Older blog entries for Burgundavia (starting at number 67)

31 Jan 2006 (updated 31 Jan 2006 at 07:22 UTC) »

For those who care about not crashing the aircraft they are on

Heed those warnings and don't run your electronics in the plane. Transport Canada has documented cases of pocket calculators screwing up electronics (primarily navigation and communication equipment), or at least so says my brother, the pilot. Also, as he says "I can't cite, but I believe that the bandwidth that GPS operates in is also very, very susceptible to interference. GPS signals are also very low-powered; GPS antenna are correspondingly sensitive..."

Martin, hope that answers your question.

(Sorry, couldn't resist the title)

24 Jan 2006 (updated 24 Jan 2006 at 08:22 UTC) »

God Bless Canada?

Please no Mr Harper.

And when you go the polls (Canadian only)

Well, it seems another election is upon us in Canada. As I rarely talk about my political views, I guess I should preface by saying this by saying that this will be the only post about those views this year (unless we have another election).

As a self described small-L liberal, I am tormented by this election. The possibly election of the Conservatives and their leader, Stephen Harper, scares me s**tless. Advances in such things as abortion and same-sex marriage might not be and despite the antics of a certain Liberal candidate, I don't think the Conservatives are going to be any better on copyright. Couple that with a little Liberal arrogance and few scandals and I candidate, Keith Martin of the Liberals, whom I like, I just don't know where to vote. NDP is where I would vote in a perfect world, but should I vote Liberal to keep the Conservatives out?

But hey, at least I am going to vote. Are you?

A great fora of numbers

For sometime I have watching how the numbers of people in our forums stack up against other distros. While no number should ever be taken in isolation, together they can probably yield a pretty good idea of how big the community is around each distro.

First I took the top ten or so distros on Distrowatch. I discarded Suse, Slackware and Debian as they did not have alarge centralized forum. Of those that were left, Mandriva, Mepis, Damn Small, Knoppix and Xandros had smaller forums, by any count. This left Gentoo and Fedora.

Gentoo has by far the largest forum of any distro, but this might be due to a large number of users/developers being of the forum culture (as opposed to the mailing list culture that is Ubuntu and Debian).

Fedora and Ubuntu forums stack up pretty much equally when you look at all numbers except one. Fedora typically has about 6 times the number of currently active users as the Ubuntu forums, with the vast majority of those being guests. Very odd. A better statistician that myself will have to explain that.

11 Jan 2006 (updated 11 Jan 2006 at 01:20 UTC) »
More on Flash

Zack says "Not having an open library fully implementing SWF is not a problem." After that rather bizarre statment, he then says some really really smart things about competing and good UIs.

Why is that statement bizarre? Because having a free flash player is not really about competing, which is the gist of the rest of his statement. It is about caring about your users and their freedom. That is why we are here, after all, right?

Gnash != GPLFlash

It seems that FSF released a free flash player today. However, this means we now have three free flash implementations: SWFdec (LGPL), GPLflash and this new Gnash.

Bah.

9 Jan 2006 (updated 9 Jan 2006 at 06:39 UTC) »

Google Juice

One bored moment this weekend I decided to google for "linux desktop". Then I realized that there was something wrong: No Ubuntu in first 20 hits. Instead we have many fine other distros (Novell Linux Desktop, Linspire, Xandros, Foresight, and Mepis), Asa's piece on why it is NOT ready, the OSDL page and a few news articles.

But then Brian Shumate pointed me to that googling for gnu/linux desktop get, in order, a non-official Debian survival guide, Libranet, and then wonder of wonders, us and our KDE brethern. Despite what RMS might want to believe, the world thinks of it as Linux and not GNU/Linux, so that doesn't do us much good.

So go out there and lets push us up the rankings. Lets make our favourite linux desktop rock!

8 Jan 2006 (updated 8 Jan 2006 at 12:28 UTC) »

How to kill a project

For sometime I have followed the development of UFO:AI. It looked like a great open source clone of UFO:Enemy Unknown (also known as XCOM:UFO Defence) , a game produced by Microprose in the 1990's that still enjoys a cult like following. UFO:AI took the best bits of UFO:EU and then ported it to the Quake 2 engine. Seems like a great strategy for world dominiation. And then they stopped releasing anything. Oh, and they also actively refused help. Yes, they have actively turned away people, even those who set up a friendly fork with an SVN server. Anyway, the game is great fun, if unfinished. Do try it out.

Unexpected Ubuntu

In my many web wanderings I come across any number of things, most not related to Ubuntu. What is interesting is when you run into Ubuntu in completely unexpected places. For instance, today I was following a link from The Linux Games Tome's forums and I saw this cool blog on making a graphical Interactive Fiction game. Funny thing was, I didn't even recognize the brown theme, because it is so natural now. It wasn't until I saw the Ubuntu logo on the applications menu that I clued in. So enjoy the unexpected Ubuntu.

4 Jan 2006 (updated 4 Jan 2006 at 07:29 UTC) »

The problem of data

As someone who dabbles in GIS stuff, there is a constant problem with FLOSS GIS: There isn't much free data, which makes all those fancy free tools pretty much useless. So if you own a gps, head over to the Open Street Map and lets solve this no data problem.

58 older entries...

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!