-
An interesting look into the business benefits and value you can derive from social networking. Some interesting and unexpected use cases
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A great article linking open government, FOSS and open data together. Also covers briefly the attitudes to open government in the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand. Nice work!
2010-02-05I just was searching through the web and found this learning chatbot, after talking to him for 10 min and he told me about very interesting stuff (He believe that pigs can fly, but still don’t know homer simson) i got some very amazing result that i really did not expect: [..] long chat [..] This bot really understand girlish Chinese slang! Have fun chatting: http://international.jabberwacky.com/ Cheers 2010-02-04
Dear GNOME friends,
We are call for the host of GNOME.Asia Summit 2010 now ! GNOME.Asia Summit is the yearly GNOME Users and Developers Asian Conference. The event focuses primarily on the GNOME desktop, and also covers applications and the development platform tools. It brings together the GNOME community in Asia to provide a forum for users, developers, foundation leaders, governments and businesses to discuss both the present technology and future developments. GNOME.Asia Summit was held in
Beijing, China during 2008 and in Ho-Chi-Minh City, Vietnam during
2009. We would like to continue finding new national locations as we
spread GNOME throughout Asia, and we are looking for local organizers
to rise to the challenge of organizing an excellent GNOME event. The
GNOME.Asia committee will assist in the process, but there is a
definitive need for individuals to be actively involved and committed
to the planning and delivery of the event.
The following two links are “must read items” for organizing the GNOME.Asia Summit:
If
you are interested in hosting the summit please submit a formal
proposal to the GNOME.Asia Committee at asia-summit-list [at]
gnome.org. The deadline for proposals is 31st March 2010. You are encouraged to ask questions before writing the formal proposal.
GNOME.Asia is much like a few trees just planted and we want to grow a forest in Asia. We are looking for local organizers in any Asian country with the desire to take on and succeed in the challenges of organizing an excellent GNOME event. We know that you will need all the time you can get to prepare a proposal but we hope we have inspired you to get started. Sincerely, GNOME.Asia Summit committee 2010-02-03Ubuntu Desktop will include Chinese translation by default, which mean users will get a localized livecd when he download the official image from Ubuntu Cdimage, all he need to do is chose Chinese at the boot screen. This great job was achieved by Aron Xu, who hasn't join us for too long. But he is very active in Open Source community, like Ubuntu, GNOME, etc. So, kudos shall go to him for his contribution. 2010-02-02Well, i luckily call myself a programmer and not admin, so i don’t feel to bad about what happend ^^ Today i noticed that my Firefox plugin NoScript reported a script that should be executed at my blog, as its my blog i know i never add such a thing. So i checked and now the one year not updateing my WP hit back straight in my face, i was hacked After checking my server i could confirm that it is just a WP hack (hopefully), most likely i cough one of these WP worms that a recently going around for old WP installations. It was anyway time to do a fresh reinstall, this time i decide to install straight out from the SVN, not the trunk, but the last stable, now i just need to do:
to keep up to date, i also installed some interesting plugins, and paranoid as i am now read the code in detail of all that plugins hopefully this will keep a while running. Soon i will add the old posts as well, and try to post a little more often than before. Cheers I have been spending some time reviewing a few FOSS educational software translations over the last months. Localization is a commitment if you want to do a good job; badly localized software leads to poor experience (people simply won’t use the software) and gives the wrong message that FOSS applications are just bad software. So if you thought localization was just pure translation, then you need to think again! Hopefully my experience will help more people to start a localization effort well prepared and be proud of the work they did. Cultural adaptation and knowing who that software was written for are paramount in the process. I’ve put up a few rules together hoping it will help newcomers, if I missed anything please feel free to add yours in the comment section!
Following the steps of Michael and Peter I’ve just started to blog on ZDNet Asia yesterday. My writings there will be a lot more “journalistic” than my random stories over here and covering Linux and Open Source in China, and not what I personally get involved with. Most likely I will also add the feed to the BLUG Planet but only once I’m done writing a feed filter that removes the add in the default feed. If there are any specific topic that you would like to be covered just leave a comment at either place. 2010-02-01
This is with great pleasure that this "little corner of the Web" is resuming activities through another member of the (now famous ;-)) Beijing Linux User Group (BLUG) doing the reporting.
I was reading my predecessors first posts to get a feel of what a.....
2010-01-31That’s right! The StatusNet crew invites you #StatusCheckBRU to grab a beer on Saturday night, February 6, 2010 in Brussels at nearby “A La Mort Subite” for a couple of hours to talk all things StatusNet, the free network service microblogging software. Myself (@rejon) and @Evan will be on hand and have free limited number of new StatusNet shirts, loads of new stickers, and lots of discussions to be had. This is a StatusCheck to coincide with FOSDEM, a Free and Open Software Developer Meeting. You don’t miss StatusNet CEO and Identi.ca Founder, Evan Prodromou’s presentation on Sunday at 4 PM at FOSDEM, either. http://fosdem.org/2010/schedule/events/820
You are invited to this #StatusCheckBRU where we will have beers, free shirts, free StatusNet sign-ups for private beta, stickers, and great discussion fun. Please go to the wiki page and let us know you are coming! Put it on your calendars and share it with your friends! StatusCheckBRU, 6 PM A La Mort Subite Map: http://ur1.ca/l16z UPDATE: In addition to some other staffers and community members, StatusNet’s own User Experience Designer, @csarven(Sarven Capadisli) will be on-hand at FOSDEM and the StatusCheckBRU. freenode migrated to use a new server, which forked from others, something notable to me are: 1 support ssl, 2 support sasl authentication, 3 support hang on over 100 channels simultaneously. To get sasl work, you need some configuration work to do:
sudo aptitude install libcrypt-blowfish-perl libcrypt-dh-perl libcrypt-openssl-bignum-perl
cd ~/.irssi/scripts/ wget http://freenode.net/sasl/cap_sasl.pl cd autorun ln -s ../cap_sasl.pl .
/sasl set freenode primary-nick password DH-BLOWFISH /sasl save /save
22:30:54 [freenode] -!- Irssi: CLICAP: supported by server: identify-msg multi-prefix sasl 22:30:54 [freenode] -!- Irssi: CLICAP: requesting: multi-prefix sasl 22:30:56 [freenode] -!- Irssi: SASL authentication successful Time: Jan 31 15:20-16:30 Temp: 6 ℃ Route: Not so cold today, very nice for cycling. 2010-01-27
Dear GNOME friends, We are call for the host of GNOME.Asia Summit 2010 now ! GNOME.Asia Summit is the yearly GNOME Users and Developers Asian Conference. The event focuses primarily on the GNOME desktop, and also covers applications and the development platform tools. It brings together the GNOME community in Asia to provide a forum for users, developers, foundation leaders, governments and businesses to discuss both the present technology and future developments. GNOME.Asia Summit was held in Beijing, China during 2008 and in Ho-Chi-Minh City, Vietnam during 2009. We would like to continue finding new national locations as we spread GNOME throughout Asia, and we are looking for local organizers to rise to the challenge of organizing an excellent GNOME event. The GNOME.Asia committee will assist in the process, but there is a definitive need for individuals to be actively involved and committed to the planning and delivery of the event. You can learn more about GNOME.Asia Summit at our official website: http://gnome.asia The following two links are “must read items” for organizing the GNOME.Asia Summit: If you are interested in hosting the summit please submit a formal proposal to the GNOME.Asia Committee at asia-summit-list [at] gnome.org. The deadline for proposals is 31st March 2010. You are encouraged to ask questions before writing the formal proposal. GNOME.Asia is much like a few trees just planted and we want to grow a forest in Asia. We are looking for local organizers in any Asian country with the desire to take on and succeed in the challenges of organizing an excellent GNOME event. We know that you will need all the time you can get to prepare a proposal but we hope we have inspired you to get started. We are looking forward to hear from you on or before 31st March 2010. Sincerely, GNOME.Asia Summit committee 2010-01-26
upgraded my blog system, installed a plugin which can let me use my photo from flickr much easier. Because more than 70 of our colleagues are working at home, so its seems a nice idea to share with each others what your home looks like. so here is one corner of mine. Some of you might have received a SMS from me this morning, I have switched mobile provider and therefore have a new number. I’ll keep the old one for another month during the transition period. Why did I switch? Well the main reason is that I am getting about 10 to 20 SMS and 1-3 MMS spam a day with China Mobile. Being a “Diamond member” (the highest membership level at China Mobile) I did call them a week ago to ask to solve the problem (there are many many technical solutions they could implement) but the only two things they could tell me is that they got an award for fighting spam (???) and that I should install a software on my phone to do that. Note that I started to get spam from day one with them. I suspect their staff are just selling customer data for a few bucks. I still told the customer representative I gave them a week to address the issue or else I would switch carrier. Nothing has happened, so here I come China Unicom. On top of not getting spam (at least at the beginning) I’ll get the pleasure to enjoy 3G on my phone (as China Mobile only supports the Chinese 3G standard on overpriced handsets made only for the Chinese market) and flat rate calling all over China.
