Bobulate

Well, Shaun, here’s a chocolate cake for you. it’s very similar to the pecan cake I wrote earlier — but closer to the “ultimate chocolate brownie” recipe that I based both off of.

Chocolate cake for Shaun: Mix three eggs and a cup of (brown or cane) sugar and a tsp. of vanilla extract and a pinch of salt for 10 minutes on high with an electric mixer. Alternately, show the world you’re amazingly buff with a hand whisk. Optionally add chopped nuts. Stir in 100g melted pure chocolate (that’s 4 squares in North America, I believe). Sift one and a quarter cups of flour with 2 tsp. baking powder and sir that through the wet ingredients. Pour into a 9″ round pan and bake for 30 minutes at 350F or until a fork comes out clean. Frost with a mixture of icing sugar and powdered cocoa and afew drops of water (if you’re into frosting, that is).

I’ve added some bits and pieces to my badges-for-licenses scheme, mostly based on comments received from readers. Most notably, I’ve added the LGPL, added links to the license texts, twiddled the CSS a bit, added mouse-over warning messages to those licenses that deserve a warning, and improved the description of some of the badges. What still needs doing — and I wonder how to achieve a good balance between having an overview of licenses that is short enough to be readable, and the subtleties of licensing reality — is writing up a good piece on how these badges reflect the most important pointsof each license, but do not state the complete effect of each license (unlike Creative Commons licenses, where each set of icons maps to one set of license terms).

The next round of updates will basically be adding more licenses, improving some of the icons, snazzing up the presentation a bit and importing the whole thing into the FSFE site. That’s for just before FOSDEM, I think.

The Netherlands has a “dichter des vaderlands”, a national poet. I don’t know if that would be comparable with a British poet laureate — perhaps because the Dutch one is primarily a product of a single newspaper / publisher. The conservative one, at that, but the national poet is tasked with doing whatever poetry demands. A little like a national ombudsman, I suppose. The current holder of the title is Ramsey Nasr, and his latest foray starts with (loosely translated): “So, Mr. Premier, how does it feel to lie // and then to see the same in print?” The Dutch version refers to the premier by his initials, JP. I’d pin this up as a testament to Free Speech in this country.

LinuxTag in Berlin is one of the recurring and very fun events, both on the community and business sides of the Free Software equation. The call for papers is open until the 29th of January. The NLUUG spring conference on systems administration has a call that is open until tomorrow, but tends to be somewhat lenient in the submission deadline. I think it would be cool to have a talk on “Konsole as a sysadmin tool”; I don’t think general Free Software talks fit the bill all that well. There will probably be an FSFE stand at the conference, though, to talk about licensing and the importance of Free Software in sysadmin tasks, even if it’s not an all-that-obvious fit for the conference theme.

Though the call for papers closed a long time ago, you can still attend CampKDE starting on Friday. This is the North American get-together of KDE developers and users, in San Diego this time around.

Much of the time I work from home for the Freedom Task Force, which is the “legal department” of the Free Software Foundation Europe. It’s nice to work from home, although my colleagues know that that also means long lunches (picking kids up from school, feeding them, bringing them back) and occasional emergency stops. On the other hand it also means that I can go on til all hours of the night if needed. (I won’t claim that’s always efficient — if I wanted to be efficient I might follow Isabel Drost’s lifehacking approach).

But sitting at home is not always the best thing to do: it’s lonely (at least as far as those colleagues are concerned) and it can be difficult to bounce ideas off one another. No matter how much VoIP and Jabber and whatnot we throw at it, nothing really beats a planning session over lunch (except maybe one over dinner + drinks). In addition, it’s fun to sit together and just get work done: that’s the old “hey, look, I just fixed bug #17!” approach which works well at software sprints and which conveys progress so well.

And let’s not forget the benefit of having someone watching over your shoulder, to prevent unfortunate cake-recipe posts and the like.

So, with all that in mind, I’m in Berlin this week for a few days of intense FSFE office time. I’ll be working with Matthias on website things, Karsten on planning and sales and Hugo on legal things. Evenings will probably be a little more KDE-themed as a way to unwind — when visiting the Kapital of Germany I might as well, and anyway I owe Claudia a lovely home-cooked dinner. One KDE thing in particular is going over the Fiduciary License Agreement that KDE e.V. uses and providing better guidelines for its use and administration — as well as checking that it still matches the policies used. That’s one of the cases where work-work and volunteer-work collide (in a pleasant fashion).

So, Berlin. See you around (well, at the office, which is in Linienstrasse).

Now I’m prime again, not square, I thought I’d take a moment to jot down what’s really precious to me. That’s my family (Mignon, Mira and Amiel), good food (wine, cheese and coffee), responsible lifestyle choices (bicycle, local organic vegetables and the train). I work to live, and those are what I work for.

Straightforward simple carrot cake. Still the subject of a classic joke in the Netherlands (“vies hé?”).

