Open Access publication message

scientific ratWe, scientists, create, provide and judge the science presented to journals. While we are not paid by the publishers, we pay to get access to this science.

Publishers who concentrate more and more journals within a few companies use their oligopoly to charge more and more and earn tremendous amounts of money. They use a snobbism about impact factors and the tyranny this exerts on the career of young scientists.

We can dilute this power in a simple way. Open access is the only answer. Whenever I have to choose one reference out of several, I shall from now on choose a reference to a paper that I and my readers can access freely on the Internet PubMed. If we all do that, we shall push the impact factor of those journals (printed or not) which do not grudge us.

If you agree with this message diffuse it.

(message originally from Pr Jacques E. Dumont, IRIBHM, ULB ; links are from myself)

ISAL will celebrate Holi on 11th March

The Indian Students Association of Leuven (ISAL) will celebrate Holi on the 11th of March 2006, in Leuven (more info soon). Holi is an annual Hindu spring festival, aka. festival of colors (article from Wikipedia). Although it has Hindu roots, Holi is now celebrated by people with all religions (even by people without religion). It will be a good occasion to meet other young Indians (students or not) in Belgium, eat good food 🙂 and maybe play with colors. Of course, you are welcome; just drop a line to the Office Bearers to say you’ll come.

SMC wireless card recognized automatically on a FC4

Since I moved my desk in another room far from the ethernet plugs, I needed a wireless access to the laboratory network (and internet). I tested two PCMCIA card on a laptop with Fedora Core 4.

The first card I found at home was an Acer card without too much information on it (it was sold with my wife’s laptop). When inserted, a lspci tells me that it’s a Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8180L 802.11b MAC (rev 20). But the Fedora Hardware Browser doesn’t recognize it. There is an open project to support this card but it’s still experimental (they are saying it on their own webpage). My lazy nature asked my hand to eject the card. This card is recognized but not working ‘out-of-the-box’.

The second card I tested was a SMC2632W. The strange thing is that a lspci doesn’t give me any information. But the Fedora Hardware Browser recognised the card as a Intersil PRISM2 11Mbps Wireless Adapter.

network cards listed by the Fedora Core hardware browser

The fact that the card is working is further confirmed by iwconfig (it finds wifi0 and wlan0) and cat /proc/net/wireless. But … I don’t have any wireless access point at home (and none of my neighbours seem to have one since I can’t establish a link to any access point). I’ll have to wait till Monday to test and configure it in the lab.

Why bother with denunciations? Just use free software!

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).

first frame of the movie

last frame of the movie

Namur Linux Days 2006: March 18-19th

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.

On the 19th, there will be a more “classical” Linux Install Party (LIP). If you intend to attend the LIP, they ask you to register.

Some thoughts on Saturday session at FOSDEM 2006

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.

At the end of this keynote, someone from the FFII (I think it was Hartmut Pilch) took the microphone for a short, 10 minutes speech. Unfortunately, a lot of people was leaving the room at this moment and we were not able to hear a lot. An indicator that really few people were listening to his speech (or could’nt hear it): at one moment, he made a small joke (something like “politicians aren’t used to listen to peole wearing geek T-shirts, so I am wearing a business suit” but it was more funny) and no one laughed!

We skipped the discussion about GPLv3. In the afternoon, we followed the talks about voice-over-IP (VoIP) in the Chavanne room.

We first listened to Jan Janak talking about SIP Express Router (SER, a SIP server). It was a good talk, a bit too technical for me.

Then we listened to Mark Spencer talking about Asterisk, an Open Source PBX (a PBX is a privately-owned telephone switch). If the room was quite full for Jan Janak’s talk, there wasn’t enough seats for Mark Spencer’s one! His talk was sleek-looking, full of acronyms I even don’t have a clue about their meaning and full of humorous audio clips from a (hopefully false) PBX. But it was still accessible to non-technicians.

Finally, we listened to Jean-Marc Valin’s speech about Speex, an Open Source/Free Software patent-free audio compression format designed for speech. We were about only 30-40 people to listen to his great, technical-but-not-too-much talk. From the human speech specifities to the different compression samples, Jean-Marc Valin explained us how speex processes human speech without too much technical details (even Nandini understood how speex worked in spite of the fact that she is a molecular biologist and have less interest in computer-related things). With simple audio samples, clear charts and block diagrams, his talk was a good one.

As usual, besides the official talks and tutorials, they were “dev rooms” and stands held by some free software projects (*BSD, Debian, Mozilla foundation, Fedora, …). We didn’t had too much time to have a look at them, this year. I guess you’ll find more information on the webpages dedicated to the dev room (or on blogs like Laurent Richard’s one, since he was co-organiser of the GNOME room). A last thought? I think that the free software scene is slowly evolving because, besides the usual geek men in T-shirts, I noticed more 30-40 years old people and more women than in previous editions.

Yes, Trusted Computing is used for DRM

In this blog, Andy Dornan takes us from a simple demonstration of Lenovo laptops new “abilities” to the fact that the real owner of documents with DRM is the software company and not the owner/creator of the document.

You can create a document and claim ownership on it with DRM systems. Unless you can open it with or export it to a software coming from another company, you’ll be dependent on one company to open your document. Imagine you create a text file and protect it with sofware X. If you cannot open it in another text processor/editor and that the maker of X decides that you cannot open your document anymore (for whatever reason: you live in a dangerous “terrorist” country, your name sounds too different, you didn’t pay your monthly fee on time, etc.), your are stuck.

Why do people needs to control who can access to their documents?

I have not lived a long time on this earth but I can’t find a good reason to control access to a document. The documents-themselves do not need to be protected. The protections need to be enforced at the physical access (and/or at the network level).

I thought that one good reason was to restrict access to confidential data/documents regarding health of patients in hospitals. But even at that level, the document is the wrong target. In the real, still paper-based, world, hospitals don’t encrypt data in the medical files. They simply don’t give the key that open the door to archives to anyone. Of course, a malicious key-owner can give/lend his key or lose it ; it’s exactly the same in the computer world: I can give you my passwords or lose the small sheet of paper where it’s written. You can even reproduce my fingerprint (I’m not saying it’s easy).

Finally, I think there are actually enough tools that are free and do not force you to use proprietary tools to encrypt your data (cryptoloop, dm-crypt, GnuPG, …).