Mika and I are going to be in Europe for the next few weeks. The
tentative plan seems to include these stops:
This bottle was found in Mika's biosafety level 2 laboratory.
To address any confusion, isoamyl alcohol is not drinking
alcohol and this bottle was bought for use in a scientific lab from a
scientific lab supply company. Explanations are welcome.
At Kinokuyina in New York, I noticed that Playboy was sorted into the
"Men's Fashion" section of the magazine rack.
Funny. I wasn't under the impression that Playboy's primary selling
points included either either men or clothing.
I spent more time than I would like to admit massaging the process that
ultimately led to the release of the the GNU Free Documentation
License 1.3 (GFDL) by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Hours
counted, it was probably one of my biggest personal projects this year.
The effect is to allow wikis under the GFDL to migrate to the
Creative Commons BY-SA license or, as Wikimedia's Erik M ller has
proposed, to some sort of dual-license arrangement.
There are many reasons for this change but the most important is that
the move reduces very real barriers to collaboration between wikis and
free culture projects due to license compatibility. BY-SA has become the
GPL of the free culture world and Wikimedia wikis were basically
locked out from sharing with a larger community, and vice-versa;
projects will no longer have to choose between sharing with Wikipedia
and sharing with essentially everyone else. The GFDL has done a
wonderful job of helping get Wikimedia projects to where they are today
and M ller's proposed switch seems, in my opinion, the best option to
continue that work going forward.
The FSF gets a lot of credit (and a lot of flack) for what it does.
Offering to "let go" of Wikipedia -- without question the crown jewel of
the free culture world -- represents a real relinquishing of a type of
political control and power for the FSF. Doing so was not done lightly.
But giving communities the choice to increase compatibility and
collaboration by switching to a fundamentally similar license was and
is, in my opinion, the right thing to do.
Everyone who has worked hard to make this happen deserves the free
culture movement's thanks. This list includes Richard Stallman, Brett
Smith and Peter Brown of the FSF; James Vasile and Eben Moglen of the
SFLC; Erik M ller, Mike Godwin and Shunling Chen of the Wikimedia
Foundation.
The FSF in general, and RMS in particular, deserves a huge amount of
credit for what it has decided to not do in this case and for giving
up control in a way that was responsible and accountable to its
principles and to GFDL authors and in the interest of free culture
movement more generally. It has not been easy or quick. If you support
or appreciate work like this, please support the FSF and express
this while doing so. Doing so is an important way to support these
essential and almost inherently underappreciated efforts.
The following list is merely a small selection of scholarly articles
listed in the ISI Web of Knowledge with "invisible hand" in their
title:
For those that are curious as to I've been up to recently, you might be
interested to read this portrait of Eric von Hippel on Linux.com.
The article mentions that I'm currently studying with von Hippel in my
own effort to try to help build a more evidence-based understanding of
how free software works and explore some of the ways I might help it
work better.
I've been a bit remiss about keeping this space up to date with my
upcoming talks over the last month or so. Here's me playing catchup.
On Monday October 20th, I gave a talk on Selectricity for the IEEE
Boston Section's Society on Social Implications of Technology. It
covered more or less the same ground I coverd in my OSCON talk on the
same subject. Then next day, Tuesday October 21st, I gave a short talk
on Revealing Errors as part of the MIT-Harvard-Yale
Cyberscholars meeting.
There was nothing new or ground-breaking in either but it was good to
spread the word on the projects -- work continues on both.
I also have one more coming up: another Revealing Errors talk in
Amherst, Massachusetts at my alma mater on October 31st (Halloween).
If you are in Western Massachusetts and would like to meet up or attend
the talk, let me know.
On the morning after the final US presidential debate that happened a
week ago, I was invited onto the excellent new WNYC morning show The
Takeaway -- syndicated by Public Radio International. One of
the hosts, John Hockenberry, was in Boston to tape that edition of
the show.
I was on to talk about Selectricity and some of other ways that we
might use election technologies. I was on and off (mostly off) air for
the whole second hour (7:00-8:00 AM) of taping and had a bit of a
segment just into the second half of the hour. You can check out the
website or download the podcast.
