Where law and open source get together for a nice cup of tea.

Change of license: CC-BY

Posted 10. March 2010 - 19:19 by Matija Šuklje

After quite some thought I've decided to change the license of my homepage and blog from CC-BY-NC to CC-BY.

hook out >> busy with DFD, the FSFE, baking croissants and studying

Birth of a new emoticon set: OpenHeads

Posted 8. March 2010 - 0:39 by Matija Šuklje
  • Computers and IT:

As promossed, my new emoticon set — OpenHeads — has launched on KDE-look. There is also an official OpenHeads group on identi.ca for updates and comments.

The goals of OpenHead are:

  • cleanliness;
  • fitting nicely with the text;
  • small size; and
  • feature parity (as much as possible) with typed emoticons — i.e. only emoticons which make sense when typed will be included.

For now I only launched the black 22x22 version, others may follow. The current release should work on KDE/Kopete as well as Pidgin. If there is demand, Adium support may be included later on.

Joined identi.ca

Posted 30. January 2010 - 18:28 by Matija Šuklje

It has finally happened — I succumbed to the microblogging craze!

Until now I never felt any urge to use a microblogging platform, because I think that if something is worth telling, you should tell it right and that SMS'ing the world in general is rather stupid. The only real use I can think of would be to join a group you belong to communicate there when writing a blog post or e-mail would be too much.

So, now that I plan to actively participate in FSFE (and hopefully FSFE Slovenia soon) and therefore found a use for it, I created an identi.ca account.

This being said, I still think people are (ab)using this medium way too much for just outright garbage...

hook out >> trying to figure out how to get Gnash to work in Konqueror

New e-mail address

Posted 22. January 2010 - 15:17 by Matija Šuklje

Since today, my default e-mail address is coherent with my domain.

When e-mailing me, please use the following form:

<name> [at] <surname> [dot] name

hint: my website's URL is 

<name>.<surname>.name

hook out >> making some Iranian tea and studying

Spam testing

Posted 25. December 2009 - 16:05 by Matija Šuklje

I've recently added the Spam module to my website and I recieved a report that it rejects normal comments.

The thing is that I'm still learning its ins and outs and that the Basyesean filter hasn't learnt much yet and some false positives and false negatives are bound to happen for some time now.

If there you experience any problems with it, please submit the feedback to me or contact me.

Update: it seems there's a problem with my installation, so I'll disable the Spam module until I fix the problem ...terribly sorry for the inconvenience. Commenting should work normally now.

hook out >> writing Christmas cards and sipping tea

Comments on the leaked EIFv2 draft

Posted 28. November 2009 - 16:00 by Matija Šuklje

This month a leaked draft of the revision of EIF has shook the FOSS world.

Having read the initial EIFv1 and lectured and written already about it and its implications, I feel I can safely share a few of my thoughts on the official draft of EIFv2 from the summer of 2008 and its recenlty leaked later draft.

While reading the 2008 draft of EIFv2 I had the impression that some very much needed work was done towards clearing up some of the terms that EIFv1 kept a bit murky and ambigious. Also I was quite happy with the fact that the European Comission would now require the EU member states to implement a policy that is in terms with the EIF and that all public tenders have to comply that policy — (if that draft was final) effectively meaning that all public tenders would have to prefer open standards/formats and open source solutions whenever possible.

I knew this was only a draft and it even showed some weaknesses even then, but little did I (just as anyone else, I suppose) suspect that the public consultation[summary] [comments] would lead to such drastic twist of events! As FSFE states in its critique "FSFE: EC caves in to proprietary lobbyists on interoperability" and analyses in detail in its comparative analysis "EIFv2: Tracking the loss of interoperability", if the draft would be approved as is leaked, it would mean a heavy draw-back on interoperability an openness on several grounds. Here is just a short summary of FSFE's points:

  1. the original draft had a very strong pro-standards position, while the leaked draft undermines the importance of standards and leaves place for non-standard solutions
  2. while the original draft emphesised the open standards and gave a pretty good definition of what they are, in the leaked draft the "principle of openness" can be applied in full or not at all
  3. the spectrum of "openness continuum" is too wide in the leaked draft
  4. the public consultation phase was not done nearly as transparent as it should have and the leaked draft shows that from the numerous comments the EC only took notice of one loby group — namely, the BSA

I strongly suggest you read the rest of the critique and analysis yourself, because it includes some other points that I will not add anything to here.

Apart from what FSFE is warning about, I noticed another aggravation. As already mentioned, in the 2008 draft of the EIFv2 it was clearly stated in its recommendations that the member states should both integrate EIF into their national policies (i.e. NIF) and use those to comply to EIF in their public calls-for-tendee. This measure would give some — even if only slightly — more strength to the document itself apart from some political (quasi)obligation.

