Planet Fellowship (en)

Apache Hadoop Get Together - February 2012

Inductive Bias | 00:14, Thursday, 23 February 2012

Today the first Hadoop Get Together Berlin took place - David got the event hosted by and at Axel Springer who kindly also paid for the (soon to be published) videos. Thanks also to the unbelievable Machine company for the tasty buffet after the meetup. Another thanks to Open Source Press for donating three of their Hadoop books.

Today’s selection was quite diverse: The event started with a presentation by Markus Andrezak who gave an overview of Kanban and how it helped him change the development workflow over at eBay/mobile. Being well suited for environments that require flexibility Kanban is well suited to decrease risk associated with any single release by bringing the number of features released down to an absolute minimum. At Mobile his team got release cycles down to once a day. More than ten times a day however aren’t unheard of as well. The general goal for him was to reduce the risk associated with releases by reducing the number of features released per release, reducing the number of moving parts in one release and as a result reducing the number of potential sources for problems: If anything goes wrong, rolling back is no issue - nor is narrowing down on the potential sources of bugs in the changed software that were introduced in that particular release.

This development and output focused part of the process is complemented by an input focused Kanban cycle for product design: Products are going from idea to vision to a more detailed backlog to development and finally live the same as issues in development itself move from Todo to in progress, under review and done.

With both cycles the main goal is to keep the number of items in progress as low as possible. This will result in more focus for each developer and greatly reduce overhead: Don’t do more than one or two things at a time. Only catch: Most companies are focused on keeping development busy at all times - their goal is to reach 100% utilization. This however is in no way correlated to actual efficiency: By having 100% utilization there is not way you can deal with problems along the way, there is no buffer. Instead the idea should be to concentrate on a constant flow of released and live features instead.

Now what is the link of all that to Hadoop? (Hint: No, this is no pun on the project’s slow release cycle.) The process of Kanban allows for frequent releases, it allows for frequent feedback. This enables a model of development that starts out from a model of your business case (no matter how coarse that may be), start building some code, measure your performance with that code based on actual usage data and adjust the model accordingly. Kanban lets you iterate very quickly on that loop getting you ahead of competitors eventually. In terms of technology one strong tool in their toolbox to really do data analytics on their incoming data is to use Hadoop and scale up analysing business data.

In the second talk Martin Scholl started out by drawing a comparison from music vs. printed music sheets to the actual performance of musicians in a concert: The former represents static, factual data. The latter represents a process that may be recorded, but may not by copied itself as it lives by the interactions with the audience. The same holds true for social networks: Their current state and the way you look at them is deeply influenced by your way of interacting with the system in realtime.

So in addition to data storage solutions for static data, he argues, we also need a way to process streaming data in an efficient and fault tolerant way. The system he uses for that purpose is Storm that was open-sourced by Twitter late last year. Built on top of zeroMQ it allows for flexible and fault tolerant messaging. Example applications mentioned are event analysis (filtering, aggregation, counting, monitoring), parallel distributed rpc based on message passing.

Two concrete examples include setting up a live A/B testing environment that is dynamically reconfigurable based on it’s input as well as event handling in a social network environment where interactions might trigger messages being sent by mail and instant message but also trigger updates in a recommendation model.

In the last talk Fabian Hüske from TU Berlin introduced Stratosphere - an EU founded research project that is working on an extended computational model on top of HDFS that provides more flexibility and better performance. Being developed before the rise of Apache Hadoop YARN unfortunately essentially what they did was to re-implement the whole map/reduce computational layer and put their system into that. Would be interesting to see how a port to YARN performs and what sort of advantages it gives in production.

Looking forward to seeing you all in June for Berlin Buzzwords - make sure to submit your presentation soon, call for presentations won’t be extended this year.

Updates in the Booth guidelines…

alessandro.polvani's blog » English | 14:23, Tuesday, 21 February 2012

These days, I am working extensively on updating the Booth procedures, in order to make things easier for anyone who wishes to set up a FSFE booth in town, spreading the voice about Free Software and FSFE mission and work.
Your comments and feedback are very welcome.

Do you have experience in organising booths? Did you notice recurrent problems that you would like us to take into account of? Please let us know!

Indictment: Prologue or The Shackles of the People, by the People, for the People, Shall Perish from the Earth

Heiki "Repentinus" Ojasild » English | 17:47, Sunday, 19 February 2012

> I will close my ears, I don’t need to hear,
> what I am and what I’m not.
> They’re not competent to say such things,
> ’cause they don’t know me after all,
> but in the end I’m still ahead,
> I get to do just what I like.
> The thought of this will bring back the smile on my face.
(Vanilla Ninja (2003) Polluter. On Vanilla Ninja. Estonia: TopTen)

Although the time would be fitting, this is not a discourse on draconian copyright laws, copyright in general, free software, underhand politics, oppressive governments, et cetera. This is a discourse on freedom and liberty. Or rather, this is a discourse on Freedom and Liberty.

If we won all the political fights we are having this very moment, we would be no freer than we have been while fighting them. Why? The political situation right now is constrictive, there is no denying that. However, the restrictiveness and harassment is nothing compared to that of the situation with our goals fulfilled but ourselves unsatisfied and lacking. And we would be lacking: Our freedom would merely be a shade of Freedom, and our liberty would be but a shadow of Liberty. Thus, we need to set Freedom and Liberty as our goals. Not freedom from government, but Freedom from the society — independence. And not liberty constrained by the desires of fellow humans seeking to use and abuse us for their own ends, but Liberty — no conscriptions, no curfews, no taxes, no government — nothing but individual’s wanton desires and noble sentiments to command, restrict, and limit the individual.

Obviously, the challenge itself is not new. It is rather ancient, dating back to the beginning of society. Fellow humans have had an effect on individuals, an influence over individuals, throughout the history. Unfortunately, that influence has also been growing throughout the ages, and the pace of its growth has also been increasing. Thus, individuals have come to the verge of ceasing to be and becoming something else, something Gaia-like, only more sinister, stupid, inadequate, incompetent, constrictive, destructive, and useless.

