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Rasberry Pie and GreenArray Tea?

Posted 14 Mar 2012 at 19:51 UTC (updated 15 Mar 2012 at 14:07 UTC) by badvogato

Chuck Moore had some thoughts on the number Pi.
The Brits took the hint and push out the door their cheap Rasberry Pi
While I was sipping on my delicious & priceless Green Tea ,
pondering if the number Tau equals twice as much as Chuck's Pi.

Read more... (7 replies)

Advogato Master MichaelCrawford Needs Your Support in Court!

Posted 23 Feb 2012 at 07:30 UTC by MichaelCrawford

"This is going to sound really weird. Please understand that I am mentally ill; it's my job to be weird."
-- Jonathan Swift, The Convenient Hallucination

State of Washington v Michael David Crawford

Omnibus Hearing, Thursday, February 23, 9:00 AM, Downtown Vancouver, Washington

THAT IS TEN HOURS FROM NOW, FOLKS!

This Entreaty Goes Out to the Pacific Northwest Free Software, Open Source, Creative Commons, Slashdot, Mobile Portland as well as the
- NSFW! - Portland Sex Trade - NSFW! - Communities, Begging You to Demonstrate to Judge Stahnke That I, Michael David Crawford, Have Strong Ties to the Vancouver, Washington and Portland, Oregon Communities.

Simply showing up in court on my behalf, without even speaking, let alone testifying in any way, might convince the Honorable Daniel Stahnke that I do not present a risk of Jumping Bail.

That would enable my desperately-anxious Mother, Patricia A. Crawford, to obtain a refund of the $50,000.00 Cash Bail she posted on my behalf, after I was arrested for living by the words of The Reverend Doctor Marting Luther King Junior, by complying with my "moral responsbility to disobey unjust laws", thereby staging a sit-in between the two halves of the folding front door the C-Tran #105 Salmon Creek Express at the Salmon Creek Park-and-Ride just North of Vancouver, for which I was arrested for Misdemeanor Disorderly Conduct on Friday, January 13.

I myself dialed 9-1-1 that the Emergency Dispatcher send a Deputy who might supply the belligerent and slothful bus driver and I some manner of amicable solution to our dispute over my assertion that he Suffered the Deadly Sin of Sloth for having the bright idea that it was better to drive a late bus completely devoid of passengers so as to make up for his extreme tardiness, than to transport two freezing cold public transport patrons who'd been waiting for the #105 for more than an hour.

For my contribution to today's social discourse, and despite my cry of "Don't Tase Me, Bro!", Clark County Sheriff's Deputy Prather - who I really do think the world of - jolted me once with his Taser, then, upon finding I was a Trained Professional Driving on a Closed Course - that is, that I am a Physicist and my father was a Electrical Engineer, and so do not regard even 800,000 Volt Alternating Current electrical shocks to not be that big a deal provided that shock's current is quite low, Tased me yet again, only to find me still refusing to get off that Damn bus unless he and Deputy Kerr grant my reasonable and polite request to place me under arrest.

I apologize, I would have posted early this morning had I not been hauled to a Nuthouse in an Ambulance because I'm the kind of Right-Thinking Citizen that rings up Emergency 9-1-1 when he has reason to believe that a profoundly psychotic person is well on their way to committing Vehicular Suicide or even Manslaughter.

Don't Even Get Me Started.

It Breaks Down Like This:

Read more... (11 replies)

Ash Wednesday

Posted 20 Feb 2012 at 05:43 UTC (updated 22 Feb 2012 at 13:03 UTC) by badvogato

To celebrate Ash Wednesday this coming Wednesday, Feb 22nd, 2012, I had a good start in translating T.S.Eliot's 'Ash Wednesday'. I am rather pleased with it so far

Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

Read more... (8 replies)

LISA'11 Boston Dec 4-9

Posted 2 Dec 2011 at 16:14 UTC (updated 2 Dec 2011 at 16:32 UTC) by sye

Are you going to this fair ?
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme.
Remember me to one who lives there
he once was a true love of mine.

Read more... (6 replies)

Software Freedom Day 2011

Posted 13 Sep 2011 at 17:49 UTC by StevenRainwater

Software Freedom Day is coming up on September 17. Events are planned around the world in most major cities. If you write free software or use free software, attend your local SFD event. Give a talk, help someone install GNU/Linux, or just hang out with other free software and open source people for a few hours. If you're attending or organizing a Software Freedom Day event, post a reply here and tell us how SFD will be celebrated in your city.
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In Defense of Negativity

Posted 3 Sep 2011 at 17:03 UTC (updated 4 Sep 2011 at 00:00 UTC) by mako

I have often heard criticism of "negative campaigning" in the free software movement. "Negative" campaigns speak out against proprietary software as opposed to "positive" campaigns which instead speak of the benefits of software freedom. This essays unpacks some of the arguments against negativity and makes the argument that negative campaigns, in some forms, can play an critical and important role in free software advocacy.

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Losing lifeblood: Advogato's marginal appeal

Posted 31 Aug 2011 at 10:16 UTC by chalst

Two days ago, gesslein announced his retirement, provisionally at least, from Advogato, saying No one can comment on my posts, and it doesn't seem to be reaching anyone.

