Planet Fellowship (en)

Working on the Booth…

alessandro.polvani's blog » English | 16:13, Friday, 27 January 2012

My next challenge is the one to re-organise and restructure a bit the procedures for setting up a FSFE booth. Basically our Booth page will be improved, and new material (posters…leaflets…) will be made available soon.
I started today this new project, whose main purpose is: making life easier for volunteers who wish to organise a booth. Your input is very important: please let us know your opinion about that! What do you think the most important things which need to be improved are? What are your experiences about FSFE Booths? Looking forward to receiving your feedback, as this is supposed to be an open process

Scrumtisch Berlin

Inductive Bias | 23:10, Thursday, 26 January 2012

After quite some time off I went to the Scrumtisch Berlin. The event was incredibly well visited - roughly 50 people filled the upper floor at Cafe Hundertwasser. Today’s event was organised such that participants first collected discussion topics, prioritised them together and then discussed the top three items in a timebox of 15 minutes each.

Topics collected were:

• Best tricks to make teams self organised (20 votes)
• What is QA doing fulltime in a team (13 votes)
• Ops and planning in a team (15 votes)
• PO disappears and takes backlog and vision with him - what now? (7 votes)
• Working with non-Software teams (17 votes)
• Pimp up my retrospective (12 votes)
• Multiple teams on one projects and vice versa (4 votes)
• IBM doing Scrum/ massive Scrum (9 votes)
• Feature knowledge vs market knowledge - what is more important in a PO if you have to choose due to people constraints (9 votes)
• How to convince a team to do more (3 votes)
• Why is agile good (10 votes)

Compared to previous meetings quite some topics repeat. About half of the attendees were there for the first time - so it seems there is a common set of questions people usually run into when rolling out Scrum.

Self organising teams

Seems like this is one of the most common questions run into when rolling out Scrum - how to really get to self organising teams. The question can be answered from two positions: What are the pre-requisites it takes to enable teams to become self organising? How to actually transform teams that are used to a command and control structure and are reluctant to transform?

The discussion, mainly led by Andrea Provaglio, CSM trainer focussed mainly on the first part of the question. Even when limiting discussion that way, the answer will still depend heavily on the organisation structure, number of management levels, team sizes.

Marion made the topic a bit more concrete: Given the flexible vacation planning approach of Netflix, her question was whether that sort of loose approach could work in a typical German company (after all we have 30 instead of <20 vacation days, we have fixed holidays, she as a C?O of course wants to avoid customers being left alone when the whole team is on vacation.) Andrea re-phrased agility a bit here. His proposal was to not allow people to take their time off just anytime but to give them the freedom to figure out when to take time off. He identified five principles for leadership:

• Clearly setting a goal (in that case: Everyone needs to have a vacation plan at a given date.)
• Provide the team with all resources, information and with the environment they need to accomplish their task.
• Define constraints (”there must be at least one guy in the office on any given working day”)
• Check back regularly
• Make yourself available to answer any questions

The discussion on teams reluctant to adopt self organisation was separated out and deferred. His point was mainly about enabling and encouraging self organisation. Enforcing self organisation however is not possible.

Scrum in non-Software teams

Though phrased very broadly the topic quickly turned into a “how to do Scrum for hardware” discussion. Main problem here is that the further down you go the longer design generally takes. Even just routing lines on one decently sized circuit board can take several weeks. Mainly three possible ways out of the problem emerged from the discussion:

• Loosening the definition of done - “potentially shipable” may not mean sellable or even really shipable. I don’t think one should go down that slippery path. Only by actually shipping can I get the feedback I need to improve my design. So instead of loosening the definition of done we should instead start thinking about ways to get faster feedback, reduce risk and introduce shorter iterations.
• Another way is to look for ways to reduce iteration length, even though we might not get down to software release cycles, and align releases such that integration can happen earlier.
• The third way out could be to realize that maybe Scrum does not quite fit that way of working and use a different process instead that still provides the transparency and fast feedback that is needed (think Kanban).

Overall the most important result of the discussion was that within 15min discussion the issues cannot be solved. After all the solution will depend on what exactly you are working on, who your suppliers are and what your team looks like. Most important is to recognize that there is a problem and to work on removing that impediment - most important is to identify issues and to improve your process.

Operations and planning in Scrum

The last question discussed involved operations and Scrum planning: Given a team that does software development but is interrupted frequently with production issues - how should they work in a Scrum environment.

There are multiple facets to that problem: When it comes to deciding whether to deal with something immediately or not it makes sense to weigh size of the issue against amount of work it takes to resolve it. “Getting things done” states that the minimum size of an issue to deal with instantly is 2min of work. Issue with that is that the assumption of GTD was that issues flow into and inbox that is dealt is when there is time. In production environments however these issues usually trickle in instantly interrupting developers over and over again incurring a huge cost due to task switching.

One way out might be to have an event queue and assign developers (on a rotating basis) to deal with the issues and leave time for others to work in a focused way. Make sure to rotate frequently instead of by sprint - otherwise you run into the problem of making the team unstable thus delivering no stable amount of business value each sprint.

Another obvious way is to account for frequent interruptions and include a buffer for those in your plan. The most important benefit of that approach is to make the cost of this working mode clearly visible to management - leaving the decision how to deal with it up to them.

Other simple fixes include introducing some level of indirection between the actual developer and the customer raising the issue, documenting solutions as well as incoming issues for better visibility, introducing a single point of contact capable of prioritising.

Coming back to vanilla Scrum however there is one interesting observation to be made: The main contract with iterations is for developers to be able to work in a focused way. Instead of having their tasks switched each day they are promised a fixed period of time to solve a given set of stories. In the end a sprint is a compromise between what management may need (change their mind on what is important frequently) and what developers need (working on a set of defined tasks not interrupted by re-priorisation). If the assumption of focus does not longer hold true, Scrum might be the wrong model. If what needs to be done changes daily, Kanban again might be the better option. Still making sure that the cost of task switching is visible is vitally important.

To sum up a very interesting Scrumtisch - in particular as agile methods really seem to become more and more common also in Berlin. Speaking of challenges: As user groups grow sometimes their character changes as well, in particular when built around participation and discussion. It will be interesting to watch Scrumtisch deal with that growth. Maybe at some point splitting the audience and having separate breakout sessions might make sense. Admittedly I’d also love to know more on the background of the audience: How many are actually using Scrum in the trenches vs. teaching Scrum as coaches? How long have they been using Scrum? In what kind of organisation? Maybe a topic for next time.

Take part in Document Freedom Day, 28th March 2012

I love it here » English | 15:28, Thursday, 26 January 2012

Document Freedom Day (DFD) is a global day for document liberation. It is a worldwide event celebrating Open Standards and raising general awareness about the need for their adoption, and why it matters for society. DFD is actively redefining perceptions of Open Standards in media, public administration and educational institutions. Thanks to generous donations, in the last year we were able to:

• Organise 42 events in 14 different countries around the world, ranging from Brazil and Mexico, to Greece and Portugal,
• Coordinate an important talk at the European Parliament with multiple speakers, and
• Raise the profile of pioneering users of Open Standards, such as German news website ‘tagesschau.de’, by awarding certificates and prizes in view of the press.

The DFD 2011 Germany prize went to a popular news website which provides its 1.4m daily visitors with current affairs videos in the Free video format Ogg Theora. The award was presented in Berlin, resulting in coverage in 8 national and international media outlets. The city of Munich received the European prize, for the use of Open Standards in its LiMux project.

At March 28th 2012 we will celebrate Document Freedom Day for the fourth time. We shall again organise more than 42 events, include countries that were previously not involved, and strenghten engagement with the public sector.

To make these plans a reality, we need your support as a partner of Document Freedom Day 2012! Talk with your friends/regional groups, and think about activities and events that you could organise to promote Open Standards. We would be happy to help you with ideas, prize-giving, and finding sponsors.

With your help we will be able to organise more events in 2012, and together we can raise awareness for Open Standards around the world.

At the moment we are coordinating our activities with international partners and sponsors. Please do not hesitate to contact us for more detailed information about partnership opportunities for Document Freedom Day 2012.

–
Matthias Kirschner
Support Free Software! Join the Fellowship!

Fellowship Interview with Heiki Ojasild

Fellowship Interviews | 11:35, Monday, 23 January 2012

Heiki Ojasild joined the Free Software Foundation Europe in 2011, undertaking the task of translating fsfe.org into Estonian, his mother tongue. He is currently developing an XChat add-on, as well as a website for free SVG and JavaScript games. In 2010 he took part in the Baltic Olympiad in Informatics. I talked to him about copyright, Digital Restrictions Management, kopimism, and activism.

CW: How did you first become involved with Free Software?

HO: I vividly remember, years ago my nephew told me about GNU/Linux and I couldn’t believe it worked the way it did. I thought that computers couldn’t function without Windows. At the time it seemed such a strange concept that I didn’t pay much attention to it, even after he had demonstrated it to me.

