rants


Archive for February, 2007

Problems with YouTube are close to be removed

Friday, February 23rd, 2007

This is something worth announcing during FOSDEM 🙂 In a chat with Gnash maintainer,  Rob Savoye, Peter Brown discovered that YouTube videos will soon be available for Free Software users and all free digital citizens.

It works in CVS as a "hack job" […] I expect, that with community help for Gnash and support from the ffmpeg and Gstreamer folks, the next release will enable us to put an end to the number one bug report we receive – Gnash won’t play YouTube videos.

This is good news.  Gnash is one of FSF’s high priority projects.  If you wish to contribute go to  http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/.

How do you hit people in SL?

Thursday, February 22nd, 2007

Karsten sent me this link today of a newbie trying to get some action in Second Life.  I was wondering too, like him, if you could kill or wound a SL character.  A short googling and I found out that fighting is allowed only in selected areas.  Boy, this is a strange game.  But can we call it a game or is this something else?

Conversations about Second Life

Wednesday, February 14th, 2007

I have kept my eyes open on Second Life since Linden Lab announced the intention to release as Free Software the server too, after releasing the client.  I am fascinated by virtual worlds and SL in particular because even if there are no dragons to kill or magics to spell, it seems to be amusing to many.  Even IBM is investing millions to develop activities on SL: it’s building virtual-offices and moving employees to work there. It seems an interesting experiment for widely diffuse organizations, like IBM. But also FSFs are widely diffused 🙂

IBM’s manager, Irving Wladawsky-Berger, has published a contribution to the debate on virtual worlds.  His point is that computer-aided visualization allows people to communicate visually, therefore SL facilitates communication.  This vision is coherent with IBM’s investement, as one would notice.

Three professors have contributed some good fuel to the debate around SL.  Prof. Henry Jenkins in his blog suggests that SL is interesting for participatory culture:

What’s striking to me is not that so many people still prefer to consume professionally generated content (it has always been thus) but what a growing percent of people are willing to consume amateur content and what a smaller but still significant percentage of people are willing to generate and share content they produced themselves. Second Life interests me as a particular model of participatory culture.

Assistant professor of Writing and New Media at MIT Beth Coleman thinks that SL should have a standard for measuring it (see  Standard Metrics of Use by statician Dmitri Williams). Coleman thinks that SL helps communicating:

 

[…]many of the current platforms from text message to instant messaging to virtual worlds are designs for simultaneous connectivity. Putting a human face to things is a lot of what this is about, even if that human face is a codebot. 

The fourth blog entry is from Clay Shirky, a consultant, writer and teacher who is Adjunct Professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program.  He is the most skeptical of the group, and expecially regarding demographics he says:

Linden’s Residents figures are methodologically worthless. Any claim about Second Life derived from a count of Residents is not to be taken seriously

With this in mind, Shirky goes into predictions:

I predict that Second Life will remain a niche application, which is to say an application that will be of considerable interest to a small percentage of the people who try it. […]The logic behind this belief is simple: most people who try Second Life don’t like it.

I found this last post the most challenging. I definitely agree with him that the promises of virtual reality have yet to be kept, avatars still don’t have body language. But still, I am a believer 🙂  What do you think?  Are you a skeptical or a believer?

Conferenza italiana del Software Libero

Thursday, February 8th, 2007

FSFE è tra gli organizzatori della conferenza italiana sul Software Libero. Si terrà a Cosenza durante i giorni 11-12-13 Maggio 2007.  È stato pubblicato il bando per sottoporre articoli al comitato scientifico.

Il 13 Maggio ci sarà anche un meeting dei Fellow italiani: segnate la data nell’agenda, preparate il viaggio 🙂 

Going to etch and eZ Publish 3.8.6

Wednesday, February 7th, 2007

I and Georg have spent most of the day upgrading the server that runs fsfe.org.  The Fellowship needed to upgrade eZ Publish to use the better language management of new version, but to do so we needed to install also php4.4, that is not available for sarge. After testing on a test machine we decided to go on the real one this morning.  The server seems to be doing well for now, there are only some minor glitches still to solve. 

As for eZ, I and Alejandro will be working on setting up the new language stuff in the next days. If you want to join hacking on eZ Publish let us know.

Printing still a nightmare

Thursday, February 1st, 2007

It’s been a while since I posted a real rant here. Well, this morning I had a good (well … bad) inspiration.  I had a meeting with a long time partner of FSFE to discuss new projects to finance and I wanted to present them the SELF Project.  I thought that printing the slides and carrying them with me would help me make the point: SELF is a very cool project and it is important to contribute to it also in Italy and in Italian.

The printer refused to cooperate.  HP PSC1210, fully free drivers, supported by CUPS.  I open the presentation on OO.org and try to print the outline but either OO.org sucks or something else sucks: I could only print the first page.  OO.org help system was of no help.

I thought of exporting to pdf the presentation and print that instead of using OO.org.  Opened the pdf in Evince, print… guess what?  GNOME printing sucks too:  no matter if I tell the printing panel to print two pages on one sheet of paper, the setting is ignored. Also there seemed to be no way to set the orientation of the paper. I seldom use the printer, but WTH! Things should just work, man. I’m using latest Ubuntu right now, and I am not sure they are the ones to blame.