rants

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.

A new fellow asked on the forum why we picked eZ Publish. I have answered there, but I think it’s better to repeat it also here for all the Planet readers.

FSFE chose eZ Publish because we needed a system that was not only flexible and easy to deploy but that was fully supported.  We ran tests with other CMS, but none convinced us fully until we were offered by eZ Systems not only the software eZ Publish but also one of their programmer to assist us in all customizations.  eZ Systems also added on top of that a support contract.  So, the software fit our needs, eZ Publish is Free Software released under the GNU GPL and we had a developer available for customization plus a support contract.  It was the best offer we received .

As a good side effect, since FSFE and eZ Systems started this collaboration, eZ released almost all of their software under the GNU GPL, and we are very happy about this.  Some of their software is still under non-free licenses and we are not so happy.  But the cooperation proved to be good for Free Software and we will keep helping them do the right thing and become a fully free business.

Let me add that paying for free software is not a sin, but until today FSFE didn’t pay a dime.  We will probably decide to invest into the development of the portal during 2007 to add the collaboration features we need for the Advocacy groups that are starting to form. But we haven’t taken any decision yet.

I have good news today: there are two Fellows that are activating Advocacy in Italy and Austria.  Madero has been working to adapt the Advocacy Project document in Italian and to the school he knows best.  Cristian is doing pretty much the same thing in Austria, although he didn’t use the name ‘advocacy’ (Disclaimer: I don’t read German very well).

I am going to help Madero setup the Italian advocacy group because he lives in the same city where I live. I would also like to help Cristian, but my German is not up to the task.  We can all discuss on the mailing list discussions at lists.fsfe.org or on the forum, whatever you prefer.

During the holidays people usually play cards and eat a lot.  I did that too, but I also wanted to play with GIMP and Blender.  I guess you saw the results of me playing with GIMP already.

I have just published the results of my experiments with Blender bones and animation.  Here you can find a fully digital 3D puppet of good old Plussy.  If you want to see its walk try downloading this ogg file.

Feel free to experiment further and add more features to the scene, like background or other objects. Blender is fun 🙂

Some Fellows in Italy have been silently working to move the Advocacy project on next steps.  Madero, for example, has prepared and run a poll between his colleagues high-school students asking what kind of topics they would be interested in.

The results are not surprising me but they are worth spending some thoughts on (even without considering statistics, for a moment).  Students seem to be interested in peer-to-peer technology and ‘hacker’ stories, more than definitions of licenses or copyright.  It’s something all Free Software advocates should keep in mind: students go to school to learn, while extra-curricular activities should be classifiable as fun, not study.  Another important consideration: students want to know about practical things that affect their life, like p2p.  Only few are fascinated with programming or knowing computers. A good Free Sw advocate should be able to translate Free Sw concepts immediately into real life practical considerations, without using technical terms. 

Do you have a reference to a speech that can be taken as reference to talk to students?  An audio or video recording or a transcript would be very nice to start a debate.

Happy 2007, Fellows: this is my first post in this new year, so I use it to wish you all a wonderful time.

One Fellow asked me recently: how do you claim your fsfe.org blog on Technorati?  It’s fairly simple, once you know which buttons to click.  You need to create a weblog in your home folder on fsfe.org, first.  Then  go to your profile on Technorati and click on  Claim your blog. Enter the url of your blog (in my case it is http://fsfe.org/fellows/maffulli/rants) and use the Embedded claim.  Copy the html code provided by Technorati (it’s a script code) and go back to your weblog folder on fsfe.org.  Click on Edit to modify your weblog and paste the html code in the ‘Technorati Blog Claim‘ field.  Click on Send for publishing and get back to Technorati to complete the process.  You’re done.  Happy blogging.

A few days ago I decided I wanted to play with Plussy and the GIMP.  Inspired by the lack of snow in Milano, Italy, where I live, I thought of experimenting with the GAP aka GIMP Animation Package to make snow flakes fall on a Plussy with santa-hat.  You can admire the result here.  I also want to thank fence-post for his tutorial and Shoofly for the background.

Remember that the sections Fun/ Meetings/ News/ /Events and /Advocacy are writable to all Fellows: you can add your own material, play with it as you wish.  You can make the Fellowship.

Happy holidays 🙂

Florian has commented on my previous entry saying that this site misses an important feature: allowing comments from non-fellows.

He is not only right, but damn right: allowing comments from anonymous is definitely important and we want to implement this feature.  But there is a but: allowing anonymous comments translates into the need to implement something to prevent spam comments to appear on the site.  On fellowship-hackers’ issue tracker you can follow the evolution of the bug: we are only missing a plugin to akismet service.  Does anybody want to help?

Don’t you want to be able to say I was there at the First international meeting of the Fellowship?  In case you want to leave your mark in digital-stone, there is a page ready.  Go here and put your name, link it to your home page if you like. And in the future you will be able to say been there, done that 🙂

Back from Bolzano, back from the First International Meeting of the Fellows, lots of important news in my (and yours) mailbox.  First of all: thank you to all participants, it was a wonderful experience.  There were at least 40 Fellows from all over Europe in the same room for the first time, and that only was worth the efforts.  But that all of them were so interested in the Advocacy project and willing to participate in it was probably the best part of the day… at least for me.

In the next days we will put together a page with pictures and recordings of the event, but for now let me just announce that Alejandro and Ekke added the planet aggregator during the eZ Publish workshop: you find the rss feed here and the page will be ported in production in the next days.  Thank you again everybody, stay in touch for more news.