Although it's definitely not as fun to listen to as my a last gig on
public radio, it's certainly more consequential. The role of the
techno-pundit was also -- unfortunately? --- easier for me to fill.
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It's late notice but Boston area folks should drop by the local Software
Freedom Day events today. It goes from 10:00-16:00 and is located in a
great space in Chinatown. More information in on the wiki.
I'm teaming up with John Sullivan of the FSF to talk about free software
on in your pocket on unexecpted platforms. We'll show off CHDK (for
cameras), the FreeRunner (a phone), and probably also talk about
RockBox, iPodLinux, and more. It should be laid back and fun!
The whole point of SFD (and this SFD event in particular) is create a
space that's appropriate to folks that don't already know about free and
open source software and that aren't necessary technical. If you are a
hacker or an advocate, show up and meet some like minded folks and
introduce new people to the ideas that inspire you. If you are just
curious about this stuff this event is designed for you.
If you're not in Boston, check the SFD webpage. There are hundreds
of events around the world and may even be one near you!
It's been a year or so since I last reported what I was up to in my "day
job." The last year has been a productive, if sometimes schizophrenic,
period.
I've had a good time working with Eric von Hippel (innovation and
free and open source software research guru) and have decided I'd like
to do a bit more of that.
So I'm taking classes again -- mostly sociological methods courses -- to
try to learn a bit about becoming a social scientist. To do so, I've
enrolled in the Technology, Innovation and Entrepreneurship PhD program
at the MIT Sloan School of Management and am working on putting together
an interdisciplinary -- probably even interdepartmental -- research
program. My basic research questions remain the ones that have motivated
all my work: How can I get a better understanding of communities
producing free stuff? How can I help those communities do so more
effectively?
MIT has a large number of people who share these goals and interests.
Who knows, if I can put together enough of them and an academically
rigorous research proposal that will provide a real benefit to the free
software and free culture communities I care about, I might even manage
to get a degree out of it!
I'll also be staying on as a fellow at the MIT Center for Future Civic
Media where I'll continue to maintain and expand Selectricity, work
on Revealing Errors, and more.
Nearly a week after its release, I suspect most of my audience has seen
the FSF's Freedom Fry video of Stephen Fry wishing the GNU project and
the free software movement a happy birthday. While I'm not usually one
for birthdays, I thought I'd at least reflect on it briefly.
Certainly, it's a wonderful video -- for which Matt Lee at others at the
FSF should be proud. But it's fact that the GNU project is now
twenty-five years old that is truly noteworthy.
Wikipedia says that a generation (i.e., the average interval between
the birth of parents and of their offspring) is somewhere between 25-30
years in most of the Western world. Twenty-five years isn't just a big
number divisible by five, it marks a generational shift.
Certainly, GNU has matured and accomplished wonderful things in last
quarter-century. More importantly perhaps, it's produced wonderful
progeny. It has spawned hundreds of thousands of free software projects,
thousands of free or nearly-free operating systems, and an unbelievably
vibrant global free and open source software community. Beyond the
software realm, the free culture movement, most free licensing projects,
and much of the access to knowledge movement can trace a connection back
to GNU. We are living, and building, a new generation of the free
software movement.
It's not been an entirely smooth ride, feelings have been hurt, and it's
hard for GNU's proponents -- myself included -- to not wince at some of
what has been done in GNU's name and because of its example. But even
cynics must admit: the world is an undeniably better place because of
GNU and the efforts and ideas that it has motivated.
I turn 28 in December and have spent my entire computing life in world
where free software was a viable option and an active form of
resistance. Here's to another generation! May we be half as productive
and positive as the last!
When my friends Karen and Annina were confronted with an offensive
sticker on the laptop of someone working at our lab, they organized a
very constructive and effective intervention.
I was so impressed that I made a short illustrated write-up of the
story on my wiki.
I took a little time today to make a new release of the Free Software
Project Management HOWTO. Nearly eight years after I wrote it, much
of the document is out of date or has been replaced with better, more
comprehensive write-ups. In particular, I think Karl Fogel's book,
Producing Open Source Software says everything insightful I say in
the HOWTO, a whole lot clearly -- plus adds a lot I missed.
