Archive for January 2005

Asia Source #3 and #4

Yesterday was great. How to plan a migration, and another part of the folk got to take a tour of the Linux desktop and other varied applications. Afternoon session was something on FLOSS and disabilities – got to see the software that Stephen Hawking uses, and got to take Gnopernicus with festival for a twirl in FC-3, which impressed everyone.

Today, further talks about migration, and we did a dual-boot install on a Windows-based laptop that was relatively new. Surprisingly, everything seems to “just work”. The ICT & Disasters talk was excellent – GRASS was demo-ed (now all we need is a nice front-end), as well as lots of other disaster-related relief information cropped up. Didn’t realise that there was so much free GIS/mapping data available online.

Culture jamming was something else that got covered (sniggle.net ?), and it seemed rather interesting. Lots of “activists” see this as “art”, what I sometimes see as an annoyance; but its rather interesting new viewpoint. Seeing Seth getting a scarf, funnily enough for Christmas, I got my first scarf too – the girl decided to knit one for me and it took her months! Now, thats literally one of my most prized posessions that goes along with my trenchie real well.

Asia Source #2

Yet another amazing day. Migration track actually got folk installing Linux on their desktops and then a Q&A session, with a user migration case study happened. Besides flaky hardware, the Linux installation process has been given a thumbs up. Later on, there was a good breakout session on how to use the Internet and mobile phones for gathering activitism, which was highly interesting (and gave me some ideas for mail marketing and signup forms).

Jeff Ooi showed up to talk about how he does grassroots stuff using the Internet, and gave us interesting knowledge about his portal usj.com.my for folks in the USJ area. Our first time meeting too; I stumbled upon Jac who’s a women’s rights person and it looks like there might be some collaboration for Net-based women’s empowering using FLOSS. A play happened, from a group called Rafiki – it was about opression in South Africa. 2-man show, I really enjoyed it.

Asia Source #1

Today was the proper start of the event. At 7.30am, Gunner started playing his guitar for the morning wake up call. Showering today was a new experience – since we stay in dorm-styled areas, the toilets are sort of “public” or shared. Water was cold! Breakfast, then some ice breaker sessions which brought up some mighty interesting topics.

  • NGOs are misguided ICT shoppers. They just decide when they get funding to go and become wired, and they don’t know their requirements and they just generally get whatever is pushed to them at the computer stores. This includes horrible operating systems.
  • NGOs should try to learn from each other as they face similar situations usually; but they never do this practically as they prefer to just go it their own way.
  • NGOs don’t like to pay for anything – they’d rather have everything for free, even if they were receiving funding. This isn’t a base case, but it happens often enough.
  • In Uganda, any telecenters for ICT that are setup need the buy-in from men. Otherwise, the women can’t visit these public Internet access points, since their husbands think they’re going to go find other men!

The Migration & Adoption track started today, and we got to meet the participants for the first time; lots of interesting questions, with lots of varying technical levels. Some haven’t even used a FLOSS app while in Windows, while some are well setup and are in-between migrations, keeping logs and so on. What surprised me is the low percentage (~10%) of users that mentioned hardware being a barrier/problem – looks like Linux on low-end hardware isn’t such a big deal for NGOs.

Asia Source #0

Whoa. Asia Source is totally a different experience for me. I’ve been in a hotel for the past two days, and even visited MG Road in Bangalore to grab lots of goodies to take home; last night was the first time I got to see Visthar. Really a camp style atmosphere, something thats really new to me I guess. But its going to be fun.

Sorted out the migration stuff today, and tomorrow the camp proper starts. Finally got to e-mail, and posted a bunch of things out. The important bit I think, is fedora-ppc bits that anyone interested in seeing FC-4 running on PPC needs to look at. We’ve got some issues and niggles that we really need to fix. And according to the schedule, freeze is 14th Feb, but we can still continue hacking afterwards I think….

Open Source Disaster Relief

We all knew that they were evil, but who thought Microsoft would refuse to give Windows licenses away, because the apps built on top of it were going to be open source based?

This is exactly the way they behaved when they refused to give XP licenses for notebooks that were to be used for relief work. Instead, they thought it was more than appropriate to charge $135 per XP license. The Sri Lankan’s were trying to build a disaster management system, open-source based, called Sahana. As described at the Sahana sf.net page, it handles all forms of crisis management, including refugee camp management (including match-making based on supply/demand), lost persons database, and more. They are looking for PHP/Mambo, Java, and MySQL blokes to help design the system and continue development.

I even noticed a post about running Mambo on an iPaq running OPIE. There’s a rather nice write-up about it at Linuz Gazette; at least now we all know, that pre-teen model is an evil bastard.

microsoft.com tsunami relief efforts
Microsoft, supposedly helping the tsunami victims in need
If anyone’s interested, The Electric Lamb Mission, a site setup within 24-hours using Drupal, with folk from Australia, KL, Sumatra, and Singapore all collaborating via e-mail, IM and SMS. Their aims are to “become an e-facilitation portal for mission-critical humanitarian and disaster relief initiatives by non-aligned volunteers.”

So alas, open source saves the day yet again, IBM are still heroes for giving away hardware, and Microsoft come out looking like crap.

Trying out gnome-blog 0.8

Seemed like something I had to do. I’ve been waiting for native WordPress support for a long time, and the last time I gave it a twirl, the title bits didn’t work. I think they do now. Seth’s FC-3 packages don’t work – I’m guessing he has Python 2.4 installed on his system and it graciously picked up on it when building the RPM.

So I rebuilt them on a stock FC-3 system, and that’s now at http://www.bytebot.net/rpms/gnome-blog-0.8-1.i386.rpm. Only missing feature now is posting to the available categories…


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