Read more... (12 replies)

NHS Scotland Open Desktop Initiative

Posted 4 Aug 2011 at 17:49 UTC by lkcl

This article is written in response to the Question and Answer phase
of the NHS Scotland Open Desktop Initiative.
From the initiative's abstract:


NHSScotland is currently in the process of developing a set of standards to
support the development and building of the NHS Scotland Open Desktop.

The response takes into account the clarification of the initiative,
through the QA session, yet the response is also equally applicable advice
to any organisation wishing to have applications written that run across
a very diverse range of devices and platforms without having to develop
and maintain multiple versions of the exact same software.
Read more... (1 reply)

Evolution of Programming Languages

Posted 13 Jul 2011 at 16:51 UTC by badvogato

read about the sad news that Jeff Fox, Forth advocate, passed away on Chuck Moore's blog.

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Implementing spam protection in Wiki engines

Posted 2 May 2011 at 08:26 UTC (updated 2 May 2011 at 11:35 UTC) by audriusa

Spam is really a problem in many Wiki communities, often forcing at least temporary to restrict editing rights. Most of the recent attempts to find a solution focus around captchas and spam lists. Captchas may be efficient to some extent; the problem is that to make them unreadable for bots, they must be twisted enough to become also difficult for humans to read. Lists seem less and less efficient, often accumulating thousands of entries and still leaving enough gaps for spammers. Spammers frequently use the Wiki search box to check if there is already some spam on the site - this shows that Wiki may be purely maintained and they can add more. Hence it may make sense to implement the delayed indexing but it also delays indexing of legitimate content. Blocking IP addresses is also no longer useful due DHCP.

One of the solutions may be to use combined protection rather than relying on some single "killer" approach. The rationale is to make spammer to invest more and more work into building the spam bot. Requiring a complex bot does not make the attack impossible but may statistically eliminate significant percent of spammers that are not willing to invest enough resources.

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Triolet

Posted 7 Apr 2011 at 19:28 UTC (updated 8 Apr 2011 at 21:48 UTC) by badvogato

I came up with this triolet to add my two cents to a Chinese physicist and poet's view on Oxford debate 'Poetry is beautiful but Science is what matters' :

Verse and song gave birth to thee
fearful mechanical and scientific device
Love's but a dance
of verse and song sublime to thee
A whisper, a glance, this little death --
"Shall we twirl down in Elysian Fields ?"
Verse and song gave birth to thee
fearful mechanical and scientific device

Read more... (4 replies)

Diversity statement for Ubuntu

Posted 9 Feb 2011 at 07:36 UTC by chalst

mdz is drafting, with the help of Valerie Aurora, hypatia, and mako, a diversity statement for Ubuntu, and is seeking comments on the current draft.
Read more... (3 replies)

Bombono DVD reached 1.0

Posted 5 Jan 2011 at 12:21 UTC by murajov

Bombono DVD is a DVD authoring program for Linux. It is made easy to use and has nice and clean GUI.
Read more... (0 replies)

GNU recutils 1.1 released

Posted 23 Dec 2010 at 23:58 UTC by jemarch

I am happy to announce a new release of the GNU recutils, version 1.1.

Read more... (0 replies)

Unicode 6.0 is released

Posted 12 Oct 2010 at 20:25 UTC by roozbeh

Unicode 6.0 was released today. Here is the link to the announcement: http://www.unicode.org/press/pr-6.0.html

The following changes should be interesting to the Persian and Iranianist computing community (based on an original post to the Persian Computing list):

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Piracy and Free Software

Posted 11 Oct 2010 at 16:51 UTC by mako

Over the last few years, many advocates of access to information have gathered and organized under the banner of piracy. Should FLOSS and free culture advocates embrace advocates of piracy as comrades in arms or condemn them? Must we choose between being either with the pirates or against them? I believe that, unintuitively, if we take a strong principled position in favor of information freedom and distinguish between principles and tactics, a more nuanced "middle ground" response to piracy is possible. On free culture and free software's terms, we can suggest that piracy is not ethically wrong, but that it is an shortsighted and unwise way to try to promote sharing that we should not support.

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MongoDB 1.5.7 - 1.6RC2 is out and ready for testing

Posted 31 Jul 2010 at 14:37 UTC by anderson

In a message posted by Eliot at Mongo DB list

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Horseshit on a stick "Can Open Source be secure" BCS riposte

Posted 27 Jul 2010 at 23:50 UTC by lkcl

An article published by the BCS was brought to my attention, and it was full of such glaring omissions and implicit attacks on free software that it had to be dealt with. initially written as a comment, it quickly extended way beyond the length of the original article...

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Coding challenge - reverse a string

Posted 16 Jun 2010 at 15:58 UTC (updated 16 Jun 2010 at 21:55 UTC) by fzort

It's simple. That's the point.

Read more... (17 replies)

Python GUI Proposal

Posted 12 Jun 2010 at 13:37 UTC by lkcl

in the longest thread i've ever contributed to rather than sparked off as a flame-war, i describe why i think that leveraging web browser technology is a much better way to create a widget set.

Read more... (0 replies)

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