portage/package.license/system
   6 /etc/portage/package.license/text
  62 total

The packages that a Listed as system include 7 ebuilds of archiving/compressing software and 8 dev-perl ebuilds which are under Artistic license (seems in Perl Artistic license is quite strong). In text the majority comes from TexLive and the licenses are LPPL-1.3 or -1.3c (1.2 is already in @FSF-APPROVED). In games the most used license is Moria since I have quite a number of rogue-likes installed.

On a related note: I'll be applying for the Gentoo Licenses team. I figured that's the thing I can help with which I'm best suited for.

hook out >> just got my SmartCard reader for my Fellowship OpenPGP card, yaaaaaaaaaaaaaay! :D
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Problem with HP Photosmart C4380 fixed

Matija "hook" Šuklje (blog) | 15:37, Thursday, 12 August 2010

For the past weeks/months I had severe problems with my otherwise nifty printer.

The thing was that after an update CUPS stopped printing. If I used the hpijs drivers, printing from most applications and PDF via lpr didn't work; but the hpcups drivers didn't even seem to include the driver I needed and/or failed to print. If I knew the reason, I'd happily tell you and report a bug.

I did manage to solve the problem though with the help of HPLIP's Launchpad

Here's the solution that worked for me. I emerged the following versions of ebuilds with the following USE flags:

• emerged net-print/cups-1.4.4
  with USE="X acl dbus gnutls jpeg ldap pam perl png python slp ssl threads tiff usb xinetd -debug -java -kerberos -php -samba -static"
• emerged net-print/hplip-3.10.6
  with USE="X hpcups libnotify policykit scanner snmp -doc -fax -hpijs -minimal -parport -qt4 -static-ppds -udev-acl"
• emerged app-text/ghostscript-gpl-8.71-r5
  with USE="X cairo cups djvu jpeg2k -bindist -gtk"
• removed the the printer from the CUPS web interface;
• re-added the printer via hp-setup.

(of course not all flags are relevant here and I omitted the linguas_* flags)

Your milage may vary, but this combination worked for me.

hook out >> after a good week of housework, now enjoying air condition
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EURO 2012 qualifying: Estonia vs. Faeroe Islands

Guido's blog (Free Software) | 12:10, Thursday, 12 August 2010

As announced yesterday, I’ll compare the participating countries of the UEFA EURO 2012 in regards to Free Software usage and Open Standards. The soccer match took place yesterday and Estonia won 2:1.

I couldn’t find any articles about the Faeroe Islands and Free Software. Does anybody know something? Otherwise, this match will definitely go to Estonia, since I found out that the Estonian public sector adopted Free Software already in 1995. Sounds very cool and interesting. We’ll have a closer look during the tournament.
If you have anything to add, please leave a comment, drop me a note or edit the Fellowship wiki page about FS in public administration or write a dent to the euro4fs group at identi.ca.

If I don’t hear anything further, I’d say Estonia wins 3:0

Euro 2012 in Free Software

Guido's blog (Free Software) | 21:37, Wednesday, 11 August 2010

Soccer girl (cc-by-sa 2.0)

During the last few weeks after the world cup, the idea grew up in me to run a parallel tournament to the football championship in Europe 2012 where the discipline is Free Software usage in Government. This idea sounds so much like work, and I have so many other more important things to do, that I forced myself to forget about it. Today was the first qualifying game for the Euro 2012 and I just decided to give it a try nevertheless. We will see how long I will stay on the ball

One of the first questions is: how do you measure the usage of Free Software and open standards in governments in a competitive way? It might be impossible to do this in a fair manner. But do soccer matches always come to a fair end?

Well, there are common rules that the participating countries declare to abide. We all can develop our own set of rules for our little tournament and I hope you will join!