I won’t post my new number here, but for those of you who know me, do not hesitate to either send me an sms or drop me an email to get the new number. 2010-01-25You’ve probably heard the news that Google may leave China. A few folks asked me how the Chinese feel about it, so we dug around a couple Chinese Internet message boards to get some responses. If you haven’t been following the story, these news articles provide great background informaiton: -
Statement from Google: A new approach to China from the Washington Post. Before reading what we have below, go check China Smack’s, Say Goodbye to Google China? Chinese Reactions, which contains great translations and more article links. In the following translations from a tt.mop.com message board posting by azheng270, Harmony refers to Chinese government censorship and TG and Celestial Dynasty refer to the government.
And here is a transcript from a video interview of Han Han, a young Chinese car racer and writer, on China’s Tudou video sharing site. In this transcript, the fifty cents party refers to people who are paid half a Chinese yuan per Internet message board post supporting Chinese government policy, and Phoenix is a Hong Kong based broadcaster. His interview is no longer available on Tudou.
I think these Internet message board postings give a bit of insight as to how China’s Internet-savvy younger generation view this issue. For my part, it’s difficult for me to imagine Google being allowed to stay in China. But I sure hope I’m wrong.
和希拉里谈话后的合影, originally uploaded by IsaacMao. 2010-01-22I was a little late getting in this morning due to a headache and feeling like I’d been hit by a truck, so unfortunately this meant I missed giving my lightning talk. For those who were interested, I’ll be blogging the content next week. I met up with Glyn Moody, Stephen Schmid and Julian Carver for a casual chat about open government which was really interesting. We spoke about Open data, which Glyn saw as low hanging fruit. We also spoke about other types of projects happening around transparency in government and technology procurement. It’s interesting to me, because there is a lot of rhetoric around open datoa, citizen engagement and making government more transparent, but there isn’t a lot of discussion about how the current processes of technology procurement may actually inhibit open government initiatives. Steve has been working for 2 1/2 years on developing the Open Technology Foundation strategy along with some of the other clever folk at the South Australian Office of the CIO, and they are now in the process of putting the plan into action. The Open Technology Foundation will be a great support mechanism for government in pursuing open data, standards, technology and methodologies, so check it out. After that I continued chatting to Julian for while, particularly about policy development which was great given his experience. We discussed how policy development can mean a lot of different things, and how successful policies usually involve not only logical points but also an understanding of broader social and political context. As we were chatting he came up with an interesting idea. He said that the development of policy could be compared to code development, and perhaps we could purposefully apply the processes of code development to policy development. It’s an interesting thought that needs more consideration before further blogging After a lovely ladies lunch at a great vegetarian place on Cuba St, I got ready for Rusty’s talk. Rusty always gives very entertaining talks, and this was no exception. It was great not only for it’s humour factor, but because so many of our geek peers are having children (and Jeff and I look forward to having children someday) so getting Rusty’s experience in trying to introduce his young girl to programming was fantastic! It was wonderful to see video of Rusty’s child (who is now around two years old now) using the different wrist bracelets and software Rusty developed for her. After many experiments with writing software she might like, Rusty hooked up a drum machine to an application he wrote, and it was an interesting experiment because when she hit the drums on the outside she got the best physical feedback (sound) and when she hit it in the middle she got software feedback (more eyes on the screen), which wasn’t nearly as satisfying or understandable for her.
This has been quite successful, so nice work Rusty, particularly for being the world’s first kernel developer focused on the pre-school market. Favourite saying of the speech about introducing children to programming -> “Brainwash early, brainwash often”. And as for what I eluded to yesterday, I played the part of a 2 yr old child for Rusty’s talk to demonstrate his awesome user design hacking for children. It was a lot of fun! As a side note, I really want Rusty’s shirt, it said “Video games ruined my life, good thing I have two extra lives. <3 <3”. I had a great discussion with Nat Torkington, again about open government where we brainstormed what government does, is meant to do, and what it would look like if it was designed by geeks. We talked about open data, and how there are many stages to achieving openness. In the first instance, it is just about getting the data publicly accessible in useful formats and with permissive licences. The second stage is automation of the data (so it is machine readable and continually updated), then interactability wherein the APIs to the data is all open so that people can create systems thatfully interact with the systems and thus the data. Finally achieving read/write public data means that government data can be updated by citizens. We also spoke about trust, and how trust is beginning to trump statements made regardless of the logic or verifiability, because many people will believe a statement from a trusted source even if they can’t verify it. Access to data is one thing that can help with verifiability, however often data by itself is not enough and data needs to be presented in an understandable and if possible interactive way for people to get the best outcomes. In terms of interacting with government directly, using open API’s would lower the cost of business transactions and ultimately service delivery for government as well as potentially making goverment better at partnering with others. This would be particularly useful in emergencies as a great example. We also had a bit of a thought experiment about how would we build a government department from scratch. More on that idea in a later blog post I think. The conference closing was great. Lots of love and thanks all round. They announced the competition outcomes, and the QR code commpetition was nicely explained by Glynn. Gopal (T3rminat0r) was the runner up for the photography competition with this, which is an amazing shot, and Andy Fitzsimon said we should all set it as our backgrounds for “at least two months”
Mike Beattie took the great winning photo:
linux.conf.au 2011 was announced to be in Brisbane! Hooray! I didn’t get to the Penguin Dinner, which was a real shame but I wasn’t feeling well and had to stay home and sleep a bit more. Other cool stuff I saw today:
Some linux.conf.au media coverage I’ve enjoyed from this week so far: Angus Kidman
Computer World — Stephen Bell CIO — Rodney Gedda Tech Eye — Nick Farrell Computerworld — Kathryn Edwards There’s a bunch more, I’ll try to do update the media list tomorrow, right now I need to go sleep some more. 2010-01-21Early this morning I went to Yoga which was great! It was my first time, and a really wonderful class. The class was pretty full and the exercises were really interesting. Thanks very much Francois for organising it and to the lovely teacher for the illuminating class. Afterwards I was feeling a little shaky and so I watched the keynote stream from another room. I enjoyed Glyn Moody’s talk immensly and really want to try to catch up with during the few remaining days at lca. I had one interesting discussion today with Mako where we discussed the impacts of risk management and liability policies on innovation. It’s an interesting area and I’d love people’s comments or any examples they can think of. Jeremy Allison gave a talk called “The Elephant in the Room” which discussed Microsoft and it’s relationship to the Free Software community. He spoke about several strategies Microsoft have attempted over the years:
Jeremy see patents as the biggest current issue. He posed the Tom Tom lawsuit as “the first openly aggressive use of Microsoft’s patent portfolio against Free Software”. His core messages came down to what we can do about the elephant in the room, and it came down to:
I have always been quite firmly in the camp of not attacking individual companies. I do believe people and organisations should be held to account for disruptive and destructive actions, and unfortunately for them, Microsoft often come up due to many of their behaviours. But it is a mistake for people in our community to assume companies are “evil” or “good”. They’re just companies and we need to encourage open and collaborative behaviours whilst keeping our eyes open to bad behaviour, so to speak. I then had a great lunch, catching up with some friends we haven’t seen for ages. We had a great discussion about gender, sexuality & culture. We were comparing social norms, good/bad behaviour, and how to actually drive social progress without excluding or blaming any person or group. It was a really fascinating conversation, and I personally believe that treating issues of negative bias or bad behaviour as a community problem, rather than a problem just of the target group is the way to draw everyone in to creating the best community we can. I went along to the Sahana talk, but couldn’t stay long as I was helping Rusty prepare for his talk tomorrow. I’m a big fan of Sahana, it is disaster management (in the Tsunami sense) software, so if you are interested in FOSS for saving lives, you should check it out and get involved. My role in Rusty’s talk is top secret, so you’ll have to come along to see. I caught the Q&A from Jon Oxer’s talk — “Tux on the Moon: FOSS hardware and software in space” — which I’m going to make sure I watch once the recordings are put up as it sounded very interesting. After that I thought I’d take advantage before it rained again to go out kayaking for an hour. Kate Olliver had said she was keen to go so off we went. I was feeling dizzy as we walked over but ignored the sensation and went kayaking. The kayaking was a lot of work but a lot of fun, and we saw amongst many other cool things a baby starfish which made me wish I’d risked bringing a camera. It was very cute. Now the story gets a little more exciting. On the way back from kayaking I felt much more dizzy and had to sit down rather suddenly about half way back. We got back and I accepted I was actually a bit sick, so I wanted to figure out whether I had the same bug Andrew and Susanne (the core organisers) had suffered. I went into the NOC to ask and their symptoms didn’t match. I felt quite dizzy and sat down, then lay down, then had some muscle and body spasms which were quite unpleasant and at times painful. Got taken to the hospital where anti-inflamatories, a drip and bed rest calmed down the symptoms, and now I’m home feeling like I’ve been hit by a truck. Turns out muscle spasms are a pretty good form of exercise. Anyway, thank you very much to the lca2010 team, especially Steve Walsh, Susanne Ruthven and Jayne Foster for putting up with and helping me out, and I’m sorry to everyone for causing a fuss. Other cool stuff I came across today include:
UPDATE: Friday morning I felt a lot better. Massive headache, stiff neck. sore muscles, but still fine to attend lca. Hooray for panadol and anti-inflammatories.
