IT – Page 15 – Søren C's blog

Open Source Software conference

Thursday Michael, Niels and myself represented the Danish Ubuntu community at a conference about open source software in the public sector.
crew
From left to right: Me, Michael, Louis and Niels.

We shared a community booth with the nice people from the Danish OpenOffice.org and Mozilla communities.

The conference took place at the historic Børsen.
We handed out all our remaining 8.10 desktop cd’s, got to talk with a lot of people and I believe we managed to convince a few people that Ubuntu (and Linux) has come a long way the last couple of years. Unfortunately I wasn’t quick enough to get a picture when one of the speakers, Christian Lanng, booted his laptop while it was plugged into the projector and revealed that he is in fact running Ubuntu.

You can find resources (presentations etc.) from the conference and discussions of the conference at Digitalisér.dk (in Danish).

Wikimedia Danmark

Ved en tilfældighed bemærkede jeg at der på lørdag d. 14. marts er stiftende generalforsamling i Wikimedia Danmark. Se forslag til vedtægter.

Jeg er selv aktiv og begejstret bruger af mange af Wikimedias projekter, specielt Wikipedia, men har aldrig rigtig involveret mig i arbejdet der ligger bag. Men jeg har stor respekt for dem der gør og jeg nyder til daglig godt af deres store arbejde.

Hvis du har lyst til at involverer dig i det danske arbejde med Wikimedia er det måske en ide at møde op på i København på Dag Hammarskjölds Allé 30 kl. 14 på lørdag d. 14. marts 2009.

Conference about Open Source Software

As part of the Danish LoCo Team I have been invited to attend the conference Open source-software i det offentlige (Open Source Software in the public sector) on March 19 in Copenhagen.
oss-konf-stor
The conference is a part of the governments software strategy (as formulated here in Danish) and is hosted by the Videnscenter for Software (the people who run The Software Exchange).

Hopefully we (along with the other open source projects and companies present at the conference) can convince some of the decision-makers and IT professionals in the Danish public sector that Open Source Software is a useful alternative to the current closed source solutions being used throughout the public sector.
In the Danish Team we have been discussing what arguments are best used to convince this audience. Our experience when it comes to advocacy has been mostly with individuals who need an alternative for their machine with Windows and MS Office at home. But what arguments will work best at this conference?
Some of the top selling points we came up with on our mail list seem to be:

No malvare (viruses etc.)
Low TCO
Easy to administrate

There are of course many other advantages of Ubuntu and open source software, but what would be your top three selling points to this audience?

(Links to the conference on Facebook and LinkedIn.)

Nedtællings banner

Hvis du har en lille grafiker gemt i maven har du nu muligheden for at designe det banner (countdown banner) der skal bruges når vi nærmer os udgivelsen af Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope).

Ved de sidste udgivelser af Ubuntu har der været mulighed for at indsætte en lille banner, der talte ned til udgivelsen på hjemmesider. Her er de bannere der blev brug ved udgivelsen af 8.10:

Du kan se mere information på The Fridge – der også står hvor man skal sende sit forslag hen. Se også denne wiki side.

Kravene til bannerene er:

Størrelse: 180px bred og 150px høj
Filformat: png, gif eller jpg. Der er også lagt op til muligheden for at have en iframe med html, javascript og noget grafik.
Der skal laves 32 bannere i alt. Nedtælling med 1-30 dage tilbage, en “comming soon” og en “it’s here” til når Koalaen endelig er udgivet.

Da der er en måned til bannerne skal tages i brug haster det lidt, så start hellere Gimp nu end i morgen, hvis du har mod på at komme med et forslag.

Karmic Koala

Mark Shuttleworth just announced that Ubuntu 9.10 will have the nick name Karmic Koala

Photo by: Erik K Veland

The focus of the Karmic Koala will be cloud computing on the server side – a technical concept I don’t know much about – and a more polished experience on the desktop, especially faster and more inviting boot and login options. The release mail also hints that maybe (just maybe) the characteristic Ubuntu brown colour will replaced.

Brown has served us well but the Koala is considering other options.

I’m not one of those who have opposed strongly to the brown colour schemes, but after five years of Ubuntu maybe October this year is the right time for a change.

Det er ikke helt optimat, Telmore

Da min bindingsperiode på 6 måneder hos Telia (hvor jeg købte ny mobil telefon for seks måneder siden) er udløbet har jeg valgt at flytte min telefonabonnement tilbage til Telmore. Jeg har faktisk været glad for Telmore tidligere og jeg finder deres priser rimelige. (Jeg har ikke undersøgt markedet til bunds. De er nok ikke længere de billigste, men med mit begrænsede telefoniforbrug er der alligevel ikke enormt mange penge at spare.)

Nummeret skulle være blevet overflyttet mandag. Mandag aften kl. 18 modtog jeg så nedenstående mail fra Telmore:

Kære Søren Bredlund Caspersen

Der er desværre opstået en forsinkelse i overflytningen af dit mobilnummer 51946954 til TELMORE.

Vi har tidligere meddelt dig, at flytningen af dit nummer gennemføres i dag. Desværre er der opstået en forsinkelse. Der arbejdes på højtryk på din flytning, således at nummeret kan blive oprettet hos TELMORE hurtigst muligt.