So here is my set of rules which I hope to see mature with your help:

1. Since I am obviously the only one participating so far, my judgement will rule, if nobody else speaks up.
2. If somebody disagrees, I’m overruled.
3. If a third or more parties join, majority wins.
4. If even and a winner is required (only then), FSFE Fellow votes count double.
5. If still even. We’ll copy the result of the corresponding football game.
6. We’ll try to follow the soccer championship time table wherever possible.
7. These rules can be changed by consensus until the UEFA qualifing ends on Oct 11, 2011. After that date, we’ll stick to what we have by then.

Comments are welcome.

Some statistics

Isabel Drost's blog | 20:03, Wednesday, 11 August 2010

Various research projects focus on learning more on how open source communities work:

• What makes people commit themselves to such projects?

• How much involvement from various companies is there?
• Do people contribute during working hours or in their spare time?
• Who are the most active contributors in terms of individuals and in terms of companies?

When asked to fill out surveys, especially in cases where that happens for the n-th time with n being larger than say 5, software developers usually are not very likely to fill out these questionairs. However knowing some of the processes of open source software development it soon becomes obvious there are way more extensive sources for information - albeit not trivial to evaluate and prone to at least some error.

Free software tends to be developed “in the open”: Project members with various backgrounds get together to collaborate on a common subject, exchanging ideas, designs and thoughts digitally. Nearly every project with more then two members at least has mailing list archives and some sort of commit log to some version control system. Usually people also have bugtrackers that one can use as a source for information.

If we take the ASF as an example, there is a nice application to create various statistics from svn logs:

The caveats of this analysis are pretty obvious: Commit times are set according to the local of the server, however that may be far off compared to the actual timezone the developer lives in. Even when knowing each developer’s timezone there is still some in-accuracy in the estimations as people might cross timezone bounderies when going off for vacation. Still the data available from that source should already provide some input as to when people are contributing, how many projects they work on, how much effort in general goes into each project etc.

Turning the analysis the other way around and looking at mailing list contributions, one might ask whether a company indeed is involved in free software development. One trivial, naive first shot could be to simply look for mailinglist postings that originate from some corporate mail address. Again the raw numbers displayed below have to be normalised. This time company size and fraction of developers vs. non-developers in a company has to be taken into consideration when comparing graphs and numbers to each other.

Yet another caveat are mailinglists that are not archived in the mail archiving service that one may have choosen as the basis for comparison. In addition people may contribute from their employer’s machines but not use the corporate mail address (me personally I am one of these outliers, using the apache.org address for anything at some ASF project).

101tec	JTeam	Tarent
Kippdata	Lucid Imagination	Day
HP	IBM	Yahoo!
Nokia	Oracle	Sun

Easily visible even from that trivial 5min analysis however is general trending of involvement in free software projects. In addition those projects are displayed prominently projects that employees are working with and contributing to most actively - it comes as no surprise that for Yahoo! that is Hadoop. In addition if graphs go back in time far enough, one might even see the timeframe of when a company changed its open source strategy (or was founded ).

Sort of general advise might be to first use the data that is already out there as a starting point - in contrast to other closed communities free software developers tend to generate a lot of it. And usually it is freely available online. However when doing so, know your data well and be cautious to draw premature conclusions: The effect you are seeing may well be caused by some external factor.

Fight spam with spam

Matija "hook" Šuklje (blog) | 19:17, Wednesday, 11 August 2010

I just stumbled upon a rather evil way on how to fight spam.

SpamPoison claims to fight spam by luring spam bots/crawlers via a link on your website onto website which "will redirect email harvesting bots to trap sites that will feed it with an almost infinite loop of dynamically generated fake email addresses, mostly on known spammer owned domains! This will render their harvested lists practically useless and of no commercial value."

Sounds logical enough to try ...so here goes nothing.

hook out >> beh, more home improvement to help with; should be studying :\
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KDE work day 2 - git and lugo

Mario Fux | 07:25, Wednesday, 11 August 2010

So good morning dear readers. It took a long time for this new and next entry of mine about my kde work days. But I’ve an excuse. I moved - and the new and better internet connection starts to work from the 19th of August. Till then I’m online only when I’m in the office and on some swiss train stations occasionally. It’s now more than two or three weeks since the last entry and I want to start right on about some stuff I did or tried.