I’m in Wellington right now at LinuxConf2010 in Wellington presenting, hacking with @andyfitz and many more of my developer friends. I gave a presentation yesterday updating my StatusNet 2.0 presentation and then having a StatusCheck meetup with about 30-40 people and several getting free StatusNet t-shirts! I have some more for this Saturday’s openday here in Wellington, then I’m back to SF. If you are in Wellington, lets meetup and talk StatusNet and other projects! Here is the presentation abstract:
Here are the slides as a PDF, on Scribd, and then Slideshare. 2010-01-20 I hope everybody had a great time over Christmas and the new year festivities. It’s not really my preferred time of the year for various reasons, but that doesn’t mean other people can’t enjoy  ! So I have been focusing my time and energy on Open Source stuff, namely RUR-PLE, some GNOME.Asia related stuff, Greenboard of course, our pilots in migrant schools and Software Freedom Day planning for 2010.On top of those activities I will start blogging for ZDNet Asia about Linux and Open Source in China, most likely organize the Beijing chapter of the Global Ignite Week with O’Reilly and the cool guys from the Beijing LUG, while trying to get a Hackerspace started in Beijing with a few other enthusiasts from various communities (but mainly from the BLUG though for now). And finally I am happily providing hosting space for two open source projects, the Phnom Penh LUG, a growing Linux community in Cambodia, and moonOS, a lightweight Ubuntu based distribution (using Enlightenment) started by a cool Cambodian guy with whom I chat almost daily nowadays as we’re working on other open source stuff together. I’ll probably come back to all of those but for sure it’s more than enough to keep me away from writing here… Day 3 of lca2010 and I had 3.5 hours sleep last night but got up early anyway and did some stick and pole weapons training with Ian Beardslee which was great fun.
This morning Benjamin Mako Hill gave the keynote. I met Mako years ago and he has always been a massive inspiration. He’s spoken, written and hacked on software freedom for many years, a freedom fighter from way back. In his keynote he talked about empowerment and autonomy rather than licences. “Who controls the technology, controls how I get to use it. So the question of who controls software is a profound and political question.” He spoke about “antifeatures”, features that users hate and would even pay money to have removed. Mako holds that these antifeatures are very common and everyone deals with them. He gave four key categories of antifeatures:
He talked about how network services are creating new and interesting roadblocks to personal empowerment and autonomy and a bunch more. It was a highly informative and entertaining talk, so watch it! Also check out his Unhappy Birthday website.
Then I went to Richard Jones’ Games programming Tutorial, which I was really excited to see as I’ve always wanted to develop games, but had only got as far as some Battle for Wesnoth campaign development, which is more like marked up creative writing I took a bunch of notes about games development, but it would be most useful to actually watch the tutorial and check out of Richard’s slides and material. It’s a great tutorial for all ages My notes on collision detecting were:
By the end of the session (which just flew past) I had a basic but working Asteroids game! Now I just need to learn more Python and I intend on taking up the recommendations and get into more study. Thanks Richard!! He recommended the “Invent with Python” online book to check out, even though it was written for 12 yr olds I then spoke to Pamela Fox about applying Wave to a Public Sphere government consultation. I’m not sure how yet, but I have the feeling there could be some very clever way too do this. I need to think about it more. I attended Matthew Garrett’s talk on “Social success in (and for) the Linux community”. I always enjoy Matthew’s talks, just the right mix of dry humour and cutting cynicism — very British. First he spoke about who the Linux community is:
Matthew observed “As a community we are very hostile”. He talked a bit about how obvious people are about minorities in the community, and gave a great example of women. He said that pointing out to people that they are in fact quite obviously different is not endearing. He posed the question “what is acceptable?”: “The idea that we should be nice to each other does not mean that we can’t have fun.” Completely agree. I get so sick of inappropriate humour that marginalises people in the community. Great point! It’s much better to create a community where everyone feels comfortable and enthused to contribute and make the project rock! Matthew pointed out that as a community we often value code above all else, but this isn’t necessarily a good thing, and we should be thinking about what we want our community to be and then make a choice. Matthew said in Q&A that he used to be very abusive and got a lot of attention for that, however he’s realised over time that he can earn respect through his contributions to the community and doesn’t need the other sort of attention. This was a very useful and personal insight to this kind of behaviour in projects.
