wjsullivan.net

I just got my tickets to come from Seattle to the FSF's LibrePlanet conference in Boston.

I'll be in town from the evening of the 16th till the morning of the 23rd.

Let me know if you'll be around and want to get together. And please make sure it's warm by the time I get there -- I don't even know where my heavy coat is anymore.

The themes here seem very...uncreative.

World Intellectual Property Day - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Apparently, being on April 26th, it shares the esteemed company of Confederate Memorial Day.

Turnpike pizza in Seattle has Daiya vegan cheese, even though it doesn't seem to say so on their (very minimalist) online menu. I ordered the veggie combo from there yesterday (delivery!), and was pleased. It's not as good as Pizza Pi, but then Pizza Pi is more expensive and doesn't deliver, so there's plenty of room for both in my life.

It's nice to live in a place where I get to see mountains again. They are particulaly clear today, even though the pictures aren't.

I don't buy a ton of domains, but when I do, I get them from Gandi. I support them primarily because they use and contribute to free as in freedom software. Also, even though they are more expensive than other registrars, they are generally not jerks and tend to not treat their customers like garbage.

To celebrate their 10th birthday, they are giving away domains via promotion codes distributed to their current customers. So if you have a Gandi domain, you can sign up to receive your code(s). The number of codes you get depends on how long you've been a customer -- I've only been with them since 2004 so I get 5 codes; people who have been with them since 2003 or before get 10.

They don't actually give them out until March 1st. If I have extras to give, I'll say something about it here.

Today I added (add-to-list 'gnus-buttonized-mime-types "multipart/alternative") to my Gnus configuration. The effect of this is to put a nice button at the top of each message I can click to view any HTML part, while keeping the default as plain text. I don't often directly read or write HTML mail, but at work I do sometimes need to proofread HTML mails.

I've done this manually more than a few times. Nice to have a better tool for it.

Dirpy - YouTube to Mp3 Converter

I also wrote to them to ask that they release their source code, perhaps under the GNU AGPL, and that they offer Ogg Vorbis as the converted format.

This is really something -- arguing that countries whose governments have pro-FLOSS policies should go on the USTR's Special 301 list because such policies are bad for the software industry and its intellectual property.

Yes, the same "property" that exists only by virtue of artificial government subsidy via temporary monopolies granted through patents and copyright.

But don't you dare give a "subsidy" for a different model of software development; certainly not one that is pro-sharing, obviating the need for these ridiculous bureaucratic processes, and is actually consistent with democratic ideals, public interest, and government autonomy.

Oh, and right, FLOSS doesn't do anything for the software industry -- that's why nearly every (perhaps every) electronic thing that people have been excited about in the last 10+ years is built on a core of free software -- TiVo, your television, the Kindle, the iPad/iPhone/iEtc, Android phones, netbooks, this company called Google, this thing called Firefox, this web site called Wikipedia, this operating system called GNU/Linux. Not like whatever makes certain people the most money should determine international policy anyway, but you get my point -- leaving aside the obvious contributions of FLOSS, even things which appear proprietary depend on or were bootstrapped by FLOSS.

Countries with pro-FLOSS public policy should go on an honor roll, not a bully hit list.

Encouraging open source could land you in trouble « TechnoLlama

As an antidote, you might like to read the FSF's comment, which I helped a bit with, and also the one submitted by EFF and Public Knowledge.

Update 2010-02-26: A recent article in the Guardian about this has been getting a lot of attention.

I've made a simple start at porting Debian's NetHack packages to Maemo 5 for the Nokia N900. For now there is just the console interface. It and the nethack-common package are now available in the extras-devel repository.

http://maemo.org/packages/view/nethack-common/

http://maemo.org/packages/view/nethack-console/

The packages are "optified" so they don't occupy space on the root partition.

Note that right now the default shell does not include /usr/games in $PATH, so you'll need to either add that or just start it with /usr/games/nethack.

Bugs can be filed and files downloaded at the Garage project page.

I'm sorry I won't be in Boston/Somerville for the opening of this new vegan cafe. I went to its predecessor (Vej Naturals in Malden), and it was tasty. I'll be checking it out when I'm in town in March.

The Pulse Cafe

I'll be in San Francisco this Wednesday morning for the Defective By Design anti-DRM protest at Apple's launch event. We'll be out having fun handing out flyers, doing a little theater of our own, and talking to the media and people walking by about the danger DRM poses to the public's freedom and the history of Apple's support for it. We'll be focusing especially on the App Store model used on the iPhone (and possibly used on the tablet to be announced on Wednesday), which prevents users from installing any software from anywhere else.