It was a couple of years before I learned to code and started participating in informatics competitions. Then, at first, learning to use GNU/Linux became a status symbol for me. I just thought that I would be cooler using it. Gradually I realised I had less crashes and trouble with Linux. By the time I had talked my mother into buying me a personal laptop, I had made a decision to go with GNU/Linux as the main system and saved her the Microsoft tax. I was 15 at the time.

That was almost 3 years ago. During my high school years I’ve become interested in philosophy, and gradually became interested in the ideology behind Free Software.

At first, I was just awed and accepted everything in Stallman’s essays as gold. Nowadays I am a bit more critical, but I am still convinced that Free Software is the future.

“learning to use GNU/Linux became a status symbol for me”

I became involved with FSFE when I spotted a blatantly incompetent Estonian translation on the FSFE website. That was in August 2011. I reported it and Nicolas Jean (FSFE’s Web Team Coordiantor) removed it and told me that I would be welcome to translate the website. For some reason – a personality flaw, maybe? – I couldn’t decline.

Gradually I grew closer to FSFE and became involved with both translations and website maintenance. At some point in October 2011 I arrived at the conclusion that I should join the Fellowship. I probably just fancied the @fsfe.org mailing alias. I became a Fellow, And I have been growing more attached to the FSFE ever since.

CW: What are you working on at the moment?

HO: On the FSFE side, I am currently translating PdfReaders.org into Estonian. I’m also trying to persuade my friends to do the same. At the same time, I’ve been scouring the web for proprietary software advertising on Estonian governmental institutions’ websites, as part of the PDF Readers campaign. I have some new targets waiting in the queue because I want to finish the translation before contacting them. I occasionally contribute improvements and translations to the main website. Mostly I tend to blog about issues that are dear to me. On the technology side, I have been trying to work on an XChat add-on and I am planning to launch a new website for free SVG and JavaScript games.

These projects are low priority, however. Activism is far more important to me at the moment, and there are lots of thorns in my side as well as interests: proprietary software advertising, proprietary software in schools, skepticism, copyright, pirate parties, secularism, and kopimism are just a few favourites. Since Jessica Ahlquist won her case to remove the prayer banner in her school in the U.S., I have been contemplating possibilities to stop schools in Estonia from supporting religion, even if they do it only during Christmas. I am also considering trying to register a kopimistic church in Estonia. An achievement in one of the subject areas dear to me has the effect of increasing my attempts in all of them. Activism is certainly contagious!

CW: So your primary interest in Free Software relates to political activism?

HO: Nowadays definitely. For me, Free Software is philosophy. And applied philosophy is politics. One can be involved in politics either through a political party or through a campaign group. And the activism I have in mind is being active in politics through a campaign group.

CW: The ‘E’ in FSFE of course stands for Europe. How European do you think FSFE is?

HO: The technical set-up is certainly sufficient to be pan-European. The legal and social situation…well, if one takes a look at the team page, it is evident that representatives of many European countries are part of the FSFE. However, the situation could be better. FSFE needs to find a way to expand our activities into all of the European countries. And I have no magic solution to that problem. Nevertheless, the culture of FSFE is certainly European. It is open, welcoming, and democratic.

“I cannot trust Google to provide me with the most relevant results any more”

CW: How important do you feel your translation of fsfe.org is?

HO: I’m not sure. On the one hand, most Estonians can speak and understand English well enough that they could probably understand a lot of materials in English in the first place. On the other, if we want to distribute the materials in Estonia and reference them in communications, it is only polite to ensure maximum reach and comprehension. I am also of the opinion that as we translate the materials and develop local terminology, the issues become easier to understand for people, and it becomes more likely that people will get involved in our work. It is certainly important to increasing the amount of people perceiving FSFE as being European, rather than German.

CW: Increasing the perception that each country has an equal role in the organisation, you mean?

HO: Absolutely.

CW: How well known is Free Software in Estonia?

HO: Some packages are well known, like Mozilla Firefox. Lots of people here have heard of Free Software. Unfortunately, most of them have several misconceptions, chief among them the misunderstanding of Free Software being about price, not Freedom. It is also common to generalize one’s impressions and common hearsay into what Free Software is, instead of adopting the position held by the FSF and FSFE, or reading the individual software licenses. Also, as far as I know, most primary and secondary education providers use and teach proprietary software.

CW: Is perception changing? Is it on the government agenda?

HO: As far as I know, it is neither changing nor on a government agenda. There exists some ancient document that calls governmental institutions to use open document formats but that is not followed either. Probably Estonian MEP Indrek Tarand is the only Estonian politician who could be regarded as having an understanding of Free Software and doing something for it. He started the European Parliamentary Free Software User Group and is their patron. The user group certainly helps to promote Free Software in the public sector by offering support to Free Software users. It is not much, but it is more than most Estonian politicians can claim to have done.

CW: What excites you in the world of Free Software at the moment? You’ve switched to YaCy recently I notice.

HO: Everything. Google’s actions have clearly demonstrated the need for new and distributed search engines, and that has made me switch to YaCy. Google’s attempts at mixing search results with their other products are anti-competitive, and in case of the last tweaks to the Personalized Search, actually deteriorate the user experience. Their early commitment to the users has been replaced with a commitment to the shareholders, who want more profit from the company’s products. That commitment to the shareholders has caused both the Buzz fiasco and now the integration between search results and Google+. Google might have the best web index at present, but I cannot trust Google to provide me with the most relevant results any more. So I switched to YaCy.

“I am plainly horrified by how locked down and crippled my Kindle is”

I also enjoy pretty much anything interesting related to cryptography, steganography, and otherwise “sticking it to the man”. I’m currently keeping an eye on the Amazon Kindle jail-breaking community. I hope someone manages to jailbreak the K4. I got it for Christmas, and I am plainly horrified by how locked down and crippled this beautiful device is. When I asked for the device, I was thinking I could exorcise the undue influence Amazon holds over the device, and effectively get subsidised hardware. I was a bit naive. Though I still hope I will manage to cut Amazon out of the loop one day, encrypt the file system, and fill the device with Project Gutenberg e-books.

CW: The Free Software / Free Hardware issue is such a difficult one. Is enough work done to explain the link between software and hardware and promote the idea of Free Hardware over vendor lock-in in your view?

HO: Yes and no. The FSF has certainly warned people about the dangers. However, I believe that DRM should be outlawed. As long as companies are allowed to keep users from writing and running their own software (which would cut into their profits), that’s what they’ll do.

CW: You’re a fan of Wittgenstein. Do you think of computer code as a language in the way that Wittgenstein talked about language?

HO: I think of code in the same way as any other language, only less ambiguous. Though, obviously the C++ standards committee did not wish to succumb to English, and thus invented undefined behaviour. Regarding freedom, I think that all data must be free.

All data, regardless of its meaning, can be applied in a manner sufficiently tool-like to require its ‘freeness’, if we use the tool discourse. Should we use a discourse establishing free software as a thing in itself, it would be too strange for me to comprehend. In my opinion, freeness of information is natural. Copyright is the result of deviant and misguided politics. And nowadays abolishing copyright is political because people have become used to copyright existing, and they do not see the need to justify its existence.

Teddy in Chicago

Inductive Bias | 21:56, Sunday, 22 January 2012

Last week I spent several days in Chicago mainly to attend a few meetings at the local Nokia/Navteq office. Though the schedule was pretty packed, a few hours remained to explore the then frosty and windy city:

Top three images: Some impressions of the city. Bottom left: Teddy’s new friend. Bottom right: Situation at ORD when flying out - fortunately both, the airport as well as the airline (Swiss) have quite some experience with challenging weather conditions so that we could leave without too much delay.

As usual I wondered whether there are any Apache people close by. So before flying in I checked our committers map. As there were a few people in that general area I sent a brief heads-up to the greatly under-advertised, private, non-archived, committers only list party@apache.org. In case you’ve never heard about it: The main use case of that list is to provide a means for committers to arrange for meeting up with fellow Apache people and share travel details.

As a result I received a brief list of things to do in Chicago and got to attend a small but really nice meetup. Having a means to get in touch with locals can make such a difference - thanks for the warm welcome! Hopefully next time I’m there weather is as warm - would love to explore the (at least according to my travel guide book) beautiful nature of the great lakes.

2012w3

blog.padowi.se » English | 11:00, Sunday, 22 January 2012

mitmproxy

Granted, there shouldn’t be all that many use cases for a software such as this for a non-pentesting, non-criminal, but the fact that it can record and replay previous interactions, which can be useful, for instance, to automate login on access protected networks (hopefully ones that we already have permission to enter, but find the actual logging in part a real hassle).

Procedural City, Part 1

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this entire series of blog posts, in which the author had the “simple” goal of generating an entire city, digitally, in a procedural manner.

Fedora Friendfinder

Ok, so this is just humor, but you know what? It is good humor

XXXTerm

This sounds like something kinky, but is in reality a minimalist web browser with sophisticated security features designed-in.

So, a bit like luakit but with a funnier name

Pipeviewer

pipeviewer really is something I could have more use for, if I just ever remebered to use it

The next SOPA

You know what? This guy is on the right track. And I think Joel is as well.

