Search Results: "phil"

2 January 2006

Benjamin Mako Hill: Getting Involved in OLPC (IAP Class)

The press, others, and even myself have made much of the Media Lab and One Laptop Per Child's decision to embrace a platform that is fully free and open. There are two major reasons for working with the free world on this project. The first is the philosophical reasons that I've laid out recently. The second is the fact that a free platform will help us leverage the work of a large community to accomplish building, testing, and improving what we believe will ultimately develop into a new and more relevant type of software platform for the world's children. In terms of building community, our first goal must be harnessing the power of the existing free software world and interested parties therein. Later on (i.e., once the machines exist) we can focus on getting governments, non-profits, and ultimately some of the students using the machine, to contribute as well. While there's clearly a bootstrapping phase, we unfortunately, we haven't done much of either so far. Up until now, Red Hat has been doing the legwork in the realm of software. So much so that at points it has been difficult even for some of us officially working on the project (e.g., myself) to make meaningful contributions. While we've had many people express interest in helping with the project from elsewhere in MIT and in non-MIT world, we've been at a loss for ways to plug folks in. As part of a larger effort to address these issues in the next month or so, Walter Bender, myself, and David Cavallo are organizing a short workshop on getting involved in the OLPC/$100 laptop project for people at MIT. We will also be posting information from that workshop online for everyone. If you're at MIT and are interested, please show up. If you are in the area but without an MIT or Harvard affiliation, contact me. If you're out of the area and are interested in getting involved, just stay tuned. The workshop is being offered as a three hours one-day-only IAP class. You can check out the IAP web page and then show up. We will be done with plenty of time to rest up before the MIT mystery hunt begins. It looks like I'll be hunting with Codex Dresden.

Zak B. Elep: [REVU] for 2005

Now here’s the thing I’m supposed to write ;) It took me quite some time since I was too busy sleeping ;) Looking back at 2005:
  • February :
  • March :
  • April :
  • May :
  • June :
  • July :
  • August :
  • September :
  • October :
  • November :
  • December :
    • Things to I want to do this 2006: Things to look out for: Rock on, 2006!

    Philipp Kern: Coding with Ruby and xmpp4r

    Hm Andres, funnily enough I was currently coding a new Jabber bot for my personal use when you came up with your Dapper post on the Planet With xmpp4r and Ruby of course. What features does xmpp4r lack? Couldn’t you implement them? ;-) After a bit of crawling in xmpp4r’s documentation I still think that it’s quite useable for Jabber tasks. I just think that its developer should file the ITP for it and upload a package of it to Debian. Although they seem a bit messy, he already started such an effort and I would be happy to sponsor him. It really seems that Christmas time is also a time for diamonds. :-P

    1 January 2006

    Hanna Wallach: year summary

    My 2005, in cities: (One or more nights spent in each place.)

    31 December 2005

    Zak B. Elep: Ubuntu-PH Christmas EB at El Pueblo

    I’m at Ayala Center in Makati, enjoying the Sunday life amidst the buzz of the mallrats. I’m also enjoying the free internet provided by Globeline’s kiosk here, as well as access to a (locked-in) HP laptop with wired LAN. Anyhow, I’m not too comfy here, blogging without a chair to sit on, and dragging a backpack too, so let me do this quick. Yesterday I met up with the Ubuntu-PH people (namely, Jerome. Clair, Donnie, and Ealden) for our Christmas EB at Congo Grill in El Pueblo, Ortigas. I almost got lost trying to find the location, which I knew was somewhere near SM Megamall, and since I was coming all the way from UP Diliman via the MRT. Nevertheless, after some asking-around, I finally got to where I was supposed to be, and ate a hearty meal with chicken and garlic rice while listening to the channel, er este, people chatter (amidst the roaring Christmas party another gang was making.) After the meal, we then moved to The Podium nearby and sipped some coffee at Starbucks, then talked some more about Ubuntu, Gnome and KDE (especially the recent and quite controversial thread on desktops,) and some other stuff mentioned in Donnie’s post. There was also some stuff to be brought up at the next team meeting (see TeamMeetingAgenda) that we touched on, in particular that bit about membership to Ubuntu-PH. Well, it took us almost a midnight to wrap up; even then, along the road towards EDSA we were still talking about Ubuntu-PH, PLUG, and the AsiaBusinessTour, before we all finally parted ways. Indeed, EBs like these rock, especially when we’re all doing something great together as a team. Indeed, the next year seems to hold great promise for Ubuntu, Linux, and FOSS for the Philippines—and we’re at the forefront of it. Now, I need to go, and eat some Whoppers…

    26 December 2005

    Tollef Fog Heen: Mail based tracking systems: RT

    Philipp Kern asks about mail-based tracking systems. Even though he specifically says "no" to RT, I would recommend it. The source is very hackable and making up commands for changing ticket properties is easy.