We're starting at 8:30am (that's not our fault -- Apple is starting at 10am so people will be arriving by 9am I'm sure) outside the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater. A perfect time for stopping by on the way to work :).

Here's the full background info.

If you can come out and support the effort, please let me know at info@defectivebydesign.org.

We'll be meeting up outside the Theater entrance. Stay tuned to http://identi.ca/dbd for updates. Hope to see you there, and bring some friends!

I finally got around to installing GNU Emacs on my Nokia N900.

The instructions and package there worked for me. I did not find it necessary to do the maximization fix -- after turning off the tool bar, the minibuffer was visible for me.

Remapping the keyboard using the file provided does seem to cause some problems. The function key is no longer sticky, so I have to hold it down along with the letter key to get a number. That's not so possible when trying to type the number 1. Will have to look into that.

Now, to get Planner mode working well on it.

And yes, I will be trying out reading my mail using Gnus on it.

Click to reveal Amazon's latest innovation in shipping. The screenshot was taken Wednesday, November 18th, around 12:30am.

I ended up being in Logan this morning longer than expected, so I was poking around Terminal C looking for some vegan friendly food, without much hope for anything better than trail mix.

Turns out the Boston Back Bay Cafe (kind of by Gate C15) carries some of the "Macro and Vegetarian" prepackaged stuff. They had the Vegan Pad Thai, Vegan Dumplings, and Vegan Udon Noodles. Supposedly they can be eaten hot or cold. I've had their stuff before and it's not my favorite, but in the airport, I'll take it.

Unsurprisingly, the cashier didn't know how to ring them up.

There must be more like this in his collection -- the unspoken speech written for Nixon by William Safire to be delivered in the event that Armstrong and Aldrin couldn't return to Earth.

This article confusedly says, "Will carriers be willing to subsidize the N900 and its locked-down Maemo OS?" The "lock down" that it's describing refers to the comments by a Nokia executive saying that Nokia would not do customizations for carriers. These customizations are usually proprietary, often relating to locking the phone to their network, or implementing carrier-specific features like "MyCrap" or whatever. Nokia's comments were in contrast, for example, to Google's Android operating system, which is licensed in a way to specifically allow proprietary software extensions on top of a free software core. So apparently, unlocked is the new locked. Or something.

Unfortunately, Nokia quickly retracted the executive's comments anyway, saying they are leaving room for the possibility of such customizations.

In other phone freedom news, Palm has been working hard to demonstrate the fundamental incompatibilities between free software and the exclusive "app store" model of software distribution.

My OpenMoko FreeRunner has still been having some voice quality issues in low-reception areas, but is otherwise working quite well running the SHR distribution. Unfortunately one of those low-reception areas is my home, but I've been compensating for that by using the free VOIP software Ekiga and Asterisk more when I'm home.

Good to see that the dudes who ran off with one of the cash registers from Dave's Fresh Pasta have been apprehended. I apologize for blaming it on the return of the students, since I don't think these guys even qualify as students of life.

As the men fled in a car toward Teele Square, they were pulled over by police. A witness identified Doane and McCarthy as the men who busted into Dave’s Fresh Pasta. An open 10-inch folding knife was found in the car the men were in, police said.

McCarthy was arrested and charged with possession of a dangerous weapon, destruction of property over $250, breaking and entering in the nighttime for a felony, operating a motor vehicle with a suspended license and larceny over $250. Doane was arrested and charged with receiving stolen property over $250.

Also, it's funny to me that when people break the law in one major way, they seem to often break it in other random incidental ways. If you're going to drive around robbing places, how about having a valid license and not carrying a weapon? And does this mean that it's a worse offense to break into a place at night?

Now if that second cash register could be returned, I'd appreciate it. With only one, the line has been looonnnngg.

The FSF is not "open source." Any ideas where this Google description comes from? It certainly doesn't come from the web site it's supposedly indexing and presenting.

I'm happy to see that Allston's TJ Scallywaggle's (which as I understand it is actually closed despite the fact that their web site still pretends that they are open and asks you to donate to them) is reopening under a new name "Peace o' Pie" and will continue serving vegan pizza.

Vegan pizza - returning soon to Allston!