MPAA shows us just why they are not a part of the solution. Mostly it is because they, and the rest of the abusive copyright-holders are their own worst enemy. Of course, they won’t go down peacefully, so it really is time for us to start fighting back. And there are plenty of targets to chose from.

In related news, it seems the Polish internet community is “unhappy” with ACTA… very nice

Scrum done wrong

Inductive Bias | 06:39, Sunday, 22 January 2012

“Agile and Lean have a single purpose: to continually challenge the status quo. If you’re not doing that, you’re probably an impediment to it.”

agile42.com

Judging from the way some people become overly careful when discussing agile in general and Scrum in particular in my presence I seem to slowly have built up a reputation for being a strong proponent of these methods. Given the large number of flaky implementations as well as misunderstandings it seems to have become fashionable to blame Scrum for all badness and dismiss it altogether - up to the point where developers are proud to finally having abandoned Scrum completely - so that now they

• can work in iterations,
• accept new tasks only for upcoming but not for the current iteration,
• develop in a test-driven way,
• have daily sync meetings,
• mark tasks done only when they are delivered to and accepted by the customer,
• have regular “how to improve our work” meetings,
• estimate tasks in story points and only plan for as much work per iteration as was done in the past iteration

… my personal take on that: Add in regular releases and you end up with a pretty decent scrum/agile implementation, no matter what your preferred name for it may be. Just for clarification: Though very often I write about what I call Scrum, I don’t use that particular method just because it is the latest fashion. It simply is a tool that has served me well on multiple occasions and given me working guidelines when I had no idea at all what software development in a professional setting should look like.

So where does all that friction with anything Scrum, agile, lean or whatever you call it come from? Recently I came across a blog post that jillesvangurp.com nicely identified some grave issues with current Scrum adoption. Unfortunately the blog post only lists the failures without going into a deeper analysis of the actual defects causing those failures.

First of all, lets assume as working hypothesis that Scrum in itself does not solve any issues in your organisation but is a great tool to uncover deficiencies. The natural conclusion should be to use it as a tool to discover problems, but search for solutions for these problems elsewhere.

With that hypothesis, lets discern the the issues discussed in the post above and assign them to one of three defect categories.

Category one: Issues with the team

Problem: You have a team of all-junior developers, or of all-mediocre developers.

Goal: Turn them into a high performing team.

Solution: Imagine you were not using Scrum at all, what would be the ideal solution? Well the obvious route probably is to re-adjust the team, add several seniors so that you end up with the right mix of people that have experience and share a vision - juniors than can learn and adapt what works from them.

Comparing that to our hypothesis: Scrum is all for short delivery cycles. You will uncover teams that perform badly much faster than in methods with longer iteration periods. So it should be reasonably simple to figure out teams that have a dysfunctional configuration. Changing that configuration however no longer is dictated by Scrum.

Category two: Bugs introduced during Scrum roll-out

The failures discussed in the blog post include people following Scrum mechanically: Only because your developers are moving post-it notes from left to right does not mean they are doing anything agile. It’s perfectly possible to do waterfall in Scrum. Whether that helps solve any of your issues is a different matter.

Instead of mechanically going through the process what is more important is to understand the reasons and goals of each of the pieces that form Scrum. To make a rather far fetched comparison:

<iframe allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" frameborder="0" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/d2afuTvUzBQ" width="420"></iframe>

When introducing Scrum without a deep understanding of why each piece is done, what you end up with is people following that process without understanding the meaning of each step. They end up mimicking behaviour without knowing the real world: To some extend seeing only the shadows of good development patterns without understanding the real items producing these shadows.

As a general rule: Understand why there is a retrospective meeting, remember why you need estimations, think about why there are daily stand-ups (instead of weekly meetings, instead of daily sit-togethers, instead of hourly stand-ups). Figure out why there is a product owner, what the role of a scrum master does. Pro-Tip: As soon as you really have understood Scrum, you don’t need a checklist of all meetings to hold for a successful iteration - they will just fit in naturally. If they don’t, you are probably missing an important piece of the puzzle - rather than rely on a pre-fabricated checklist, go bug your trainer or coach with questions to better understand the purpose of all the different bits and pieces.

One very grave bug on roll-out is the general believe that Scrum is equal to a little bit of fairy dust you spread over your teams and all problems will automatically be solved afterwards. It is not - it’s not a silver bullet, it’s not fairy dust, it’s no magic - such things exist in fairy tales but have been seen nowhere in the real world. According to our working hypothesis above however Scrum does something really magical: By shortening delivery cycles it introduces short feedback loops which make it very easy to uncover problems in your organisation way faster than people are able to cover them up and hide them. Finding a solution on the other hand is still up to you.

The last roll-out issue mentioned is that of crappy certification - current certification programs are designed such that the naive organisation may believe that after two days of training their employers will magically turn into super heroes. Guess what - as with any certification training is just the very first step. Actual understanding comes with experience. Compare that to learning to drive: Only because you managed to get a drivers license does not turn you into a formula one winner. Instead that requires a whole lot of training. Same applies for any Scrum Master or Product Owner.

Category three: Organisation specifics

All other issues with Scrum mentioned in the blog post are either specific to the broken structures in the organisation under investigation or due to general Scrum mis-conceptions. Leaving these aside here.

To sum up: Scrum to me is nothing but a term to summarize good, proven development practices. I don’t care how you name them - however having any one name that is well defined makes it way easier to communicate. Scrum is not silver bullet - it does not solve all the issues your organisation may have. However it is a very effective debugger uncovering the issues employees and managers are trying to cover up. If you know all those issues very precisely already or you are certain that you don’t have any, chances are you don’t need Scrum.

And, WordPress hackers, just in case you’re interested…

Computer Floss | 20:59, Thursday, 19 January 2012

… here’s how I made the earlier slightly tricky change.

Using this tutorial page I changed the front page of the site into a static page, which sat at “computerfloss.com/blog”.

But I wanted the front page to be at the root of the domain, so I skipped over to this other tutorial page. This one guided me through the process of redefining the root of the URL  – a very nice little feature of WordPress — so that the “/blog” part of the URL is no longer visible (to the public).

Now I can work on my plans to expand the site into something more than just a blog, using WordPress more like a CMS than a blogging platform. Watch this space for new content!

Computer Floss – Slight URL change. Update your feed!

Computer Floss | 20:47, Thursday, 19 January 2012

I’ve added a new static front page to the computerfloss.com site. (I have some plans to expand here, you see.) The “/blog” part of the URL is no longer needed, so the old RSS address won’t work.

Either click the RSS icon or change your feed address to:

http://computerfloss.com/feed/rss/

 

Digikam Code Sprint @ Genova + Telepathy KIPI Plugin

Dr. Danz's blog » freesoftware | 23:00, Wednesday, 18 January 2012

This post was supposed to be published yesterday January 18th 2012, but I’m delaying it of 24 hours in support of SOPA STRIKE

Last weekend the Digikam Code Sprint was held in Genoa (Italy). Yes, I’m not a Digikam developer, but I live in Genoa and this was a very good occasion to implement something that I’ve being planning to implement for a long time: A KIPI Plugin for Telepathy. So before saying anything else, here is the mandatory screenshot:

Thanks to this plugin, you will be able to send your pictures and albums from digikam, showfoto and any other application using KIPI plugins. Most of all I wanted this feature in KSnapshot, and yes this is now possible.

This is something I already implemented in the past [1] but I must admit that having all the contacts in a menu was a bad idea, so I gave up at the time… So this time we have a widget instead that takes shows only the person that are online, that can accept a file transfer and there is a bar to filter by name (actually most of this is widget is “borrowed” from Telepathy Send File, written by David, so credits for that go to him). I think this solution is much better than the menu, but comments are very welcome.

Unfortunately the widget won’t be in KDE Telepathy 0.3 so you will have to wait for the 0.4 release, and then you will have to wait for the kipi-plugin to be reviewed by the digikam developers… Meanwhile it will reside in my clone repositories (I will update this post with the links as soon as the code is available)

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P.S. Thanks to ALID (especially to Angelo, Stefano and Claudio) and KDE e.V. for hosting, organizing and supporting the event and to all the Digikam developers.

Why I Love Free and Open Source Software

Thomas Løcke Being Incoherent | 21:40, Wednesday, 18 January 2012

My love for, and interest in, Free and Open Source software comes from two fairly different perspectives. One perspective is that of me as a programmer, a geek and a freedom loving individual. Another, equally important, perspective is me as … Continue reading →

MSN+XMPP in KDE Telepathy

Dr. Danz's blog » freesoftware | 21:49, Monday, 16 January 2012

As Xavier already wrote on his blog,

Microsoft announced that they had added XMPP to their Windows Live APIs. Microsoft announced that they had added XMPP to their Windows Live APIs. That means that any Jabber client could connect to MSN using our favorite open IM protocol! No more closed protocol to reverse-engineer.

Since Gabble now supports it, I just had to add a little bit of magic to support the Messenger OAuth2 authentication in KDE-Telepathy Auth Handler and add a profile to the Account Manager. Microsoft implementation still have some problems (you cannot add/authorize new contact, yahoo contacts are not shown, etc.), therefore by default the “old” method will be used, but we think that it is important that people starts using it, therefore starting from KDE Telepathy 0.3 (that will be released the 25th of January) you will be able to use XMPP protocol with your MSN account.

