Colin Charles Agenda

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.

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.

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.

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….

So, about ten days ago my mom and Laura came to Beijing. Consequently, I went to the Summer Palace, and got to climb The Great Wall of China! At some stage, I have to process the photos and get them uploaded… Today, we all left Beijing, and while I write this in Kuala Lumpur, I’ll be headed to Bangalore for AsiaSource 2005. I don’t expect to get any OOo/OSX or fedora/ppc work done since I left the Mac in KL (India is incredibly anal about people having more than one laptop, it seems). If anyone is ever in the Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) there’s free Wifi throughout the terminal building. Whee! No ssh/irc/IM access though.

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, supposedly helping the tsunami victims in needIf 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.

Life
Reading an article titled Stay Thin by Sleeping More got me a little worried - most of us don’t really get that much sleep I think. Thats alright, my BMI is still about 20.5, so thats okay.

Work
Hearing that a workmate can’t sleep and is approaching insomina because of work, seems to be highly incorrect. I thought we all worked when it was fun, and the moment it wasn’t, we went out and had fun. And if the work was still absolute drudge, we found work that wasn’t.

<mharris> I bought a snowshovel yesterday. Figured it would be funny to find a big snowbank somewhere, and carve out snow bricks and make an igloo, then borrow a laptop and take out the digital camera for some fun shots of “mharris working from home”

Like mharris does :)

OSS World
Doing lots of Java related things recently. Also realising that the Apache Software Foundation has just far too many projects out there - all useful mind you, just takes a while to digest it all. Its just amazing.

So the CNet article titled Red Hat tries again with Linux enthusiasts hit Slashdot today. It has a few quotes on fedora/ppc, as well as cvs. There were comments on OSnews too… Seems the humour behind FUDCon #1 isn’t appreciated by quite a few posters. Well, the team really did have a good discussion about it and we threw around FedoraCon and FUDCon, and I think, we decided that FUDCon had good fun appeal to it. It makes for better t-shirts, anyways. Yeah, wait till you see the t-shirts.

There’s a good agenda, and a great schedule, with a great number of RH super stars attending, so I’m sure it’ll be a great event. Jack has more FUDCon information.

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…