Last Friday I started a serie of programming courses at my local LUG (the LUGO - Linux User Group Oberwallis). I’m not yet good in developing with Qt and KDE but I tought that I could give and share my new knowledge with some other LUG mates as I go on. And we already were a group of four people increasing in the next course. There are some spare notes and nine slides of a short presentation. Probably I still write some text of what I told them. But the course shall and will be quite interactive as we are all on different knowledge. So if and when you’re in Switzerland and speak German visit us. The next course is on Friday, the 10th of September 2010. Oh and btw. This Friday, the 13th of August, we have another general meeting at our LUG with some presentations about Linux on different devices (and of course a short presentation by me about KDE mobile) and somehow an integrated release party for KDE SC 4.5.0.

Then I read and tried some of the git stuff in the last weeks. As the projects grow (more than one file) and version control system begins to make sense and which could be better suited than git (no flame war about vcs please - I’ve choosen git because Qt already switched to it and KDE will finally switch to it in the next months). So here is a short summary and listing of some git commands:

• "man git-log" or "git help log" to get information about the git log command
• "git init" in a directory to create and initialize a new git respository
• "git add ." to add the current directory to the cache (index) and
• "git commit" to finally commit it
• "git commit -a" to commit all new changes without explicitely adding them
• "git diff –cached" to see the changes and
• "git log", "git log -p" or "git log –stat –summary" to view the history
• "git branch <newBranch>" creates a new branch and
• "git merge <newBranch>" merges it with the master branch (what a surprise
• "git clone <localOrRemoteUrl> <newName>" clones another repository
• "git pull <otherRepo> master" merges the changes of the otherRepo with your master and
• "git fetch <otherRepo> master" does the same without merging
• "gitk" is a graphical history and diff browser for git

All the stuff I read or learned is from the gittutorial and git documentation (aptitude install git-doc on a Debian system ;-).

As you probably already noticed I’m somehow interested in semantic and natural language stuff. Some months ago I asked some friends of mine to send me five to ten (5-10) sentences in natural (human) language about searches they want to do on their computers. Something like: "show me all the text documents I worked on last week and tagged with ‘project X’". So here is a wish to you or job for you: Send me some such natural language query (english or german, probably some french once, that’s all I speak and understand ;-), preferably from collegues or friends who are not power users but normal computer users. I want to analyse them and try something out.

As this blog entry is already longer than expected I want to add some information about myself. You should now my name and that I like (or love?;-) free software and thus KDE. I’m 31 years old, life in Switzerland (grew up in the south of it and life now somewhere in the middle (who knows where and read the last entry?;-). Eleven years ago I finished my schooling as a primary school teacher but decided to study which I hope to finish in the spring of 2012. My major at the university is education and social education and the minors are computer sciences (with a special interest in AI and semantic web engineering) and computational linguistics.

And to end this entry. There is a new Qt technology coming up about the semantic web and desktop: QtSparql… (but Soprano is worth a look as well to say the least) and soon you’ll find here more information about Konqi the dragon…

NoSQL summer Berlin - this evening

Isabel Drost's blog | 06:38, Wednesday, 11 August 2010

This evening at Volkspark Friedrichshain, Café Schoenbrunn the next NoSQL summer Berlin (organised by Tim Lossen) is meeting to discuss the paper on Amazon’s Dynamo “Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store”. The group is planning to meet at 19:30 for some beer and discussions on the publication.

TeleMetrum at Apogee Components

Bdale Garbee (Bits from the Basement) | 04:16, Wednesday, 11 August 2010

Exciting news! As of today, TeleMetrum starter kits are available through Apogee Components in addition to the Garbee and Garbee web store!

