Month: July 2005

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Libre Software Meeting

Tomorrow I will be at the Sixth Libre Software Meeting or Les 6èmes Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre. I’ll be giving a talk on Ubuntu as part of my aforementioned Ubuntu Does Europe tour and, due to my own weak will and the persistent nature of the conference organizers, also be giving two other talks.

Here is the line-up:

  • On July 5, I’ll be opening the "taking Free Software beyond IT" theme with a talk called Broadly Defined Freedom and Radical Non-Discrimination based off of some of the writing I’ve done with Biella Coleman including How Free Became Open And Everything Else Under the Sun. It’s some of my older work but I think it’s still important to repeat every once in a while.

  • On July 6, I’ll be giving a LinuxTag redux of To Fork Or Not To Fork: Lessons From Ubuntu and Debian on the Ubuntu derivation model and how other projects can learn from our successes and challenges and why I think the model is an important step toward the way that free software will be built in the future.

  • Later on July 6, I’ll be giving a final talk on Creative Commons and why I think it has fundamentally misunderstood (or at least misapplied) the structure (and goals, but that’s another talk) of the Free Software movement.

    I’ve had a concise and rather stinging article on this I’ve been circulating semi-privately for over a year and that I’ve been unsure about what I wanted to do with it. Cory Doctorow read it and compared me to a trot and Richard Stallman somehow managed to get a copy and has been repeatedly urging me to release it — along with a number of other people I respect in the movement. As a result, I’m going to give the topic a go at LSM and then, if all goes well, incorporate any meaningful and helpful criticism I receive and release the article afterward.

    If you’re not at LSM but you want a preview of the article or know of someone who might be interested in publishing it, please get in contact

You’ll have to check the posted conference schedule for details, precise times, and rooms. Please find me if you’d like to sign keys or introduce me to an excellent French wine.

Slides, notes, and the like are on their way from my LinuxTag talks and I’ll link to them some time this week.

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AttachCheck

I received an email last week with the subject, "woops…attached this time," and decided that enough was enough. How many times I have read (or written) emails referencing the file "attached below" that is nowhere to be found.

I’ve heard people joke about creating a program that would remind people to actually attach their attachments but Googling only came up with two Outlook specific scripts. So I wrote one myself.

The only tough problems are interface issues. Since I send through Mutt, I figured the best, least invasive, and least MUA-specific way to set it up was a MTA wrapper that could fail and spit out warnings on STDERR (which Mutt and most MUAs will then show you) when the program expects attachments but find them missing.

The user then needs the ability to either confirm that they really want to send the message sans attachment or they need to go add their forgotten file. The former example is the tricky one from an interface perpsective. Since you can’t depend on being able to ask "Y/N", the program currently looks either for an added header or a CONFIRM command in the subject that it will then strip out before actually sending. This should make it work with just about anything that sends mail using /usr/sbin/sendmail.

At the moment, the program is smart enough to ignore attached PGP signatures but not smart enough to understand any languages other than English (and a super limited vocabulary at that). Patches and suggestions are welcome.

You can grab the script and the necessary Mutt configuration to make it painless at this little web page I put up for it here:

http://mako.cc/projects/attachcheck/

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Club Clothes

I want to start selling clothes to club-going crowd. The first outfit I have in mind is a shear skirt designed with either built-in underwear (thong, etc.) or that comes with matching underwear of a sort that would encourage the owners to wear the skirt and the underwear together.

People are surprised, not always positively, by the selective luminescent of certain parts of clothing under ultraviolet lights in dance clubs. My outfit will be designed so that the underwear luminesceses powerfully through the sheer skirt which will not luminesce at all.

I haven’t yet decided whether I want to keep this aspect of the outfit a secret and sell these to club-goers as a sort of performance art project or to advertise the feature widely as a way to increase sales.

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My Passport

For everyone who reads my blog and participated in the large Ubuntu Down Under keysigning, the keysigning at LCA, or the large keysigning at Linuxtag, I’d like to point out that nobody remembered where my passport has been.

Points go to anyone who remembers at the Debconf keysigning party. Double points, and a good laugh afterward, go to anyone who remembers and does not tell their fellow keysigners.