I watched Andrew Tridgell and Bob Edwards give a great talk about “Teaching FOSS at universities”. Basically they ran a course last year as a bit of an experiment to see whether it was feasible to teach people the technical and community methods of FOSS in the context of a university. Tridge says it was a resounding success and encourages us to suggest this kind of course to other universities. They are repeating the course in April 2010 and it looks very interesting. It would be great to get this kind of courseware into schools as it would help all students understand how to engage online, how to contribute to an online project and how to apply FOSS principles to other areas. The final talk I attended today was Paul Fenwick’s “Worst inventions”. He compared leeches in glass bottles from one 18th Century invention with social networking, because the inventor said *glass* bottles were used so the “little comrades… were not in social isolation”. He described some rather terrible inventions over the years, a few are below:
The night finished with a Girl Geek Dinner with about 30 attendees. We had an amazing dinner at the Little India restaurant and Amber the dinner organiser also managed to coordinate heaps of prizes which was fantastic, thanks Amber! I managed to score an awesome KiwiCon tshirt from Joh which has Bruce Campbell on the back, and being a big Army of Darkness fan, I’ve been quoting Ash all night. Other cool things I came across today include:
Below are a couple of photos I’ve taken this last week to keep it interesting
                              2010-01-19Firstly I should say that the Martial Arts Bof last night was awesome! We had about 8 linux.conf.au people, plus a few locals. We had many styles represented and it was a fantastic night of knowledge sharing, training and loads more. Paul Wayper came along as a Martial Arts newbie and did a good write up that was fascinating as he was observing all of us with fresh eyes. Day 2 of linux.conf.au was just amazing. The day started with the brilliant Biella Coleman who gave a keynote talk about the history of IP rights, which included some really interesting reflections on hacker culture and the paradox of the “global politics of IP” vs the free software (and broader open culture/knowledge/source) movements. One insight was about TINC (There Is No Cabal), and how it is a joke in most hacker circles, she reflected that the joke is actually a constant subtle reminder to project leaders and other people in positions of responsibility to maintain openness and transparency in the governance and process of their project. Had never thought of it that way. Biella’s blog is well worth checking out. I first met her in Brazil at DebConf a number of years ago, and she has done a lot of interesting research. One paper I really enjoyed explored female hackers in the early days of computing when the machines were room size. Her research showed that it was mainly women coding because “typing” was seen as women’s work, however whenever there was press or announcements made, photos would be taken of the computers without any of the women. I’ll find the link later (as I am trying to blog this tonight so I get a post in every day Finally, Biella made a fascinating comparison between the Free Software/Open Source movement and “clear-sighted irony”, watch her talk to see more. The rest of today I spent in the Open in the Public Sector miniconf where there was an amazing lineup of speakers from NZ, Australia and the UK. We also had attendees from all over the world, who participated in the conversation! It was an incredible day and I recommend anyone interested in government, politics and/or open government to check out the presentations once the video is made available. I’ll be helping Daniel Spector (the awesome organiser) to put up all the slides in the coming day. Below is a quick wrap up of each talk. Please note I’ve linked where possible to their Twitter accounts so you can followup with them later:
Am now getting to bed, past midnight, but importantly before midnight Australian time so I’m counting this as being on track to blog every day at lca, which has been my challenge this year! 2010-01-18Day one of linux.conf.au 2010 started with a fantastic video introducing Wellington in a very tongue in cheek fashion: It turns out that Andrew and Susanne Ruthven, the core organisers of the conference are actually quite sick today, which must be heartbreaking for them given how much they have put into the conference. On the flip side, the rest of the team are doing really well, with Glynn Foster doing all the welcome and introductions this morning. So don’t worry Susanne and Andrew, it’s all going well! We miss you and hope you get better soon! Glynn asked the audience members to stand up for previous lca’s they’ve been too which was interesting. There were only about 6 of us who stood us for the very first lca (CALU) in 1999 (although I didn’t actually get to 2001 and 2002 40% of this years attendees are from Wellington, 40% are from Australia and 20% are from the rest of the world. Another interesting statistic is that 15% of attendees are women. I’m not sure, but I think it’s the highest percentage yet which is great! Everyday there are podcasts happening from linux.conf.au so I’ll try to make sure I link to them all. Radio NZ podcast on the linux.conf.au opening The wireless here has generally been good, although I’ve had to reconnect a few times, so thanks very much to the networking team for keeping the juice flowing Today we even had a few hours of sunshine, which was the first I’d seen in Wellington (I’ve been here since Wednesday). Yay! Below are some thoughts about the talks I attended:
And now I’m off to the lca Tweetup, and then the Martial Arts BoF, both of which I’ll report on tomorrow. UPDATE: There was a great writeup of the Haecksen & Linuxchix miniconf by Helen Varley Jamieson, make sure you click through to part 2 and 3. 2010-01-17Since starting my new job last April, I haven’t been blogging much because I’ve been so busy! I decided to take this week to make up for my slackness by trying to blog about each day of linux.conf.au, which is why I’m in Wellington, New Zealand all this week. linux.conf.au, for those who don’t know it, is the yearly Australia/New Zealand Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) community conference. A bit of a mouthful, but basically it is one of the best technical and geeky conferences you’ll ever go to, seriously Every year it is run by a different group of volunteers who bring their own ideas and surprises to the mix. It is a great formula for continually keeping the conference fresh and interesting — although it does mean each team usually gets pretty burnt out. Having been on the organising team for lca2007, I can completely understand the pressure and commitment of the current team. Given we arrived in Wellington a few days early I decided to volunteer to help over the last few days, so I’ve been running around playing gopher Today the conference registration opened so people could get in early, get their passes and schwag (thanks Grant!), and catch up with other conference goers. It was great to catch up with a bunch of people, who I usually see either online or at lca This is the first linux.conf.au not run in a University, so it’ll be interesting to see how it feels in a conference centre. I’ve checked out the building and although you’d expect a conference centre to feel a bit sterile, it is an interesting and warm building and I found it a great venue for lca. Today at registration it felt pretty chilled out and normal for an lca rego day There are great coffee places close by, along with great shopping (clothes, games and gadgets). The conference is pretty much in the centre of town, there is plenty of sightseeing only a short walk away (if you haven’t been there yet, go to Te Papa. If you don’t have time for anything else, go to Te Papa). Check out the conference pages on Wellington for more. Most looking forward toI’m pretty excited about this year’s lca. Some of the things I’m most looking forward to are:
Finally, for those of you not attending linux.conf.au, you can follow it online with the live streaming, which will be linked every day from the schedule. Please note the links will be available during lca only (Monday to Saturday including the Linux Australia SGM). Update: after some prompting, I should also add I alwayss love the Ghosts dinner where we catch up with other previous organisers of lca to share war stories At the beginning of this week Jeff and I travelled around the North Island of New Zealand with John and Silvia for a bit of sightseeing in the lead up to linux.conf.au 2010 as we drove down from Auckland to Wellington. It was a lovely few days seeing the Rotorua mud baths and Mitai Maori culture, the amazing Art Deco towns of Napier and Hastings, and Te Mata Peak, where John surprised Silvia by proposing on the highest peak. It was a lovely moment, and one that I luckily (and accidentally) caught on camera We got into Wellington Tuesday night as Silvia and John were organising and going to the Foundations of Open Media Software (FOMS) conference from Wed - Fri, so I’ve been helping the lca2010 team out with their final preparations. It has been great to be in the action again, even just as a helper (I was on the organising team for lca2007) and I think this lca is going to be great! The other great thing about an lca in Wellington is the opportunity to catch up with some friends in New Zealand, and also to do some Martial Arts training with friends and mentors. We are having a Martial Arts BoF on Monday night for anyone interested 2010-01-13今天一上班就听到Google要退出中国的消息， 之后twitter上就看到有很多网友自发组织要去Google的碑前献花。
Just like the current confusion over .cn, registrations, ICP – ICP by itself let alone in combination with others. Rules in China are one thing – but this isn’t the first time that two regulators don’t agree and have a pissing match. Or the rule creation and rule enforcement depts are thinking different things. 2010-01-11NSC1 Neotenylabs Conference Singapore, StatusNet, Open Font Web 1.0, and MiddleEast EntrepreneurshipI somehow didn’t post my praises towards the excellent NSC1 Neotenylabs conference in Singapore which happened in mid-December. What a great event! Great Friends all in one place! And I accumulated another huge mound of business cards to process Here are my sets of slides from presenting lightning talks, then I used my current StatusNet slide deck to talk about StatusNet. I don’t have any slides for the Kids2.0 that Jon, Max and I did! That happened last minute! That session was more popular than my sessions!!! What's Your StatusNet? Lightning Talk 1.0
View more documents from Jon Phillips.
Here is the StatusNet slides on Scribd. Here is my slide deck as well from the Open Font Web 1.0 mini-presentaiton I gave for a competition, but Joi, Cory and Sean gave me the shaft in not voting for my presentation. Open Font Web 1.0 Open Font Web 1.0
View more documents from Jon Phillips.
Here is the non-flash version of the DOC and PDF. And, here is another presentation that Bassel and I put together for the conference. There will be more about this in the new year as well. MiddleEast Entrepreneurship Here is the link to the presentation in non-flash google docs. Bassel wrote a bit more about in arabic, and I encourage you to read his page. The above documents were more relevant in December, but some projects have already changed hands slightly. The SAMAlab, Bassel and I are now calling the AikiLab, and these projects are actively being pursued from the IDEA2009 stack to SHARISM2010 project. 2010-01-08
I just posted over at the StatusNet blog about the big StatusCampSF next week, followed by StatusCheck drinks at Norton’s Vault at 6 PM. Here’s a bit, but please follow to the real blog post to get all the details:
2010-01-04Yesterday, the 2010 first snow visited Beijing. I stayed in home till midnight, then went out to take some photos.
The air was so cold, I walked in the frozen wind for 1.5 hours. It was fun to see the snow covered every where, especially the houses, cars, and plants. Several fat cats appeared on my way without glancing on me. I guesses they were looking for some warm place to stay, wish they felt comfortable last night and still be okey this morning. It’s probably that cats are stronger than me, after last night’s walk and even stayed in a warm room, I am afraid I’ve caught a chill In China, it was a perfect sign for a big snow in beginning of year 2010. Maybe this is another excited and impressive new year, if we are more diligent and optimistic, who knows ?