Short Rekonq 0.5.0 user review

Matija "hook" Šuklje (blog) | 22:43, Monday, 09 August 2010

Lately I've been trying Rekonq to see what all the fuzz's about. In short it's an alternative web browser for KDE, which uses WebKit^[1] and aims to be lightweight.

I don't intend to judge it by how it renders web pages, since many web pages still don't follow the W3C standards, so I usually have several browsers installed, so I have KHTML, WebKit, Gecko and for emergencies text-only. Also Konqueror in the newest release already supports both KHTML and WebKit, so that's not a relevant question.

Here's in short what I found out when using Rekonq 0.5.0 for a few days/weeks as the default browser (compared to Konqueror 4.4.4):

pro:

• no menu bar
• no status bar, but the URL show in the bottom of the window the webpage when hovered — I love that! In fact, I'd like to see that everywhere in KDE — Konqueror, Akregator, KMail, etc. etc.
• adblock subscription
• rearranging tabs with mouse works
• page previews are nice
• location bar filling up when loading is a nice touch
• the hack with the forced bright background makes badly written web sites work also under dark themes
• searching only parts of the URL from the location bar works (although it's not as good as Firefox' yet)

con:

• scrolling not smooth, sometimes autoscroll doesn't work
• middle-click in window does not (always?) open the pasted URL
• missing keyboard shortcut to move tabs
• i don't like the close buttons integrated into tabs — I prefer Konqi's close button on the far right of the opened tabs and the new tab button on the far left
• missing bookmarks: KIO slave (and others, but those are not so much browser-related)
• favicons don't work always
• a lot of missing features. Amongst others a quick way to add AdBlock rules from browser (like via right-clicking an ad)
• sessions would be nice ...maybe TabCandy is not the best way to tackle it, but it's not a bad idea
• I actually like that Ctrl pops up shortcuts in Konqueror
• the hack with the forced bright background does look quite ugly and still is just an ugly hack (works though)

Bottom line: for now I switched back to Konqi, but will continue to follow Rekonq's develpment closely. I feel comparing the two is quite similar to comparing the whole Mozilla Suite and Phoenix (= how Firefox was named initially) in the early 2000's — it's a clean, no bloat underdog, but as of now, feels underpowered and a bit clumsy compared to the beast it's trying to replace. I won't be as bold to predict their future to be the same as Mozilla Suite vs. Firefox, but I'll say I wouldn't be surprised if that happens.

Side note: both share the annoyance with how KDE handles cookies — the rules get wiped out every few days.

Also, it'd be a nice idea in general to have Stop and Reload in one single button. If the page (or anything else for that matter) is loading, reloading doesn't make sense; while if the page (etc.) is loaded, stopping it doesn't make sense. Therefore in turn one of these two buttons is always obsolete.

hook out >> sipping my bloody well deserved tea and deciding to apply for the Gentoo License team...

Apache Dinner August Berlin recap

Isabel Drost's blog | 21:54, Monday, 09 August 2010

This evening yet another Apache Dinner took place in Berlin (this time Schöneberg), location booked by Simon Willnauer. As it was announced less then a week ago (see post below) we were expecting no more then some 7 people … we ended up being a group of 15 attendees: There was Michi Busch from Twitter together with Tanja, Uwe Schindler from Bremen joined us. With Matt and Josh some of our local Hadoop users from Nokia joined our group. We had Sebastian Schelter from Mahout. In addition there were the usual suspects, that is Jan Lehnardt, Simon Willnauer and Torsten Curdt.

Indian food at Yogi Haus was great and very tasty - though we should introduce a sharing algorithm for the various dishes next time around. Speaking of next time: If you would like to be part of the dinner, subscribe to our Apache Dinner mailing list. Best way to make the location suit your needs is to simply send out the next proposal yourself.

As usual the Lucene guys are the last to leave: Currently they are on their way to X-Berg for further drinks, some food and lots of fun. Looking forward to the pictures you promised, Simon