Luis VillaRamblings on software, law, and the spaces in between.

I am amused to see that Ximian was not the only software company with ipod-using, non-company-line toeing, sellouts. ;)

After much playing with HEAD gstreamer, and using Uraeus’s nifty script, I was able to convert CC’s ‘Building on the Past’ video into a theora version, with minimal quality loss (only really noticeable in two places) and a 2M decrease in filesize. The project to organize media bits for a liveCD continues apace. Oh, and I got a lot of picture submissions yesterday, but the more, the merrier…

Finally, about that liveCD- the biggest current blocker is that the latest gnoppix builds are very strongly ubuntu branded. I’d love to see some matching session splashes and backgrounds that say ‘GNOME 2.10- powered by gnoppix and ubuntu’, ideally matching the default ubuntu color scheme. But I’m not sure how best to get those, besides beg. :) If anyone has any, or has pointers to where the community artists hang out, let me know :)

So, I’m a student again, sort of. Had the first class in The Technologies and Politics of Control (sort of the canonical Berkman class) tonight- was a lot of fun, not least because Dom is going to take it too. Over beers after class, Dom described the vibe of the profs as ‘libertarian’. After thinking about this a bit, I’d almost go so far as to say ‘utopian’- the Berkman Center is about the only place I know of where there is still a very tangible sense that the complete internet is this new, wondrous place that needs tender care and protection. There are lots of people who still think their particular pieces of the internet are Cool(tm), but Berkman seems to bring all of them together under one roof- lunch had experts in blogging, knowledge taxonomies, e-learning, IP law, the economics of privacy, and technology in the workplace. (And one free software hacker.) That combination of people from across all these different fields creates an outlook, energy, and optimism that is really quite powerful, and to me at least, quite infectious.

[As for the class itself... I probably could have taught the first day's lecture ;) and I've probably read a third to half of the readings for the course already. But I'm excited about the chance to apply myself to these issues in an academic setting- I've never seriously discussed them or written about them outside of this blog and over beers or IRC with Seth Vidal, so this will be a change of pace, even if some of the material is a rehash of iLaw, the Public Domain conference, or my blog reading.]

Hey, all- I’d like to make a picture request of GNOME folks. Specifically, I need pictures from FOSDEM, the Foz do Iguacu conference, the Madrid conference, Concepcion, etc. GUADEC and the Summit are nice, but I want breadth too- finding GUADEC pictures is a lot easier than those other conferences :) Ideally, the picture should have both GNOME contributors (not just rock stars- I have enough pictures of Miguel :) and a GNOME ‘item’ (screenshot, foot on a banner, etc., etc.) somewhere in them, but pictures with either are acceptable. This picture from Foz do Iguacu is a great example- person, banner with clear foot, etc. I want more of these, maybe with slightly better exposure ;)

My plan is to distribute the best of these pictures with a GNOME LiveCD both as a demonstration of the breadth and scope of the GNOME community (again, not just rock stars) and because we need sample pictures :)

Email them to me at gnomepics@tieguy.org, or just email me a link and I can grab them. Thanks!