It is important to notice that you can have just one MSN-XMPP account at the moment, so here is how to add it.

First of all, you have to add a new account from System Settings > Instant Messaging and VOIP > Accounts > Add Account > Others > choose the “MSN (using XMPP)” profile and click Next

OAuth2 authentication is a little bit different from the normal authentication. You don’t have to set any parameter, just click “Finish” in the next tab.

Now the magic will happen and the Authorization Handler will popup with a dialog where you have to insert your Windows Live ID and your password, then click “Sign in”

Finally you will get another page where you have to authorize the application to connect, by clicking on “Yes”

And you should be connected.

Have a nice chat!

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P.S. Due to this bug, if you manage to connect the first time, but you fail later, try deleting the account and repeating those steps… [EDIT: Fixed before 0.3]

P.P.S. Thanks to Xavier for the support and the suggestions!

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EDIT: MSN OAuth2 authentication requires telepathy-gabble >= 0.15.0

Standards Quartet for Document Freedom Day

I love it here » English | 08:25, Monday, 16 January 2012

we are currently organising the next Document Freedom Day on March 28thand therefore we wanted to produce a card game, called “StandardsQuartet” (a card game that is often played by little children usuallynot comparing different facts about Open Standards but about cars,dinosaurs, etc.). For this we need your help to collect all theinformation that we need, maybe you could help us out.

Please have a look at our public etherpad on this andfill in as many facts as you know.

Basically until 29th January we need 32 cards, 4 groups (each consisting of 8 different cards) and categoriesto compare those cards. Examples for the groups:

• Text
• Video/Audio
• Picture
• Network

Examples for the categories:

• Amount of words of the current standards
• Amount of implementations
• Exists since year XY
• Freedom level? (Give points from our Open Standard Definition. One point for each fullfilment.)
• Uses XY other open standards
• Amount of money to lobby the standards

If you have any other ideas for groups or categories, please add them tothe list. (You can also include proprietary standards, depending on howmany Open Standards we find we will decide how exactely to structureit.)

We will than design the cards, print them, and have them as DFD merchandise.

–
Matthias Kirschner
Support Free Software! Join the Fellowship!

Reasons for you to visit Berlin Buzzwords

Inductive Bias | 19:59, Sunday, 15 January 2012

I’ve heard of several people who are not quite sure yet whether they should visit Berlin Buzzwords or not - in particular when having to travel far and cross 9 time zones to attend. My general recommendation is to plan to spend some more days in Europe. The conference is conveniently scheduled on Monday and Tuesday which gives you one weekend before to explore the city and the whole week afterwards to go and see more either in the city or around.

In case you are wondering whether the city is a worthy destination when travelling with children - below is a list of things to do and places to go I sent to someone recently. Hope it helps with your decision as well. In general the city is pretty green, there are several locations specially amenable to a visit with kids - so treat the list below as what it is: An incomplete listing of some of the most obvious locations that might be of interest collected by someone who knows a few parents and their children. Also in case you speak German make sure to check out one of the many guide books for Berlin with children available in local book stores - Dussmann and Hugendubel generally have the largest selection though Chatwins is my preferred one for anything about travelling.

In the city

In case of good weather:

• Tierpark Berlin - make sure you visit Tierpark (not Zoo) - it’s much larger and friendlier. See also images taken by Berlin Buzzwords fotographer Philipp, general images.

• There is a huge park in walking distance of Brandenburger Tor: Tiergarten for recreation after sight seeing.
• For swimming head over to either Wannsee or Schlachtensee
• For exploring a NSA listening station head west to Teufels-berg
• On warm evenings plan for some time at Maybachufer

For bad weather:

• If your kids like tech go to Technik Museum (it features one of the first computer (the one built by Zuse that is))

• If you kids like nature go to Naturkunde Museum
• If you are interested in science - make sure to be here for the long night of science (web page may need google translate unless you speak German.)
• For a city tour check out the following scribbles - they also include some interesting parts of the bus line 100 and 200

Close to the city:

If you have some more time to spend make sure you also explore the closer surroundings:

• 80km north: rent a canoo and explore Mecklenburg
• 200km north: visit Rügen, spend some time swimming, some time to see the amazing chalk cliffs, some time to see the isle by bike
• 250km south: go hiking or rafting in Elbsandsteingebirge
• 80km south: rent a canoo and explore the canals in Spreewald

Hope to see you in Berlin in June. If you need more information or recommendations don’t hesitate to ask.

2012w02

blog.padowi.se » English | 11:00, Sunday, 15 January 2012

Update: Corrected link, thanks Ulf

This has been quite the busy week. Oodles and oodles of stuff happening, both nice and… less nice.

UEFI + SecureBoot

Microsoft up to no good again. Basically, on non-ARM systems Microsoft requires that a user can disable SecureBoot, but not on ARM systems (i.e. smartphones, tablets, and the upcoming ultrabooks). Anyone surprised?

Music Production

While I have no real interest in producing music myself—code and, to some extent, graphics have always come easier to me—I do have an interest in seeing tools like this come to GNU+Linux as well, since it means that’s one less category of creators not having the alternative to be creative in a free software environment

sshuttle

This project seems pretty cool, I haven’t tried it out yet, and the thing about uploading code to the server is something I’ll definitively look into before actually considering executing it, but all in all this looks like a pretty easy SSH tunneling/VPN mimicing proxy thingy solution which could be useful at times.

Especially if it means I can sit at an internet café or some such, and have all my traffic routed över SSH through my server at home, not having to worry about someone in that café sniffing it up.

tmux

I installed a local copy of tmux at work, and so far it has been a complement rather than a detriment to the way I work.

The one thing that I wasn’t pleased with at first, but which was trivially easy to fix, once I read a blogpost (also, don’t miss the second post), was that I wanted 11 shells all stacked on top / below eachother, with an even size (i.e. each should take up 1/11th of the tmux window height.

When splitting the window, to make room for another shell, it just divides the current shell height by two, and makes the one part the new shell, and the other part the old shell. For multiples of two I suppose this would work out fine, but with 11 shells?

So I went about it, and the tenth and eleventh shell were small.
But there are different preconfigured layouts, and you loop through them by repeatedly hitting the control sequence (I’ve mapped this to C^a) and space. One of those layouts proved to be just what I wanted

Raspberry Pi

Now this is a pretty cool project! For the condensed summary, read the wikipedia page. It is making the dream of a $100 computer a reality, and there are some pretty cool ideas already about how to put it to good use.

SOPA

Reddit doesn’t like SOPA, and Tim O’Reilly isn’t all that pleased either.

If you’re an Android user, and you don’t like SOPA either, there is an app for letting you know (by scanning barcodes) if a product is made by a pro-SOPA company so you can avoid supporting them.

There have been some advances which means that making a fuzz about it can pay off. Of course, it would be better to scrap those bills completely.

So, 2012-01-18 is still SOPA Blackout day and a whole lot of sites are participating, and you could join in as well (and if you want to join in, please be smart about it and host the javascript your own damn self so that the hosting server doesn’t go down… (which also means, get that javascript now, and not on tuesday evening when everyone else is going to try to get it))

Links

• Privacy in social networks — not sure I understand how it is done, not sure that this implementation is optimal, but nice idea none the less
• I read a post the other day, and the author of that post, while being in the right, just came off … I don’t know, but his post was a rant, and not the passionate kind, but the whiney kind, so I won’t be linking to his post, I have no wish to drive traffic to him. However, another person, with reasoning and values more aligned to my own, wrote a reaction post to his, which I feel was more constructive, and nicer, so here is the link to that post
• Unfair advantages grow from irrational habits
• Rikard tipped me off to a thoughtful TED talk video, which I liked alot, and through the speakers website I found, among others, this game—EVOKE—which seems to be pretty cool
• I had the idea of building an image gallery a while ago, so when I came across this link I was a little interested in seeing how they’d approached it, but what I really took away from this site, is how much I liked their rather user-friendly step-by-step manual for getting it up and running
• I wonder what he will create?
• I don’t know if it’s just me, but non-flashy, low-requirements games make me all warm and fuzzy inside
• I seem to recall that I wasn’t all that impressed with the unhosted project some time ago. This post (specifically the verification section) is exactly why I hesitate

Changes to Google’s personalized search: repulsive abuse of dominance

Heiki "Repentinus" Ojasild » English | 23:07, Saturday, 14 January 2012

Recently, I chanced to Google myself. It has been a habit of mine for a long time. Thus, I have grown accustomed to seeing certain results near the top, including my Identi.ca and FB profiles and this blog. I was not used to seeing my Google+ profile as the top result, featured as prominently as possible. Google is claiming that they are improving the search results. Bollocks.

I have usually called the antitrust allegations against Google bollocks: I have found that even if Google has been displaying results to Maps, Youtube, etc more prominently, it has been useful to the consumer. And I do not care about the little businesses who cannot make money because Google is offering a superior product. But this time they have another Buzz at their hands. They are stepping on the toes of the consumers, not other businesses. They have made the product inferior.

