Hook's Humble Homepage

Linux Magazine issue 118 has just been published and in it my article License That! The European Union can show off with its own free, open source license. [PDF].

It is a short article about EUPL. This is an OSI- and FSF-approved license which was written by and for the EU and is equally legally valid in all EU language versions. Not only does it tackle legal problems of FOSS very elegantly and in a short and understandable way^[1], but is the first ever free license to be written by an international government body.

Maybe one day we will be able to agree on a global (or at least WIPO-wide) public license, which would be valid the same in all languages and in all jurisdictions.

This is my 2^nd article for Linux Magazine and I can say that writing for them is quite a treat.

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[1] It really is very easily understandable and a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the basics of free software.

The 3^rd meeting our Fellowship group was on the 4^th of March and was mainly about organizing the DFD. You can read the full minutes (in Slovenian) on the wiki.

The next — 4^th — meeting of FSFE Fellowship group Slovenia took place on the 6^th of July and although there was only five of us present, it was pretty important.

1. Money Refund — we divided the money we got refunded for the DFD from the FSFE.
2. Structure of the FSFE & Fellowship — I explained what I learnt about the structure of the Fellowship and the FSFE and how they relate to each other to others. Since only those who donate to the FSFE are formally Fellows, strictly speaking most people on our mailing list and participating in our meetings aren't Fellows. But since our Fellowship mailing list, meetings and actions are open to anyone, that doesn't bother anyone really. The main thing is that stuff gets done.
3. Plans for the Near Future — The general vibe is that we would need to be more vocal about emerging privacy and IPR problems and for that that we need more effective communication channels with the outside world. There was a debate whether and how much we should concentrate on Windows/Apple tax and/or si2010.
4. Regular Meetings — We plan to have regular (probably monthly) meetings on a fixed date in the future. We will discuss the exact date after the summer vacations.
5. Censured SourceForge — Rok Papež explained that sf.net follows the US embargo and in general disables downloading of free software in certain countries. This of course goes against the basic ideas of free software. Afterwards a short debate arose on the mailing list as well [start of thread]
6. Digital Agenda, Internet Censorship in the EU — After that I explained a bit about what's happening in the EU concerning censorship (e.g. access to all internet search terms) and the Digital Agenda.
7. ACTA — A short introduction and promise to post short and informative links to the mailing list on what problem we face with ACTA.
8. Better Communication — We all felt that to achieve anything we need better means of communication with the outside world. One of the problems is that for (mainstream) media a wiki page and planet of blogs is not good enough. Apart from the guerilla approach — blog, microblog, mailing lists, social networks etc., a solution would be to make a website with its own domain name where we could post our press releases. We are also planning to cooperate even better with other similar-minded groups on activities that are of interest to both.

   There was also a debate whether local portals where citizens can submit suggestions to the government and to the EU could be of use. Milan Lazarevič commented that in theory the idea of participation via e-government is good, but from his experience in practice it's not worth the time. We'll still keep an eye on it though.

9. Misc. — general chitchat while sipping coffee and juice.

As always the full minutes (in Slovenian) are available on our Fellowship group's wiki page.

Side note: for the past few months the number of subscribers to our mailing list has pretty much stabilised itself to a little over 60.

hook out >> eating chocolate pudding and going to bed...

Since I'm occasionally writing articles for Linux New Media and they have this bogus syntax they expect you to follow when writing articles, I decided to put an end to my suffering.

Most of the time I use Kate for writing articles (I use Vim mainly for administration). Therefore the logical solution was to wrap those syntax rules into a highlighting file for Kate. Now I can finally make heads and tails out of the whole mess!

So, in case you write for any of their magazines^[1], you can now download my Kate syntax highlighting file and enjoy the goodness :]

BTW, if you want to write your own syntax highlighting for Kate, check out its online documentation and/or this article. Taking a peek at the already existing XML files in /usr/share/apps/katepart/syntax/ and ~/.kde4/share/apps/katepart/syntax/ might be a good idea as well

Someday I may even write the same highlighting for Vim.

hook out >> sipping tea and writing an article about FOSS solutions to cloud computing for Linux Magazine

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[1] Linux New Media are releasing a huge amount of GNU/Linux magazines all over the world. Amongst others: Linux Magazine, Linux Pro Magazine, EasyLinux, Linux User, Linux Technical Review and many others.

With my last (under)grad lectures past me, I decided it was high time that I made my first proper Resumé ...so I did!

With great pleasure, I present you with my CV — both in English and Slovenian — which is residing on my brand new "About me" (sub)page.

It was written using the wonderful and awesome ConTeXt and Kile.

hook out >> translating some stuff, slowly going to bed.

Yup, I've changed the theme again, to make it look better in the summer. Enjoy ;)

This time I've decided for: Beach.

As before, you can always change the theme if you have an account created. Now there's a few more summery themes available as well.

hook out >> making his own tea blend and studying

The first Document Freedom Day in Slovenia has passed and it went pretty good.

I know that for the biggest impact I should have reported about it the very same day or at least the next one, but a) I was too tired b) I had to much other important tasks to do and c) I wanted to gather everything so I can submit a nicely rounded off report. Warning: longer post ahead.

The impatient of the more audiovisual persuasion can check out the photos of the DFD cake transfer at the Supreme Court here, the evening event's pictures on Kiberpipa's Flickr account and the lectures and the Q&A session on their video archive. Others read on.

This year in Slovenia we will officially celebrate DFD for the first time!

And although this is our Fellowship group's first action, we plan to make it a memorable one!

During the day we will bring a DFD cake to the Supreme Court of Slovenia (as the representative of all courts) for their exclusive use of open standards and open formats. Not only do use ODF, but have seen its potential as an open XML-based format and adapted the software to fit their use and with it solve many problems and hardships that they otherwise faced.

It's nice to see a branch of government to just get it what the benefits of open source and open standards are. Other branches should really take an example from our courts and follow suite!

In the evening we will host an event at Kiberpipa. Here is the planned timetable:

• 18.00: greeting — Matija Šuklje
• 18.15: "Short introduction to open formats and standards" — Matija Šuklje
• 19.00: "Use of open standards in Courts" — Bojan Muršec and Gregor Strojin, Supreme Court
• 19.45: "Open standards in multimedia" — Andrej Čremožnik
• 20.30: round table
• until 22.00: general merriment ;)

If you are in Slovenia or near it, you are cordially invited to join us!

More on DFD here.

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

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.

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