Hoe serieus kun je een conferentie met de naam LinuxWorld nemen als in de uitnodiging de tip staat:
Wilt u de beurs niet missen? Blok de beursdata alvast in uw Outlook agenda.
Ik schreef al eens eerder niet zo positief over LinuxWorld. Zonde dat een evenement met deze naam mijns inziens meer fout dan goed doet.
Door een verschil in visie en gebrek aan tijd heb ik in samenspraak met de rest van het bestuur van Vrijbit besloten niet verder te gaan als voorzitter van de vereniging Vrijbit.
Vanaf heden ben ik dus niet meer betrokken bij het bestuur van Vrijbit noch volksopstand2008. Ik blijf uiteraard mij inzetten voor het behoud van burgerrechten zoals het recht op privacy, echter op mijn eigen manier en in mijn eigen tempo.
Ik wens het blijvende bestuur veel succes en wijsheid toe in het opzetten en organiseren van zowel Volksopstand2008 alsmede de vereniging Vrijbit.
Stephen Fry celebrates GNU's 25th birthday
I just watched a small endorsement err, short film made by British multi-talented Stephen Fry on Free Software. Although I find his use of plumbing as a metaphor to compare software with a bit strange, it does seem to get the message across. Personally I like the analogy of science versus bad science better. In any case its a nice short clip to introduce Free Software to those not aware of its existence.
From the press release:
The GNU operating system is turning 25 this year, and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has kicked off its month-long celebration of the anniversary by releasing “Happy Birthday to GNU,” a short film featuring the English humorist, actor, novelist and filmmaker Stephen Fry.
In the five-minute film, Fry compares the free software operating system to “good science” and contrasts it with the “kind of tyranny” imposed by the proprietary software produced by companies like Microsoft and Apple that it replaces. He encourages people to use free GNU/Linux distributions like gNewSense (http://gnewsense.org) and free software generally, for freedom’s sake.
Happy Birthday GNU!
With a name like Truckasaurus an artist cannot do anything wrong. Especially if they blend electro, with 8-bit bleep and more. Check out the whole album after the click.
Thanks to 3voor12 luisterpaal I got to know this band.
I’ve had my share of bad luck the last week. Servers dying, Internet connections going down and all sort of annoying technical issues you rather not want to work on while having deadlines. During this I noticed that using Subversion as a tool for version control and in my case general asset management for projects kinda sucks. If you don’t have a connection or the server goes down, you cannot use the repository in a structured manner. So I’m going to leave the centralised server repository for version control behind and start using distributed version control. I’ll still use a central server for backup and easy access for clients and collaborators, but I will not be dependent on it anymore.
Since its kinda hard to know which of the myriad of distributed revision control systems (DVCS) complies with my demands I’ll start using some of the ones that looked most promising. The features I’m looking for are:
I’ll be checking out Mercurial (I hope to contribute to this project for my Neuro OSD and learn a bit of Lua), Bazaar (also checking it out with a small project) and maybe I should have a look at Git.
Off course, the DVCS of my chosing needs to be FLOSS.
Any hints and tips are appreciated!
Last night I read Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother from cover to cover. Its a page turner and highly recommend it to teach people about the importance of privacy and other cilvil liberties. I hope this book will be available in Dutch soon, so I can recommend to everyone.
Ver interesting article on access to knowledge, but not in the conventional sense of it. It deals with the historical responsibility some people and organisations (such as the extrodinary Long Now Foundation) take upon themselves to make sure future generations will have access to (some of) our knowledge. Their plan: using an evolved Rossetta stone of the 21st century.
Paper, it turns out, is a very reliable backup medium for information.? While it can burn or dissolve in water, good acid-free versions of paper are otherwise stable over the long term, cheap to warehouse, and oblivious to technological change because its pages are “eye-scanable.”? No special devices needed. Well-made, well-cared for paper can last 1,000 years easily, and probably reach 2,000 without much extra trouble.
We can not say the same for digital storage. Pages stored on plastic DVDs are neither stable over the very long term, nor readable over the long term. Unless digital information is ceaselessly migrated from one fading medium to another new one, it will quickly cease to be accessible. Two decades ago the floppy disk was ubiquitous. Most personal digital information then was stored on this format. Today, any information stored only on a floppy disk is essentially gone.? Imagine the incompatibility of today’s DVD in 1,000 years.
As durable as paper is, its inherent limitations in storing digital data are clear. Pity the person who would need to find something if the only backup of the web was a paper printout that filled several airline hangers.? What we need are media that have the durability of paper and the accessibility of a floppy disk (or better!).
Read the whole article here.
Awesome video explaining the Large Hadron Collider. If you haven’t seen it already check it out.
Read the rest of this entry »
Voor de opkomende conferentie van xs4all genaamd Fear it? Fix it! (FIFI) op 27 en 28 november ben ik gevraagd om mee te denken over het programma en te bloggen. Vandaag heb ik eindelijk(!) mijn eerste stuk afgeleverd over open source en web 2.0 oftwel software als een dienst. Ik ben benieuwd naar de reacties.
Je kan het gehele stuk hier lezen of hier op mijn eigen blog. Read the rest of this entry »
I have a Wacom Graphire (2?), but did not use it anymore due to the fact that I could not reach the whole screen with the pen. This was due to the pen being set to absolute mode. So after a quick Google search I found this tutorial, followed the steps 8 till 12. Restarted the X-server and set the stylus to relative mode (can also be done in xorg.conf) using xsetwacom (installed the package using synaptic) like this:
xsetwacom set stylus mode relative
Et voila a Wacom stylus behaving like a mouse. Nice!
ps: Check my xorg.conf Read the rest of this entry »
My name is Björn Wijers. Inhabitant of the Netherlands. Pragmatic advocate, user and contributor of open content, open standards and open source.
I used to work at Waag Society, where I was involved with Creative Commons NL.
In 2006 I quit my job at Waag Society and nowadays I focus on my own one-man digital media buro called burobjorn. Under this name I offer my services around FLOSS technology and digital (open content) media. I am co-founder of Stichting Open Media (Open Media Foundation), lead developer of Simuze and usually more modest.
I like to write and you can find my scribblings here:
In short: music is a must. Sharing is human. (Web)coding is cool. Information junk by nature. Politics is interesting. Vegetarian food, yummy!