    25 December 2005

    Philipp Kern: Mail-based tracking system

    Does anybody know a mail-based tracking system which allows one to manipulate all item properties by mail? Web interface and installation ease would be nice, too. It should also contain a reminder function for email or other notifies as I tend to delay issues. But it would not be too hard to code that in if the data is easily accessable through a database. Something like Debbugs would fit my needs, but is a mess to set up properly and the data is not easy accessable as far as I remember. And it really serves another purpose And no: RT is not an option, not being modifiable by mail.

    24 December 2005

    Philipp Kern: Source-only uploads to Debian

    I did some investigation (which was very little, dak’s source is very helpful) upon the possibility to do source-only uploads to Debian’s ftp-master. In short: It’s not possible. Jennifer rejects uploads which do not contain a single binary Debian package:
    if not has_binaries and Cnf.FindB(“Dinstall::Reject::NoSourceOnly”):
    reject(“source only uploads are not supported.”);
    But well, there’s a way to trick it: If the package contains an arch:all binary independent package and if you upload it together with the source (the binary-indep target of debian/rules will help), Jennifer thinks that the upload contains indeed a binary package and ignores the fact that there are no real architecture dependent binary packages. The autobuilders will do the work for you.

    Philipp Kern: Meme: Who needs what?

    This meme is really silly, but ya know, I can’t resist... When looking for “Philipp needs”:
    Obviously from an other incarnation of this meme:
    Last but not least something which stuns me (softly edited):

    Philipp Kern: Apple Laptops

    I get tired of this laptop on my desk called iBook G4. It’s now the second time I receive “I/O error(s)” from the harddisk drive. So I’ll have to call up Apple just again and beg for a send-in to fix it. This will take several hours on the phone because the support guy can’t decide that on his own. How nice and time consuming level based services are. But could somebody please tell me why I needed a replacement after seven months of use, when the errors were just weird and only Linux refused to do something with the harddisk, and now again after three months when OS X can’t even repair its own filesystem because of bad blocks. The last time I sent it in I even had to go to the nearest Apple Support Provider to get my Airport card replaced because it broke. The whole repair at Apple took three days, the WiFi repair three weeks. And yes it’s true what you could probably read between the lines... My knowledge of English is vanishing... *cough*

    18 December 2005

    Aigars Mahinovs: I spent day preparing a presentation for tomorrow...

    RMS in Riga

    I spent day preparing a presentation for tomorrow's "Open Christmas" celebration in Latvian University. One of my topics is "Free vs. Open: philosophy vs. presentation" about the various terms floating around the FLOSS movement: free, open, libre, shared, ... (and also their various translations to Latvian :P). This reminded me of the day I organised an event in Riga for the RMS's Baltic Anti Software Patent rally in 2004.

    15 December 2005

    Philipp Kern: Tailor

    Hey Wouter, did you already hear of Tailor, a script which syncs various repositories of various SCM?

    11 December 2005

    Christian Perrier: darcs

    Philip, I *already* have to use darcs because Daniel Burrows uses it for aptitude.:-)

    Clint Adams: No-fault states

    Phil, it is rumored that all the people in the NM bureaucracy are volunteers, and therefore should not be thought of to have any sort of responsibility as part of their positions of authority, and should not be held accountable for anything. Jacobo, realise is not a word in en_US.

    Philipp Kern: Another NM lost

    I seriously tried to persuade Thomas Hood to revoke his withdrawal from NM, but he made it official now. According to him, both his current (formorer aka Alexander Wirt) and his former AM seem to have lost the AM correspondence with him. So we just lost another NM due to Debian’s bureaucracy. Normally he should have contacted the Front Desk to just get a new AM, but this already was his second.

