rebel with rather too many causes
Due to the fact that my favorite Window manager is now licensed non-freely (and then some), I award Tuomo Valkonen the Jörg Schilling award for free software project management.
Tuomo can console himself with his award while I console myself with Tritium. With the new dock feature announced today, I think it just turned into something I can switch to.
Inspired by Mitchell Charity’s printable paper rulers and Steve Pomeroy’s CSS ruler, I wrote a little python script to generate an on-screen ruler for the OLPC XO-1. The XO-1 screens are super high resolution (200dpi) and are each identical. This makes for a very accurate ruler. It’s one of a few project I’ve done or am working on that tries to take advantage of the physical qualities (and physical consistencies) of the XOs. Also, a ruler is just a really useful thing for a school child — or anyone else for that matter.
Of course, different screens have different pixel sizes so the ruler for the XO won’t work on another screen. This made some of my friends jealous. To appease them, I spent a couple hours and hacked up a little web frontend to my ruler generator which allows anyone to create custom on-screen rulers and to save them and share them with others who might have the same screen. I’ve called it YouRule. Please check it out or download the source and send me improvements.
This Saturday, September 15, is Software Freedom Day 2007. With more than 300 teams registered, there’s a good chance that there’s something going on near you.
I’ll be helping at the Software Freedom Day event in downtown Boston where I’ll be giving a talk on a still undetermined topic. I’ll also be helping out with GNU/Linux and RockBox installs and letting folks play with my XO and OpenMoko.
If you are into free software, open source, or GNU/Linux, please show up to your local SFD event. Go ahead and bring your friends who are not yet familiar with free software — this event is primarily for them.
In Boston, there will be refreshments, talks, demonstrations, and installs. Bring your laptop, desktop, iPod, or other DAP — or just bring yourself and a friend.
Perhaps you want to both reflect on 9/11 and help demonstrate that limericks can be serious by writing some serious limericks about 9/11?
Several months ago, I announced that I’d received a grant from mtvU and Cisco to work on a cool voting technology research project called Selectricity. A project in quotidian democracy, Selectricity attempts to apply some of the best voting technology and election methods research towards every-day decision-making. It takes research I did at the MIT Media Lab and packages it into a real, useful, application.
I spent probably half of my time over the last several months managing a team of competent hackers and designers as we’ve built out the project. Last week, press releases and news stories went out as we launched our first production batch of features and a new design. You can check it out online at:
There is a whole line-up of a groups and organizations, some high profile, that will be using the software in the coming months. There’s also half a dozen killer new features that are built and waiting in the wings for a little polish and fanfare. We’ll be testing and releasing those in the next couple months.
No doubt, I’ll be mentioning bits and pieces of my work on the project on my blog here. However, if you want to follow development, you should subscribe to the Selectricity News Blog where more full coverage will take place.
You can leave feedback, suggestions, and bugs as comments on the blog or email it to team@selectricity.org. The election method code is already published and we’ll be releasing the rest of the code under the AGPLv3 when the license is released by the FSF in the next few weeks.
Last week, Raphaël Hertzog mentioned a transition in progress that was going to change the way that Planet Debian updates. As part of the plan to deprecate cvs.debian.org, Raphaël helped me move Planet Debian away from the old CVS repository and to a new Subversion repository in Alioth.
Readers of Planet Debian should not notice any differences.
When it comes time to change or disable a feed, contributors to planet Debian will have to update their feed slightly differently. Documentation on how the new method is now in the wiki and at gluck:/org/planet.debian.org/README.
As Raphaël mentioned, all Debian Developers have write access to the configuration file in the Subversion repository through their Alioth accounts. Unlike the old setup, non-DD’s who have blogs in Planet can have write access to it as well, but they’ll need to have an Alioth account and they’ll need to be added to the ACL by me. As before, it’s only OK to modify one’s one feed and anyone who violates this in bad faith will have their privileges to the repository removed.
The old CVS repository remains crudely broken. Please help update any references to the old CVS-based method or alert me to documentation that’s public and out of date that you don’t have access to change yourself.
With the help of open clipart, I made my first webcomic!
On a related note, Mika and I will be holding something of a mead market this Saturday to celebrate moving into our new place and the grand opening of the Acetarium 2.0 (and its new Web 2.0 webpage). We’ll also be celebrating my finishing up my degree at MIT and the end of Mika’s first semester at HSPH. If you know us, are local to Boston/Camberville, and haven’t been invited yet, it’s probably an oversight. Contact me first and we’ll work it out.