What happened in the leaked draft on this matter is two-fold:

  • The recommendation to member states to comply to EIF (via their NIF) in their calls-for-tender has vanished from the text.
  • If the first draft of EIFv2 did not limit itself to a specific layer of communication and was to be broadly applied to both national as well as EU level, the leaked draft only talks about cross-border communication. Which could well be interpreted as that on the national level the EIF does not need to be considered at all.

These changes would not only give the member states (and in fact the lobies within them) a bigger freedom in deciding on how much of EIF will they effectively use, but therefore — which is even worse — cause the member states to implement formats and solutions that are not compatible or interoperable. This in turn means that if the leaked draft is to be adopted, EIF would de facto not ensure any interoperability anymore.

TGJE no. 10 — On music players

Posted 9. November 2009 - 10:06 by Matija Šuklje

Having listened to quite a few tracks of music (free and otherwise) and tested quite a few of music playing applications, I decided to comment on those that I used the most.

This being said, what I look in a music player is organising music, scrobbling (i.e. sending track info) to Last.FM, integration with remote resources as much as possible (e.g. Jamendo, Magnatune et al.) and obvously playing music ;)

Herrie — a minimalistic CLI media player with a simple ncurses interface and is able to scrobble. So far this is my favourite CLI player and quickly took over mp3blaster's role. No integration with any netlabels though.

SongBird — I used it via PortableApps when I was forced to use Windows XP on a borrowed laptop and frankly, I don't like it much. The interface is borrowed from iTunes and just doesn't work for me (or big collections in general!). On several occasions I had minute-long lags during playback and even crashes! It does have a Jamendo plugin though, but I find its behaviour odd — it opens up Jamendo's website within the player and then only plays the tracks within its own player instead of the Flash player. The huge downside is that you can only have one album in the playlist; on the other hand it does enable you to rate and comment the album directly on the website. It does sport many plugins because of XUL though and scrobbling works as well.

Rhythmbox — although the interface is very much not to my liking, I was happy to switch to it from SongBird when I got myself an Ubuntu LiveCD (yes, I'm still laptopless! XD). Scrobbling works. Jamendo and Magnatune plugins are included (by default?) and work. There are two problems that I have with its Jamendo plugin though. Firstly, the plugn is handled as separate collection and you cannot mix online tracks with those on your local collection. And secondly, it loads the whole Jamendo music repository into the playlist and then you can only filter through it using the iTunes-esque system.

Amarok 1.x — Scrobbling works. Interface is OK and is very power when it comes to organising (especially huge) collections. Jamendo support is missing, but Magnatune is there. Plugins to add other remote resources also exist.Mixing the remote tracks with local ones was possible.

Amarok 2.x — I absolutely adore this player! The interface is amazing with tons of extra information at hand. In the latest release both the interface and the playlist info can be pimped out to the maximum. Scrobbling, of course works. What I particularly love about it, is that it doesn't differentiate a remote from a local collection — meaning that I can simply combine tracks from my HDD with those on Ampache, Jamendo, Magnatune, Free Music Charts, Last.FM recomendations and even streams and "podcasts" in the same playlist. The Jamendo plugin is not the best yet though — it could use some spit and polish to come at least on par with the Last.FM plugin.

In my time I've used other players as well (Juk, XMMP and its clones, etc.), but that has been so long ago that I won't bother spilling pixels over them...

hook out >> @faculty & birthdaying some more ..."die mauer muß weg!" ...oops, have to run I'll miss the lectures otherwise!

P.S. This is the last TGJE post that will be promoted to the front page. TGJE will continue in my blog section.

TGJE no. 9 — Joy of discovery

Posted 9. November 2009 - 0:31 by Matija Šuklje

Lately I've been thinkin of what's keeping me hooked to free music — and I found the answer: the joy of discovery!

What I mean by that is probably best explained by examples.

In the MTV era that we (still) reside in, "discovering" an artist means pretty much being the first bloke or lass in your class who saw the video on the music channel. Then you can brag: "Aye, I've been a fan of Bloc Party even before they were hip — I saw the video to Banquet just when it came out on MTV" ...yeah, I've been like that as well ..and, yeah, it's not really thrilling.

Now let's see how I find new free artists nowadays by looking at two examples that lead me to discover uncharted seas of music.