When I Google a person, I do not want the first result to be an incomplete G+ profile belonging to a person who usually does not use G+. When the person is mostly active on his blog, on Identi.ca, or on FB, I expect one of those to be the top result. I expect Google to use PageRank to provide me with relevant information, I do not expect them to advertise their own service simply because they want to take away customers from FB.

When YaCy was released, I viewed it as a cool and interesting proof of concept that would not be needed on the Lightnet. I found it useful using Tor, but I had Google to use outside the Darknet. I believed in Google. I believed they adhered to, “Do no evil.” How very mistaken I was… Chinese and Instant censorship should have been enough to wake me up earlier. The Google Buzz controversy should have definitely made it clear to me that Google is willing to opt for people having to opt out and they have no problems trying to increase traffic at the expense of the users. However, I still hope they do not want to be evil and thus I am going to write a letter to Larry Page and tell him Google should reverse course or I will never use it again. Never. Nevertheless, I do not trust them any more, and thus, I also intend to tip off the DG for Competition and my national competition authority. And I encourage everyone else to do the same. It is the single worst change Google has ever made to its search engine, and it must be fought.

I also intend to switch to YaCy for the time being and encourage everyone else to do the same. The virtues of being distributed and decentralized should be obvious, unless one wishes a deluge of poor results individually tailored to the one.

Berlin Buzzwords 2012 - Call for submissions

Inductive Bias | 19:15, Friday, 13 January 2012

The countdown started several weeks ago - finally in the past days the date for Berlin Buzzwords was announced, the call for submissions published. It’s exciting to see that the first talk is in already. Looking forward to yours.

Compared to last year there are two changes:

1. Submissions are no longer evaluated by Jan, Simon and myself only. Due to the large number of talks submitted last year we reached out for help to be able to split the task of reviewing talks.
2. Also the conference itself grew quite a bit in the past two years. As a result it now takes several full time positions to handle not only ticketing, hosting and software development, sponsorships, venue management, travel support, but also external communication and marketing. The team of newthinking grew quite a bit and is helping substantially with tasks that before were handled by Jan, Simon and myself exclusively to keep some of our time reserved for the fun part of schedule curation. Please make sure to include info@berlinbuzzwords.de if you have questions that need a quick answer.

We are looking forward to a successful community conference on all things scalable - be it search, NoSQL or data analytics. Don’t be afraid to submit highly technical talks - Berlin Buzzwords always has been a place for developers to discuss new technologies, algorithms and implementations.

If your community need more than just a day to meet - please do talk to us. We will be providing room for meetups on Wednesday after the conference. Those are handed out on a first come first serve basis.

If you are a local Berlin company and want to get Berlin Buzzwords into your offices, please talk to us - we are more than happy to get you in touch with one of the meetup organisers.

If you would like to co-locate trainings with Berlin Buzzwords - we are happy to co-promote you event. Talk to us to be included in our official schedule. In case you need any help organising your training, newthinking will be more than happy to provide their services for your event.

Looking forward to June: It’s amazing how large that event grew in the past two years - and almost scary to return back online after a flu and see how things unfolded magically.

Getting Cohesive

Green Eggs and Ham | 11:41, Friday, 13 January 2012

So, in my mission to see how we can automatically detect “core” teams, I need a measure for how closely people work together. Those of you with strong memories will remember I once coined the term “cohesion” for this measure. I introduced it in a paper at the International Conference on Software Maintenance, three years ago and blogged about it around that time.

This measurement is based on some basic graph theory that I have been over before. But for the sake of completeness here is a quick recap. Let’s start by taking a look at a graph which represents one month of KDELIBS development, in this case, April 2009 (click to enlarge):

Each node here represents someone who has committed to KDELIBS in the month. The edges represent resource sharing: two nodes are connected if the committers both commit to the same file in the month. These edges have a weight (not shown) which is the number of shared files between the nodes.

Using the Floyd-Warshall algorithm it is possible to find the shortest paths between all pairs of nodes in the graph. This, in turn, allows us to find the mean shortest path length and this is what I call “community cohesion” (which should not be confused with graph structural cohesion). Now, this number is not really comparable between communities; their differing working practices really disallow this. However, within a community, we can certainly trend this metric and see how it varies over time. Perhaps, for example, certain events (such as release deadlines) cause the metric to increase? An increase in this metric shows the community is working together more tightly (higher edge weights, contributors sharing more resources).

The next step, of course, is then to actually measure this and see how the trend looks for different projects. So, I have picked KDEPIM and KDELIBS to look at; below is their cohesion trends for the 120 months from 2001 to 2010 (click to enlarge):

Now, I admit these projects are both part of the greater KDE community and so share a few contributors and a release cycle. Other than that, however, they are distinct projects. So I was surprised to see the two trends above. Why? You do not have to look too closely to see that there is a certain degree of correlation between them.

If we use Pearson’s method, we find the correlation is 0.33. To jog your memory: a score of -1 shows perfect negative correlation, 1 perfect correlation and 0 shows no correlation whatsoever. So our score of 0.33 is hardly strong correlation, but it is enough to show that either the release cycle or contributor sharing has some impact.

Interesting, no?

At a later time I will rerun this with more randomly selected KDE projects to see if similar results are found.

Will teaching children basic programming skills have a political impact?

Sam's Blog | 16:31, Thursday, 12 January 2012

I was emailed by the BBC last week and asked to comment for the PM programme about suggestions that the British Government may add basic programming skills to the national curriculum, and whether this would have a political impact on society in terms of how we interact with technology. Here’s my answer.

Question: Are we going to get a more critical, creative society if we are all taught basic programming skills?

Yes, we are. Very often technology, and particularly software, are artificially restricted in their usefulness in order to allow one set of interests, like a private company, to manipulate consumers to their profit. Although in Britain we are consuming more software and media products than ever, only a tiny percentage of the population are able to participate in how these products are formed, or to adapt them to their own needs, or to create their own.

This has an enormously damaging impact on society. It creates an imbalance in power between those who design the tools that determine the work of everybody else. Regardless of what industry a person works in, they will most likely have to use a web browser or an email client at some stage, for example, even if it’s just to find a job in the first place. But the terms of how a person interacts with these technologies are typically set by a remote group of people with no association with the person who ends up using it, and who may have catered very poorly for their needs.

If our society was better educated in basic programming and digitally creative skills, we would be more able to interact with the culture of our social and professional environments. This is particularly relevant to important trends like citizen journalism, and self-hosting and publishing. A wide understanding of how digital voting systems function could have a big impact on future politics, for example.

Simply having programming skills is not sufficient however – to be competitive, efficient, and productive, Britain will have to also foster a culture of freedom and Free Software in its computer industries. This is because copyright and patent restrictions can silence the creativity of even the most gifted programmer, or require them to reinvent the wheel over and over again before they can even begin to innovate.

Free Software has driven a revolution in communications and technology markets over the last three decades, bringing us the Internet, and computers cheap enough to be distributed en masse in the third world, amongst other benefits.

Schools should foster curiosity and the spirit enquiry in an environment that encourages students to learn. A classroom running proprietary software cannot provide this. “How does this work?”, “what happens if I change this?” – these are questions that have no answer when children are taught using non-Free Software operating systems, office suites, and robotics packages.

The four freedoms of Free Software guarantee rights to use, share, study, and improve the technology around us. You can find more information about them here:

https://fsfe.org/about/basics/freesoftware.en.html

You may also find our Education Team’s mission statement useful; it explains why an understanding of software, and the use of Free Software is critical in training young minds to understand the world they live in:

https://fsfe.org/projects/education/eduteam.en.html#mission

Sincerely etc..

Estonian political landscape 1: Lauri Luik from Estonian Reform Party answers our questions

Heiki "Repentinus" Ojasild » English | 20:49, Tuesday, 10 January 2012

In the end of December all Estonian political parties represented in the Estonian parliament were sent requests to answer a few questions about Free Software, proprietary software advertising on the websites of public institutions, open standards, software patents, and copyright. Estonian Reform Party (Eesti Reformierakond) was the first to respond. They replied that the party does not have official positions on those questions, but they were kind enough to have their member Lauri Luik offer his personal opinions. Our translation of our questions and his answers can be found below. We thank Estonian Reform Party and Mr. Lauri Luik for their kind reply.

1. Free Software
1.1) Does Your party think that the state should support the development of Free Software as one of the characteristics of a civil society?
The Free Software ideology is acceptable to me and history shows that it works. Advocacy is reasonable. However, excessive interference with the workings of a free market is not. This can probably be achieved without the state allocating considerable finances. Nevertheless, it is important to trust the consumer, who has to make the final choice.

1.2) Does Your party think that Free Software should be preferred to proprietary software in the public sector?
The quality of service (software) matters. If Free Software guarantees the best quality, then obviously. If not, then no.