Furthermore, the challenge has been recognized by various philosophers and statesmen since the antiquity: Urukagina saw the established social order of the 24th-century-BCE Mesopotamia as unjust, and seeked to change it (Wikipedia Contributors (2012, January 11) Urukagina. In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 22:24, February 18, 2012.); the Athenians saw the solution in giving the Power to the People, until the death of Socrates woke Plato and inspired him to write the Republic, which advocated for yet another repressive regime, and thus the ever-lasting war between repression-by-a-tyrant-or-the-elite and repression-by-the-People had been firmly established to keep raging forever…

And the battle has been raging through the centuries and millennia, from the Roman Monarchy to the Roman Republic, from the Republic to the Empire, from the Empire to the less worthy medieval regimes, from which to the nation states of the 19th century, wherefrom to communism and fascism, and finally to the repressive regimes of today posing as havens for Freedom and Liberty. While, in fact, the modern self-proclaimed free countries are more often than not as bad as China, only a lot less open about that: Modern repressive regimes at least have the courage to admit being repressive. Modern ‘free’ regimes, on the other hand, tend to be ‘free’ for the majority who do not care about privacy, liberty, due process, harassment, democracy, et cetera. Freedom to conform, however, is no freedom at all. At least the freedom to say that two plus two equals five would have to be granted.

Thus, “freedom” means nothing in the West. One might be allowed to use the old on a rare occasion or two, but reinterpreting and reusing in a way that threatens the social order is forbidden. One might be allowed to protest against minor injustices, but campaigning for environment, privacy, and liberty is effectively forbidden, whether the ban is enforced by the authorities using dystopian tactics from Fahrenheit 451 and Little Brother or societal pressure to keep quiet in order to avoid becoming a pariah. Nevertheless, even the need to campaign for or against something is indicative of societal oppression, especially in conjunction with the possibility of many people attending: The need to protest against something implies the existence of a major wrongdoer, and major wrongdoers are hierarchical mini-societies like corporations and governments; the ability to rally many people is testimony to the fact that the struggle for power takes place between classes, not inside the individual for the Power.

Thus, while the current struggles might be worthy of support, they are irrelevant to the struggle for Power. In order to conquer oneself and become an overman (or an overwoman), one must be a human, an individual. Yet, today’s limitations make it impossible for people to be individuals: Increasing global co-operation among the individuals, which would lead us to a freer society able to nourish overpeople, is being stopped by those in power because they are afraid of losing their power and having to manage by themselves.

So, they have distorted the political theories of free market and liberalism to establish their atrocities as the only possible way forward. If it were not for the state, there would be no monopolies that do not arise from the control of the land and natural resources. (Ludwig von Mises (2000) Liberalism. Ludwig von Mises Institute. Chapter 2, section 7. Retrieved 2012-02-19.) And if it were not for the society, there would be no corporate feoffs. If there were no fiefdoms nor monopolies, then we could abolish the state, and if we had no state, we would be able to disband the society.

When we dissolve the corporations threatening our planet and our livelihoods, we cut off the resources from the state. When we have cut off the resources from the states, they have no choice but not to be. Once the states are no more, we do not have an external enemy left, and we have to turn against ourselves.

Then, we will have to ask ourselves whether we can stop being ‘us’ and become a collection of mes. And it will not be a matter of choice; it will be a matter of individual development. We will have to stop being Caesars and become Socrateses. “I came, I saw, I conquered” simply will not cut it: we have to make it I, instead of us under the aegis of ‘I’. We must not use society, nor may we allow it to influence us. We have to separate from the society and alter individuals; we must not attempt to change the society.

Because society tries to alter people to fit itself and more often than not succeeds at that, society is an evil a priori, and one’s utmost goal can only be to exorcise oneself of the evil, unnatural, and undue influence exercised by the society. The society must not be allowed to hold sway over individuals. And thus, it is only fitting to dissolve the society. The shackles must be broken, the society has to perish, and individuals must be given freedom. Freedom from society must become an essential liberty. And giving up essential liberty for temporal safety is unacceptable.

Addendum: Nothing set forth herein shall be construed as a statement against co-operation of mes, formation of small groups, etc; everything set forth herein shall be construed as an indictment against the society, which is suffocating the mes and trying to make everyone average.

2012w07

blog.padowi.se » English | 11:00, Sunday, 19 February 2012

What I thought I’d do was I’d try some more tweaks, this one about categorization. Mostly because I think some of the neat things I’ve stumbled over in the past couple of weeks might not deserve their own heading. So I am revamping the headings:

Hacks

I thought this section would be about… not necessarily hacks, but if you would, the hacker mentality. Redefining a problem, is one such trait.

And building an eco-friendly house for around $5000 is defintively another.

Finally, Hacking Hacker News, which sounds like a rather fun project.

Tech

I’ve been meaning to learn wireshark, mostly because I could probably put it to pretty good use at work, and then I found pcap2msc which could probably be pretty useful for visualizing the collected data.

I also found a pretty useful site, Sleepyti.me which, given an average sleep cycle of 90 minutes, and user input when she wishes to wake up, calculates when the user should go to bed. Neat!

Commandline

I came across a very good explanation on how to use join.

I’ve also looked into how to increase trust in commits in git, namely by signing commits with your gpg key, and it turned out to be downright easy to accomplish.

Society

I guess that if we are completely ok with any potential ramifications of businesses keeping track of everything we buy, and speculating about what our purchases indicate, then it is completely ok to dispose of cash altogether. Personally it scares the willies out of me.

It’s funny how people seem to always confirm my concerns by abusing powers they shouldn’t have had in the first place…

I knew there was a I keep calling these guys the MAFIAA. Asshats…

While I understand this point and certainly agree to a certain degree, I maintain that if more people voted with their wallets, they’d soon run out of funds with which to buy new laws.

:wq

Hackerspace.gr: Creative Hacking

autoverse » libre | 15:51, Friday, 17 February 2012

<script src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.www.universalsubtitles.org/embed.js" type="text/javascript"> ({ "video_url": "http://www.archive.org/download/Hacking_211/hsgr-creative_hacking.webm", video_config: { poster: "http://autoverse.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/hsgr.jpg", click_to_play: true, width: 480, height: 200 }, "base_state": {"language": "en"} }) </script>

“Either ACTA is useless, or it is a threat”

Karsten on Free Software | 08:09, Wednesday, 15 February 2012

The Wall Street Journals has an interview with Kader Arif, who recently resigned as the EP’s rapporteur for ACTA. He says that “either ACTA is useless, or it is a threat”.

