Open-Source

Some days ago, I was quite amused by Flagrant Disregard Top Digital Cameras: these people daily took 10000 photos that were uploaded on Flickr and looked at the camera makes and models of these photos. This kind of study is interesting because one can see what people are actually using and what camera models can give good results (with a good photographer, of course). I was just disappointed by the fact that they are not saying anything about their sampling method nor the statistics they can apply to their data. I then thought that I can do a kind of survey like this one and publish results along with the method. ...

Under this title, James Boyle, professor of law at Duke Law School (USA), wrote a comment article in the Financial Times [1]. For him, we all have a cognitive bias regarding intellectual property and the internet: the openness aversion. The openness aversion is the fact that we undervalue the importance and productive power of open systems, open networks and non-proprietary production. With three examples (internet, free software and Wikipedia), he somehow shows the evolution of mentalities towards theses “open things”. In 1991, scholars, businessmen and bureaucrats (and even us, maybe) would have scoffed at the internet as a business product. At that moment, control and ownership seemed the right way to go. ...

For a long time, I was looking for a video capture software for GNU/Linux. From time to time, I look on the web to see if there are improvements in this field. A recent NewsForge article triggered my curiosity, one more time … If you accept proprietary formats, you can use vnc2swf : your film will be in Flash format, a proprietary format. Also based on VNC, there is vncrec that produces its own video format (this one seems to be free and easily exported with transcode). ...

IPGPhor is a device from GE Healthcare (formerly Amersham Biosciences) that performs an isoelectrofocusing of proteins. Version 2 of IPGPhor can be connected to any computer via a serial cable. GE Healthcare provides a monitoring software but no post-hoc analysis software. This gap is efficiently filled by IPGPhor 2 Reader. Today, I wrote “IPGPhor 2 Reader”. Its goal is to parse log (text) files resulting from an experiment with the IPGPhor and to plot graphs. This software (for MS-Windows, since IPGPhor logs are collected on a MS-Windows computer) is available here. ...

GooDiff began its work a week ago and I didn’t see much news/blog posts about it. If I correctly understood, the idea behind GooDiff is to monitor changes in legal documents of (internet) service providers (like Google or Yahoo!). Indeed, service providers are often trying to change on the fly their legal documents, especially in some critical sections like privacy, copyright and alike. With GooDiff, consumers and users are now able to keep track of these changes. Thanks Alexandre! ...

Les Namur Linux Days avaient pour objectifs de présenter les applications libres, sous GNU/Linux et disponibles pour l’utilisateur final, leur degré d’utilisabilité, leur état d’avancement et leur diversité. Ma première présentation était consacrée àla messagerie instantanée sous GNU/Linux (dont Jabber !) et vous pouvez la télécharger ici (page reprenant toute une série d’informations dont la présentation en PDF). Ma seconde présentation était consacrée àOpenOffice.org Impress. Cette page reprend plus d’informations ainsi que la présentation àtélécharger. ...

I really had a hard day at work, moving my desk from one room to another one and coping with unexpected problems. But I finally found some time to look for a new graphic card for my desktop PC (btw. the OpenGraphics project released the schematic of its first FPGA). While reading an article on Tom’s Hardware, I saw a flash animation for the BSA that explicitely ask for denouncement about software without licence. It was so farcical I captured the animation and added a small message at the end. You can download the AVI file here (.avi, 2Mo). ...

From the LiLiT homepage: Breaking news!! Richard Stallman’s visionary statement at Fosdem 2006 : " Even HURD is history. You should now use GNU/Tchantchux!". For those who don’t already know it, Tchantches is a mythical character from Liege (see Liege’s folklore) and Tchantchux is a mix between Tchantches and Tux, the Linux mascot. You can see the complete photo coverage here ;-)

On the 18th and 19th of March, 2006, the Namur LUG will organise the " Namur Linux Days 2006". Despite an English title and this post in English, all the talks will be held in French. On the 18th (Saturday), there will be two main keynotes: an introduction to Free Software by Maxime Morge and a presentation about intellectual property and free software by Philippe Laurent. Between these two keynotes, there will be a lot of talks about office, multimedia and internet free software for the general public. I will give a talk about OpenOffice.org Impress. The complete schedule is here. ...

I went to FOSDEM 2006 on Saturday 25th ( schedule here). This year, I went with my brother Laurent (as usual) and my wife, Nandini. This was the first time at FOSDEM for her, it was also the first time she saw so many geeks and I am not sure she enjoyed her day… In the morning, after a small introduction, Richard M. Stallmann gave his keynote on software patents. Of course, he was preaching to a converted audience (i.e. everyone is against software patents). And, even if we didn’t learned new information on what’s going on, it is always interesting to hear someone else’s opinion (event if it’s the same opinion as us) and a formal presentation on the subject. Two things turned Nandini against Richard Stallman… At one moment, RMS rudely asked that someone “removes this source of noise” (talking about a baby making some noise). Then, during the question, RMS roughly replied to someone trying to ask his questions because he was not talking louder enough (from the middle of the assistance) and because he “dared” to use the words “Open Source” in from of “Him”. I must say that she’s right: we seemed to easily forgive his behaviour because we know the character. But, imho, you can still be a great man, father of the GNU project and be polite. ...