2. Proprietary software advertising on the websites of public institutions
2.1) What does Your party think of proprietary software advertising on the websites of public institutions?
2.2) Would Your party be willing to sign the “Petition For The Removal Of Proprietary Software Advertising On Public Websites“?
2.3) Would Your party be willing to propose a bill to ban proprietary software advertising on the websites of public institutions
Depends on the kind of advertising you have in mind. If a university were advertising its cooperation partners, I would not see it as a problem. However, it is certainly not for governmental institutions to broker advertising and profit from such activities.

3.Open Standards
3.1) Does Your party agree with the definition of an Open Standard and considers Open Standards necessary?
Life has demonstrated that Open Standards will ultimately make life easier for the customer and that is important.

3.2) What does Your party intend to do to avoid vendor lock-in?
Raising awareness is exceptionally important. It could as well be asked what should be done to avoid people falling prey to SMS-loan and telemarketing companies. Raising awareness as usual. And should problems arise, we have the Consumer Protection Board to deal with them. However, contributing to prevention through raising awareness should come first and foremost.

4. Software patents
4.1) Does Your party think that software should be patentable?
4.1.1) If yes, why?
4.1.2) If yes, should mathematics also be patentable?
Patents are granted based on concrete rules. If it is thought that these rules need to be changed or adapted, then we are open to proposals from experts in the subject field.

5. Copyright
5.1) In the opinion of Your party, is the current Estonian copyright legislation too harsh, too mild, or adequate?
5.2) In the opinion of Your party, should the term limits of copyright protection be reduced? Why?
Copyright and essential liberties must find an adequate compromise in the Internet and it is being worked on.

---

Eesti | English

Eclipse trainings available

Computer Floss | 14:10, Monday, 09 January 2012

I delivered my first Eclipse training just before Christmas last year. I’m happy to say that the clients, just under a dozen programmers working for a large German corporation, have reported being “very satisfied” with my two-day seminar. I’m also happy to say I enjoyed it even more than I thought I would, probably due to the lack of nervousness I thought I might experience. In fact, I was so at ease and enjoying myself, I’m now hugely looking forward to delivering it again for other clients.

For anyone who wishes to know more about the Eclipse training I provide (perhaps you’re interested in it yourself?) here’s the basic overview:

• Downloading and installing
• Introducing the working environment (workbench, views, perspectives)
• Programming using the editor, basic functions
• Backup and versioning, local history
• Using plug-ins and updates sites
• Project administration
• Features for object-oriented programming
• Features for Java development
• Debugging and Running programs
• GUI development using visual editors
• Automated testing using JUnit
• Version control using Subversion and Subclipse
• Developing UML diagrams
• Editing XML files
• Plug-in development
• Practical tips and tricks

These subjects are by no means carved in stone, but they certainly embody what is necessary for beginners to learn (with the possible exceptions of UML, XML and plug-in development) and represent what can be covered in a minimum of two days. Beyond that, my curriculum is flexible and open to discussion.

If you’re interested in knowing more or booking a training, then please feel free to get in touch via mail@karlbeecher.com.

FSFE calls for an amendment of Slovak Copyright Act

Blog of Martin Husovec | 14:07, Monday, 09 January 2012

Free Software Foundation Europe calls for an amendment of the Slovak Copyright Act that would eventually enable Free Software and Creative Commons licenses for Slovak citizens. Currently, these licenses are considered to be void due to lack of their written form and problems with formation of the contract. Slovakia is thus one of a few countries where these popular licensing tools still struggle with rigid legislative framework. During the last week, FSFE therefore sent support letters to four members of Slovak Parliament that proposed this highly awaited amendment, but later faced its dismissal due to preliminary elections (See the sample letter below). If you also feel that also other 5 million Europeans should have this option, please support our action and write members of Slovak parliament (regardless of your residence). Explain them what is your experience with Free Software or just reuse our letter. Your support is important!.

IN ENGLISH:

Dear Mr /Mrs,

We would like to express our sincere appreciation for your current legislative proposal for modernization of the Slovak Copyright Act towards Creative Commons, GNU GPL and other licenses. Having followed your initiative, we are very sorry to learn that it was recently stoped in the Slovak parliament. We hope that this will not discouragge you from proposing the same piece of legislation after the next parliamentary elections in March 2012.

There are many reasons why we believe this is important for Slovakia and its citizens. First of all, current legislative framework in Slovakia is being left far beyond the digital age.Authors of copyrighed works, including creators of computer software,generally suffer from great uncertainaty when it comes to licensing of their works online. This eventually weakens any authority of the copyright protection in the eyes of gerneral public and leads to nearly zero enforcement. Secondly, current status quo enourmously restricts the freedom of the authors to decide how and under which conditions they can distribute their works. Today, thousands of Slovaks are left without any possibility of benefiting from licenses such as GNU GPL, GNU LGP, other Free Software licenses or Creative Commons, which would enable worldwide distribution of their works, knowledge and expertize. This is despite the fact that Slovaks are enthusiastic users of GNU GPL licensed software and Creative Commons licensed works. In fact, we believe that nobody benefits from the Copyright Act as it stands today.

Therefore, we support the legislative initiative taken by you. Your effort is of a great importance to all Slovaks. We hope that soon after the elections we could see from you another legislative proposal challenging this problems. We will be closely following your work. If we can be of assistance in regard to Free Software licensing, please let us know.

Best Regards,

IN SLOVAK:

Vážený pán/pani,

Chceli by sme týmto vyjadriť našu úprimnú vďaku za Váš nedávny legislatívny návrh, ktorým ste sa usilovali o modernizáciu slovenského Autorského zákona vo vzťahu k licenciám Creative Commons, GNU GPL a mnohým ďalších. Keďže sme v FSFE sledovali Vašu iniciatívu od úplného počiatku, veľmi nás zamrzelo keď sme sa dozvedeli, že táto iniciatíva bola nedávno zastavená v slovenskom Parlamente. Veríme, že Vás to však neodradí od navrhnutia rovnakého druhu návrhu zákona po ďalších parlamentných voľbách v marci 2012.  

Existuje veľa dôvodov prečo sa domnievame, že to dôležité pre Slovensko a jeho občanov. V prvom rade, súčasný legislatívny rámec na Slovensku je ďaleko za očakávaniami digitálneho veku. Autori autorských diel, vrátane tvorcou počítačových programov, všeobecne trpia veľkou neistotou pokiaľ ide o licencovanie ich diel na internete. To v konečnom dôsledku znižuje autoritu autorskoprávnej ochrany v očiach všeobecnej verejnosti a vedie k takmer nulovému vymáhaniu práv. V druhom rade, dnešný status quo zásadne obmedzuje slobodu autorov rozhodnúť sa o tom za akých podmienok distribuovať svoje diela. Dnes sú tisíce Slovákov ponechaných bez akejkoľvek možnosti benefitovať z licencií ako GNU GPL, GNU LGP, Creative Commons alebo ďaľších slobodných licencií, ktoré by im umožnili celosvetovú distribúciu svojich diel, vedomostí a odbornosti.  Je tomu aj napriek tomu, že Slováci sú v skutočnosti veľmi oduševnení používatelia počítačových programov licencovaných pod GNU GPL alebo diel licencovaných pod Creative Commons. Sme hlboko presvedčený, že z neútešného stavu v akom je Autorský zákon dnes nebenefituje vôbec nikto.

Preto, podporujeme legislatívnu iniciatívu, ktorú ste nedávno vyvinuli. Vaše úsilie je veľmi dôležité pre všetkých Slovákov. Veríme, že tesne po nových voľbách od Vás uvidíme nový legislatívny návrh, ktorý vyrieši vyššie uvedené problémy. Budeme podrobne sledovať Vašu prácu v tejto oblasti. Ak by Free Software Foundation Europe mohlo byť akokoľvek nápomocné, prosím kontaktujte nás.

S pozdravom,

Demanding Free Software in a business context

Jelle Hermsen | 09:38, Monday, 09 January 2012

People who hire companies or freelance programmers to write code for them should demand a Free Software license. This time not even because of ideology, or the higher goals of Software Freedom. Nope, just because it makes sound business sense and saves a lot of money!

There are many non-IT companies who pay other self-employed programmers, or companies to program for them. Most of the time they have some sort of issue, or specific need that’s holding back their normal business operation as it is. So they decide to throw some money at it and voilà, the problem is solved with some code tailored to their need, sitting cozily on their server. Oblivious of the code’s license, the customer is happy with another fixed “problem”, not aware of the future issues this approach might impel.

Let me describe a typical work day:
A customer rings me up. After months and months of neglecting their webshop, they noticed that it’s time to do something about the situation. Their Magento site needs to be upgraded from version 1.3 to 1.6 and since there’s no “click here to upgrade” button in the backend, they need me to do the job. “No problemo”, I say. “I’ll migrate your webshop to my development server and upgrade it bit by bit. Any issues, or installed modules that resist the upgrade will present themselves easily and they’ll be fixed before you can pronounce ‘gelegenheidsgorgelaar’. After this I’ll just migrate everything back, making sure no orders and sheep are left behind and Bob’s your uncle.”

