Overengineering 4TW

I know Rhythmbox can display notification bubbles when it starts playing a song, but it has been hit and miss for m (using Enlightenment 0.16 as a window manager can sometimes be troublesome :( ), but after getting the Mugshot software working (as far as I can tell) I have been getting notifications. Rhythmbox is telling last.fm my song, and Mugshot is picking up on that and telling me. Pretty nifty, if a little OTT!

GNOME Blog Works!

Yes, I know. I am a genius. Anyway, just tried Ubuntu Feisty's package of gnome-blog and found that it can use Blogger's new API (it changed when Google bought them, thus making the older versions not work for accounts using the new API, like mine). This is a welcome relief since I no longer have to deal with the nightmare of writing blind (white-on-white == bad usability), and if a dodgy website (or browser) loses the Blogger page then I'd lost it all (as happened to me just :( ). Anyway, now that we have established that GNOME Blog works onto the main issues of the day:

The Free Software Society has now got a forum, located here. Thanks go to our secretary Harriet for that :) Of course there is still the Mugshot group as well (although their software could do with a little improvement, I'll download the source and see what I can do to add proper last.fm, jamendo.com and other integration).

Check out this video: Whilst being a slightly exaggerated parody it is still very insightful and funny too. Still has nothing on the master though, Prof. Eben Moglen, who recently gave a talk in Edinburgh. If you haven't seen any of his talks then you're missing out, he really is a powerful and passionate speaker who makes beautiful use of the English language.

Also, check out Frets on Fire, which has now had its non-Free songs and fonts removed and has been packaged for Debian (and therefore Ubuntu). It's made with Pygame BTW :)

Finally....... I'm going LUGRadio Live! Woooo!!!! I'll meet Jono Bacon and other people I have admired via HTTP for all these years (well, 2 or 3). Whilst some people I would like to chat with won't be there (namely Mirco), it could help me become more known throughout the community which would be good news networking-wise as president of the Free Software Society (hopefully my social networking will beat my ethernet networking, the height of which was getting ping to work and kicking my little brother's ass on Crack Attack).

I am pondering GUADEC as well, but accommodation would make it impossible for a week-long event :( (unless I am an extremely cheeky bastard to Jo, which I honestly try not to be)

Lawyers are our friends too...

... Well, at least some are. Check out Prof. Eben Moglen's latest talk stunning, as usual. You should check out his other talks too, because they are great to watch as he's a very powerful and persuasive speaker. Prof. Moglen was an accomplished programmer even when 14, and after restudying Law and History he became a Professor at Columbia University in the USA. He has a laudable vision which his work attempts to make real, a world of privacy and anonymity, freedom to use and improve all works represented in a digital fashion (ie. software, music and any other art form which can be shared freely for no cost thanks to computers and the Internets), a world where communication is uncensored, anyone can use the commonly owned electromagnetic spectrum thanks to computerised devices which allow multiple overlapping signals to coexist without interference, all described in his famous Dotcommunist Manifesto, and is steadily working towards such a world by firstly ensuring that the right of the individual to privacy outside of state control is maintained (eg. making sure encryption is not made illegal) which he accomplished in the early 90s by acting as defence for Phil Zimmerman's Pretty Good Privacy encryption system when it was attacked by the US government (these days the GNU Privacy Guard is a Free Software, and therefore more widespread, descendant of this), he then became lawyer for Richard Stallman's Free Software Foundation, and has recently stepped down as a leading figure in the FSF to nurture his newly created Software Freedom Law Centre. He has also worked with Larry Lessig and others on the Creative Commons project. Basically he knows exactly what he wants, and knows exactly how to get it.

Today I also found a humourus Google TechTalk video on a similar topic. Called 7 Ways To Ruin A Technological Revolution it outlines how the legal systems of the world seem to be blinkered towards "must make up new rights for authors, must extend and enforce those rights" without ever thinking of other ways to keep the flow of new and innovative ideas going, and even denying the existence of evidence that contradicts their purely empirical thinking. The quote from the World Intellectual Property Organisation is particularly amusing, but also quite horrifying, about how Open Source software should not be taken into account when dealing with "intellectual property" (copyright, patents, trademarks, etc.) law, since it doesn't fit the WIPO's world view about protecting and extending copyrights and such. I'm sorry but this seems just like the masses of FUD coming from corporations like Microsoft who claim Free Software/Open Source software don't respect intellectual property. Oh of course, because free software projects, which have all of their code freely available for anyone to study and look for any such infringements, and places such code under a series of copyright licenses (thus making Free and Open Source software intellectual property) don't have any respect for the system which makes them
work, and of course corporations like Microsoft and other proprietary software organisations, which keep their code hidden from any investigators, are the pillars of high moral standing that keeps the software industry respectful of the rights of others.