'Til All Are One

Another year, another Soft­ware Free­dom Day…

Scrub that. That sounds far too mundane.

Soft­ware Free­dom Day rocked!!!

*ahem*

I could not attend last year (since it coin­cided with my mum’s birth­day), but this year I dived in head-​​first as an offi­cial helper on the A/​V Team. I was assigned to do video edit­ing and encod­ing, which basic­ally entailed crop­ping the begin­ning and end off the recor­ded present­a­tions and then encod­ing to Ogg (Vor­bis and The­ora) format. I had a wicked rig set up in the UNSW Law theatre that we were using for the talks, con­sist­ing of two laptops and a DV cam­era. The DV cam­era was ori­gin­ally inten­ded to serve as a backup to a DVD cam­era we had set up else­where, but due to some tech­nical glitches it rose in import­ance. I ended up being solely a cam­era­man, since we weren’t able to read our recor­ded DVDs on the day (it later turned out to be a simple mat­ter of final­ising the disc).

Although it was tir­ing keep­ing an eye on the cam­era for the entire day (through all of the talks), I must say that I enjoyed myself immensely. Pia did a fant­astic job of organ­ising and co-​​ordinating the event, not just in Sydney but also glob­ally (as Pres­id­ent of Soft­ware Free­dom Inter­na­tional). Silvia had the A/​V Team well organ­ised, and des­pite some minor set­backs I think we are well-​​prepared for LCA 2007.

What impressed me most was the speech by Sen­ator Kate Lundy. She proved that it wasn’t orches­trated in an inter­view with James Purser a few days later. She truly under­stands what free soft­ware is about, and she does not fall into the com­mon traps of see­ing free as gratis, or open source as only hav­ing a cost bene­fit. She’s set up her own Joomla-​​based web site, and she uses Auda­city to record her audio.

It’s strik­ing to see how Sen­ator Lundy dif­fers from her former nemesis (while she over­saw the Com­mu­nic­a­tions and IT shadow min­istry), Richard Alston. That is a man who was labelled ‘The World’s Biggest Lud­dite’ by sev­eral inter­na­tional news out­lets dur­ing his ten­ure. It is shame­ful to see how under­ap­pre­ci­ated she is in her party. Would it not best serve the interests of the coun­try to have a (shadow) min­is­ter who actu­ally knew some­thing about their port­fo­lio? Maybe so, but that would inter­fere with the politicking

Microsoft have announced their Zune music/​video player to take on Apple’s iPod. Like Apple, they con­sider col­our to be an import­ant dif­fer­en­ti­ator in the mar­ket­place. With white hav­ing been co-​​opted by Apple, and black being the gen­eric (and hence indis­tinct­ive) hue, what does that leave Microsoft?

Appar­ently, it is brown.

Once again, Ubuntu is vin­dic­ated! What’s next, naked people?

The fol­low­ing is an e-​​mail that I pos­ted to the SLUG mail­ing list:

Sub­ject: [SLUG] Main­tain­ing a con­stant IRC pres­ence
Date: Sunday 03 Septem­ber 2006 13:07
From: Srid­har Dhanap­a­lan
To: SLUG list

I am in a situ­ation that I’m sure a lot of SLUG mem­bers are in. I am a
pro­lific user of IRC, using it from one of three machines depend­ing on where
I am. I have three main problems:

  (1) main­tain­ing a single and con­stant online pres­ence
  (2) main­tain­ing eas­ily access­ible chat logs, even when not at the machine
  (3) being noti­fied of mes­sages that suit spe­cific criteria

I cur­rently use Xchat, which means that I am logged in at least two places at
once. Being a fat cli­ent, it can beep when I have a mes­sage. If I leave it
con­nec­ted, it keeps logs (I only need the last 1000 lines or so). I can’t do
this with my laptop, though (I need to dis­con­nect when trav­el­ling). Also, it
forces me to have a sep­ar­ate login for each machine (and hence each Xchat
ses­sion) connected.

Issues (1) and (3) can be addressed by some­thing like irssi-proxy[1], since it
would allow me to use local cli­ents with a single login. I could ssh into a
single sys­tem run­ning irssi, which would alle­vi­ate both (1) and (2).

I under­stand that there are plug-​​ins for irssi that per­form a noti­fic­a­tion
ser­vice or run com­mands on cer­tain cues. If irssi was run­ning loc­ally, I
could do all kinds of things with such a fea­ture. If run­ning remotely,
how­ever, I believe that I am lim­ited to noti­fic­a­tions inside the irssi win­dow
itself. This would force me to manu­ally check the win­dow on a fre­quent basis,
which will either become annoy­ing or be for­got­ten. I would like to have
audio/​visual cues to let me know that my atten­tion is required.

[1] http://​www​.garion​.org/​i​r​s​s​i​/​i​r​s​s​i​-​p​r​o​x​y​.​php