I recommend you go read the whole thing. It’s a concise summary of some of ACTA’s greatest risks, plus interesting background on goings-on in the European Parliament.

Arif makes clear that ACTA cannot come into effect in the EU unless all 27 member states sign the agreement. The reason is that ACTA contains a chapter on criminal measures, and those are a competence of the member states.

And here I am very much concerned because I (and many international experts) consider that the text of the agreement breaks this very fragile equilibrium between interests of right holders and protection of civil liberties. [...]

First is the article 11 of the agreement, which states that the right holder has the right to ask for information “regarding any person involved in any aspect of the infringement or alleged infringement”. This article is worded in such wide and unclear terms that it leaves a great deal of room for interpretation. In practice, almost anyone could be linked to an infringement of intellectual property rights and face criminal sanctions under such a vague definition. It is our responsibility as legislators and people’s representatives not to leave it to a judicial authority to decide of the scope of an agreement which could affect people’s civil liberties.

He says that if the EU and member states sign ACTA, and then discover at some point that it’s incompatible with the acquis communautaire (ie. accumulated current EU law), then EU/national laws would have to change — not ACTA.

The European Commission claims that national law would take precedent over ACTA. But Arif says that this doesn’t make sense, as it would render ACTA ineffective. Why negotiate an international agreement if it can be overriden by national laws?  So these claims are probably bogus.

At the same time as it says that ACTA will not bring changes in Europe, it claims that the agreement would make it easier for European companies to enforce their copyright and patents abroad.  But most ACTA parties are countries where this isn’t a problem today. Those countries where enforcement is difficult – Arif names India and China – are not party to ACTA.

HowTo: Meetups in Berlin

Inductive Bias | 20:23, Tuesday, 14 February 2012

I get that question once in a while - and need the list below myself every now and then: How to actually setup a meetup in Germany. Essentially it all boils down to three questions: Which channels to use for PR? Where to do the meeting? What other benefits to offer to attendees?

When it comes to PR there are several options:

• Announce the meetup on relevant mailing lists
• Use social networking sites relevant to your project - in Germany Xing works best, Twitter, Facebook, Linked.In and Google+ are other options
• Ask anyone you know personally for help with spreading the word
• If you have one post information on your personal blog

Where to go for the meetup:

The venue usually is the biggest question mark. After deciding on how big you’d like to shoot for initially you can start looking for a location. For your first meetup don’t rent a room - with a bit of creativity there are lots of options that are free of charge.

• If you are a student or have active relations to any university going there usually is the cheapest and least complicated version.
• Another option is to just book a table in a restaurant that has a reasonably large room. Simply choose your favourite one - knowing the owner helps in getting extra space.
• Third option is to go to any co-working space that also has a meeting area. In general they are very open to hosting community events - co-up Berlin, Betahaus are just two options.
• If you are planning a less formal event, your local hacker spaces might be an option: c-base Berlin, in Berlin e.V. are two Berlin examples. Hackers Dojo and Noisebridge are two Bay Area examples.
• Last but not least look out for local startups that are currently hiring new people: They tend to be very open to hosting events. See Berlin Buzzwords Hackathon providers list for some examples.

What else?

• Make sure attendees can register themselves - xing works for that, so do Google forms
• Setup a mailing list or some other notification service to help people track future events (Google Groups works, so does a dedicated Twitter Account)
• Provide some background online - meetup.com works but does charge a small fee. Setting up a blog on wordpress or blogger works as well, though it is not quite as interactive as the meetup.com site.
• Get in touch with attendees and local companies - usually they are quite happy to provide some financial support to your meetup for free drinks or videos.
• If you want videos: Recording audio is trivial, putting it online is extremely simple if you use soundcloud’s app. Recording video also is rather simple but can be time consuming. Finding sponsors to pay for them if you offer to brand the videos is reasonably simple. For the Hadoop Get Together we usually hire Martin Schmidt. Sites to put videos online: Vimeo works but has rather low upload limits, blip.tv is a bit better in this respect.
• Sponsoring in general: Companies looking for developers related to the meetup’s technology as well as those providing consulting for that technology tend to be open to supporting local events. What works best is to contact people you already know there - they will know best who to ask internally.

One final note: Being the organiser of such a meetup puts you at the center of a local community. Over time people will start remembering your face and name. Make sure you do the same - you should at least be able to remember faces, affiliations and names of your regular attendees.

Today is I love Free Software Day

Torsten's FSFE blog » english | 13:00, Tuesday, 14 February 2012

Today is I love Free Software Day, so we don’t complain about bugs and missing features, but say thanks to all those developers who made all those awesome Free Software! Thanks to all of you!

Why I love Free Software

Karsten on Free Software | 12:44, Tuesday, 14 February 2012

For today’s I love Free Software Day, I’ve thought a little about what makes me get behind the keyboard every morning. Turns out there are lots of reasons, but here are two of them.

The great thing about Free Software is that it gives me control of my own life. I want to be able to shape the way I live. Don’t get me wrong: I have no desire to rule the world. But I want to be in control of my own little slice of it. If I’m using machines to help me achieve things, I want to know how they work and what they’re doing. I want sovereignty rather than dependence. There are so many things in the world that need changing, and no way for me to change them all. But Free Software gives me an easy way to take charge of the tools that I use to work, to create, and to relate to others. That’s a great feeling, and it inspires me to tell others about it.

And then there are the people who I get to work with, from the Free Software community and beyond. They’re a very smart bunch, and I get to learn something new almost every day. Our community is a place where we push each other hard to succeed. It’s a place where we can throw ideas into the discussion before they’re fully thought out, and then work together to make them great. Or throw them out if they’re no good, which is just as well. The only real failure is not having fresh ideas any more. If you see FSFE doing something good, then you can safely assume we threw out ten other ideas in the process of settling on that one good proposal.

Free Software lets me change the world, side by side with truly inspiring people. That’s why I love Free Software.

Great students, great work done!

