Bobulate

Time to put down my NLUUG hat (that’s the purple one, matching the NLUUG color scheme) for this conference round and look back for a moment. It’s good to hear kind words from Sebas about the conference. They pretty much match my impressions of the whole: a conference with strong technical talks (I chaired three, on Legal aspects, Ampache and Midgard2) and a satisfied audience. The coffee was darn good — but you had to order a cappucino (after 11am) to get the full sense of artistry; Schuberg-Philis takes good care of its people. They had a nice talk on data storage tiers at the previous (spring) conference — the same conference where Ben Marin talked about libferris, so I’m happy to see him show up on planet KDE as well, now.

Kudos especially to Jos Poortvliet for filling in on short notice. I fully expect some form of revenge for that, even if the dinner and lengthy discussion about Free Software usability made up for some of it (quoth I “surely someone who drives a car has some mental model of what’s going on?” saith the usability expert “ha ha ha.”).

Thanks too to the programme committee, headed by Armijn, and to Interactie, represented by Andrea, for their dedication to the conference. As they say in Inspector Gadget: “next time” (the topic is “Systems Administration”, nice and traditional, and the call for abstracts is up if you’d like to submit a paper.)

Well, it has been a wild four days here in Foz do Iguacu. This is the social and travel entry, with KDE and FTF related ones to follow. First off, it was fun to see old friends again — Helio in particular, and a belated congratulations to him for joining Collabora. Met many new friends, from Python Brasil, from KDE MG (not the racing car, but Minas Gerais). Heard from Ane Cecilia about her GSOC work on Plasma, watched some Gluon games, saw a bit of Rocs, and had James Italiano explain Fluid to me. All very impressive pieces of technology or innovation. Anne-Marie Mahfouf was here as well, on vacation, and we just kept having to say to various KDE-BR folk “you need to go to Akademy.” Good times.

As for the Iguacu Falls themselves, Eleanor Roosevelt was right. Four of us — Sandro, James, Anne-Marie and myself — went on saturday afternoon. There had been a heavy rain and wind storm in the morning, so there were trees down all over Foz; however, mere rain doesn’t get you nearly as wet as the swollen river thundering over the falls into the Devil’s Throat. Advice: wear sandals and short shorts, and buy the raincoat.

Going to Paraguay for shopping is a popular pastime here, so I joined in an expedition this morning. Expedition is the wrong word, since it’s a ten minute taxi ride across the Friendship Bridge. However, shopping in an area crushed by poverty feels very wrong. The contrast between the two sides of Foz is striking and uncomfortable. The Brasilian side of Foz is relatively clean and neat, and — although I have very little material for comparison — feels safe and somewhat welcoming. I know I’ll be planning for next year.

What’s to say about Amsterdam – it’s too far away from my house to be convenient, and then dead boring with its shopping concourse. Even the whisky store is of little interest because it has prices comparable to the local place at home; there is no benefit to “tax-free”.

Paris Charles de Gaulle, though, is arguably worse. Most of the shops are closed at 19:00, and lights go out in parts of the terminal buildings, so it seems empty and deserted. Signposting for the shuttle bus that goes around the six terminal halls is erratic, so I ended up walking. It’s only 15 minutes from one end to the other, but again you need to search every now and then for the next sign to 2A. For those who have gone to FOSDEM by car with me, think “like Brussels, only less grotty.”

The flight with TAM from Paris to Sao Paulo was surprisingly pleasant. Not too cramped, mostly, and that’s important on a 12 hour flight. Watched some movies I otherwise would not have. Wolverine was terribly unfinished, I thought. If you know the comics perhaps it makes a little more sense, or the time jumps are dealt with better. The SFX could be described as “cheesy” at best. Ah well, at least I’ve seen an American comic-based action movie this decade.

Much better — at least until 5 minutes from the end — was Adventureland, one of those comic growing-up movies. Set in 1987, this was terribly recognizable for me. Not the drunk driving and copious use of marijuana, but the rest of the cultural setting. Billy Idol, the Cure and faux-philosophical conversations? Check. The overly feel-good ending felt tacked-on, though. That tied up one loose end that need not have been.

Anyway, Sao Paulo airport is boring like most others. I should go for a coffee. At R$ 2.90 it’s 35% of the price of an espresso in Amsterdam. Probably better coffee, too.