The second GNOME.Asia Summit was happened on Nov 20 - 22, 2009, Ho-Chi-Minh City in Vietnam. In order to better support this summit and bring more international speakers to Vietnam, the GNOME travel committee and GNOME.Asia committee have sponsored below speakers, they are:
Thanks a lot to those speakers who bring the latest technology, start the discussion, build the connection around GNOME to the Summit. You can read some of their blog about the GNOME.Asia Summit 2009, from their eyes:
Fred Muller
Ming-Ting Wei
Ray Wang
Tobias Gruetzmacher
Viirak Hor
Chanrithy Thim
2010-01-01
Junting Pan, an excellent Linux programmer in Beijing, a friend of mine, his daughter is dying. I am here asking more people to save the lovely life of a little girl. Yifan, the 5 years old daughter of Pan, has a badly lung disease in past years, she almost died on Nov 11 2009 (http://help-yifan.org/img/notice.jpg). In order to save her life, her parents must send their little girl to see some of the best specialists in the world, which means a big amount of money ($300K~$500K US dollar). This is an impossible number for a software engineer (especially in a developing country).
Yesterday, the last day of Year 2009, I visited Yifan’s family in Beijing. Her parents sold their only house to support the treatment expense, now the whole family stayed together in a small room. Yifan’s mother and father were brave and strong-minded, we talked about Yifan’s physical situation and current donation amount. The great news was, by Dec 31, 2009, help-yifan.org got 314K RMB Yuan donation (most of it was from China mainland), which was almost 1/10 of the expected donation amount. Yifan said hello to me, and looked at me with sweet smile. She looked like a small flower, to wait for the beautiful sunshine of he life. What a great miracle if she can have a blissful tomorrow, while what a pity if she has to leave us due to the lung disease. Last week, I got the remuneration of “Linkers and Loaders” Chinese translation, and donated it to little Yifan. I wish it’s helpful, but in order to save the life of Yifan, the family needs more help from more people in the world. If you read this blog, please do not hesitate to tell Yifan’s story to your friends. If you want to help Yifan, please visit http://www.help-yifan.org (Chinese) or http://www.yifanfund.com (English) , donation or volunteer are all helpful. Today is the first day of a brand new year. I wish Yifan to be able to have more new years in the future, wish people from all of the world can help little Yifan, to make the life’s miracle happen. 2009-12-30
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 great gift from my parents to youngens but reminds me, is there a wikipedia for human genealogy? wikiroots?, originally uploaded by rejon. Much happening. So much in transit. So much necessary to end the year. Happy holidaze #xmas2009! I’m cleaning out my queues and killing tasks until 2010. You may or may not see more blog posts prior, but you’ll definitely see some traffic. NOTE: The above image is a great genealogy that my Mom pulled together with some family and gave to all grandkids on my dad’s side. Very cool! Check out my other photos up on flickr. We have been looking for an Open Source typing application for kids for quite some time. We found TuxTyping appealing and decided to localize the interface and the 43 typing exercises that come with it into Chinese. TuxTyping is an educational typing tutor for kids starring Tux, the Linux penguin. This educational game comes with two different games for practicing typing, and allows you to create exercises according to students needs. Of course we already brought this good news to Wende School. After two hours of training, Miss Liu was already mastering TuxTyping. She will incorporate it into the school program starting from 2010. Fred is now submitting the Chinese version upstream to make it available for everybody. The TuxTyping developers have been very responsive and helpful with our translation problems and fixing minor bugs we found. We are now even working with them to make it workable for Chinese input method, as only pinyin typing is available currently. Hopefully we will have something ready to test soon. In no time thanks to volunteers and passionate people like us, we went from nothing available in Chinese to a great looking software that will even deal with the Chinese language specificities. That’s the reason why I love Open Source; its community and its spirit definitely ROCK!  TuxTyping is an educational typing tutor for kids starring Tux, the Linux penguin.  There are four different kids of typing games for kids to practise typing.  Tux the penguin is hungry, and loves to eat fish. But Tux can only catch the fish if you type the right letters in time!
 There are over 40 exercises learning the finger position of each letter and punctuation 2009-12-23It’s been such a long time since I’ve posted anything but considering the post I made in March I’m really not that surprised. Zander is taking up a lot of my spare time which is the way it should be. The last twelve months have been a bit of a rollercoaster ride:
The best thing that happened this year was definitely Zander closely followed by graduating. The worst thing was Sheree being diagnosed with cancer. I was really scary when we knew it was cancer but didn’t know what type of cancer it was or if it was even treatable. When we finally found out it was Hodgkin’s lymphoma we were actually relieved because Hodgkin’s lymphoma has an 80%+ cure rate which is much better than some of the alternatives. Sheree has been having chemotherapy for almost two months now and the side effects haven’t been that bad. The worst side effects have actually been from another drug she is given after the chemotherapy which makes her bones ache. I’m going to try to post more frequently this year but we’ll see what happens.  China Menu One of the most challenging things that I had to deal with when we moved to Beijing in 2006 was ordering food from chinese restaurants that didn’t have English menus (most of them). Over time it became easier (you memorize a few favorite dishes) but it was always slightly annoying. Well technology keeps on progressing and a new application has been released on the iPhone that should make ordering Chinese food easier. If you are planning to visit China for a holiday or have decided to line in China but can’t speak Chinese then China Menu is an App worth considering. Unlike phrases books this China Menu helps you customize your order (you want cold beer, not warm beer). It also has a section that help you to understand Chinese customs and tells you how to deal with some of the more interesting ones. That being said it doesn’t have the killer feature that I would love to see which is being able to take a photo of the menu and being told what it is ^_^ Discloser: I worked with the primary developer of this App when I was living in China. That being said it’s still a great idea and I’m looking forward to using it when I go back to China.
开源软件更安全
（开源促进会OSI主席Michael
Tiemann也指出：开放标准、开源理念、开源解决方案将成为各国政府在实施几乎所有政务上的潜在优势）
“七”乐无穷，尽在新浪新版博客，快来体验啊~~~请点击进入~ 2009-12-16智能手机的格局和走势
智能手机操作系统市场格局
下面我介绍Gartner关于2012年全球智能手机操作系统市场格局的预测：
NOKIA智能手机操作系统在转型
Windows Mobile（WM）平台死了吗？
Apple iPhone引领智能手机发展潮流
Linux智能手机的增长
谁来掌控互联网
Nexus One提出的挑战
中国智能手机产业路在何处
“七”乐无穷，尽在新浪新版博客，快来体验啊~~~请点击进入~ ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Hi everyone, It is a proven fact that Ubuntu, the Linux for Human Beings, is a great GNU/Linux distribution, which enables more and more people all over the world enjoy free software, share their knowledge and joys. Being an user of Ubuntu, I must say all the work done by the community and Canonical is awesome; but as a contributor from a not English spoken country, I would be extremely happy to see we can launch localized edition Live CDs, in other words language specific edition Live CDs for users that have different languages and preferences. For different languages there always be different cultures, and this caused to different user preferences. There are many people don't have enough knowledge about English to use a not localized computer in this world. A user of this kind will find it essential to download and install many thing to complete their language support when they installed Ubuntu from our Live CD in the past and at present. Most of these users have some common usage of software, so install these "language preferred" software is another required task before the system is usable. Do you think such a thing is very annoying? Yes, users would be much happier when they find an operating system designed to be very considerate. We have spent lots of man power on improving the process of installation including language support, and a GNU/Linux distribution always ships not only a system but also a set of selected applications, but I think things are still not perfect for us. Microsoft and Apple make their operating systems have different language's editions, and as a non-native English speaker, I 'd like to say it worth. Users prefer to have a fully localized environment in every corner they can see from the very beginning. But for Ubuntu we can only add translations of software that used during installation. The live session is an exciting feature, but I always here somebody ask "why are those all in English?""is there a fully translated Ubuntu available?" I've explained our current situation times by times, and these people always return to say "Ubuntu is great, but if there is a fully translated one, things will be even better." The way to solve such problem, is having a language specific edition. So there are teams and individuals appear to make their distributions based on Ubuntu, or we are regarding them as Ubuntu Derivatives. The existence of these derivatives help us spread our distribution in the positive side, but there are really negative side, it's not just a problem on user choice, like between Fedora and Ubuntu, but something influence our build of community. Those derivatives always not only ship language packs but also some small tweaks for specific user groups (not like Mint, which makes some bigger differences). Due to many reasons, there always be breakages and bugs that never existed in official Live CD. Users have to choose a provider that he or she can trust when they are about to turn to Ubuntu but can hardly accept to start from a global edition Live CD with minor support of his or her language. But who can make sure the quality of these derivatives? Perhaps nobody can tell. For the derivatives provided by non-profit organizations, situations are better than those profit-driven teams. I know some editions have changes that bring security holes, ship Ads (e.g. hard change on Firefox home page which point to a site full of Ads), and of course some of them refused to open there changes. Yes, users are able to drop those unwilling changes, but why he or she tries a derivative if they like to deal with such issues? We may still say it doesn't matter a lot up to here. Then, most of those derivative's authors don't supply support even though some of them have