Non-straightforward is my latest proposal for fixing the issue of decades once and for all. Obviously the year 1 AD started on December 25th, 4 AD, as calculated by the best scholars. So 10 years later is December 25th, 14 AD. But — and this is important — on September 2nd, 1752, 11 days were skipped, so the end of the 175th decade isn’t December 25th, 1754 AD but 11 days later, on January 5th. It’s a good thing the reform of the Roman calendar under Julius Caesar was done before 1 AD, or we would have to shift by two months to compensate for the newly created January and February, as well. So remember, we can celebrate the last day of the decade in just 1460 days.

One and a half cup grated carrot. Three quarters of a cup of sugar (I use cane sugar). One tbsp. “koek en speculaaskruiden” or an equivalent mixture of cloves and cinnamon. Pinch of salt. Mix thoroughly, then stir in two eggs and half a cup of cooking oil (sunflower or corn oil). Whisk with a fork until foamy. Mix in one and a half cup self-raising flour (or plain flour 1 tsp. double-acting baking powder per cup of flour). Pour into a bread pan (what are the sizes on those things anyway?) and bake at 160C for 40 minutes or until a fork comes out clean. Frost with icing sugar and mascarpone or cream cheese.

Optionally you could add raisins or nuts, but I usually do not: the kids and neighbours don’t like them, and whenever I end up baking I make too much and give away plenty all ’round.

[[ No, wait, let’s make that the new decade’s recipes. I’m with the “convention determines usage” on the decades front: the 80s do not include 1990. Oddly enough, I side with the centuries-and-millennia from one group, so my decades and centuries don’t run in sync. I guess it’s all about the Ordinals vs. the Cardinals (weren’t they from St. Louis?) John Layt, are you going to support that feature too? ]]

So, baking. I’ve taught Mira how to crack open an egg into a bowl for baking a cake without getting bits of shell and gunk into the batter. It cost a half dozen eggs over a bunch of practice sessions, but now I can delegate that bit to her. She’ll be baking bran muffins all by herself, soon. But today we made a pecan cake which turned out really well, so I thought I’d share the recipe. This also serves as a demonstration for what you can get if you’re one of the lucky winners of the Freedom Food donation drive from the FSFE.

Pecan Cake: Mix three (3) eggs, one cup of sugar, half tsp. of salt and one tsp. vanilla extract with a hand mixer on high for about 10 minutes. Add 1 cup of chopped or whole pecans and one cup self-raising flour (maybe a tad more). Mix briefly until all blended, then in the oven at 160C for 30 minutes or until a fork comes out clean. Frost with 100g mascarpone and 100g icing sugar and 2 drops lemon juice.

See, my recipes, like my time-reckoning, use a mix of units and conventions. Basic stuff gets North American units applied, but I’ve never used an oven that didn’t have a scale in centigrade (well, except during CampKDE last year, where I baked cookies for most of the attendees, but that was .. exceptional, shall we say).

My friend Armijn pointed me to a thing called Orange Office (no link). I get a Dutch site, which is full of d/t errors (a fundament of Dutch grammar) which tries to sell me .. OpenOffice.org. It comes down to a long spiel about Microsoft Office compatibility and how OOo works exactly the same as Microsoft Office and yet it’s so cheap! Buy now! Word! Powerpoint! Operators are standing by! Yes, they’re charging 15 EUR for an OpenOffice.org download. Going through the terms and conditions is hilarious (well, ok, I should take my medicines now) for disclaiming responsibility, disallowing resale (hello, LGPL!), disclaiming the applicability of refund law which applies to tele-sales. You know the drill. It gets better as the “buy now” page has a “limited quantity offer!” for Calc and Draw as well. The payment processing, somewhat to my surprise, seems to be legitimate — it’s still a heck of a way to rake in 15 bucks for an otherwise gratis download of OpenOffice.org 3.1.

Ah, libel. Publishing defamatory or damaging text. There’s various interpretations, and generally calling John a complete moron on a web forum or in a blog post might be libelous (which John? I dunno .. you decide). This has been troublesome regarding publications which are also available (like on the Internet) in Britain, because British libel law treats publication, certainly online, a little differently from how one might expect. It’s not the date of production that counts, but the day of reading. This has led to a notion of “libel tourism” in the UK.

In any case, that’s my background for being interested in the topic, so a Canadian result on the topic caught my eye. It has no impact on the UK, of course, but it shows how the interpretation of libel is changing elsewhere. The CBC reports and Michael Geist comments on the introduction of a new defense “responsible communication” against libel suits. Interestingly, the CBC claims that the Canadian Supreme Court looked (among others) at the UK and found the available defenses in Canada “too strict.”

In any case, it means that in Canada, as long as (1) I did some research (2) the communication is in the public interest (3) the judge in the case confirms that it is in the public interest, then I can publish “John is a moron”.

And on a totally unrelated note, does it not strike you as odd that John Turner (17th prime minister of Canada) is not listed on the category page for Johns? Neither is John (Maddog) Hall. Nor John Oates. It’s a travesty.