Along with all the videos of all FOSDEM editions, the FOSDEM team put the 2009 videos on YouTube. So here is the video about Gemvid:
The presentation in PDF is still available from the Gemvid webpage (and in live here).
A blog about health economics, public health issues, free software, and probably everything else too …
Month: March 2009
Along with all the videos of all FOSDEM editions, the FOSDEM team put the 2009 videos on YouTube. So here is the video about Gemvid:
The presentation in PDF is still available from the Gemvid webpage (and in live here).
This 25th of March, 2009 is Document Freedom Day. Although it’s not as important as starvation in parts of the world, the economic crisis or the continuous deterioration of our privacy and civil rights (in UK and elsewhere), it’s good to take a break and think about our use of electronic documents in our everyday live. Let me just give you an example …
A few days ago, I was trying to retrieve data from an experiment. As a well-formatted student, I stored my data in a then state-of-the-art, proprietary statistical software my dear statistical professor taught me to use. As long as I had this software, it was fine. Now that my university stopped to pay the license, that I didn’t installed this software on my new computer, I am stuck with a serie of 1, 0 and other delirious characters in that file. Does that mean I lost all my data? Yes.
Fortunately, I thought to save a backup of my data in a simple text file with CSV format. This saved my day because although I don’t have more information in this file, I don’t have less information than in the proprietary format either. And this simple CSV format allows me to enjoy processing my data with any spreadsheet software I want along with some more serious statistical packages like R.
If you want to know more about Open Documents (and more broadly about Open Standards), you can start by reading what are Open Standards. Wikipedia has a more technical article about them.
Photo credit: Slide0001 by Paul Jacobson on Flickr (licence by-nc-sa)
Sometimes, even if you mainly develop on Unix/Linux boxes, you are stuck with MS-Windows on your desktop. Moreover, although your are a developer (i.e. someone who is supposed to know how to run a computer), you have no administrator rights so you can’t install the right tools that can improve your productivity and enhance your code stability/security. This is for the sad part.
Fortunately, Free Software are there and most of them can even be run without being installed on your machine, just copy the software and use it! Here is a list of some of the software I’m using. Feel free to promote your favourite application in the comments.