Myriam's blog | 12:07, Tuesday, 14 February 2012

During 2 months a couple of students aged between 13 and 17 have been helping to solve KDE tasks during the Google Code-In contest. As last year I did mentor a few of them, 19 to be precise. To give you a short update on how much work was done, here comes a list of their achievements:

• Number of tasks: 34

• 22 KDE bug triaging tasks (9)
• 5 Amarok wish-list cleaning tasks (5)
• 5 Amarok Userbase Manual update tasks (5)
• 2 Amarok webpage creation tasks (2)

2 Students also worked on different tasks, just in case you wonder why the numbers are different here Now 34 tasks seem little work, but the numbers behind the tasks are quite impressive:

• Amarok wish-list cleaning: The task consisted in installing the latest Amarok 2.5 version and testing 50 wishes to check if some might have been implemented and forgotten to be closed. There was a total list of over 450 wishes to test, and indeed all 459 wishes were tested!
• Amarok Userbase Manual update: it consisted in going through all chapters of the current handbook and update it to version 2.5, changing text and screen shots.
• KDE bug triaging tasks: the most impressive of all, as the students did triage over 750 bugs, finding many duplicates and even already solved ones and help reducing the bug count considerably.

All this work would not be possible if KDE and Amarok were not Free Software as it empowers the users and the developers alike and gives great opportunities to students to improve their skills. That is just one of the reasons I love Free Software

i

blog.padowi.se » English | 08:00, Tuesday, 14 February 2012

Patrik <3 FS == true

I don’t suppose this comes as a great surprise to anyone who’ve spent more than 20 minutes with me, and while I do believe that I am pretty good at spreading the love to the various new projects I find and make good use of, I know I can also be pretty harsh about dropping programs which no longer suits my needs (be it because my needs changed, or some feature I didn’t like got into the latest version).

This doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate the efforts of all those who contributed to the software in the first place. Without it my life would not have been as simple as these programs have made it.

So while I’ve dumped nano for gedit, and gedit for kate, and kate for emacs, and emacs for gVim, and gVim for vim, I am still fond of all those projects. Without them I wouldn’t be where I am today.

So thank you all, everyone who has contributed with your time, or money, or ideas and all the other stuff I can’t think of right now. Know that you have positively impacted at least one persons life, and for that I am truly greatful.

So thank you. All of you.

I love you guys and gals

Happy Valentine

Inductive Bias | 06:24, Tuesday, 14 February 2012

Free Software developers can be very critical: Every single line of code gets scrutinized, every design is reviewed by several often opinionated people. Even the way communities are supposed to work sometimes gets restricted. Sometimes a simple Thank You can make all the difference for any contributor or committer.

FSFE proposed a really nice campaign: Celebrate the “I love Free Software” - Day on February 14th. In the hope that some of the readers of this blog actively develop or contribute to free software projects - this is a thank you for you! It’s your contributions that make all the difference - be it code, documentation, help for users or code reviews.

Call for FSFE Fellowship quotes

Heiki "Repentinus" Ojasild » English | 23:51, Monday, 13 February 2012

The following e-mail was sent to the discussion@ mailing list:

“Dear Fellows subscribed to this list,

“As you ought to know, FSFE has recently added donor quotes to its front page. (If you have not seen those quotes yet, take a look at <https://fsfe.org/index.html>.) These quotes are good reasons to support the Foundation. However, they are geared a bit towards entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs usually have money; however, they do not have time. Thus, the quotes contain good reasons for entrepreneurs to support Free Software financially. Nevertheless, it would be useful to let people who have more time or who do not have entrepreneurial tendencies know why they should support Free Software and the Foundation.

“Thus, we are, as of now, collecting quotes from our Fellows on what it means to be a Fellow, why they became Fellows, what part has the Fellowship played in their life, et cetera. The quotes should not be too long and they should be accompanied by the Fellow’s picture. I cannot guarantee we will use all the quotes, but I am sure we will use some. Thus, by sending in a quote and a picture you obviously consent to whatever use the FSFE is going to put those quotes to.

“As the quotes (or some of them) are going to be published anyway, you ought to send in your quotes and pictures as replies to this very e-mail. When we will have gathered enough and we will have decided where exactly to display them, we will make some kind of a selection and everyone will have an opportunity to see the finest experiences, reasons, et cetera.

“To begin with, here is my very own quote: “I honestly do not know why I joined the Fellowship. However, the @fsfe.org e-mail alias is simply great and you won’t find a finer company to hack with on the Earth; thus, I recommend joining us anyway, regardless of whether you are into translating, coding, design, law or anything else even remotely connected with [to] Free Software.” Now, I won’t attach a picture, as mine can be easily found on the Fellowship Interviews blog; however, you should attach a one.

“Furthermore, as it would get boring if everyone simply repeated what a great Fellowship we have, you should try to put in a bit more of your personality. It would be great if the quotes gave an overview of what we Fellows (and other volunteers) do, why we do the things we do, and who we are.

“As you probably get what we want, just send in your quotes. And do not worry if you do not know what we are looking for: It would be more beneficial to send in your quote anyway.

“Faithfully,”

Should you wish to e-mail us a quote, drop a letter entitled “Re: Fellowship quotes” (no quotes) to discussion at fsfeurope dot org.

February 14th: “I love free software day”

Inductive Bias | 21:07, Monday, 13 February 2012

This year FSFE is once again running their I love free software campaign on February 14th: The goal they put up is to have more love reports, hugs and Thank You messages sent out than bug reports filed against projects.

They have put online a few ideas on what to do that day. I’d like to add one additional option: If you are using any free software and you feel the urgent need to file a bug report on that day, use the opportunity to submit a patch as well: Make sure to not only describe what is going wrong but add a patch that contains a test to show the issue and a code modification that fixes the issue, is compatible with the project’s coding guidelines, doesn’t break anything else in the project. Any other contribution (documentation, increasing test coverage, help to other users) welcome as well of course.

Letter supporting Manchester hackerspace funding application

Sam's Blog | 18:08, Monday, 13 February 2012

Sent to the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities (AGMA)in support of a funding application made by MadLab Manchester Hackerspace.

Dear AGMA,

I am writing in support MadLab in their request for AGMA funding. I have been running Free Software Foundation Europe events at MadLab since January2011, and have made use of their facilities on both a monthly basis for regular community meetings, and also on weekends for special local and national events.