Vi beklager naturligvis ulejligheden og håber på din tålmodighed lidt endnu.

Vi glæder os til at byde dig velkommen hos TELMORE.

Bemærk: Det er ikke muligt at svare på denne e-mail.

Besøg www.telmore.dk, hvis du vil have yderligere information, eller kontakt TELMORE kundeservice på tlf. 7021 8900. Vores åbningstider er mandag-fredag kl. 8-20 samt lørdage og helligdage kl. 9-17. Kundeservice er altid lukket på søndage og den 24. december.

Med venlig hilsen

TELMORE

På deres driftstatus side (hvem har forresten en driftstatus side uden rss feed?)kan jeg dog læse:

Der er i øjeblikket ingen driftsforstyrrelser

Jeg har forsøgt at ringe til deres kundeservice og her informerede en indspillet stemme mig om at der var problemer med overførsel og oprettelse af numre og at de arbejdede (på højtryk) for at finde en løsning. Så de ved godt at der er et problem – og det er ikke kun mig det rammer, men deres driftstatus side afspejler ikke denne viden. Hvorfor?

‘Ubuntu Wanted’ wants you!

Mads Rosendahl points out (in the Danish forum) that the Ubuntu Wanted project needs help. The idea of Ubuntu Wanted is to be the place to go if you have some time and skills that you would like to contribute to the Ubuntu community, but don’t know where to use your skills. Then you go to the Ubuntu Wanted website, and they list all sorts of tasks ready for you to start working on.

To put the project into perspective Ubuntu Brainstorm provides the great ideas, Launchpad is our common work platform and Ubuntu Wanted aims to turn all these great ideas into reality.

More info at the wiki page, discussions at the websites mailing list or drop into the #ubuntu-website irc channel at Freenode.

PS. WordPress 2.7.1 is out, and upgrading is as easy as one click in the web interface. Love it!

Pictures from Open Source Days 2008

As promised here are pictures of some members of the Danish Ubuntu LoCo team, at the Open Source Days 2008 in Copenhagen. All pictures by Niels Kjøller Hansen.

From left to right: Niels, Elge Sander, Søren (me), Mads, Mark and Sakse.

The moose is named after Helge Sander, our Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation. (Elg means moose in Danish.)

The Software Exchange was running the booth with the fancy setup. They work under the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation and help the public sector in Denmark choose relevant software, in particular open source software.

Below are some pictures of LoCo team members lounging in front of the portrait of the sabdfl.

Working webcam

Finally my webcam is working! Up until recently there was no working Linux driver for my webcam, but that seems to have changed.

Reports indicate that the driver is included in the Linux kernel from version 2.6.28. Until that version hits your system (should ship with Ubuntu Jaunty) installing the driver is still possible. See this guide:

http://m560x-driver.wiki.sourceforge.net/testing_m5602

The webcam (or the chip to be more accurate) is located in a lot of laptops. The Launchpad Bug report mentions Asus, Acer, Lenovo and Zepto. I have a Zepto 6615WD myself.

To find out if your webcam is a m560x model, open up a terminal and type

lsusb

if you see a line like this:

Bus 005 Device 003: ID 0402:5602 ALi Corp. Video Camera Controller

you are in business. You may have to activate your webcam somehow. On my system there is a button with a camera icon on it that I have to press before the camera turns on.

The quality is a bit grainy and far from the best – hopefully this can be solved as the driver matures.

However me being (and looking) tired in the morning is properly beyond the scope of some webcam driver. (Yes I cheated and used a regular camera for the Get to know a LoCo post a few weeks back.)

How to mirror your blog onto Freenet

I received an email a few days ago asking how I manage to mirror this blog onto Freenet.

For those of you out there who don’t know about Freenet, it is a computer program that aims to provide anonymity for consumers and providers of information, in an effort to secure free speech. The network is decentralized and uses strong encryption to secure anonymity and free speech.

I have been using Freenet, and following its development, on and off over the last couple of years, both because I generally like the idea of free speech and also because I find the technical aspects interesting. The Freenet program is still under heavy development, far from a 1.0 release, and always in need of support. Since I’m not much of a coder I can’t really help The Freenet Project that way, so instead I try to provide something else – content. In other words, I mirror this blog onto Freenet (where a blog is often called a flog).

It is actually quite simple (although a bit time consuming) to insert content into Freenet. Assuming my Freenet node is running, here is what I do:

First I fetch the files locally, using HTTrack (apt install) (I guess wget, puf or similar would work just as well…)
Then I use jSite, to insert onto Freenet.

Quite simple really… If you feel like getting your blog (or other content) on Freenet, I say go for it. If you run into any problems, feel free to contact me.

PS. I’m always looking for friends to connect my Freenet node to, so if you feel like you know and trust me, and that I might now and trust you, feel free to get in touch.

PPS. You can find this blog on Freenet at this key:
USK@nwFgddANy8mudsvcXin~XhPLmiiM8tKG0iYdFRcBgM0,edFuHQpV3fY6eeedhSbfSPpQ9gkBFVwvR~uEzTZiB8k,AQACAAE/blog/74/