I recently met the wonderful Laura Norris. Inspired by that delightful sentence Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo, one of Laura’s many worthy endeavors is the creation of a comprehensive list of animals that are also verbs. With help from Daf and a few other folks at Debconf, I’ve expanded the list considerably and put it into my user space in Wikipedia.
You might want to help out with wiki formatting, links to relevant articles or, of course, additions of animals that are also verbs that we have missed. When it’s done, I’ll make a (foolhardy?) attempt to move it into the article namespace.
The list has a temporary wiki-home here:
It’s been fun to see a stream of translations of the The Official Ubuntu Book coming in. I now have copies of El Libro Oficial de Ubuntu and Das Offizielle Ubuntu-Buch on my bookshelf. I’m particularly happy about Ubuntu徹底入門 The Official Ubuntu Book日本語版, the Japanese translation. It was coordinated by the Ubuntu Japan community, looks great, and has won me all kinds of brownie points — and a congratulatory bottle of top shelf shōchū — from Mika’s family members.
I’ve let my talks page fall badly out of date in the last year. As a first stab toward updating it, I’ve uploaded all of the notes for all of talks I’ve given calling for a free culture movement built around a standard of freedom and for adoption of the Definition of Free Cultural Works.
There are notes posted for talks at the following conferences and meetings:
The talks and notes are not the same, but they are often very similar and they share a lot of text.
The only recording I have is the one from the FSF Members meeting which I posted here before. It’s still available online here:
Perhaps a couple other recordings will surface.
The good news is that I think that those of us involved with the definition have begun to make real progress in getting the message out and I think that, in several real ways, we’ve changed the nature of the conversation around free culture.
I hope so, because I think that, looking at the list above, it’s probably time to move on and to think about helping the definition and the movement in new innovative ways and with new compelling arguments.
I’m in Taipei this week whole week for Wikimania 2007. I’m here for two days for a retreat of the Wikimedia Foundation board of directors and advisory board. I’m also going to be giving two and a half talks in the conference itself, attending a Debian birthday party, and perhaps giving a talk on Ubuntu at ITRI.
Here are the overviews of my talks at Wikimania:
Details on Debian’s birthday party are online too which will have talks, food, beer, and more.
As always, get in contact if you want to meet up or just find me at the conference.
Seeing Yellow seems to have encouraged hundreds of people to contact their printer manufacturers and complain about tracking dots. Lots of reports (like this one) are popping up on blogs and being sent to me in email. There are reports in upcoming magazines. And as far as I know, nobody has been visited by the US Secret Service yet.
I spent half an hour on the phone with HP. I filed a technical support request about the yellow dots and had to speak with the engineer for a while before I was able to convince him that this was definitely not a malfunctioning printer. He checked out seeingyellow.com while on the phone with me and seemed to be genuinely shocked and concerned. He said he would talk to the other technical support people in the color laser group and would write up a report to send up the chain of command. I even had him promise not to turn me into the Secret Service.
Please, lets keep the calls coming! We really are making a difference.
Another thing people might do is call laser printer manufacturers before they buy a printer and talk to sales representatives. Demand an assurance that the printer they sell you will not surreptitiously print intentionally identifiable information. Explain that you will buy from the first printer manufacturer who can give you such an assurance. So far, no company has.
I was thinking about how it was slightly funny that Brother prints tracking dots in their color laser printers. One might say that tracking dots are courtesy of Big Brother, and Big HP, and Big Toshiba, and Big Xerox, and all the other big printer color laser printer manufacturers.
At the risk of seeming a self-aggrandizing, I wanted to point folks to a nice biographical profile that Linux.com is running about me upon my election my to the FSF board. I’m pretty honored, and excited, by the whole thing.
The article talks a little bit about my road to free software and the FSF board in particular and about some of my ideas about the foundation and its work.
There are three little footnotes I thought I would add to what I think is a great article:
The phrase "rebel with rather too many causes" was a phrase originally directed at protest.net — a event calendaring system for activists that I was briefly involved in over a summer during college. I like the phrase and use it frequently but I didn’t want to take credit for it. Google indicates that it originates in NTK #53 I’m not at all surprised.