In about an hour I carry on to Foz do Iguacu for Latinoware. I still need to rassle up my slides, but there’s enough time for that — and it looks like a beautiful day now the sun is coming up. [[ Posted much later in the day because I fell asleep once I got to the hotel, and later the ‘net was down. ]]

Because I was futzing around with Samba yesterday, I installed smbmount (a shell wrapper around /sbin/mount.cifs). I needed to (briefly) mount a network-based NAS in order to move some files to it. I’ll reconfigure the NAS later to take either FTP (unsecure, but it is on a local wired network) or NFS — although I’m not sure it actually supports NFS. Anyway, apt-get install smbfs on a Kubuntu 9.04 box. So, who’s to be surprised when this happens:

$ /sbin/mount.cifs
Segmentation fault

That is, shall we say, not an ideal response if there are mandatory parameters that have been left out. Good thing it’s Free Software, so you can see the source code and realise that the check for argc < 3 is a little late and that mountpoint = argv[2] might not be a good idea if no arguments are given. Hey, it’s worth a bug report, patch — and then hope for a release faster than when fixing Windows 7 SMB bugs 🙂

On the open-* front, it turns out that next week is officially Open Access Week, pushing for open access to the results of scholarly work. I would venture that publicly paid research belongs to the public, and part of the social contract in supporting institutes of learning is that the results become evailable to the public quickly. That means I’m against patents on the results of publicly funded research as well. The results should be patent — make public, published, obvious — but I can’t support further restrictions on that, as the contract around patents is a trade off between the public good and risk in investment. And for public money, that risk is non-existent.

But I digress. Open Access week. I actually found out only because one of the institutes at the faculty of science where I used to work won a prize around Open Access; of course the event around the prize is closed.

I’m in Grenoble this week for the ELCE conference, where I’m mixed in with hordes of kernel hackers and embedded device manufacturers. I feel slightly out of place as a userland-and-legal guy. I had a nice chat about patents with a gentleman from a consortium working on ultra-low-power communications; in particular when casting a specification as a standard I feel that patents which may restrict the use of the technology or prevent certan kinds of implementation (e.g. Free Software implementations) have no place whatsoever in standards. It seems like we agree on that topic; I will continue to ask people carrying ‘open standards’ on their banners to explain what they mean.

For the Open Web, two weeks remain for registration.

Some time in march I will need to go back to Kano, Nigeria, hopefully for the second Nigerian Free and Open Source software conference. I’m looking forward to seeing Mustapha (now a proud father) and Ibrahim and Immanu and the rest of the guys again. The news out of Nigeria hasn’t been very good recently, and the Dutch government is advising against travel to the south of the country at all; this doesn’t apply to the north, which I found a wonderful place to visit and talk about Free Software last year. Licensing is always an issue, as are business models.

I was therefore really happy to stumble across the FOSS for Africa wiki with a whole series of educational modules around business models and examples of what works in Africa right now.

In Switserland today. It’s great to be in the mountains again, it puts a spring in my step — although the travel also puts a crimp in my email responsiveness. I’m in Winterthur for OpenExpo, where I’ll be showing off all three of my hats. Stop by for a promotional talk about the Open Web conference from the NLUUG, or about KDE, or we can sit down and discuss licensing issues in community-led and business-led Free Software projects. Your choice. It’s gorgeous weather — or it was today during the day, lovely to see the hills and countryside — some come on in before you get a tan.

[ Maybe I really mean Talk Like a Pirate Day ] This year’s Software Freedom Day saw me weeding the garden, pulling up spent corn stalks and cursing the stinging nettles. So I hope they had fun in Barcelona and Amsterdam; I see Jos was a speaker at the latter, so let’s assume (KDE bias here) that it was so. There are some pictures from Irina linked, looks like a nice broad selection of Free Software people from the Netherlands. Checking out the interactive map, I see that there were even four SFD events in the Netherlands. Whodathunk. Better put it in my calendar for next year — and deal with the weeds in the garden earlier.

Fell quiet for a bit there. After ferreting out some anti-blogging quotes written fourty years or more ago, I headed off to the UK. Lincoln, which does have a very nice cheese shop as well as a cathedral. There was ale and innuendo — and a blind taste test to see if Stella Artois is actually different from Beck’s — as well as some planning of interesting Free Software things. I have another research paper to wrestle with now, for one thing. Returned home to sad news in the KDE community. I will remember Matthew as the guy who inexplicably got me not one, but two horse whips — which I take to most conferences ever since.

