November 2006 Archives
Upstream is a collection of tools that allow users to send in system specific log and troubleshooting data to support personnel. It can be easily modified to output data to any pastebin or support tracker.Upstream aims to simplify the support cycle and make it more efficient. One of the main problems that support staff face when helping people via IRC or mailing lists is getting user log files across. Often this process is time consuming, and many new users may even be unable to find / copy these logs.
Came across this when on IRC today.. I'm going to have to give it a whirl.
If the BBC gets enough complaints about their use of patented file formats, they will support Ogg Vorbis/Theora. The use of patented formats excludes users of Free Software. This is a matter of fairness and equality.
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So, I'm sure everyone's heard about the Novell/Microsoft thing (Read Eben's excellent summary of what's going on and how we're going to fix it), so this Friday, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu distribution of GNU/Linux, posted Invitation to OpenSUSE developers.
So, the backlash... Firstly, in response to Mark's post to the opensuse list, Andreas Johannsson replied:-
It is interesting how everyone in the community seems intent on dividing it, committing suicide by infighting.Congratulations, Mr. Shuttleworth. You are doing a fine job of doing
Microsoft's FUD work for them.
Corey Burger has some interesting thoughts on the subject in which he points out that doing what Mark did is simply not done. Corey has some other interesting background on the binary drivers in Feisty (anyone sensing a theme here?) - the real tragedy is that Mark's post says "If you have an interest in being part of a vibrant community that cares about keeping free software widely available and protecting the rights of people to get it free of charge, free to modify, free of murky encumbrances and “undisclosed balance sheet liabilities”, then please do join us."
A noble goal, but one that ultimately can't succeed as long as you're shipping proprietary drivers and asking people to put their bugs into a proprietary system.
Please join me in boycotting Launchpad. Launchpad is a proprietary suite of web applications increasingly used by the free software community, and while Canonical have said they will release it as free software, it is still essentially a promise.
Anti-Hipster, Tom Chance on Behind the scenes at GNOME's Web site revision.
A week in and he's writing about Plone! ;)
Attended a W3C Webinar on the Mobile Web earlier.
One of the interesting things to come out of it, was a plugin for Wordpress that makes your blog work better on Mobile devices.
However, this image of the diversity of mobile devices scares me a little.
Your browser is currently not applying CSS (or does not support display:none;). Assuming it supports CSS, it should be applying one of the following media types:screen
A great utility to see which stylesheet media your browser accepts
Earlier, I found my mate's eBay Profile
Anyway, here for the preservation of the world, are some of the things he's bought lately.
Which is all well and dandy, but of course, he ever quite gets around to buying this:-
I must speak out against both her and DReaM. A DRM compromise at this stage would be insanity. This is a fight we have to win.
Quote from Mako's blog post about Sun's OpenMediaCommons - 'Dare to DReaM?' - however my favourite part of the post has to be "I interrupted Landau to point out that CC licenses had an anti-DRM clause that, as far I knew, would make her system unusable on CC content. "
I'm certainly glad we have people willing to go and long and be a pain in the arse at events like this, because that's what it'll take to win this.
We provide licence support services for Free Software. These services include education, fiduciary activities, protection and guidance for individuals, projects and businesses.
Goals
- To help build, analyse and share legal knowledge about Free Software.
- To safeguard the interests of Free Software projects and businesses.
- To bring together experts in Free Software legal issues.
- To work with other groups and help them achieve similar goals.
Cool!
Sign this petition: http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/privatecopy/, which reads:
"We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to create a new exception to copyright law that gives individuals the right to create a private copy of copyrighted materials for their own personal use, including back-ups, archiving and shifting format."
Definition: Someone who uses a beta version of Windows.
I've just finished listening to the latest episode of TechShow - I'm astounded. They had RMS as a guest, and had clearly done very little research, and one of the presenters, Linc, jumped on him and tried to play on the confusion that nobody would ever be able to get a job working on free software. The interview was one of the worst I've ever heard, on any subject.
Why are there no good podcasts on free software? None that really understand the issues.. none that dip between open source and free software, none that perpetuate the myth of 'Linux' as an operating system. LUGRadio isn't so bad, but it's still far from what I'd really like to hear.
Via Mako:-
The iRony RockBox Installer is a simple Python installer for the RockBox jukebox firmware onto Apple iPods. It is meant to automate the long and sometimes complex process of installing RockBox firmware onto different types of iPods.
Useful. iPod Flashing Party anyone?
Last Saturday, I gave a talk at York GNU/Linux Users Group about Free Software. This was the first time I'd ever really gotten up in front of a room full of people in quite a while, and the first time I'd ever had a real point to make about Free Software. Preparing the presentation was useful, as it forced me to really think about the key messages of free software. I opened with a bold slide, that said 'Free Software is software that respects our freedom. Free Software is an ethical choice asserting your right to learn share knowledge with others' - the audience was largely made up of users of free software, but also largely made of users who think of the system as 'Linux' and that the software they're using is 'Open Source'. The messages of ethics and freedom seemed to go over well, and at the end people had some useful questions and discussions of the ethics of using free software continued for hours afterwards.
I am also now on Planet Advocacy thanks to Jono - stop on by, we're always awesome.
So, the WCAG 2.0 FAQ is up. We're currently working on redesigning our website - it'll be quite radically different from our existing site. This is also a good opportunity to get all the accessibility features we can into the site, including all the ones we always wanted but never had.
I'm trying to get my head around all the advances in accessibility, trying to understand just where we went wrong, trying to work out where the shortcomings in Plone are. I'm also trying to be more active on the mailing lists, as some of the brightest people in accessibility seem to lurk on them.
Here's everything that's currently on my 'not-sure' list...
- Alternative text - just how should this work? I'm of the opinion that unless an image can be interacted with, or expresses data, it is decorative and therefore alternative text would actually be inappropriate as it would read something out of context for a screen reader. 456 Berea Street has some useful information but it's not conclusive and by no means a W3C recommendation.
- Fixed size - our new design will be a fixed size design, but should we offer a non fixed style? Should the size be fixed in pixels or with font relative units?
- Navigation - how the hell can we maintain a sensible, logical page order while having all these wonderful new page elements?
- Semantically correct markup - how best to mark up elements of the page that fall outside the realm of being obvious headings?
I'm certain there will be more things that will come to mind on this. I would really like this site to be an example of absolute quality when it comes to both design, but also in terms of accessibility. What things should I be aware of?
Welcome gNewSense! A GNU/Linux distro backed by the FSF based on Ubuntu but with added freedom. "With all the kernel firmware and restricted repositories removed, and the reliance on Ubuntu's proprietary distribution management tool Launchpad gone, this distribution is the most advanced GNU/Linux distribution that has a commitment to be 100% free"
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