First, a (for me) very typical "Jamendo" scenario:

  1. I was browsing along the Jamendo website when I saw an interesting cover randomly appear in the player applet.
  2. I clicked "play", I liked the song and clicked on the album's link, which lead me to Team9's profile page.
  3. Listening to the rest of the album I fell in love with it and wanted to learn more about it and see if there's more! Sure enough there was a link to the band's/artist's website.
  4. On the website I found a huge amount of awesome mashups, which of course they couldn't publish on Jamendo. I listened to them and downloaded some ...but more importantly for this example, I looked at their links to affiliates and artists they (actually Team9 is just one guy) like(s).
  5. A name cought my eye, I followed the link and landed on the website of World Famous Audio Hacker.
  6. There I saw even more mashups (including the famous 8 Minutes of Madness) and a link to a brand new project/album — Tron 1.5. Seeing the movie as a kid, it brought up nostalgia and I checked it out
  7. Needless to say, I checked out the (surrealistic prank) album and amongst the artists listed and linked I saw Solcofn, Tiger Mendoza and Lilith the Kitten, all of whom I liked a lot on Tron 1.5.
  8. More link-clicking and more great music revealed — Lilith the Kitten has some mean remix of Prodigy's Invaders Must Die and some very nice tracks completely of her own as well (I adore Jewelbox); Tiger Mendoza also has some nice tracks on his self-titled EP on BandCamp; while apart from his music Solcofn has lead me to discover a new netlabel — Corpid, which I'm still dicovering.

The next example goes around BlocSonic — another netlabel I frequent:

  1. While checking out the (then) newest release of NetBloc — BlocSonic's regular compilations of music from other free netlabels — I heard an enchaning pop song called Animals.
  2. BlocSonic offers direct links to both the artists' and their netlabels' (if they have one) websites, but at that time I just wanted to see if Entertainment for the Braindead (that was her name) has any other songs available and if they're equally as good.
  3. Sure enough on her website there was a videospot and a short discography — it turned out that she hand-crafts every single CD's art, making it unique and doesn't want in return anything more then enough money to cover the material costs of the CD and the cover. Wow!
  4. Browsing around on her website I found a link to her netlabel (because I didn't bother to click on it on BlocSonic) — Aaahh Records. Surprisingly it's a netlabel that specialises on acoustic pop/rock, which is not easy to come by nowadays.
  5. On Aaahh Records I also found The Wind Whistles — not my favourite, but very good acoustic pop/rock all the same.

And least, but not least, how I discovered one of my favourite artists in the world — Jimmy the Hideous Penguin:

  1. I was bored and, being a Linux geek, searched for "penguin" in Amarok (it uses Jamendo API) and Jimmy popped up. Imagine the chances! I laugh a little inside by only thinking about it :]

Yes, it takes some more work (although less time) then sitting hours on the couch gawking at MTV and being fed the latest ads and fads. But, boy, was it worth it! Not only is there (again) the thrill and joy of discovering completely new artists and new music, but you have more control, make your own choices, find out what you like and what not. And, yes, being able to talk with the artist instead of only about his/her music, is a lot more fun!

Bottom line: finding free music is a lot more thrilling and gives a lot more joy of discovery! Not because of the (lack of) price, but because of the artists' freedom of speech, the listeners' freedom of choice and the freedom of both to communicate.

hook out >> happy birthdaying and going to bed

P.S. I've decided to slowly stop promoting TGJE blog entries to the front page and keep them in the personal blog area only. Both to keep the front page cleaner and to keep TGJE more personal by being less tied to (self-imposed) rules by which I try o keep the front page more serious.

Matthias Ettrich awarded the German Federal Cross of Merit

Posted 7. November 2009 - 8:55 by Matija Šuklje

Yesterday Matthias Ettrich, the founder and inventor of KDE (as well as being my namesake) recieved German's highest civil general decoration — the German Federal Cross of Merit.

This medal was awarded to him in recognition of his work spurring innovation and spreading knowledge for the common good by contributing so greatly to FOSS.

Not only is this a big recognition for Etterich, but also symbolically for the whole FOSS movement.

More on KDE.News

TGJE no. 8 — Tron lives!

Posted 26. October 2009 - 9:43 by Matija Šuklje

Many geeks will remember Tron to be a nice great movie from the 80's.

A few, will not be surprised that there is a new Tron movie scheduled for 2010, called Tron: Legacy.

Even less people will know that this is actually not the second, but third Tron movie Disney and Pixar planned. The sad truth is that at the end of the 90's there were already plans to make a sequel, called Tron: Rise of the Virals, but eventually funding for it stopped.

What's awesome though is that the (unfinished?) OST — Tron 1.5 — is therefore available for free (as copyleft, I suspect) on Tron.FM ! There is even some commentary and links about the failed attempt of Tron: Rise of the Virals. Of course, the soundtrack is at times lively and at times ambiental electronic. What else would one expect from a Tron movie ;)

What surprised me is that I found on the track list some familiar artist like Team9 and World Famous Audio Hacker (of 8 Minutes of Madness fame with 54 tracks in a single mash-up).

An(other free) artist that I have not previously known of has surprised me quite a bit though — namely Tiger Mendoza or Lilith the Kitten.

Another fine find of free music and a great example why freedom matters. If the artists were not into copyleft, we would all be depleted of this album, just because Disney stopped funding a movie ...as absurd as that sounds ;)

hook out >> lectures, here I come