• Search for:

• Tags

  bluetooth bureaucracy camera cartoon chat communication community design desktop evangelism events free software friends fuse future GNOME google history howto hunger internet irc jabber kde laser cannons law life marketing mobile nokia offtopic random science silly site support system topaz troubleshooting ubuntu usability vim web web2.0 work

• Archives

  Select Month January 2010  (2) December 2009  (2) November 2009  (2) June 2009  (1) May 2009  (3) February 2009  (1) January 2009  (1) December 2008  (2) November 2008  (1) October 2008  (1) September 2008  (1) August 2008  (1) July 2008  (2) June 2008  (1) May 2008  (2) April 2008  (2) March 2008  (3) February 2008  (1) January 2008  (2) December 2007  (4) November 2007  (2) October 2007  (3) August 2007  (3) July 2007  (2) June 2007  (4) May 2007  (2) April 2007  (2) February 2007  (5) January 2007  (3) December 2006  (9) October 2006  (5) September 2006  (4) August 2006  (1) July 2006  (5) June 2006  (2) May 2006  (12) April 2006  (21) March 2006  (8) February 2006  (3) January 2006  (5) December 2005  (1) August 2005  (1) July 2005  (2) June 2005  (1) May 2005  (2) April 2005  (3) March 2005  (2) February 2005  (3) January 2005  (1)

• Subscribe

  
  Entries Feed
  Comments Feed
  

• topyliweb

  • Bookmarks
  • Music charts
  • Official homepage
  • Photos

• Lifestream

  • Pedopear to be Olympic mascot? In some disturbing way it just seems... appropriate. http://is.gd/7S7Bw 2010/02/07
  • @myrtti: looks like a pretty standard windows system to me! 2010/02/06
  • Peter Lennox on chickens, behaviour, ethics, evolution and the psychopathic nature of modern 'efficiency' http://icio.us/rclnv5 2010/02/05
  • Why corporations have the right to free speech. http://ping.fm/0JBRU 2010/02/04
  • Symbian liberated months ahead of time. Now *that* is a first. http://ping.fm/5ifF1 2010/02/04

• Talkback

  • oliver on The superior, tinier desktop?
  • ethana2 on The superior, tinier desktop?
  • Carl on The superior, tinier desktop?
  • bruno on The superior, tinier desktop?
  • anonymous on The superior, tinier desktop?

• Desktop Porn

  
  
  Sun Nov 22

• Propaganda

  
  
  
  
  
  

  
  Protect your freedom!

  
  
  
  

• Small print in big fat letters

  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
  
  Cartoon artwork created with Stripgenerator; dialogue copy/pasted from #ubuntu-offtopic on Freenode.
  

  ---

Ploughing through my feeds today, I came across Jonny’s post about the Telepathic goodness he’s playing with on his N900. Very nice.

Which brings me to one simple question. Why can’t we, with our powerful computers and full-blown GNOME desktops have any of these nice things? We run the same stuff: evolution-data-server, D-bus, mission-control and the Telepathy connectors. Yet, we have an address book that doesn’t know whether or not our friends are online. Nor can we send IM and email from the same application based on this presence information.

Nothing has happened since I last pondered this question in November 2008. Maybe I should start running Maemo on my desktop? Does the N900 support high resolution external displays? Clearly it is superior.

What is the Web 2.0? Friending, voting, and above all, comments! In the first installation of the new decade of tales from the offtopic, meet the luddite gord, and 2.0 enthusiasts Pici, rww, and mc44.

Yesterday, I announced my official approval of the “inverted” Clearlooks theme to be included in the list of usable things. Everyone was happy, no doubt. I hope the theme creators are recovering from the resulting party nicely. Always concerned with the quality of Ubuntu’s IRC services, elky inquired about the certification status of #ubuntu-offtopic. I hope this installation of tales from the offtopic clears everything out, and everyone can continue enjoying their time on the channel!

Edit: I guess you’re probably thinking, “pffft there’s no such thing as a topyli starburst sticker of approval!” Guess again! Of course there is one, kindly (and 100% officially) created by mc44.

In yesterday’s EMEA regional membership approval board meeting, my application for Ubuntu membership was accepted, and tonight I’m in the process of activating my membership perks, such as syndication on Planet Ubuntu. Thanks to all who cheered for me in the meeting, and who added testimonials on my wiki page!

For those who don’t know me, I’m a Finnish academic guy and a big freedom fan. I have used, advocated, and supported Ubuntu as long as it has existed, and more in fact – I downloaded my first pre-Warty copy of Ubuntu from nonameyet.com. :)

I hope I can continue to be useful for the Ubuntu community for a long time still. I foresee a glorious future for Free Software and our favorite distribution, and I only wish I can recognize as many opportunities as possible for making Ubuntu a little bit more awesome as they come by. Because they always do.

