End of FISL 2006, two tech things, Irish accents

Posted by ciaran on 0

Yesterday was the last day of FISL. After blogging in the morning, I participated in a panel discussion about adoption of GPLv3. I think this went better than my software patents presentation on Thursday – I’m happier and more suited to Q&A or small room discussions than giving non-interactive presentations. The GPLv3 panel discussions actually attracted a good crowd. Not as big as for Richard Stallman’s talk where people had to sit on the floor after the seats filled, but larger than for Richard Fontana’s presentation of GPLv3 from a legal perspective. Maybe this indicates that free software users and developers are more interested in the goals and motivations of the GPL than then legal implementation.

Two tech things for users of GNU/Linux or similar operating systems:

  1. If you ever need to download a torrent, install bittornado and the command line is: btdownloadcurses http://example.com/path/whatever.ext.torrent
  2. If you ever want to reduce the size of a movie, there’s simple, useful information for using mencoder at: http://web.njit.edu/all_topics/Prog_Lang_Docs/html/mplayer/encoding.html .

I get stressed when I can’t find simple information such as that quickly. Hope those help someone.

When I say "bag" here, Latin Americans hear "bike". When I moved to Brussels first, locals couldn’t understand me because of my Irish accent. It was strange because two second-language English speakers would be having a conversation in English, and when I’d join in they wouldn’t understand me!

After a year and a half, I’ve learned how to speak plain English. Plain English means removing cultural references, saying things in the simplist constructs, pronouncing all the letters in each word, and trying to use international vocabulary. I still speak my own normal English when I’m with Irish people, but my plain English obviously still has some Irish artifacts.

Five days to the Education, Government, and Free Software April 29th event in Dublin, some last minute promotion help would be welcome.