My parents worked as doctors in Kenya, Papa New Guinea, and elsewhere before they had children. This probably doesn’t matter to anyone else but they worked with an organization that was like MSF in that it was a humanitarian organization that sent physicians around the world but it was not actually MSF as the article states. I don’t think MSF had grown beyond French doctors when my parents were practicing overseas.
When LWN pointed to the article, and in the original was well, there a focus on some comments I make about non-profit organizations. Since in a context of talk about my political work I just want to clarify my comments in a little more depth here.
I think that one problem that has stemmed form Open Source’s emphasis on businesses and efficiency is that free/open source software people end up making arguments in business terms: you should use application X because it is more efficient and faster. For many of the folks who have built this whole movement though, and for most in the free software camp, it’s about freedom, not efficiency. By targeting businesses, we encounter a skeptical audience. More importantly though, we end up making arguments that, while true, are not the ones that motivate us.
I think that low-hanging fruit for free software activists might include groups that already support free software ideas of sharing and user empowerment and that are looking for ways to use free software already. Groups we don’t need to be afraid about saying "freedom" around. Not so coincidentally, these are sometimes organizations that I have a lot in common with politically. But that’s far from always the case.
There’s a big group of philosophically aligned organizations in the NGO/non-profit community and the problems keeping them away are often technical. This is good news, of course, since solving technical problems is the free software movement’s core competency. This is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time: Debian-NP was one project I helped start that tried to address this issue.
Now, many people involved in the FSF, including myself, have political convictions that go beyond software. I do not want these convictions, and my statements about philosophically aligned organization, to be interpreted as call for a political shift in the organization in mainstream political terms. I deeply respect the way that RMS has kept his political opinions separate from the Foundation’s. Biella and I have ever written about the importance of this political demarcation to free software’s success. It’s certainly not something I would want to change.
You may have heard some of the noise that EFF was making a year so ago about the tracking dots hidden in documents by color laser printers. A number of people contacted their printer manufacturers to ask how to turn the "feature" off. At least one person (who has, understandably I think, expressed interest in remaining anonymous) was subsequently visited by the United States Secret Service who asked him questions about why he wanted to turn off the tracking dots in his printer.
I’ve put up a little website with some others in my research group at MIT that tries to organize individuals to call into their printer manufacturers and demand that the feature is turned off. If many people call, the government won’t be able to visit us all.
We’ve made a long list of technical support contacts to help with the process. Please call your printer manufacturer today and spread the word about the site so that more people call in.
The site is called Seeing Yellow — a reference to tiny yellow dots that make up the tracking code — and its online at seeingyellow.com.
I announced the Official Ubuntu Book roughly a year ago. Several months ago, I wrote this in the preface of the second edition:
As we write this, it is one year since we penned the first edition of The Official Ubuntu Book. The last year has seen Ubuntu continue its explosive growth, and we feel blessed by the fact that The Official Ubuntu Book has been able to benefit from, and perhaps in a small even contribute to, that success.
It’s an honor indeed. The first edition received almost universally good reviews and sold very well. Due to the book’s success, most of the group that brought out the first edition (plus a few others) reunited to update the text for Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn).
After months of hard word and waiting, printed copies of the Official Ubuntu Book Second Edition arrived in my office today! They should be shipping out of the online stores very soon.
The new version is updated throughout to reflect changes in Ubuntu over the last two releases and to document new features and improvements. Trying to keep a book like this up to date is a great way to learn about just how fast moving Ubuntu is (answer: very). Meanwhile, Edubuntu has blossomed over the last year. Through the work of Peter Savage, we’ve included a new chapter that deals with Edubuntu in depth.
The book is bigger (almost 450 pages!), better, and more up-to-date. It provides a great introduction for those that are uninitiated to Ubuntu or to GNU/Linux and free software in general. We’ve tried to keep the price down (it is available for $27 plus shipping from most online stores) and should ship almost immediately. Best of all (at least to me), the whole book is released under a free culture license (CC BY-SA).
The book is a major improvement on what was already a very solid piece of documentation. Everyone who contributed to the book (the list is too long to put up here) should feel proud. It was a lot of work but it shows. The opportunity to represent the Ubuntu community in this way, and to try to live up the distribution’s high technical standard with the "official" branding, is a challenge and a reward that is worth the effort.
You can order the book from Amazon or find it in any of many other sources.