Software Freedom Day 2011 (SFD), for example, was a major event at MadLab. SFD involved 437 teams around the world, from Sweden to Nigeria, for the purpose of introducing the public to powerful and freely available computer software. At MadLab approximately 50 people visited during the day (despite heavy rain) to view demonstrations, booths, and presentations. A mapping party gathered downstairs and organised an afternoon of amateur cartography, contributing to a global map, under public ownership, which is used extensively in GPS and governmental systems. [Pictures]

The Gnome 3 launch event, which I also co-organised at MadLab, drew people from as far as London and Scotland to come on a Saturday afternoon last April to see new  accessible computer desktop technology demonstrated by experts,and discussed by attendees. The event drew corporate sponsorship from Codethink, and generated hours of discussion. [Pictures]

I attend several other community group meetings at Madlab which are run by other societies. In particular, I attend groups which meet to develop technical skills relating to computer science, such as the Python programming language monthly meetings.

MadLab has exhibited creative work in the past, and I enjoyed taking a partyof friends to see the artwork and literature on display at ’38° of Separation,Korea’. This was purely for my own interest, and introduced me to a culture which I had previously known very little about. [Pictures]

MadLab is non-profit making, is open to all for free and over 75% of attendees are Manchester residents.  MadLab encourages the uptake of ICT skills in surprising and effective ways, which has led to job creation and skills enhancement in the region.

The fact that MadLab existed in the city of Manchester was one of my primary reasons for moving to live in the North West when I emigrated from Berlin early last year. MadLab’s existence here is a very visible sign of a growing community of digital innovators in the region. MadLab’s free services to community groups, especially ones of an educational and technical nature,undeniably fosters innovation, creativity, and entrepreneurial activity in the area.

I support their appeal for funding.

Sincerely etc.

CreateJS is moving forward

Henri Bergius | 12:40, Monday, 13 February 2012

s you probably know, we at IKS have been working to decoupled content management through semantic technologies. CreateJS, together with the VIE library provide the user-facing part of this approach.

Traditional content management has been very monolithic, meaning that by choosing a particular editing interface, CMS users also have to take the web framework, programming language and content storage mechanism mandated by the developers of their system. By splitting the CMS to the separate concepts of user interface, web framework, and content repository we can provide implementers a greater degree of freedom, and allow CMS developers to focus on the functionality where they can best make a difference.

What is Create?

With CreateJS, content management system developers can provide a simple, fast, and modern editing interface to their end-users. The UI is completely built in JavaScript, and can be integrated with three easy steps:

1. Mark up your pages with RDFa annotations
2. Include VIE and Create into the pages
3. Implement Backbone.sync with your CMS back-end

Create provides functionality like in-page content editing, managing of content collections (like article lists), running workflows for content, and handling images and content tagging. The jQuery UI plugin -based structure allows CMS developers also to implement their own additional functionality. This also makes it possible to either use the whole Create UI as-is, or just to take the parts of it that fit the UX concept of a system.

The Create UI was initially made for Midgard CMS, but has since been generalized so that it works anywhere. This approach has already gained some popularity, with CreateJS widgets being used in projects like Symfony CMF, Drupal, and OpenCMS.

The January hackathon

To push CreateJS forward we organized a hackathon in Zurich, Switzerland in the early January. Participants came from different IKS project partners and CreateJS early adopters.

Some of the results were:

• Workflow support, allowing CMSs to define per-content actions like publish/unpublish
• UI notifications, including the possibility to build scripted tutorials for site editors
• WYSIWYG editing of Markdown documents
• Much more flexible handling of editing widgets, for example to choose whether some content should be edited with a rich text editor, or a date picker
• Smart image insertion when using the Hallo editor
• Content tagging support
• Blogsiple, a CreateJS CMS integration testbed written for Node.js

Image insertion, link management, and content tagging have been designed to work together so that they can find about annotated entities thanks to the Apache Stanbol engine and provide intelligent suggestions on related content.

Moving forward

The important next step is to consolidate all these changes into the CreateJS codebase and to ensure that everything works smoothly together. Our continuous integration setup would also benefit from a larger number of tests.

After that we can consider new features, including things currently under discussion.

Helping CMSs to integrate this common user interface (or parts of it) is also a major task for this year. If you're interested in using CreateJS for your system, be sure to let us know! And also follow the progress on GitHub.

2012w06

blog.padowi.se » English | 11:00, Sunday, 12 February 2012

Update: Ooops, I guess we gone incremented the year again… and no one thought to tell me

ACTA

It’s comforting to know that the people we elect to rule us at least know what they’re doing… Oh… wait…

git and branches

Last week, for the first time, I think I groked branches. The headline mentions git branches, and if they are different from other VCS’ branches, then last week I think I groked git branches

I’ve known about branching for quite a while, but never gotten past anything other than a rudimentary understanding.

I think I understood how mercurial does it (simply clone the repository, name the root directory of that clone to whatever you want to call that branch, and presto. (And yes, I am aware that mercurial has a branch command as well, so my understanding on that point is probably incorrect).

Either way, what finally gave me an “aha”-moment was this blogpost.

And while one the subject: Other uses of git. I am going to take a closer look at especially Prophet.

Links

• Transparent multi-hop SSH — This is pretty frakkin cool, using your ~/.ssh/config file and the ProxyCommand you can simplify connecting to a remote host which you’d have to reach by connecting through other hosts. Nice!
• And while on the subject of SSH: /bin/false is NOT security
• Yet another blog post which makes me realize that I have a lot more to learn about Vim
• Butthurt much, RIAA?
• This was a pretty cool experiment

No but seriously, frakking do it. Automation ftw.