I wish it was this easy, because more often than not I find myself held back by proprietary Magento modules that simply refuse upgrading. Sometimes these have been purchased by the customer, looking for a quick solution, but quite often they have been coded by a former contractor, to tailor fit their situation. Finding proprietary software on top of a Free Software stack can be very annoying, but one situation, which in my view could be fixed easily, strikes me the most. When people hire programmers they rarely inquire after the license the code will be under. Most of the time the resulting code (in case of scripting languages like PHP) will mention no specific license at all, which means it’s thrown in the bottomless pit called “All rights reserved”. This is a shame, because when you need someone else to code on your software stack in the future they can’t build upon this code. If the code breaks when you upgrade your site it is rendered utterly useless, and in the meantime you’ve literally flushed hundreds of euros down the drain, because all the work needs to be done again, from scratch. It’s like getting a contractor to build you a new bathroom, only to find you’ll have to break it down completely when he’s unavailable to fix your leaky bathtub a year later.

So the next time you get someone to code for your, demand they use a Free Software license. You’ll find that most web developers are actually happy to do so. Most of them are using Free Software anyway, and you’ll find that many of their websites actually promote the use of Open Source by sporting the Open Source Initiative logo (most of the time not knowing where the image came from). Often they recommend the use of WordPress, Drupal, Magento, you name it. It’s of great added value to web developers to use FLOSS, and the business owners could even help them further by demanding their entire IT-stack is Free Software, head to toe. This will create a beautiful world for webdevelopers like me. Websites will be easy to upgrade and change, it will be more easy to swap contractors, and business owners will have more money, aka time, to watch their little children blow bubbles!

Post scriptum:
While I’m at it I also like to take the opportunity to recommend a Free Software license to use for these endeavors. I would advice demanding the use of the GNU Affero General Public License. By using this license you not only ensure that the contractor after your current contractor will be able to do her work properly, but also the people after that. You’ll make absolutely sure you can’t be locked away from the code you paid for, even if it’s moved onto an external server.

Ada Programming on Slackware

Thomas Løcke Being Incoherent | 19:59, Sunday, 08 January 2012

Over the past few months, I’ve received a whooping 4 requests for an article about how to install some basic Ada packages on a Linux system, and since 4 is a high number in my world, I decided I’d best … Continue reading →

Edu-Team 2011 summary

Being Fellow #952 of FSFE » English | 17:02, Sunday, 08 January 2012

When I talk to people as a member of FSFE’s education team, there’s always the question what we are actually doing. It is not so easy to come up with something specific. I know we’ve been busy all the time, but ad hoc, it’s difficult for me to name examples, that are worth mentioning. A lot of work that’s being done just doesn’t provide a presentable outcome (more on that below). With this post, I’ll publicly report what we’ve done in 2011 and give a brief overview of what is about to come in 2012.

For me, the main task was drafting the mission statement. It took us a few months, but finally we had something to point at when people asked. And by people I don’t mean only distant strangers, I also mean us. Everybody had his own vague idea what we are supposed to be doing. There was no way to tell if we really had that much in common at all. So, we drafted the statement, asked the public (friends) in various mailing lists for feed-back and at the end agreed on the final version. And from that point on, every new edu-team member knew what he may expect from joining. The statement may evolve over time, so I rather conserve the current version here:

The goal of FSFE’s Education Team is to bring the benefits of Free Software to all education-related activities and institutions. In accordance with FSFE’s Self Conception, we shall bring the use of Free Software in education to political agendas across European borders, and inform administrations, teachers, students and their parents about the benefits Free Software provides.

We shall foster communication and cooperation among these groups, and establish and extend dialogue between them and Free Software developers and advocates. We shall establish a legal framework that shall prohibit discrimination against Free Software and its users, and make available FSFE’s extensive expertise to all parties involved.

The second big thing for the edu-team was our involvement in the NLedu campaign. The preparation took some time and since the main discussions are done in dutch, it’s hard for non dutch participants to follow it. But Jan Stedehouder published the first newsletter about it recently also in English. If you read dutch, his blog is currently the best resource for news about it. Come join us!

Edu-Team members were also busy giving talks at events in 2011:

• I gave a talk aimed at kids and youths explaining Free Software at FrOSCon, St. Augustin, Germany.
• Sebastian gave a talk at Ubucon, Leipzig, Germany
• and so did Thomas with a different subject.
• Sebastian again, this time at BLIT (Brandenburger Linux Info Tag), Potsdam, Germany
• while I was at FSCONS explaining the work of the edu-team, Gothenborg, Sweden
• and in December, Elias Aarnio at Online-Educa, Berlin, Germany 

That is not all, there are quite a few other things we did:

We worked on a few of our leaflets. We are constantly fine tuning them and want to tailor them to address specific target groups. If you have any feed-back or want to help with that, please let us know!

Thanks to Nico and others, the edu leaflets were translated into French for RMLL . And thanks to CeDeC, the main education leaflet is now also available in Spanish.

We got asked if we had some teaching material for explaining Free Software to kids. I thought that should be easy to find, since there are so many people out there trying to bring Free Software into schools. I really tried hard, but surprisingly with no success. If you know of any freely usable materials in this direction, please let us know! We may end up creating such material eventually, but I still can’t believe that there is nothing already out there and would like to prevent the duplicate work.

The Finnish National Board of Education has funded a project in which edu-team member Elias Aarnio and others were searching a Learning Management System that would work together with Ubuntu based LTSP used in the schools of Kemi.

We helped and came up with edu related questions for the “ask your candidates” campaign that were sent to parties in various countries. Edu-Team member Peter Beck sent the questions to the political parties in Liechtenstein. 

We started collaborating with the edu group at gnu.org.

Sam Tuke published open letter to the Guardian asking for Open Standards for their educational resources.

Sebastian published an article in Freies Magazin, November edition (German).

Chris Woolfrey interviewed me for the Fellowship interview in June.

After the one in November 2010, there was another freedroidz workshop in Berlin (German).

I created and identi.ca group “eduteam” just for the sake of it, but I have no plans on how to use it yet. Would you follow it?

We were also working on our internal infrastructure, mailing lists, etherpad, wiki and managed to arrange some personal meetings among edu-team members.

And of course many little brief contacts and general networking, like providing feed-back to an ICT principle of a school in UK, looking to engage girls 11-14 with Free Software, help a Russian school to provide their materials in Free formats and reply to various other questions.

I have to work on my blogging habit which got less and less during the year, but I blame the preparations for the talks for that I began with publishing summaries of edu related news in Europe bi-monthly, but discarded that approach in favor of a more regular post-it-when-you-see-it method. Unfortunately, this didn’t work and led only to three more edu postings, which is less than the number of postings if I hadn’t changed my bi-montlhy routine.

Thus, all the news I found and sent to the edu-eu mailing list after March, didn’t make it into this blog . To name a few:

• IT: DossierScuola – Promoting the use of free software in public education
• CH Parliamentarian: Schools should use open source to inspire students
• FR: Open source-based digital working spaces for French primary schools
• NO: Friprog makes appeal to promote free software in Norway
• Learning programming to change the world (German). Nice article by Andrea Hemetsberger in an Austrian magazine.
• UNESCO launches second version of Miftaah, set of FOSS in Arabic

And of course there were a few things that didn’t work out. Luckily, most of them can be called rather postponed for 2012 than canceled.

I couldn’t attend the general assembly of FSuB e.V. in Berlin.

I heard that the organizers of the OpenRheinRuhr had planned to invite teachers to inform them about Free Software. We offered our help, but somehow this didn’t work out. The good thing about this was, that I could then attend FSCONS instead .

We got contacted by Martin Ebner, university Graz, co-author of L3T (textbook for lerning and teaching with technology) who invited us to an OER conference. Unfortunately, nobody was able to participate.

we followed quite a few hints suggested by others but had to discard them. This was partly very time consuming, but didn’t produce any visible or measurable result, but we gained some experience what might be worth pursuing in the future which will save time eventually.

A talk for teachers had to be postponed because the conference got canceled and so was a freedroidz workshop with kids in Stuttgart.

And my excuse for everything I didn’t get to in 2010 is the birth of my 2^nd child, Kanoa Tayne, in May

 

So, what’s next in 2012?

We’ll continue what we’ve been doing, like working on the NLEdu campaign, improve the edu pages on fsfe.org, the leaflets and the wiki, plan more FreeDroidz workshops (Berlin, Bonn and Stuttgart are in the works), give more talks, publish more articles in magazines and blogs, share edu related infos and network with activists throughout Europe.

So far, so good. Anything new? Yes.

Hooked up at FSCONS’ accessibility track, I got interested in the matter and also a little concerned that the Free Software that is already being used, might be banned from class in the future if strict accessibility requirements are set by law (which I’d consider generally as a good thing, btw). Developing the necessary tools will require money. The EU is currently spending some for the AEGIS project, but this will run out soon. What’s missing is a sustainable, continuous flow of money for the development of Free accessibility tools, according to Mats Lundälv in his talk. But all this might be worth a separate posting once we gathered enough information about the matter.

We’ll also spend some time investigating what can be done in Extremadura where more and more concerning news emerge.

And we might very well chose to pick up any subject you suggest!