make changes and cause problems, and even some of them push the support work to local community deliberately. Apart from general questions, these users always ask about problems caused by derivative's changes. It is an annoying and overwhelming job to answer, even just tell them "to use the official one" can be an awful thing that few people like to do. This lead to discount to our community, and those users may think Ubuntu and our community are not friendly because most of them don't know the real situation exactly. Making official localized Live CDs can also lead to a new stage of Live CD usage. A Live CD can be used as a demo, a rescue system, or even a temporary working environment, the live session is a feature that many users like very much. As mentioned before, a not English spoken user can find some very limited support in the current Live CD. We need to admit it can hardly be used to do anything other than run a installation. Even for a demo purpose, other will always ask about the nearly all English environment. I've said in the beginning of this piece, users prefer to seeing that every corner he or she can reach is localized. To achieve a better usage of Live CD, a full localization is critical for these users. As for languages that need input method to input characters, for instance CJK languages (Chinese, Japanese and Korean), without a full featured input method, their usage of Live CD can be even more limited. It is really hard to input these complex scripts, though we have ibus with general m17n support by default, but you can only type characters one by one, such thing look very ridiculous for nowadays input method development and usage. When you cannot input a sentence, how can you make it even if you just want to search the web for some articles via live session? Apart from the meanings of official localized Live CDs above, users can save time on downloading and installing language support and perhaps other common software using a localized Live CD. For example, to complete a basic language support of Chinese needs around 100MiB to be downloaded, such a size only count in the language packs and input method without pulling in any other common software like StarDict to land on the system. With a localized Live CD, users can have a usable environment to be installed when they can't access a fast Internet connection, or even without a connection, such feature is obviously welcomed by many users who have desired it for long. With a fully localized environment, we can simplify user's configuration process, and make it really almost ready-to-use once installed. Making the localized Live CDs don't need any changes on our most infrastructures, it is just a matter of default selection of software in the CD. This will cause some more work for CD image team, translation exportation and our ISO building facilities, but I think it worth it. The intention of default package sets and some QA work can be done by the LoCo teams. We can't provide Live CDs for all languages, especially at the very beginning, but starting with having a try for some languages that have special need of care and a big amount of potential users is worthwhile. We can accumulate experience and make the process better. Windows and Macs can have language specific editions, why we can't? Providing official localized editions can be a big step forward on spreading Ubuntu and free software to the world. The progress of making it out is another try on the cooperation of development community and local communities. Ubuntu is Linux for Human Beings, I think such an action is really to that point, which will benefit a lot of users throughout the world. Best regards, -- A mate from 1X.com on my insistence decided to do an un boxing of his M9 for me. It is the least he could do since we acted as counsellors and advisors on purchase and then mental distractions during the agonising wait that ensued. 2009-12-15As a volunteer of the Greenboard Free and Open Teaching project, I was invited to join the charity event hosted by Friends of New Citizens and 10 other NGOs on December 13 Sunday. The event objectives were mainly to:
It was a very successful event with over 400 participants. The whole venue was seated with migrant workers families and migrant schools teachers as well as volunteers coming from different NGOs all focusing on helping migrant workers families. It was also full of touching stories and hot discussions about how to improve the quality of living for migrant workers families. It was very nice to see that so many organizations were concerned about this society problem. But we all know that subsidy can only help in the short term, policy and education are the only long term solution. In order to solve the root problem the society should provide migrant workers with trainings in order to be able to access better job opportunities and their children with free and decent quality education. We should definitely invite the government and Ministry of Education to participate in these kinds of events and panel discussions  Awards given to volunteers from different organizations all over China  RMB 2,000 subsidy was given to 300 selected Migrant Workers' families  Gardener Awards were given to 99 selected teachers from different Migrant Schools
 Volunteers dancing with 4 volunteering children, nice performance!  A few folk songs by a Chinese famous singer  Different Panel Discussions by NGO organizers, teachers, volunteers and even media 2009-12-12As you may know Beijing Linux User Group has a lot of interest groups and one of the most popular groups is “Coding for fun“. The purpose is to bring together developers in an informal way to encourage them to share their projects and coding experience. It’s basically like a Hackathon, everyone hacks on their own code. Even you don’t have anything to hack on? Just look around and join anytime if you feel interested! I personally found this group very interesting and joined numerous times already! Especially for computer science students, it’s a great place for them to learn how to get involve in FOSS projects as they can always get guidance from other experienced hackers. For other members, it’s their regular meeting place to meet and discuss about their projects. If you work alone on your own project? You can see from the pictures that the environment is very nice, it’s definitely a cool place to spend a day working there. For myself, I always work on random stuff related to BLUG, GNOME.Asia Summit, Software Freedom Day , College OSS Society and Open Source deployment in schools. My projects of the day are mainly the BLUG website news / events announcement and TuxTyping localization. Here it is, the most popular group in BLUG!  Everybody hack on their own project there  Hacking on the Linux kernel  One of the projects is "Quadcopter Open hardware project"  All the projects of the day would be listed in every coding for fun
Hi all, round one of Asia travel is nearing completion. I’m ending with a bang at Joi’s NSC1 unconference in the always great Singapore figuring out how to build a startup culture in asia. I believe I’ll be spending much more time here over the next year, so great to build out! I’ll be in SF for about 24 hours on Sunday Monday which will be nice, do some meetings and have an Overlap Dinner and Party. Then, onto Montreal for the week to powerdrive on StatusNet! If you are in and/or around Montreal, please come to the first StatusCampMontreal1:
Also, I should add that changeMedium will be a part of the StatusNet StatusCamp. Check out this snippet about from Michael:
Check out ChangeMedium. 2009-12-11ropevim introduce a one stop python code auto complete, auto import and other features to vim. I did this: $ mkdir /home/liwen/install/rope $ cd /home/liwen/install/rope $ hg clone http://bitbucket.org/agr/rope/ $ cd rope $ python setup.py install $ cd .. $ hg clone http://bitbucket.org/agr/ropevim/ $ cd ropevim $ hg clone http://bitbucket.org/agr/ropemode/ $ mv ropemode/ropemode/* ropemode/ $ python setup.py install And added some code in my .vimrc:
let $PYTHONPATH .= ":/home/liwen/install/rope/rope:/home/liwen/install/rope/ropevim"
source /home/liwen/install/rope/ropevim/ropevim.vim
let ropevim_codeassist_maxfixes=10
let ropevim_guess_project=1
let ropevim_vim_completion=1
let ropevim_enable_autoimport=1
let ropevim_extended_complete=1
function! CustomCodeAssistInsertMode()
call RopeCodeAssistInsertMode()
if pumvisible()
return "\<C-L>\<Down>"
else
return ''
endif
endfunction
function! TabWrapperComplete()
let cursyn = synID(line('.'), col('.') - 1, 1)
if pumvisible()
return "\<C-Y>"
endif
if strpart(getline('.'), 0, col('.')-1) =~ '^\s*$' || cursyn != 0
return "\<Tab>"
else
return "\<C-R>=CustomCodeAssistInsertMode()\<CR>"
endif
endfunction
inoremap <buffer><silent><expr> <Tab> TabWrapperComplete()
Then auto complete should work automatically. But RopeRename not work, which will fill up my cpu, I think it’s ok for a beginning. PS: hg is mercurial
Here is an email that I was sent from a client – received from one of his staff: “One of our contributors sent me through an urgent news story in the morning which I was completely unaware of until the end of the day – when 600 emails suddenly landed in my inbox.” What I find funny is that email never has and never will be a synchronous and real time communications tool. Don’t people get that? Same Place, Same Time = Meeting Room Same Place, Different Time = Email Different Place, Different Time = Email Different Place, Same Time = Telephone Regardless of place or time and is urgent = TELEPHONE The issue here is that this client needs to take action and educate his staff on correct communication procedures (Logic) and what the whole concept of information asymmetry is and how to deal with it. The problem is NOT that the service provider messed up (we didn’t and weird stuff happens all the time in China and we are setup to be able to adapt fairly quickly and re route stuff – hence our CNN interview in August 2007 for being one of the few ISP’s that managed to deliver international email while no one else could for a week during the lead up to a CCPC event), the problem is that the worker was relying on EMAIL for “Urgent” matters. FAIL. This bizarre communications problem seems to happen a lot in China. And 99% of the time it is the foreigners – bitching and complaining about an email not arriving and therefore THAT is why they couldn’t or didn’t do something. That is the same logic as saying the reason why you were late to work was because of Beijing’s traffic. FAIL. It does start to grate on your nerves after a while. Have none of these foreigners ever been dragged over the coals back home for such sloppy work communication practices? Or do they just wait until they get to China to unwind themselves and become all slack and not responsible for their own situations? No – they ignore that truth and send off a bitchy email to their boss without thought to the consequences and thus potentially exposing innocent and hard working people to undue persecution or the need to defend themselves. Follow Up. Follow Up. Follow Up. :-s PS: The dog ate my homework….
