El Mundo Libre

... you get 469 spams (and counting) in one day. Up until yesterday I've had maybe five spam comments or trackbacks. I was starting to think other people we're doing something wrong for getting so many. Now I see that it's just a matter of patience. And from what I hear captchas and most other (semi-)automatic countermeasures are pretty useless. The protection features that I have now enabled might make it difficult for disabled people to post comments. My apologies for that.

I want to point out to parents that it is my intention to keep this website child friendly (unless of course the industry that has shown a huge interest in my website will suddenly become very active in the libre software community or decide that Creative Commons is a good idea). So please don't keep your children away from here. You would be depriving them of information that is essential to their development.

Research

I arrived late and left early so I missed a lot of this. The talk I barged in on was about possible threats to libre software projects (intentional or not), like bandwith draining. Radu Pop talked about improving the deployment of large volumes of packages and software updates with peer to peer technology. Debian is already working on implementing this. The Debian package manager will have even more advanced features. The next presentation suggested rollbacks (including configuration files) would be a good idea. The same research project also determined that dependency solving is an NP-complete problem, which means that resolving conflicts is very innefficient. This can be drastically improved with a SAT solver. The user should be able to decide wich solution is preferred (i.e. stable vs. newer).

The seventh edition of FOSDEM is great so far. It's the second time I'm attending. I learned from last year that you don't get a lot out of spending a whole day in a developer room if you don't know much about the subject. That's why I spent more time planning my schedule this year. Last year I didn't make a donation because I didn't know what to expect. This year I wanted to make up for that (and win a Sun workstation ), but I forgot. Sorry guys, next year, I promise.

Last weekend I installed gNewSense, one of the two FSF endorsed Linux distributions. Basically, it's Ubuntu with all the non-libre parts stripped out, including kernel binary blobs. Until a few months ago, I was under the impression that Debian was completely libre and that Fedora followed a similar policy. Then I heard the news that Debian was including binary firmware in their kernel for practical reasons. This was, as always, decided by a vote, which I'm sure was accompanied by some hefty debating. I myself am not so sure if this decision abides by the DFSG. All I know about Fedora is that they don't want to get sued for any patent violation.

I expected this distro to be kind of 'broken', but it's not that bad, really. I installed it on a destkop machine with an Nvidia GeForce3 motherboard in it and so far I haven't had any difficulties. Laptops and WiFi cards might be a whole other story, though. The thing that amazed me was that you can just play most media files and DVD's. Not out of the box, you need to install libdvdcss and VLC or FFmpeg first. It's hard to find solid information on this, but from what I've read Free software projects (unofficially) don't have to pay license fees for MPEG stuff, which includes WMV 9 (aka VC-1). Other things, like libdvdcss, are only illegal in the USA and some other countries. But this remarkably comfortable situation could still change, because the gNewSense team haven't waded through the whole repository yet. They're probably going to be on LUGRadio in the near future. I hope they will clarify some of the issues surrounding codecs.

Oh, and don't forget: this weekend is the awesome FOSDEM 2007. As usual, there is a flabbergasting amount of very interesting speakers. If you are a developer or remotely connected to some Free software project, you should definitely come. If you're not a developer, but interested in Linux and Free software, don't let all the techspeak in the talk descriptions scare you. In fact, this is the time and the place to be for you, because the speakers and the other visitors will be happy to answer any questions you may still have after listening to the presentations.
So be there and/or be square!

Last Friday, my providers DNS servers had died (again). This happens about twice a year, as far as I'm aware of. After a while I'd gotten pretty sick of it, so I decided to keep an IP address of a well known search engine in my wallet. This way I still had some access to most of the Web's information through the search engine's cache when it happened again. It also proved valuable with solving other DNS and Internet access related issues.