GNU Xnee 3.12 (‘Hannes’) released

hesa's Weblog » Free Software | 11:32, Friday, 10 February 2012

We are pleased to announce the availability of GNU Xnee 3.12

GNU Xnee is a suite of programs that can record, replay and distribute
user actions under the X11 environment. Think of it as a robot that can
imitate the job you just did. GNU Xnee can be used to:
Automate tests
Demonstrate programs
Distribute actions
Record and replay ‘macro’
Retype the content of a file

Getting the Software
====================

ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/xnee/xnee-3.12.tar.gz
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/xnee/xnee-3.12.tar.gz.sig

or one of the mirror sites as found in:

http://www.gnu.org/prep/ftp.html

Checksums
===========

md5sum:
c2a74e8d1f3965c5f3b47aadb40ba5e3  xnee-3.12.tar.gz

cksum:
2575836771 1798047 xnee-3.12.tar.gz

New in this release
===================

* New option: –record-replay, -rr
Record and replay a session (press q to stop recording)

* Fixed bugs:

Savannah
bug #35029, Segmentation fault when using stop…

…. for Hannes

Play CSS encrypted DVDs in Fedora 16

Sam's Blog | 23:02, Thursday, 09 February 2012

Download and install the following packages in the order shown:

http://dl.atrpms.net/all/libdvdcss2-1.2.11-6.fc16.i686.rpm (Shared libraries for package libdvdcss)

http://dl.atrpms.net/all/libdvdcss-1.2.11-6.fc16.i686.rpm (A portable abstraction library for DVD decryption)

More information about these packages can be found here: http://packages.atrpms.net/dist/f16/libdvdcss/

Note to self - Java heap analysis

Inductive Bias | 21:30, Thursday, 09 February 2012

As I keep searching for those URLs over and over again linking them here. When running into JVM heap issues (an out of memory exception is a pretty sure sign, so can be the program getting slower and slower over time) there’s a few things you can do for analysis:

Start with telling the effected JVM process to output some statistics on heap layout as well as thread state by sending it a SIGQUIT (if you want to use the number instead - it’s 3 - avoid typing 9 instead ).

More detailed insight is available via jConsole - remote setup can be a bit tricky but is well doable and worth the effort as it gives much more detail on what is running and how memory consumption really looks like.

For an detailed analysis take a heap dump with either jmap, jConsole or by starting the process with the JVM option -XX:+HeapDumpOnOutOfMemoryError. Look at it either with jhat or the IBM heap analyzer. Also netbeans offers nice support for searching for memory leaks.

On a more general note on diagnosing java stuff see Rainer Jung’s presentation on troubleshooting Java applications as well as Attila Szegedi’s presentation on JVM tuning.

Org-mode syntax highlighting for GtkSourceView

Intuitionistically Uncertain » Technology | 17:46, Thursday, 09 February 2012

If you’re an old-school Emacs user, and you are into GTD organizers, outliners, or would like a less messy way of generating LaTeX documents (from papers to presentations), you’re probably already familiar with Org-mode.

Org-mode is really quite tightly integrated with Emacs — so under normal circumstances there’s no reason to support it elsewhere. But at work we’ve recently had to collaboratively edit Org documents, and alas, Emacs’ Rudel no longer work reliably on newer Linux releases. We’re forced to use Gobby, which is a fine collaborative editor but is simply not Emacs. What is one to do?

I’ve thus started a GitHub project to create a language definition file for GtkSourceView (and, by extension, any editors on the GNOME desktop, including gedit and Gobby. Do check it out here — I’m adding support for language elements as I need them, and my schedule is rather busy these days, but feel free to file requests and/or enhancement patches (but if you do the latter, please include a statement licensing your contribution under the same MIT license you can see in the header of org.lang

The Threat of Digital Incompetence — Censorship Codified Into Law

Mark Lindhout’s Flamepit | 15:29, Thursday, 09 February 2012

Today, I read an article on the TOR routing service. The article was a piece of sensationalist, badly researched, idiotic crap. The article accompanied a television show in which several people speak on the The Onion Router. These people have little to say on what TOR actually is, but they seem to have it clear in their minds that it should be prohibited. In their minds the service is a breeding ground for all kinds of illegal activities. The routing service is consistently misnamed as The TOR Network, which only adds to the confusion.

The scariest part of the whole thing is when the programme’s creator interviews the Dutch parliamentary member Khadija Arib. She is asked on her thoughts on child pornography being distributed by users of TOR.

Her answer [Dutch translation mine]:

I have never heard of the TOR network before, and I’m shocked. I will ask justice minister Opstelten to crack down on it.

Because it can not be such that we think up laws and regulations and there’s still a possibility to abuse children in another way.

There it is again: Child Pornography, the magical words that together with the eponymous Terrorism are the munition of scared, unknowing politicians who seek to censor that which they do not understand. These arguments (assuming you can consider single-termed moral deadlocks arguments) always pop up in discussions on Internet regulation. They seem to be the evilest things of all, something that has to be prevented at all cost. So these politicians, not hindered by any knowledge of informational infrastructure, think up a law. “This law will make the tubes of the internets a safer place for everybody.”, so they believe.

Instead, through lack of understanding by the legislators, the law restricts users. All users. Even those for whom this law wasn’t even intended. I have yet to see a single example of the opposite. This happens always with power and freedom shifting away from citizens, and into the hands of large institutions. (Governments, companies, you name it.)

As user Mozes.Kriebel in this comment thread on the article wittily put it [Dutch translation mine]:

Child pornographers buy bread at the bakery. Therefor, I want the government to prohibit all bakeries.

But this has gone on long enough, it is not funny anymore, it is not a joke. As Joshua Kopstein puts it: It’s No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works. As long as politicians don’t take the time to understand the basic infrastructure of the internet, this problem will persist. Political incompetence is already rampant, we don’t need these people meddling in something that has been working and evolving perfectly fine on its own for the past 40 years.

The Internet is a fundamental part of our modern world. It provides millions of people with a means to live. It provides education, knowledge and a platform for free speech. It allows for communications through political barriers, and helps bring down corruption and totalitarian governments. This machine —of which we are all a part— is the single greatest, most unifying invention we as a species ever achieved. And, by the stars, it has pictures of cats! It is such a formidable victory of thought and freedom that I’m surely not going to stand idly by as a bunch of nitwits in suits shoot it down.

Proposed treaties such as SOPA, PIPA and ACTA have made something clear; Just how incompetent politicians are when it comes to the Internet. But there are no compromises in freedom. There is no lobbying when it comes to freedom of speech. Digital incompetence is proudly flaunted as ‘conservative’ by politicians like Khadija Arib. On Twitter.

This is about our future. About our freedom. It is not a joke, and it is sure as hell not funny anymore. When politicians refuse to gain a basic understanding of the mechanisms they try to mandate, they should be replaced by any means neccesary.

More love reports instead of bug reports!

I love it here » English | 07:49, Thursday, 09 February 2012

(If you are reading FSFE’s newsletters, and you already use one of our banners, you can skip this post because I copy and pasted it. Else please continue.)