2012w01

blog.padowi.se » English | 11:00, Sunday, 08 January 2012

column

The other day I wanted some prettier (tabularized) output and of course someone has already wanted this and of course there are tools for that

bash_completion

This is so frakking cool! I’ve built this little shellscript “vault.sh” which is a simple wrapper script for mounting and unmounting encfs mounts.

It takes two parameters: operation and target, where operation can be one of “lock” and “unlock”, and target—at present—resolves to “thunderbird” (signifying my .thunderbird directory).

Since I intend to expand this with more encrypted directories as I see fit, I don’t want to hard-code that.

What I did want, however, was to be able to auto complete operation and target. So I looked around, and found this post, and although I couldn’t derive enough knowledge from it to solve my particular problem, having multiple levels of completion, the author was gracious enough to provide references to where s/he had found the knowledge (here, here and here). That second link was what did it for me.

My /etc/bash_completion.d/vault.sh now looks like this:

_vault()
{
    local cur prev opts
    COMPREPLY=()
    cur="${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD]}"
    prev="${COMP_WORDS[COMP_CWORD-1]}"
    first="lock unlock"
    second="thunderbird"

    if [[ ${cur} == * && ${COMP_CWORD} -eq 2 ]] ; then
        COMPREPLY=( $(compgen -W "${second}" -- ${cur}) )
        return 0
    fi

    if [[ ${cur} == * && ${COMP_CWORD} -eq 1 ]] ; then
        COMPREPLY=( $(compgen -W "${first}" -- ${cur}) )
        return 0
    fi
}
complete -F _vault vault.sh

And all the magic is happening in the two if-statements. Essentially: if current word (presently half typed and tabbed) is whatever, and this is the second argument to the command, respond with suggestions taken from the variable $second.

Otherwise, if current word is whatever, and this is the first parameter, take suggestions from the variable $first.

Awsum!

awk for great good

Another great use for awk: viewing selected portions of source code. For instance, in Perl, if you just want to view a specific subroutine, without getting distracted by all the other crud, you could do: $ awk '/sub SomeSubName/,/}/' somePerlModule.pm

Links

If PHP were British, perhaps it’s just me, but I find it hilarious.

PayPal just keeps working their charm…

Belarus just… wait what?

Why we need version control

Preserving space, neat!

Fuzzy string matching in Python

If you aren’t embarrassed by v1.0 you didn’t release it early enough

The makers schedule, oldie but goldie

CSS Media Queries are pretty cool

Static site generator using the shell and awk

A netstat companion

Reducing code nesting

Comparing images using perceptual hashes

Microsofts GPS “avoid ghetto” routing algorithm patent…

Computer startup aid using a LEGO train

Handhelds, Linux and Heroes | 18:31, Friday, 06 January 2012

Some times it happens that I have to dig out some old piece of hardware and try to get it running again… I recently got a very geek present for my birthday – one that requires a working SGI Indigo next to it. Luckily nothing gets lost at kernel concepts and I was able to select from several Indigo gathering dust at the attic of our office. It looks like the machines survived quite some years not being used pretty well – including most of the harddisks. Unluckily all batteries which are supposed to supply the real-time clock chip were flat and these batteries are hard to get and soldered to the board. I did not have a replacement for the 3.6V Lithium battery but it was pretty easy to replace the battery with some cables to supply the board with 3.6V. The first thing to supply 3.6V I found was the electric LEGO locomotive the kids left lying around…

This one was powered by three 1.2V AA rechargeable batteries – perfect for some startup aid for this old machine. After applying power I was able to boot into IRIX 6.2 installed on this historic piece of hardware (100MHz MIPS R4000 CPU, 192MB of RAM, 2GB SCSI hard disk, ELAN graphics). I have to admit I somehow enjoyed the “time travel” experience playing around with such an old system for a while. Someone here still remembers the Netscape browser? Or Electropaint? One really scary experience was the network setup: IRIX 6.2 has the ability to configure a static IP through the GUI but obviously you have to edit the network startup script in order to set a default route on boot.

A lot more of information about these machines can be found here.

I have a new GPG key

Losca | 09:08, Friday, 06 January 2012

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1,SHA512

Hello,

I'm transitioning from my 2003 GPG key to a new one.

The old key will continue to be valid for some time, but I eventually 
plan to revoke it, so please use the new one from now on. I would also 
like this new key to be re-integrated into the web of trust. This message 
is signed by both keys to certify the transition.

The old key was:

pub   1024D/FC7F6D0F 2003-07-10
      Key fingerprint = E6A8 8BA0 D28A 3629 30A9  899F 82D7 DF6D FC7F 6D0F

The new key is:

pub   4096R/90BDD207 2012-01-06
      Key fingerprint = 6B85 4D46 E843 3CD7 CDC0  3630 E0F7 59F7 90BD D207

To fetch my new key from a public key server, you can simply do:

  gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-key 90BDD207

If you already know my old key, you can now verify that the new key is 
signed by the old one:

  gpg --check-sigs 90BDD207

If you don't already know my old key, or you just want to be double 
extra paranoid, you can check the fingerprint against the one above:

  gpg --fingerprint 90BDD207

If you are satisfied that you've got the right key, and the UIDs match 
what you expect, I'd appreciate it if you would sign my key:

  gpg --sign-key 90BDD207

Lastly, if you could send me these signatures, i would appreciate it. 
You can either send me an e-mail with the new signatures by attaching 
the following file:

  gpg --armor --export 90BDD207 > timojyrinki.asc

Or you can just upload the signatures to a public keyserver directly:

  gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --send-key 90BDD207

Please let me know if there is any trouble, and sorry for the inconvenience.

(this post has been modified from the example at 
http://www.debian-administration.org/users/dkg/weblog/48)

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux)
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=mklN
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

One day later

Inductive Bias | 23:57, Thursday, 05 January 2012

The FSFE Blog Theme — A name, a first version. Presenting: Pome 1.0

Mark Lindhout’s Flamepit | 10:58, Thursday, 05 January 2012

So, after a lot of work, quite some testing, and a request to name the theme, I’m finally at a first release. The theme is called Pome, after the genus of fruit to which apples and pears belong. It’s a theme which is loosely based on the FSFE visual style, but remains its own thing. The theme has several options to which I’d like to explain in some more detail:

Social Media Profiles

In the WordPress back-end under Settings > Social Media you will find a page which allows you to add all kinds of social media profiles to you blog. These are used in the header to display a small icon and a link to your profile.

The social media settings will be expanded in later versions to allow for custom profiles. For now, I’ve included dozens of popular sites, with a special focus on open source communities, but if you’re still missing one, please drop me a line and I’ll add it to the options!

At the front of the website these link show up in the header of the page, to allow for an easy, quick way to link your other networks and social media profiles.

Of course the displayed example has a lot of profiles displayed, which usually will not be the case, but as a web designer you always need to test for the most extreme cases.

Social Media Sharing

Every post is automatically provided with the means to share it across most popular social media platforms. Included are a short url, description, an image and, when necessary, tags. The platforms that are supported right now are: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIN, Reddit, Google bookmarks, Delicious, Digg, Stumbleupon, Technorati and Yahoo! Of course, there are so many of these platforms out there, I probably forgot to include one. But for that you can use such great plugins as Sociable.

Again, if you have any suggestions on what platforms I should add, please let me know!

Clean Typography

The main deal of building this theme is to provide a clear way to present the content written by FSFE-bloggers. Therefor the typography of the theme is of prime importance to its success.

In this case I’ve chosen a sans serif approach with the best possible font used on each platform. The CSS font stack looks like this:


body, select, input, textarea {
color: #333;
font: 14px/1.33em "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, "Arial TT", Arial, sans-serif;
}


On the to-do list is adding the Liberation Sans font families, for users of the GNU/Linux operating system. These fonts are available in most graphical desktop default installs of modern distributions, and provide a visually coherent match with the theme.

Header and Favorite Icon

The header might not look like it, but it took me quite some time. Since both the title text and the description text are editable by the blog’s author, this can deliver extremely varied results. For instance, a really long title with a short description, or vice versa. It should all look good, or at least acceptable. An added difficulty was adding the Fellowship Link to the text, and having that nicely aligned even though the title spanned multiple lines. I expect this in the future to provide more issues, but I’ll tackle them as we come across those :)

Both the header link and the favicon are based on a re-designed 16 pixel plussy logo icon. The original FSFE Fellowship favicon was way out of colour range compared to the other visual on the site, something I’ve corrected now.

Comments

Since we’re still in a situation where Free Software needs discussion to convince, I’ve paid special attention to the comments section of the Pome theme. As you can see, the comments span the entire width of the theme, taking up an important visual place in the entirety of the site.

When a user hovers over the comment, advanced functionality is revealed which allows direct permanent linking, replying to a comment in thread style, and (when you are logged in with the correct priviliges) an edit link for editing the comment.

See it in action!

So, in conclusion I believe this is a great first version, but there’s a lot of room for improvement. To check out a running version of the theme, you can visit my test-blog at: http://blogs-test.fsfe.org/marklindhout

Suggestions, rants and raves

If you have suggestions, or if you feel like helping the development of this theme, feel free to drop me a line. Check out the sidebar for info on that.