free software

→ comment to The next wave in scholarly word processors?

What I’d like to see is more people using version tracking systems.

With these you have a discussion which can be merged easily when it gets branched. I use it for anything I do, and I could use it together with an only-windows-and-GUI user with ease, installing TortoiseHG for both and Lyx for him (LaTeX made easy – you don’t have to see the sources).

• http://tortoisehg.bitbucket.org/
• http://www.lyx.org/

After the last round of polishing, I decided to publish my theme under AGPLv3. Reason: If you use AGPL code and people access it over a network, you have to offer them the code. Which I hereby do ;)
That’s the only way to make sure that website code stays free.

It’s still for Drupal 5, because I didn’t get around to port it, and it has some ugly hacks, but it should be fully functional.

Just untar it in any Drupal 5 install.

tar xjf weltenwald-theme-2010-08-05_r1.tar.bz2

pyRad is a wheel type command interface for KDE¹, designed to appear below your mouse pointer at a gesture.

install | setup | usage and screenshots | download and sources

If the video doesn’t show, you can also download it as Ogg Theora & Vorbis “.ogv” or find it on youtube.

For a long time it bugged me, that eix uses a seperate database which I need to keep up to date. But no longer: With pkgcore as fast as it is today, I set up pquery to replace eix.

The result is pix:

alias pix='pquery --raw -nv --attr=keywords'

(put the above in your ~/.bashrc)

The output looks like this:

$ pix pkgcore
 * sys-apps/pkgcore
    versions: 0.5.11.6 0.5.11.7
    installed: 0.5.11.7
    repo: gentoo
    description: pkgcore package manager
    homepage: http://www.pkgcore.org
    keywords: ~alpha ~amd64 ~arm ~hppa ~ia64 ~ppc ~ppc64 ~s390 ~sh ~sparc ~x86

A song about sharing and free software and changing the world. Originally written to recreate the vision of the Polar Skulk in art.

Criticism and praise would be a great gift to the pup writing this song.

A song from the icy lands

Freedom for Music, for Movies and for every word,
Fighting is not quite absurd,
and we are peaceful, good and kind,
and fight for freedom of the mind.

Some thoughts¹ on how the humble Indie Bundle managed to get more than 1.25 Million Dollars² in one and a half weeks — more than one quarter of that from GNU/Linux users.

Why?

What I miss in the internet is the notion of being able to control what my apps access for data.

Why can’t a chat application just connect to a neighborhood- or community-server, and why can’t the activity-stream come from the people I know — and query only their systems, like jabber does?

Almost all geolocation services should be implementable over direct friend-to-friend connections like jabber, and I don’t really see why my local identi.ca program can’t also get the news from my local jabber contacts.

We had a kinda long discussion on identi.ca about Ogg Theora and h.264, and since we lacked a simple comparision method, I hacked up a quick script to test them.

It uses frames from Big Buck Bunny and outputs the files bbb.ogg and bbb.264 (license: cc by).

-> a comment to
Wikipedia, Notability, and Open Source Software by ubunTARD.

2010-03-23
Update: I just got unblocked by henrik who also sent me an excuse for the way the whole process was handled: “…The block was partly an individual misjudgment, but also a result of the systemic culture and some poorly thought out policies. If you're interested, I'd be happy to discuss it in more detail…”. And that restores a lot of my faith in the wikipedia community — thank you very much for your excuse, henrik!
Also they are currently discussing on the incidents board how to avoid similarly overboarding blocking like that in the future.

Just as an inside notice from the discussion: I joined the first deletion discussion when I got note of it (I don't know anymore through which channel) and when it got closed, I joined the second one and got heavily frustrated when people tried to turn “he sent the developers a berliner bratwurst” into “the magazine which published his article is a first source” (which would mean it wouldn't count as source for “notability”).