Here are some lines I copied from “OCFS2 Support Guide – On-Disk Format”
2009-12-10桌面Linux初战报捷
上网本对微软是双刃剑
“七”乐无穷，尽在新浪新版博客，快来体验啊~~~请点击进入~ 2009-12-09Beijing Linux User Group (BLUG) and Beijing GNOME User Group (BGUG), two of the most active open source communities in Beijing just celebrated their anniversary in November (one day after the other)! With 7 and 1 year of services for BLUG and BGUG respectively it was about time we organized a joint event. In fact being a core member of both groups and a close friend of Emily Chen, BGUG’s President, I can recall how it all started: in 2008 we worked very closely to organize the first instance of GNOME.Asia Summit 2008 in Beijing, bringing passionate GNOME people from all horizons together, discussing and willing to contribute to the GNOME project here in China. The rest happened “all by itself” and it is really nice to see BGUG growing up strong with now a few core members taking over some of the group management responsibilities! For this joint event we presented to both groups a report of the second instance of GNOME.Asia Summit which happened in Vietnam this year. Emily, Fred, Ray and myself were giving presentation there and we gave a summary of what happened, who we met, how vibrant the local Open Source scene is and showed of course many pictures of the 3 days event. In the second part of the meeting Peter Junge, core member of OpenOffice.org community, presented his experience while representing the BLUG and attending the OpenOffice.org Conference (OOoCon) in Italy. It was really a wonderful evening flooded with event highlights, innovative technology, travel and funny stories. After witnessing the success of GNOME.Asia Summit in Beijing and Vietnam, I can’t wait to know where it will be hosted in 2010 and of course participate again!  Emily Chen, President of Beijing GNOME User Group  Peter Junge, OpenOffice.org expert, represented BLUG to join the OpenOffice.org Conference  First joint event of BLUG and BGUG, over 60 members joined!
My whirlwind bizdev journey I’m now calling #timetraveling is nearly wrapped up. I had to make a quick trip to Delhi from FOSS.in to have a great meeting with a large media organization in India. Then, zoomed off from there to Guangzhou to take my first stab at making the case for analyzing Shanzhai technology culture, and building a legal international movement from this rapid hardware remix culture.
Here is the non-PDF non-FLASH version of the presentation. Here is the slideshare and scribd version, which I’m having battle here for best quality. You can grab the PPT from them so you can use and spread the Qi.
There is a tedtochina website which has some info about the TEDxGuangzhou conference and then many more photos. Check the press hits out:
Thanks to CiCi (not CC), for taking good close-ups of me.
The TEDxGuangzhou conference I really appreciated the large 700-1000 person audience at one of the weirdest/coolest buildings in guangzhou that looks like an alien spaceship. Big thanks to the organizers, Lonnie Hodges and all the volunteers who made it real! Big thanks!
2009-12-05When I did apt-cache search thinkpad, I found this nice tool, after some configuration, my world become more quiet. the fan won't run at full speed all the time. To make it work, you'd follow some steps. 1 reload thinkacpi with fancontrol=1 2 Configure hardware interface You need to provide thinkfan with the path(s) of all sysfs temperature sensor files you want to use. You may find them by doing something like this: # find -L /sys/class/hwmon -maxdepth 5 -name "temp*_input" \ -print -exec cat {} \; Now put all file names into the config file that give you a sensible temperature reading, each one on a separate "sensor" line. Example: sensor /sys/class/hwmon/hwmon3/device/temp10_input Next you need to find the PWM control file of your fan: # find -L /sys/class/hwmon -maxdepth 3 -name "pwm?" -print -exec cat {} \; At the moment, thinkfan can control only one fan. Support for multiple fans may be added in a later release. Put your PWM control file on a "fan" line like so: fan /sys/class/hwmon/hwmon3/device/pwm1 3 edit /etc/default/thinlfan to let it start automatically and now, here we go! 2009-12-04Just back from Cambodia and Vietnam, I returned to Wende School to see how things were going. With the help of Julien and Jason, they already incorporated computer classes into their existing curriculum, once a week for grade 3 to grade 6 (grade 1 and 2 should have it soon) teaching children how to use the keyboard and mouse with Gcompris and giving Art classes with Kolourpaint. Miss Liu already scheduled each grade classes until the end of the school year. When we arrived grade 5 was actually using the computer lab, it was so cool! At the end of the class, we discussed again with Miss Liu and gathered more comments. The main reason of our visit was to give formal training to the English teacher (whom I mentioned in my previous blog post). For this session, we tried to deliver a class that would enable her to teach at the end of the course. We managed to build a new 2 hours class focusing on:
The purpose of the shortening of the initial teacher training class is mainly due to the high turn over rate of teachers in Migrant Schools. After 2 hours of training, the teacher take the Gdium home and practices with it during her spare time. Any question is then directed to either Miss Liu who is already trained (and of course ourselves). This time again, at the end of the training section, the Maths teacher this time popped in and expressed her interest to join the training next time. It seems that word of mouth is doing wonder at Wende School hopefully we can spread the word all over China soon!  A real computer class of Gcompris, not demo class any longer!  Teaching children how to use keyboard and mouse with Gcompris  Concept of FOSS, Operating System and Educational Apps training  Italc Classroom Management System Training  Computer classes are already incorporated in their existing school program  Happy kids in Wende School! Catching up with life since my return from GNOME.Asia Summit as a lot of things have happened as well last month. On December 1st the SFD General Assembly was held (IRC meeting) and as our former president Robert Schumann stepped down I was elected the new president for 2010! This is definitely a big responsibility and I will try to keep up the good work that has been carried out since 2004. The good thing is that we have more board members this coming year (some new ones and some older ones) which hopefully will help us to do more. I want to thank everyone for their support and more specifically my colleagues from SFI, our sponsors, the members of the Beijing LUG and all the SFD team leaders around the world without whom we would never have done so much. so, Thank you all! 2009-12-02What's Your StatusNet? Updates like Identi.ca
View more documents from Jon Phillips.
Following up from earlier, the above is a pretty good stack I used for first time at FOSS.IN conference today for describing StatusNet, the Company, Service and Software. The crowd received me well, and we will do a FOSS.IN WorkOut at 11 AM tomorrow at the conference venue. If you are around, please stop by for a hack session. Also, there were some reality distortion tech issues tonite, but we had a load of fun at Jaaga! I made some good slides updating and talking about Creative Commons Case Studies. I went old school instead with just me, the mic, and the audience. It went quite well! Here are the slides: Creative Commons Casestudies, Featuring Status.Net
View more documents from Jon Phillips.
UPDATE The above presentation is available, but needs the Droid Sans font if you download the presentation. View of What’s Your StatusNet? Updates like Identi.ca (NO FLASH necessary). View of Creative Commons Case Studies, Featuring Identi.ca (NO FLASH necessary). 2009-12-01I’m speaking tomorrow, December 2, 2009 at noon at the inspiring FOSS.IN conference in Bangalore with a new talk:
I’ll post my slides up once they are done! Bring on the realidad!
