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

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.

Wow!

It's pretty rare that my heart goes pouding when I'm playing a game, but this one made it. Digital: a Love Story is quite a unique little adventure game.

It has it all: oldskoolness, hacking. phracking, BBS, AI ...everything. And althought it's pretty linear, at least to me it brought the genuine feeling of being on the edge and sometimes tough decisions to do as well as pretty realistically reenacting the feeling of getting access codes blocked.

Sure, it's all done a very simple way and I , but it's just a game. And as such a very cool one :]

hook out >> just finished the game and feeling good and his alter ego a bit brokenhearted

However we spin it, it can't be denied that the status quo of our (western) society is not perfect. With the massive recession, pollution (and global warming), general unhappiness and stress leading to depression, cancer, low birth rates etc. etc. etc. I think it's safe to say we're sinking ever deeper into the cacky as a society.

I've just stumbled upon this great 10-minutes animated presentation how studies show that money is only a good motivation for pure physical work. On the other hand for anything demanding even a slight cognitive process huge money awards are counter-productive and the true motivations are the working/thinking person's autonomy, its strive to achieve mastery and the feeling of fullfilling a purpose. Which is a good explanation why FOSS exists in the first place and why it continues to grow.

In connection to that Simon Phipps has blogged about why the freedoms FOSS carries are more important even to businesses then the open source development model.

Currently the probably most brilliant project I've seen in years is the Design for the First World [Dx1W] which invites all who are born and living in the so called 3^rd world to help find solutions for problems that bother the developped world. They name e.g. obesity, consumerism, integration of immigration, low birth rate and aging population, but there's more. You could look at that sarcastically, but IMHO these are real problem we're facing and to which our society has so far failed to find working solutions.

The cruel reality remains that the current state of the 1^st world is troubled by many things, doubts arise in both capitalism and individualism and elsewhere as well. It's time to stop, smell the roses and rethink our strategy. And in that, I think, we have to learn from both the FOSS community and the rest of the world.

hook out >> halfway comprehensive news brought to you by the guy who should be studying his arse off right now, but is not :P

Reading so much lately about clouds etc. I started thinking a bit about it and remembered something not too unlike — grids.

I remembered how it used to be cool a few years ago to be the part of a huge network of computers that were together contributing to a better cause. So I decided to install BOINC and reactivate my old World Community Grid account.

A tip for Gentoo users:
If you get a SSL connection error, you can solve this by remerging curl with gnutls USE flag disabbled. So just:

echo "net-misc/curl -gnutls" >> /etc/portage/package.use
emerge -1 net-misc/curl

For now I'm still (only) hanging out on (all) of World Community Grid's projects, but when I find more time I might take a bigger look at what's out there to contribute to and make a better selection. On BOINC's site there's a nice list of projects you can contribute your computing time to.

Hmmmmm, maybe when I'm big and wealthy and will have my own law firm, I'll have a central server/mainframe which will be up 24/7 and by day it would serve the thin clients of the office, while at night crunching numbers in the grid for the public good ...I'd like that :]

hook out >> late at night hanging out on IRC, reading articles on IT and law, sipping tea and watching my CPU crunch those BOINC tasks

Today I had my last lectures ...and with that I mean my last lectures ever^[1].

It's the end of my formal education ...after pretty much most of my life spent in schools, it's over. Just like that.

It feels weird not needing to go to any lectures ever again — not that you have to participate in most of them, but still — be just months away from not being a student anymore, just a few exams and a thesis away from being a lawyer and having to find a job and all that.

It's neither freightening nor exciting ...it's just new and odd. I don't have that “the whole world is your oyster” feeling (yet), but neither do I feel scared ...odd.

Yup.

Most definitely odd.

hook out >> o_o slightly confused sipping tea and setting up BOINC

Ryzom — or the Saga of Ryzom as it was called back when I made an account for it — has become even more open as before!

Since I'm writing this already a day after I got the e-mail, you've probably caught wiff about it in the media[1][2] and wondering what the bloody hack do I mean with “even more” in my post.

The thing is that NeL[1][2] — the engine Nevrax made for Ryzom — has been already before available under GPL. What's changed now ist that all code — engine, server, client, tools etc. — is released under AGPL 3.0 and the artwork under CC-BY-SA 3.0. What's not inculded is the data of the game; so the stories, setting, parameters and quests are still only available to its gamers for a monthly fee.