Let us admit it, the Free Software community is often very critical. Wewrite bug reports, tell others how they can improve the software, ask them fornew features, and to not spare with criticism. Sometimes we forget to say"thank you, for all your work". As in the last years, we want to change this,at least for one day. So on Tuesday the 14th of February we will celebrate the"I love Free Software" – Day.

Get active, buy your favourite developer a drink or give them a hug (ask forpermission first), write an e-mail/letter expressing your feelings, create nice pictures, donate to a Free Softwareinitiative, use another of our suggestions or becreate yourself to show how you appreciate people, working hard to enlarge ordefend our freedom. Beside that help us to promote the activity with our banners, by e-mail,(micro)blog or in your (distributed?) social networks.

New this year is a whole day event in the Unperfekthaus in Essen (Germany) and that all our Fellowsautomatically get an login@ilovefs.org e-mail alias.

–
Matthias Kirschner
Support Free Software! Join the Fellowship!

Apache Mahout 0.6 released

Inductive Bias | 21:33, Wednesday, 08 February 2012

As of Monday, February 6th a new Apache Mahout version was released. The new package features

Lots of performance improvments:

• A new LDA implementation using Collapsed Variational Bayes 0th Derivative Approximation - try that out if you have been bothered by the way less than optimal performance of the old version.
• Improved Decision Tree performance and added support for regression problems
• Reduced runtime of dot product between vectors - many algorithms in Mahout rely on that, so these performance improvements will affect anyone using them.
• Reduced runtime of LanczosSolver tests - make modifications to Mahout more easily and have faster development cycles by faster testing.
• Increased efficiency of parallel ALS matrix factorization
• Performance improvements in RowSimilarityJob, TransposeJob - helpful for anyone trying to find similar items or running the Hadoop based recommender

New features:

• K-Trusses, Top-Down and Bottom-Up clustering, Random Walk with Restarts implementation
• SSVD enhancements

Better integration:

• Added MongoDB and Cassandra DataModel support
• Added numerous clustering display examples

Many bug fixes, refactorings, and other small improvements. More information is available in the Release Notes.

Overall great improvements towards better performance, better stability and integration. However there are still quite some outstanding issues and issues in need for review. Come join the project, help us improve existing patches, improve performance and in particular integration and streamlining of how to use the different parts of the project.

More trainings available via Mixin

Computer Floss | 10:11, Wednesday, 08 February 2012

I was recently added to the staff of trainers at Mixin, a German-based training company run by Dr. Björn Kesper. My entry into the company means they now offer Java and Eclipse trainings in addition to a whole host of others, including C#, .NET, SQL Server, HTML, CSS and whole lot more. Follow the link and check them out.

As of yet, my particular trainings are still offered with the understanding that content will be delivered mostly in English. I am in the awkward position of being able to speak a good deal of conversational German (thus I can deal with students face-to-face in the language), but trying to deliver a whole series of lessons in German would just compromise the quality of the teaching.

But I’m still learning. One day, very soon I suspect, teaching fully in German will be possible.

De l’impact politique d’apprendre aux enfants la libre programmation

Sam's Blog | 14:12, Tuesday, 07 February 2012

This French article is reproduced from Framablog[2], and is a translation of my article “Will teaching children basic programming skills have a political impact?“.

Apprendre les rudiments de la programmation aux enfants aura-t-il un impact politique ?

La BBC m’a envoyé un courrier électronique la semaine dernière pour me demander mon avis sur la rumeur actuelle qui voudrait que le gouvernement britannique ajoute des compétences informatiques de base aux programmes scolaires en mettant l’accent sur un éventuel impact politique que ceci pourrait avoir sur la façon dont la société interagit avec les technologies. Voici ma réponse.

Question : Enseigner des rudiments de programmation à tous nous oriente-t-il vers une société plus critique et plus créative ?

Oui. Très souvent, les technologies, et en particulier les logiciels, voient leur utilité restreinte pour les intérêts de quelques-uns, comme les entreprises privées, afin de leur permettre de manipuler les consommateurs à leur avantage. Bien que la Grande-Bretagne utilise plus de logiciels et de produits numériques que jamais, seul un pourcentage restreint de la population est capable de participer à la création de ces produits, de les adapter à ses propres besoins, ou bien de créer les siens.

Cela a un impact extrêmement néfaste sur la société. Cela crée un déséquilibre de pouvoir entre les concepteurs des outils et tous les autres, dont le travail dépend de ces outils. Quel que soit le secteur dans lequel il travaille, un salarié a de fortes chances de devoir utiliser un jour ou l’autre un navigateur Web ou un client de messagerie par exemple, ne serait-ce que trouver un emploi. Mais la façon dont une personne interagit avec ces technologies est presque toujours définie par un groupe de personnes extérieures, sans aucun lien avec l’utilisateur final et qui pourraient n’avoir que très partiellement satisfait ses besoins.

Si notre société inculquait davantage les concepts de base de la programmation et de la création numérique, nous serions plus à même d’interagir en connaissance de cause avec notre environnement social et professionnel. C’est particulièrement vrai pour les sujets importants comme par exemple le journalisme citoyen, l’auto-hébergement et la publication. Une compréhension large de la façon dont fonctionnent les systèmes de vote électronique pourrait avoir un impact fort sur la politique future, par exemple.

Pour autant, avoir simplement des compétences en programmation ne suffit pas. Pour être compétitif, efficace et productif, la Grande-Bretagne devra également promouvoir une culture des libertés et du logiciel libre au sein de son industrie informatique. Et ce parce que les restrictions des copyrights et des brevets peuvent mettre au pas la créativité, y compris celle du plus doué des programmeurs, ou les forcer à réinventer constamment la roue avant qu’ils ne puissent commencer à innover.

Le logiciel libre a initié une véritable révolution technologique au cours des trois dernières décennies, nous apportant, entre autres avantages, Internet et des ordinateurs suffisamment abordables pour être distribués en masse dans le Tiers Monde.

Les écoles devraient favoriser la curiosité et l’esprit critique dans un environnement qui encourage les étudiants à apprendre. Une salle de classe exécutant des logiciels propriétaires ne peut fournir cela. « Comment ça marche ? », « Qu’est-ce qui se passe si je change ceci ou cela ? ». Ces questions restent fondamentalement sans réponse quand on enseigne aux enfants en utilisant des systèmes d’exploitation, des suites bureautiques ou des outils de robotique non libres.