And, then tomorrow night at 7:30 PM, I’m giving another new presentation along with German artists at the first ever Creative Commons Salon Bangalore at my friend Freeman’s hacker/art space, Jaaga. Check out a quick excerpt:
For following all things CC Salon Bangalore, here’s the link. I’ll get my slides up to both! Asap! 2009-11-30开源中间件的主流优势
（在2009
Apache亚洲路演北京站会议上的讲话）
中国开源软件推进联盟主席 陆首群
 与Apache基金会主席Justin
Erendrantz合影
各位嘉宾：上午好！ 我很荣幸应邀参加Apache亚洲路演的北京站活动。 Apache是一支优秀的开源团队（600个正式代码维护者、广大志愿开发者），具有先进的开发机制（开源社区、“Help”或孵化器、Top开发项目和开发环境），并做出了辉煌的业绩。你们开发的开源中间件（软件）：Apache、Tomcat，配置Web服务器、应用服务器（硬件），在广域网（含互联网）中使用，由于质量稳定、可靠性高、灵活性大、可扩展性好、成本低等特点，自1995年以来，长期保持主流地位和竞争优势，为开源软件争来了光荣，这是很不容易的。我看了你们送来的资料，以最近（2009年11月份）的统计为例，配置开源Apache的Web服务器在网络市场的份额为47%，微软IIS服务器为17%。去年你们在北京召开Apache峰会时，我曾表示过担心：Apache和IIS两条市场份额曲线之间的间隔是否会缩小（即竞争优势是否会丧失），过了一年从现在来看，Apache的曲线基本稳定，IIS的曲线大幅下降（降幅达38%），微软似乎出现了危机！ 众所周知，由于开源软件LAMP架构（L-Linux操作系统，A-Apache开源中间件，M-MySQL 开源数据库，P-PHP、Perl、Python、Ruby超文本语言）的崛起，与IBM、SUN主导的J2EE架构（Java语言）和微软主导的.Net架构（C#语言）形成了三角鼎立的竞争架势（过去我主张用户也可根据自己需要，同时采用混源架构，这时就形成了既有竞争又有合作的架势）。LAMP也是一种信息化应用的解决方案，Apache的强势表现增强了LAMP的优势。不久前，美国政府采用开源代码改造白宫网站，并运行在LAMP平台上，他们如此做的原因据说是考虑LAMP安全、快速、灵活，并不依赖于某个私有厂商的诸多特点。 下面我简要地向各位介绍整个开源软件的一些发展背景： （1）Linux操作系统 2008年全球各种服务器操作系统的市场份额为：Linux 25%，Windows 64%，Unix 11%；中国：Linux 12%，Windows 48%就，Unix 40%。在服务器、互联网、移动嵌入式、高性能计算、云计算等领域，Linux已成为主流；智能手机的Linux化和时尚潮流化已成为其发展趋势。 我过去一直讲“桌面Linux”是Linux发展的软肋，今年是“Linux桌面年”，桌面Linux正在起飞（进行时）；必须指出国外一些市场调研公司，通常以“Web终端”的数据代替“桌面终端”的数据，误导公众，还是微软CEO Steve Ballmer说了“大实话”，他说：“根据微软自己的调研，Linux在商用和家用PCs中所占的份额和苹果的Mac OS-X相似”，这就是说目前“桌面Linux”的市场份额不是1-2%而是5%左右。顺便说一句：上网本有力地支持了Linux的发展，年初美国NPD Group市场调研公司也来一次误导，说“现在90%的上网本都装Windows XP”，NPD的错误有三：① 它也是按其Web站点作的调查，② 仅在美国市场调查，③ 只调查了2008年11月和2009年1月。据ABI对2009年全球3500万款上网本的调查来看，68%装Windows，32%装Linux。 （2）Apache开源中间件 Apache的市场份额已如前述，下面补充介绍Apache在中国普及的情况。 据www.mexen.net统计，2005年在中国，Apache占本国采用的Web服务器市场的17.65%（居全球国别统计倒数第二），2007年9月Apache占有率提升到24.22%，2008年又提升到30%左右。金蝶开发的开源中间件已达量产和应用阶段。开源中间件具有主流优势，现在是如何做的更大、更强的问题。 （3）Firefox开源浏览器 Firefox在全球增长很快，今年10月统计，市场份额达24%（微软的IE为64.7%），国内市场份额约5-6%。为挖掘提升Firefox国内市场潜力，需要解决一些技术和政策措施。 （4）MySQL开源数据库 近几年MySQL在国内市场发展很快。MySQL(社区版)2006年全国下载量为1.1亿套，中国为250万套，占全球的2.3%；MySQL（商业版）国内年销量约2000套，占全球的2.5%。PostgreSQL开源数据库在国内也有广泛应用。 （5）办公套件 2008年国内办公套件销售80万套，1.2亿元（与2007年大致持平），具有一定规模；另外，2008年国内免费下载Open Office.org 230万套，占全球下载量2.3%。 （6）PHP、Perl、Python、Ruby超文本编程语言 2007年，PHP在中国市场的份额为23.17%，在全球国别排序中居中，甚至高于美国（21.27%）、英国（17.93%）、日本（10.56%），Perl、Python在国内也有广泛应用；最近才推出的Ruby，其创始人松本于今年5月来上海交流，目前国内也有应用。 Apache基金会主席Justin Erenkrantz说，Apache第2版的许可证ALv2即GPLv3（ALv2 is GPLv3），GPL项目可用它（Apache），但GPL不含在Apache中（Can be used by GPL Projects but no GPL within Apache），Apache不执行“左版（Copy Left）”。如此说来，Apache应该是开源软件而不是自由软件。我认为，自由软件与开源软件均不排斥商业模式，而商业模式是把开源软件做大做强的前提，在当前，为开源软件探索其商业模式已蔚然成风。为此，我向Justin Erenkrantz先生建议：“为了Apache更大发展，Apache需要探索自己的商业模式”，Erenkrantz对我说：“Apache做的完全是公益事业，不谋求像赢利这样的商业行为，Apache的核心人员，包括我在内都是不支付工资的”，我说：“正像你们指出那样，Apache一路走来：Geek、Need、Interest、Career、Work、Giving back、Help、Challenge，现在要迎接挑战，与时俱进”。“软件可以免费，但与软件捆绑在一起的硬件或服务、维护、授权，或网络运营，或内容、广告等原来就是收费的，如果Apache能同时在其中也付出价值，找到价值点，我想可考虑从中“提成”。作为开源软件的Apache如果能找到自己的商业模式，将如虎添翼，可以做的更大更强”。这个建议将提供Apache基金会作研究。 “七”乐无穷，尽在新浪新版博客，快来体验啊~~~请点击进入~ its really important, but in most cases, people can't achieve it, too bad. 2009-11-29When sleeping 2-3 hours of sleep a night and very irregularly, you get loads of random naps throughout the day. Apologies if I fell asleep in your presence 2009-11-27 and she said YESSSS. For those knowing us it won’t be a big surprise as we’ve been already over 6 years together. For those knowing me, it’s probably a surprise as you know what I think about “getting married” (I’ve just lost a few beers). Overall I believe it was the right thing to do and considering the YESSSS I got, definitely it did make Pockey happy!Over at Overlap.org, I made a post about giving thanks. I give thanks to you too!
Even though the picture above is from Damascus, and I’m not in Saigon after speaking about Status.Net at Gnome.Asia, I’m chillaxin a bit before heading to FOSS.IN to speak about Status.Net on DEC 1-5, do a Creative Commons Salon India about CC and Status.Net, and then onto TEDxGuangzhou DEC 5, where I’m unveiling a new topic Shanzhai VS. Qi Inside. I promise I’ll be back to USA for the holidays With that all being said, I am thankful for all my family and friends! So many new people I have met in the last few weeks that make me more alive. Time is a finite resource. Use it well! |
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) . The numbers gradually grew, but it turns out about half the audience are attending lca for the first time, which is awesome!
I’ll get back to you all soon! Expect much more happening in Singapore over the next year. 
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Blog entries aggregated on this page are owned by, and represent the opinion of the author.
Hackergotchi heads gimped up by Fred, Lalo and occasionally the person who owns the head in question.
Optimised for standards. Hosted by CANDIS Group