I didn’t take the whips to OSiMWorld, though, because that didn’t seem like the right kind of event. More suits and ties, less silliness. Although Lefty tried, with his pub quiz. Last year, the Roaming GNOMEs won, this year it was the “Intelligents” — big Intel / Atom presence at the show. The European Legal Network team came in third, which is reasonable. The available knowledge on the team was dramatically skewed: sports were clearly our worst category.

For the OSiMWorld conference itself, I must say it was fun to meet some more Trolls and troll-alikes, chat with a bunch of people from GCDS, like the Igalia guys. Saw some very nice Linpus desktops. What impressed me most was the attention to detail — the visual feedback on user actions, the clear organization of the desktop. Something that comes from understanding the target audience and the limitations of the device. Similar efforts at polishing the user experience are the hundred paper cuts. Chatted a bit with the Canonical folk about that. But the attention to detail and tailoring for more specific uses is something that takes a way a bit from the general purpose computing model, and moves towards appliances. When I was shown a nice Atom-based MID (mobile Internet device), my response was “ooh! cluster of x86 build machines!” which is very much not their purpose. Pointing to Lefty again, he summarizes arguments against the Desktop, some of which were presented at the conference itself.

One of the things that surprised me at the conference was the number of people who “get it” from a Free Software and business perspective. Free Software asks you to play by the rules (that’s a link to the GPLv3, but of course there are other rules you can agree on: MIT/X11 rules, or APLv2, or others). Many of the people I spoke with at the conference understood the importance of licensing and of working with — or at least not against — the communities that produce the Free Software they use. It struck me that there is an increase in what I’ll call “business-led Free Software” alongside “community-led”, and that the management styles and processes of the two are quite different. Heck, talking about management in a community context always makes me a little queasy, call it leadership instead.

I had a nice chat with Peter Vescuso of Black Duck about license compliance and processes. We seem to have a common desire for understanding of licenses and license interactions and working with the implications of license terms for projects and businesses. For Free Software projects — community-led — the desire is for long term safety and stability and protection of the principles that the members of the community around a project want. Pragmatism is necessary to understand how people in multiple fields of endeavour interact. Idealism is needed to start the ball rolling.

It’s planned to be a busy week or three for me with conferences and articles, so somewhere in between I hope to write about some of the other interesting technical and legal stuff that is happening.

A Chinese colleague of mine — Ling, since moved to Boston I think — taught me to make won tons. It’s the kind of meal that is therapeutic in its preparation, because you can spend about an hour folding these little dumplings. Mira, who is six, just loves helping in the kitchen, so she climbs up on a stool and helps with all the steps of preparation except for the chopping-things-with-a-big knife.

Random idea: Since people keep suggesting KRecipes as an outlet for these cookery entries — and folk should be pestering Ariya about it as well — perhaps someone would like to announce that they will maintain a KDE-contributors-cookbook? Collect recipes from as many KDE contributors as you can, covert to KRecipes (it doesn’t run at all on my Kubuntu box) and publish somewhere.

Faux won tons, Dutch style: makes 75 dumplings, which will be enough for a family of four if you add some more steamed veggies. Get 75 won ton skins — these are sold in packs of about 50 at eastern stores all over the Netherlands, not sure how to get them elsewhere. For the filling, two chicken breasts (about 400g), four large carrots, three cloves of garlic, a tsp. of laos (is that galanga?) and a tbsp. of soy sauce (the thin salty kind; I’m partial to Pearl River Bridge brand). Chop chicken very fine, grate carrots, dice garlic. Mix together and knead until carrots and garlic are eveny spread out. Drop tsp. sized balls on to middle of won ton skin, then fold: wet two adjacent edges, fold corner across, seal edges; if you leave it like that, you can pan fry them; otherwise fold the other two corners to the middle corner again and make sure it’s well sealed. Won tons can be boiled – about five minutes – and served with soy sauce and koriander dip.

Yes, it’s probably offensive to 1 billion food purists, but I like it this way. Amiel said “eww, that looks funny” and Mira only eats the skins, and still it’s a good recipe.