Before the more official part, I think it's only fair to mention the history of it as well:

• If my mind does not play tricks on me, already early on (2004 I think) there was an official GNU/Linux port of the client available, which was quite soon stopped because of the lack of manpower.
• In November 2006 Nevrax announced they're most likely going to bust and that several companies are willing to take them over. In the same week a bunch former Nevrax employees and other contributors to NeL have started Ryzom.org — a project to “turn [the classic commercial] model on its head and give players control over the virtual world their character's inhabit. [Ryzom.org want[s] to purchase the source code, game data, and artwork, so that [they] can further develop it by placing it under a Free Software license.” To achieve this they planned to gather donations and buy Ryzom from Nevrax and release it as free software. The most notable donation pledge was FSF's 60 000 USD.
• Sadly in 2006 Ryzom.org did not succeed and Ryzom (together with the rest Nevrax) was sold to GameForge. As lady luck wants it, GameForge became bankrupt even before it had fully paid for Nevrax' assets, so these were returned back to the liquidator.
• Fast forward a few years and it's 2010, Ryzom is being “owned” by Winch Gate Properties, code and artwork is free, FSF thinks this is “probably the single-biggest contribution to free software games yet” and a lot of Nevrax' original employees are again active on Ryzom.

So, what's in it for us? Well, anyone can freely use their art and the code (now called Ryzom Core) to build your own game. Then there's Ryzom asking the community to help migrate to CMake, help make a port for GNU/Linux and in general be able to pariticpate with bug reports, patches, wishes and ideas.

For more about Ryzom's new (even more) open plan now, check out their Open Source FAQ, their RoadMap and the forum thread.

From the above mentioned Ryzom.org project quite soon (also in 2006) a more wide-scope organisation called Virtual Citizenship Association popped up which made Ryzom.org as one of its projects. It consists of MMORPG professionals, gamers and people who believe in FOSS. They fight for the rights of virtual citizens (online gamers, inhabitants of virual worlds etc.), that since they're the heart and soul of such online communities and virtual worlds they should have the right to vote, participate with ideas, not have their (privacy and otherwise) rights trampled on by corporations and even have code and artwork freely available for themselves to do their own derivatives. You can read more about it in their social contract. It's current projects include a shared hosting shard for FOSS MMORPG and the colaboration with Second Life's makers and review of the GPL'ing of their client.

À propos, Wolfire games — the guys behind brilliant games like Gish, World of Goo, Aquaria, Penumbra and Lugaru — have just published on their blog that GNU/Linux users contribute twice as much as their Windows counterparts.

Could the silver era of GNU/Linux and FOSS gaming be ahead of us? We can only hope. It's quite clear though that the dark ages are behind us. Thank gods for that!

hook out >> sipping already cold fair trade Ceylon+Darjeeling tea with sugar and having a nice tingling sensation in his tummy that he'll be able to roam Atys again :]

Jamendo has — after previously cancelling it due to financial problems — again started to support Ogg/Vorbis downloads and streams.

The catch is that now the Ogg/Vorbis streaming and downloads are handled by the community. Jamendo provides the software, while the community provides the hardware, hosting and administration of the Ogg/Vorbis servers. If that tickles your fancy, check out (or even join) the appropriate group on Jamendo.

Yaaaaaaaaaaay, now I can again listen to the Jamendo albums direclty from Amarok and feel warm and fuzzy inside :3

That being said, if you haven't yet, listen to:

• Hungry Lucy — an amazing electronic duo that covers many styles of this broad genre. One album can be a very delightful electronica, while another can already flirt with darkwave (e.g. Just Imagine on the album Pulse of the Earth) and trip-hop (e.g. Storm (Carried Away) on Before We Stand... We Crawl). The female vocals are great and the blend into the nice multi-layered music perfectly. I'm particularly fond of To Kill a King with all its remixes on the album To Kill a King. IMHO Hungry Lucy can very well compete with more known artists like Lamb or Hooverphonic.

hook out >> meh, study-wise wasted day ...off to bed and in hope of a better tomorrow :P

P.S. Word on the street is that Jamendo will start using HTML 5 audio tags.

Today is the international Day against DRM.

DefectiveByDesign.org has a nice list of possible actions you could take on this day.

hook out >> new router, net finally working a bit better ...oh, studying, aye, got some of that too :P