Search Results: "fabian"

Wouter Verhelst: Talk done

I held a talk this morning about the Belgian electronic ID card in Debian (and derivates, like Ubuntu). Things were a bit tight there for a moment, because I overslept; but eventually, we did make it in time. The talk didn't go perfect. Because I overslept, I didn't have enough time to test; because I didn't test enough, I found out that the smartcard didn't work on the demo machine. Darn; it's pretty silly to hold a talk about how easy it is to use the electronic ID card on Debian, only to find out that I, myself, am unable to use it. Grmbl. Anyway, the talk worked out okay. Despite the early hour, a decent amount of people showed up—including Fabian Arrotin, who held a talk about a similar topic in the CentOS room last year. Now for breakfast. Really.

Martin-Éric Racine: Award to the Debian community of Finland

Open Source 2006 is a one-day seminar that provides Free Software actors of Finland with a forum to present their work and the current trends in Free Software development to a greater audience comprised mainly of decision-makers from the business and governmental sectors. Finnish Open Office localization team This year, a noticeable trend were governmental cases of transition to Open Office and other Free Software solutions on the municipal desktop. Thus, it was only fitting that Finnish localization took greater importance than before and, in concordance, that this year's Linux-tekij award went to the Finnish Open Office localization team. The jury invited 3 people from the localization team to receive the award on their team's behalf:

Pastor Asmo Koskinen of the bilingual Finnish-Swedish parish of Kokkola; an active promoter of Open Office in the Finnish public sector that has given many training sessions on Open Office and helped countless end-users transition to Open Office.
Translator Marko Gr nroos; a leading Finnish localizer that is involved in the localization of an impressive number of Free Software products.
Language Technology Expert Harri Pitk nen; the initiator of the Hunspell adaptation for the Finnish language.

Pastor Koskinen also gave a very stimulating lecture on the collaborative effort behind the localization, mentioning in passing that Czech Pavel Jani k also plays an important role in building the Open Office binaries for a number of Baltic and Scandinavian languages. Debian community of Finland The jury also granted an honorary mention to the Debian community of Finland to acknowledge years of achievements, reaching an important milestone in 2005 when Finland hosted the yearly Debian Conference. Another motivation was a number of nominations for Ubuntu, both as a distribution and for its extremely active local user community. Given how a majority of Ubuntu developers actually are Debian Developers, the jury unanimously decided to honor them collectively from the perspective of Debian and its derivatives. The jury invited 3 people to receive the honorary mention on the community's behalf:

Inquisitor Lars Wirzenius needs no introduction; an early adopter and promoter of Debian in Finland, his strong voice has eloquently sung the merits of Debian and Free Software to large audiences and persuaded a significant number of Finns to join the Debian project.
Educator and Translator Tapio Lehtonen; appearing himself among this year's nominations for his extremely friendly attitude towards people making their first steps as a Free Software user, he is mainly known for localizing the Debian installation software.
Event organizer Aschwin van der Woude (represented in absentee by co-organizer Fabian Fagerholm); personally initiated countless Free Software promoting events and developer workshops throughout Finland, culminating in 2005 with the important responsibility for Debconf5's budget and legal matters.

Lars gave the audience a very interesting perspective of his long involvement with Debian, while Tapio emphasized particular pride in seeing non-programmers that maintain documentation or localize software be acknowledged. Fabian gave a very emotional speech in which he praised the commendable efforts of dozens of volunteer DebConf5 organizers that discretely handled unpleasant tasks that were nonetheless essential to the success of the event. The Jury Yours truly was invited to join the jury on behalf of Linux Aktivaattori, alongside representatives from the academic, business and Free Software communities. During the prize ceremony, FLUG chairman Arto Ter s and myself took turns at describing the award's selection process and at introducing the winners.

Martin F. Krafft: Alternative, innovative search engines

These days (and for quite a while now), the populace equates "search" with Google. If you're like me, you'll also use alternatives. For instance, I've been quite happy with the clustered sorting provided by Clusty, which produces pretty good search results, but it isn't the fastest of all. Also, Eurekster's Swicki technology looks promising, and I am currently investigating whether it could make a good search platform for the Debian project. What do you use as alternatives to Google? What I am after aren't answers like "Yahoo" or "A9", but rather more innovative search approaches. The days of index searches and even "Page Rank" are over, IMHO. What's next? Let's hear it, please! NP: Proto-Kaw / Before Became After Update: Fabian Greffrath pointed me to Metager2, which is a meta search engine (meaning it lets others do the search), which also inspects the pages in the search result set and thus promises better quality of the results. I could not yet find more technical details except that it's Linux/Python-based. It seems to be rather centred on German contents, and the way it displays linked pages in the search results consumes too much screen estate for me. Update: Steve McIntyre contributed Trexy, which is also a meta engine that records your previous searches or lets you profit from other people's search "trails". I am not a big fan of meta searches, since those are really good at screwing up the sorting order by the engines they use, but I might try this one.