Big cheers also to our other amazing new EMEA region Ubuntu members. Full speed ahead!

Via Torrentfreak:

The IFPI (read: Hollywood) is increasingly pushing for placing the onus of prosecuting infringements of their imaginary property to internet service providers. I am happy to see Telenor refuse to do someone elses business. If I build a road, I should not be responsible for drunk drivers who might drive on it. Or as Telenor puts it,

“This would be the same as demanding that the postal service should open all letters, and decide which ones should be delivered.”

The court ruled in favor of Telenor’s sanity, against IFPI’s distorted view of society, property, justice, and business. The ruling is not about whether or not the Pirate Bay may remain online in Norway, it is about Norwegian and every other country’s critical infrastructure.

Applause!

Update: now the Danish Antipiratbyron is throwing in the towel, for another reason: courts in Denmark still require evidence before convicting anyone, and they remain unable to acquire it. This is a good move as well. Let’s spend the money to producing some good art instead of suing fans.

Note to self: when organizing a debate, pick a subject on which some of the participants disagree.

The supposedly big news yesterday was Skype suggesting that their Linux client will be liberated shortly. However, I feel that in communications, open, standard protocols are more important than client implementations, so the news did not make all that big an impression.

The correct way to handle VoIP calls is using open protocols such as SIP or XMPP, no matter how the client side is arranged. Gizmo and Google have gotten this right: both have their own respective desktop and mobile clients, while the protocols are standard enough to allow us to hack together our own client implementations such as Empathy or Ekiga.

I wanted to see how our distinguished community feels about this and decided to start a debate on #ubuntu-offtopic. I failed miserably, and the discussion ended up being rather short. Please allow topyli and gord to demonstrate, if you will.

I stumbled upon an idea by Judge Richard Posner on how to save the newspaper industry: let’s extend the copyright law to “bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent”. Therefore, I’m linking to his blog while I can! There are a couple of benefits for him in this.

• His blog gets traffic via my blog. Not much but hey, someone might click. Now they can.
• He is properly referenced so that my readers can check what I’m disagreeing with, and also read his point of view.

It seems (at least the under the current legislation) also appropriate to mention that I found Posner’s blog via TechCrunch. Therefore, I’ll also link to their article.

Neither copyright owner was asked for consent before I linked to their content. That’s how the Web works. If someone doesn’t like the Web and the way it works, maybe they shouldn’t use it to publish their copyrighted content in the first place.

In the very same sentence, Posner also suggests we should extend copyright law to “bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent”. I don’t understand why a copyright law extension would be necessary for this.  As one of Posner’s readers notes (in case this isn’t obvious enough), we already need the copyright holder’s consent. The thing is, if you upload your materials onto the Internet and make it freely available to Web surfers, certainly everyone already has your consent to access it.

UPDATE Jul 6 – Simon Owens emailed with some figures on how much traffic he got from a single link on the notorious “leecher” of news content, the Huffington Post. One link, 37,000 eyeballs. ‘Nuff said.

How time flies when you’re having fun instead of fighting with unfixable annoyances in proprietary software! It has been three years since the birth of gNewSense, the FSF-blessed, all-free Ubuntu derivative.

In his anniversary message to the gnewsense-users mailing list, project co-founder Paul O’Malley had a look at both the past and the future of the distribution. As for the future, the message broke news that the original project leaders Brian Brazil and Paul think they have taken the project as far as they think they can, and plan to hand over maintenance to other community members. Thankfully, interested people have replied, and I’m fairly certain that the future of gNewSense is not in danger. It is well supported by the FSF, who provide hardware and bandwidth among other things, and of course benefits from the solid Ubuntu base distribution on which to build on.

How far, then, has gNewSense come? According to Paul’s message, one of the main goals of the project was to prove two points:

1. That Free software works
2. That non-free software “can bite you hard and should not be run”

It is fairly safe to say that on both accounts gNewSense has been a success. They provide a complete, free operating system with all the proprietary binary blobs removed and only ships with free software, and the system works well on lots and lots of hardware, thereby demonstrating the first point. Furthermore, their insistence on the second point has made a noticeable difference by making people focus on delivering more crucial pieces of software as free.

Most notably, they were instrumental in liberating GLX, which brings accelerated 3D graphics to free software. They also helped in building 100% free Linux kernels: their builder script pushed the linux-libre project forward and removing binary blobs from Linux is now easy.

Linux distributions and their users benefit from gNewSense even if they do not run it on their own machines. gNewsense is kind of a litmus test of software freedom. It is easy to check the level of freedom of your Ubuntu system for example: how much of your installed software is free enough for gNewSense? How free is your favorite distribution? For the tasks you do on your computer, do you actually need any non-free software, or would you even be able to do all the same things on gNewSense?

Hats off to the success of gNewSense so far, and may the project thrive until obsoleted by a future software status of complete freedom!

Next Page →