That said, my HOWTO is short and is apparently still useful to folks. I
updated it to include links to a new German translation courtesy to
Robert F. Schmitt, to fix a bunch of links that time broke, and to
address a few obvious mistakes that readers have pointed out.
Thinking about the documents' future, I'm happy to release it under
Creative Commons BY-SA in addition to GFDL and would love to help out on
a wiki book project to merge a few of related efforts into a
comprehensive wiki reference work.
After a late-night IRC conversation about egg corns, shaggy dog
stories and feghoots the idea for a short story came to me in the
bathtub this morning.
I give you, The Story of Josephville. Apologies in advance.
I watched Citizen Kane several weeks ago and was shocked to learn
that the major villian in the film is a political boss named Jim
Gettys. Of course, a real Jim Gettys is a well known X Window
System contributor who is currently working at an OLPC manager.
Last night someone reminded me that OLPC's new President and COO -- who
I'd always just thought of as Chuck -- is named Charles Kane!
Here's a short clip from a video of the fictional Charles Kane giving a
rather long speech decrying the fictional Jim Gettys! (Also in Ogg.)
I haven't been this amused since I learned that the head villian in the
cartoon Jem was named Eric Raymond!
Nothing is more embarrassing than a website announcing that something
will happen on a particular date -- e.g., a product will be released, a
feature will be turned on -- after the date has come and gone! Even
worse, putting things off repeatedly can be a lot of work!
To help such people, I just did a very quick 10 minute hack I'm calling
The Vaporizer. It looks like just a date on a webpage. However, if
the date originally listed has come and gone, a little bit of Javascript
will change the site so that it shows tomorrow's date instead.
Vaporware providers of all types can use it to safely (and effortlessly)
put things off without worrying about looking overdue!
I have seen the future, and the future is tomorrow.
One thing that has always annoyed me about most wiki is the way they
handle images. MediaWiki, like most wikis, allows users to upload
images and embed pictures. However, if you want to change an image,
you need to download the file, open it up in GIMP, Inkscape, or
Photoshop, edit it, save it, and re-upload it. Somewhere in this long
process, the ease of editing that makes wikis so wonderful gets lost.
Basically, I'm annoyed because images in wikis aren't very "wiki."
I had a talk with Brianna Laugher at Wikimania about ways to make it
easier to folks to edit pictures from within the browser -- even if it
is only simple stuff. Yesterday I took the afternoon to write a new
MediaWiki extension which gives a working example of in-browser image
editing. It provides the ability to crop images using David Spurr's
wonderful Javascript cropping user interface and uses ImageMagick
to do the actual image manipulation.
It is in the form of an extension to Mediawiki I've called EditImage.
It's an afternoon hack from an under-qualified PHP hacker so it's
nothing special. You can read it about on its page in the Mediawiki
wiki and you can try it out on my personal wiki where I have
it installed.
I'm certainly not the first person to think about doing this. In fact,
some old pages in the MediaWiki wiki imply that I'm not even the
first person to play around with the idea of using Spurr's code to do
image cropping for MediaWiki. Hopefully though, my code can act as a
nice first step and a framework for folks wanting to add additional
image manipulation features. For example, I think it would be quick to
add the ability to do in-browser brightness and contrast manipulation
and I would love to see this in a future version of the extension.
When I gave a Revealing Errors talk at Lug Radio Live USA, I had the
misfortune of being up against Robert Love's talk on Android which many
people at the conference wanted to see -- myself included! One person
who showed up to my talk anyway was Allison Randall. She was
apparently entertained enough to invite me to give a short version of
the talk as one of the keynote presentations at OSCON 2008!
In the talk, I covered the ideas behind my Revealing Errors project
and quickly walked through a few examples that showcase what I'm trying
to do. I'm happy with the result: a couple thousand people showed up for
the talk despite the fact that it was at 8:45 AM after the biggest
"party night" of the conference!
For those that missed it for whatever reason, you can watch a video
recording that O'Reilly made and that I've embedded below.
A larger version of the Flash video as well as a QuickTime version is
over on blip.tv and I've created an OGG Theora version for all
my freedom loving readers.
Next.