    Christian Perrier: Baz/tla/bzr suck

    This is the new hype of last years. No development can take place with these so cool tools. Crap, I just maintain the bloody localization for apt and dpkg and, as the developers of these packages use distributed revision control systems, I'm forced to use them as well. I have never lost so much time in fixing broken stuff in my archives. OK, I'm a moron certainly but I use RCS things for several years right now (the old CVS/SVN and the like with a centralized repository) and I HAVE NEVER LOST SO MUCH TIME since I use tla, than bazaar. More fun: it seems that baz is getting obsoleted by bzr right now as obviously geeks cannot live more than one year with the same tool. So I will have to convert my archives if I want to continue helping in apt/dpkg localization. Of course, I know that people will help morons like me to do it, but, hey, this will AGAIN be lost time. Thanksfully, the D-I developers are wise people and we don't use distributed RCS but a good old solid SVN for 3 years now. Frans, Joey, don't ever think about changing this, please.... So now, I'm left with a change that I can't commit in my local archive for a French man page of dpkg, as suddenly for no reason, the bloody baz complains: 
    A/  arch /dpkg/dpkg--devel/dpkg--devel--1.13/philippe.batailler@free.fr--2005
A/
 arch /dpkg/dpkg--devel/dpkg--devel--1.13/philippe.batailler@free.fr--2005/patch-log
A
 arch /dpkg/dpkg--devel/dpkg--devel--1.13/philippe.batailler@free.fr--2005/patch-log/patch-1
M  man/fr/dpkg.1
M  debian/changelog
M  ChangeLog
arch_commit: unable to acquire revision lock (could not rename file.)
tree: /home/bubulle/src/debian/dpkg/dpkg-1.13
revision: bubulle@debian.org--2005/dpkg--devel--1.13--patch-88
url: /home/bubulle/arch/bubulle@debian.org--2005
    So nice: I'll again waste precious time asking on IRC for help and hearing people telling me to switch to <insert your favorite RCS system here>. This will be a so wonderful Sunday....

    6 December 2005

    Philipp Kern: There is no Cabal!

    Joey wrote in his blog entry about the tyranny of unix permissions:
    (If I ever ran for Debian Project Leader (which I won’t), this would be one of the areas that I would be sure to investigate basing my platform on. Speaking of which, it’s nearly election season again, isn’t it?)
    Which leads me to the next question Isn’t the next Debian Project Leader report already due? Oh, I better get back into my hole again and let the Cabal do their work. Disclaimer: All views expressed in here are not mine, but those of my tamagotchi.

    5 December 2005

    Martin F. Krafft: Drugs and the law

    It is my strong belief that the law should diversify more when it comes to drugs and their use. In particular, the law should differentiate between
    • drugs that are dangerous to the taker, or can cause long-term damages, such as physical or mental addictions. This class would be primarily made up of the so-called hard drugs: opiates, entactogens, inhalants, steroids, sedatives, and stimulants.
    • drugs that cause hightened awareness and give the taker the ability to approach life, society, or any sort of philosophical question from different angles. In places, these are referred to as intellectual drugs: hallucinogens and (some) herbals.
    If the law differentiates this way, each country could make it explicit whether it tries to protect the individual (which it should), or whether it protects the equilibrium of society (which could be considered fascist). Important: this is all about use of a drug. Cultivation, dealing, and related acts must be under separate and harsher legislation. The black-white approach taken by most governments these days really just pisses me off. Who are they to decide what an individual may do (or not) with his/her own body, assuming no harm comes to third parties? PS: No, I am not a junkie. I just get annoyed when someone is jailed for smoking pot or eating magic mushrooms in the forest. Especially if you know and respect that someone. NP: Mono, Under a Pipal Tree

    Matthew Garrett

    No, seriously.


    #if LINUX_VERSION_CODE >= 0x020400
    #else
    #ifndef KERNEL26
    #include <linux/kcomp.h>
    #endif
    #define vm_pgoff vm_offset
    #ifndef KERNEL26
    #define virt_to_page MAP_NR
    #endif
    #endif


    WHAT THE INDESCRIBABLE HOLY JESUS WERE YOU THINKING YOU UTTER SHITS?

    Worse than paedophilia.

    2 December 2005

    Philipp Kern: Planet incompatibility

    So without touching my blog at all I come over this bug by myself. The Serendipity developers say that it’s something wrong in Planet Planet but I wasn’t able to track it down. I just don’t know why it eats my old entries just again and presents them as new. The publication date is as pubDate in the RSS, so it really shouldn’t think that they are new.

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