Personal notes

Nearly one year ago I was moving to Aalborg to start my ESST Master. In the while ten months have gone and I also moved to Maastricht to write my thesis.

Tomorrow I'll leave The Netherlands towards Italy, with a brief and nice stop in Stuttgart. I will stil have to complete my Master thesis, but I hope I'll be able to enjoy soon my summer holidays at the beach, and, although I enjoyed The Netherlands, moving out means a step closer to these long-wait holidays :). 

Finally the release date  has been announced:

17th June 2008

The day Mozilla and Firefox will try to enter in the Guinnes World Record as the most downloaded software in 24 hours.

Here is available a nice screencast showing the new features of Firefox 3. 

Mark Shuttleworth has just posted on his blog the interview he released to the italian magazine Linux-Magazine. The interview should appear, translated in Italian, in the next number of the magazine.

It has a great variety of argument addressed and it gives an updates on Shuttleworth's vision on the directions of Ubuntu and also Free Software in general.

I liked the fact that Shuttleworth still considers Ubuntu a 'smaller' project (at least in scope) than Debian, and that the two project still needs (and I believe always will) need each other:

6) A dirty question from our readers: Ubuntu is really a giant now, are you trying to kill the Debian project?
Absolutely not. I’m a Debian Developer myself, and very proud of what Debian has achieved, and also proud of everything that Ubuntu contributes to the broader Debian project. We consider Ubuntu to be a member of the Debian family, that’s just purely focused on the specific use cases and platforms that our customers want.

Much of what we do in Ubuntu contributes directly to Debian. We lead the packaging of many important pieces of the desktop, and server, and toolchain, and contribute that work directly to Debian. As a result, Debian is updated much faster these days than it used to be without Ubuntu. We have lead many key transitions and always try to collaborate with the relevant people upstream AND in Debian to ensure that the work flows smoothly into those projects. Most DD’s are very happy to collaborate, but some view Ubuntu as a threat, and refuse to collaborate, or make unreasonable demands on Ubuntu because they think “you have money” when in fact most of Ubuntu is volunteer driven.

My vision is that Debian and Ubuntu both grow stronger through good collaboration. I’m trying to have a keynote accepted at DebConf to help make that vision a reality, but so far have had no luck in getting approval. Hopefully, the leadership of Debian will start to come around tot he idea that Ubuntu’s success is very good for Debian.

I also liked his position on Microsoft strategies and voices over an alledged collaboration Canonical-Microsoft. The tone of the answer is 'cold' and gauged. Although Canonical/Ubuntu are in no way comparable (in the market pervasiveness), still Mark feels confident enough to assess and judge Microsoft's strategies as if he'd been a market analyst. BTW his judgements about the Microsoft-Novell deal, MS patent nonsens and OOXML issue, are not so positive:

13) In a interview (http://mybroadband.co.za/nephp/?m=show&id=6672) you declared that “you’d love to work with Microsoft”. Do you want to make another deal following the Novell one or what?
I am very happy to work with Microsoft, or any other company, to improve the state of free software and the software industry as a whole. There are many things that we can collaborate on where we have shared interests – encouraging good telecommunications policy, for example.

But I will not agree to a deal like the Novell one, because I don’t think there is any IP issue in fact, and until Microsoft actually states what patents it is concerned about there is no need for us to take any action. Unfortunately for Novell, I think they have done a deal which gives them a short-term boost, at a very high long term cost. Time will tell.

14) And what do you think about the OOXML standard and the Microsoft Open Promise?
I don’t believe that ISO’s declaration of OOXML as a standard will actually deliver any benefit to users of Microsoft Office. They will still be using a big, bloated piece of software with no competition, that is not-quite-standards-compliant. That’s a pity. Microsoft’s customers had an opportunity to ignite real innovation in the office document space, by encouraging Microsoft to support and existing, open, well-defined document standard in ODF. But they didn’t – Microsoft managed to push enough partners and resellers into the standards process that the ISO decision did not really reflect anything other than Microsoft’s commercial interests.

 

• Netbooks pre-loaded with Ubuntu — Something is moving on the netbook pre-installed side?

• Neelie Kroes: Choosing open standards is a very smart business decision — Kroes keeps hammering on interoperability.

• Red Hat Makes History With Patent Settlement - Compatible with GPLv3

• ISO Puts OOXML On Hold — After 6 formal appeal against the BRM that approved OOXML, ISO got some doubts and decided to investigate at least 4 of them.

Christopher M. Kelty published the book Two Bits — The cultural significance of Free Software. The title sounds promising and i've just downloaded it.

I don't know when I will find the time to read it though. I still have to get a bit spoiled at readingbooks on the screen.

It is released under Creative Commons licence (BY-NC-SA) it is possible to download it here or buy it here

Yesterday, while reading some old articles in Wikipedia I noticed that the website went down for few seconds. For about 20 sec no page was accessible.

Probably not much of an interesting thing, but in more than 3 years I use Wikipedia I never experience such a problem.

Today, I was reading for my thesis Sanger's The Early History of Nupedia and Wikipedia: A Memoir.

The passage that caught my attention is this one:

Beyond this, however, I believe I was given a pretty free rein. So I spent the first month or so thinking very broadly about different possibilities. I wrote quite a bit (that writing is now all lost–that will teach me not to back up my hard drives) and discussed quite a bit with both Jimmy and one of the other Bomis partners, Tim Shell. (emphasis is mine)

 Here, Sanger describes his early work of designing Nupedia, but for a small forgetfulness all that knowledge about how Nupedia's initial conceptualisation is accessible only through Sanger's words and reliability. Which i don't doubt, but this is not the point.
The point is that we can't know how many back ups people forgot to do.

I spent March and April working on the thesis outline, while part of April and May on the collection and analysis of data for my Master thesis.

Last week I started writing it. Well, mostly it was adjusting the thesis outline and setting up the introductory chapter. Ahead are coming some stressful weeks.

The thesis is an analysis of Wikipedia's Featured Articles. I try to highlight the relations existing amongst the technological, social and normative layers of Wikipedia. Intended here as a complex system.

I don't know if it is a good idea trying to resum this deserted blog right now. I'm in the middle of the writing of my Master thesis and at the beginning of a potential PhD proposal brainstorming.

Perhaps it will help me keeping a clear mind during these difficult times, or perhaps it will get soon pretty abandoned again

Perhaps it's worth nothing in this desert blog (I'm the first and main person being absent, here) having upgraded to the newest Wordpress version 2.5.1.

However, I did it and I did it without any major accident

Hope to come back soon with some more postings