Creative Commons By-Sa

Free Software Android page gets “slashdotted”

Sam's Blog | 01:23, Tuesday, 07 February 2012

At FOSDEM, FSFE’s page about how to free Android devices was officially launched by Torsten Grote, leaflets were handed out, and over the course of the weekend news of this hit hackernews.ws, causing a ‘slashdot’ effect resulting in 12,00+ hits. Great going in such a short time, and goes to show what an impact sharing your knowledge on the fsfe wiki can have!

Thanks also to UK Fellow Paul Boddie for fixing search engine indexing and Piwik analytics issues with our MoinMoin installation just days before FOSDEM – without that the launch couldn’t have been so successful.

FOSDEM 2012

Sam's Blog | 00:38, Tuesday, 07 February 2012

This year four things particularly struck me about the annual Free and Open Source Developer’s European Meeting (FOSDEM) in Brussels.

Lots of new software

Attending FOSDEM is always a great opportunity to find awesome new Free Software projects to make your life and work easier, and with more than 420 speakers in the “dev rooms” alone, and more tracks and conference rooms than ever, 2012 was especially fruitful in this regard. I found myself writing down the names of intruiging FS projects I had been hitherto unaware of every few minutes during some of the talks.

I got the impression that more Free Software is being written by European developers than ever before, and that the quality and variety is also increasing. This is really encouraging and inspiring – to find so many innovative freedom focused applications in just two days was eye-opening to the scale and rate of our ecosystem’s growth.

My most interesting finds:

• The Monkeysphere Project
• Open Pandora PDA open hardware project
• Libre Plan web-based project planning
• JWChat web-based secure XMPP client
• Wikiotics desktop wiki editor
• Yii PHP application framework
• Translate Wiki
• Open Broadcasting Encoder
• Processing.js web graph library
• Git-deploy

Lots more FSFE supporters

FSFE’s booth was in a new location, a long way from the campus center in a separate building (‘K’) together with many booths from other organisations (I notice O’Reilly retained their usual prime position – the only booth that did).

Despite the less desirable location we apparently managed more sales than ever before! Not only that, the range of merchandise was bigger, as was the number of booth volunteers, and perhaps most importantly, the number of people at FOSDEM who were wearing FSFE endorsements was definitely greater than the year before.

I saw FSFE hoodies and t-shirts all over the place – at every single talk that I attended, large and small. This was so encouraging, and hopefully will work to exponentially increase awareness and support at FOSDEM in future. Truly our presence was growing.

Lots of comeraderie

Perhaps it was just because as time goes on I know more and more FSFE people, but it seemed to me that the FSFE crowd was not only larger but also as, or more, friendly than before. I met tens of people at FOSDEM who I now consider personal friends, introduced them to tens of other people, and saw new relationships and camaraderie form before my very eyes. At the booth I felt like I was amongst a large group of friends, not a large group of aquaintances with shared interests. I think this is a real achievement – to maintain what I perceive to be a welcoming disposition towards new people as a team and also as an organisation as we grow in numbers each year.

It was also very gratifying to me to see so many people at the booth who have worked for FSFE in the past, as interns for example, and who have retained their relationship with us after their professional engagement ended.

Eszter, Hugo and Nicolas are all examples of past FSFE interns who have gone on to new jobs and studies, but who voluntarily retain important

responsibilities within FSFE – Eszter having

recently become the Deputy Coordinator of FSFE’s Policy team. This indicates to me that despite our shortcomings, the goals, culture, and camarad

erie of FSFE are on the right track. It’s so encouraging to see the good work that past FSFE staff continue to do in the name of freedom!

Lots of snow

The sub-zero temperat

ures, which reached -12, were extreme and took me completely by surprise. “Brussels c

an’t possibly be colder than Manchester”, I reasoned, and so I left my thermal underwear and thick socks and jumpers to gather dust in my wardrobe.

Apart from there being no buses from the airport to the city when I arrived late on Friday evening, Brussels’ city infrastructure coped quite well, with trains and urban transport working throughout the weekend. The University didn’t fair quite so well however – several doorways and grassy areas turned into deep dark slush, and the entrance to “Bar2″ on campus claimed many victims as they rushed in and immediately landed on their backs, feet sliding from beneath them (I fell twice before learning my lesson).

Coming back to earth

FOSDEM is a conference primarily concerned with technology rather than politics, unlike the Free Society Conference in Sweden, for example. As such it motivates and inspires me in different ways to that conference. Just like FSCONS, FOSDEM has left me exhausted, enthused, and saturated with thoughts, ideas, and intentions.

I’ll take back to Manchester a renewed conviction that Free Software can and does provide the tools necessary to free our digital worlds, and the conviction that our larger community of hackers can meet any challenge whatsoever that freedom may face in future, should they so wish.

From FSCONS in November I took a refreshed faith in the importance of Free Software in today’s society. From FSCONS I take refreshed faith in our capacity to deliver it.

The FSFE Blog Theme — Up and running!

Mark Lindhout’s Flamepit | 08:56, Monday, 06 February 2012

As you can see, the Pome theme I developed for the FSFE Fellowship is up and running on these here servers!

I’m really happy I got the opportunity to provide some help to the important work of the FSFE, and you can expect more updates and improvements to the theme soon.

For now, browse around, and if you find any bugs or errors, please drop by the Blog Project page for Pome, or you can send me an email at: <marklindhout AT fsfe DOT org>

Later!

Mark P. Lindhout.

New blog theme: Pome

Fellowship News | 14:31, Sunday, 05 February 2012

A new theme for the Fellowship blogs is available: the “Pome” theme, created by one of our Fellows: Mark Lindhout! You can read more about the theme at Mark’s blog.

If you want to try it, just log into your blog dashboard, click on “Appearance” in the left menu, then click on the “Pome” theme screenshot to preview it; then you can activate it clicking on the top-right link.

The theme is already usable, but of course improvements are welcome! You can send your feedback to Mark, and even contribute code: our custom themes are in the fsfe-blogs Fellowship subversion repository; you can find more information about it in the Blog project wiki page and information on the Pome project in the Pome theme wiki page.