Inductive Bias

It's that day of the year again: Time to buy flowers and chocolate for your beloved one. However as with previous years, FSFE wants you to put the day to good use to also celebrate your favourite free software developer (you know, the people who get way more bug reports and complaints than positive feedback): So here's to the people over at Apache, Debian, Eclipse, Elasticsearch, Linux, ZeroMQ and the many other projects that make my life easier: Happy I love Free Software Day - get yourself celebrated!

Executive summary: This is to warn those of you who are subscribed to this blog - the domain to reach this blog w/o redirects will soon change to by isabel-drost-fromm.de - you might want to adjust your rss subscription accordingly.

Longer version: This blog post is scheduled to go live some time after lunch-time on September 12th 2012. You might have heart rumors before - that date Ms. Isabel Drost and Mr. Thilo Fromm are supposed to get married.



There were times when war and conflicts between kingdoms were settled by having children of the reigns get married. Today this old tradition is being continued on a much smaller scale by having a couple get married that is comprised of one half being passionate about Linux Kernel hacking and a strong proponent of GPL/LGPL open source licensing and the other half coming from the Java world, mainly contributing to ASL projects.

As a bit of "showing of good will" both agreed to the proposal of Matthias Kirschner: Girls that are FSFE fellows really should only marry other FSFE fellows. So we got Thilo a fellowship membership setup very quickly.

PS: Now looking forward to dancing into a new part of life this evening ;)

Pps: Thanks to photomic for the DLSR fotos, and to masq for taking the above picture and mailing it to my server. Having a secure shell on your mobile phone rocks!

On August 25th/26th the Free and Open Source Conference (FrOSCon) will again kick off in Sankt Augustin/ Germany.



The event is completely community organised, hosted by the FH Sankt Augustin. It covers a broad range of free software topics like Arduino microcontrollers, git goodies, politics, strace, open nebula, wireshark and others.

Three highlights that are on my schedule:

• I'll make sure I do not miss Thilo Fromm's presentation on building a platform project on top of Open Embedded.
  
• Being an FSFE fellow I'll hang out for a bit at their booth.
  
• On Saturday there's the traditional FrOSCon BBQ - most likely I'll go there. Would be great to also meet some other Apache people there.
  

Looking forward to interesting talks and discussions at FrOSCon.

Free Software developers can be very critical: Every single line of code gets scrutinized, every design is reviewed by several often opinionated people. Even the way communities are supposed to work sometimes gets restricted. Sometimes a simple Thank You can make all the difference for any contributor or committer.



FSFE proposed a really nice campaign: Celebrate the "I love Free Software" - Day on February 14th. In the hope that some of the readers of this blog actively develop or contribute to free software projects - this is a thank you for you! It's your contributions that make all the difference - be it code, documentation, help for users or code reviews.

This year FSFE is once again running their I love free software campaign on February 14th: The goal they put up is to have more love reports, hugs and Thank You messages sent out than bug reports filed against projects.

They have put online a few ideas on what to do that day. I'd like to add one additional option: If you are using any free software and you feel the urgent need to file a bug report on that day, use the opportunity to submit a patch as well: Make sure to not only describe what is going wrong but add a patch that contains a test to show the issue and a code modification that fixes the issue, is compatible with the project's coding guidelines, doesn't break anything else in the project. Any other contribution (documentation, increasing test coverage, help to other users) welcome as well of course.

the evening after FrOSCon - that is on August 22nd 2010 at 7:30p.m. CEST - a combined "FSFE Fellowship meetup/ Apache dinner*" takes place in Tigges in Düsseldorf (Brunnenstraße 1, at Bilker S-Bahnhof). Given it doesn't rain, we'll be sitting outside.

Would be great to meet you there for tasty food, interesting discussions on Apache in general, as well as projects like Lucene, Hadoop or Tomcat in particular. Anyone interested in either the FSFE or Apache is welcome to join us.

One personal request: Somehow, Rainer (Kersten, FSFE) talked me into preparing a talk on what the ASF is all about - would be really great to have more people around share their experience.


See you in Düsseldorf

Title: Chemnitzer Linuxtage
Location: Chemnitz
Link out: Click here
Start Date: 2010-03-13
End Date: 2010-03-14


Next week the Chemnither Linuxtage take place in - well - Chemnitz. It is the second largest Linux event after Linuxtag Berlin. However only obvious for speakers and exhibitors: It is one of those events that are known for its fantastic organisation. Nearly no problems, be it WiFi, admission to the exhibitors area, food or any help in general.

I will be at the event again. You can find me at the FSFE booth, telling people what the FSFE is all about and trying to convince them to become fellows (and yes, since last summer, I am a fellow myself and own one of those really cool green crypto cards).

After two years volunteering as booth staff for the FSFE at the Chemnitzer Linuxtage explaining the advantages of becoming a FSFE fellow I am a fellow myself for two days ;)

I first got in contact with the FSFE through Fernanda Weiden during my time in Zürich in 2006. In the meantime I have learned more and more about the political activities of FSFE: Mostly during the local Berlin meetups in newthinking store and as a booth member in Chemnitz.

If you yourself want to support the work of FSFE, join the fellowship.

At the last meeting of the local FSFE group here in Berlin Sabine Stengel from cartogis gave a presentation on Open Street Map. But instead of focussing on the technical side she described the legal issues and showed the broad variety of commercial projects that are possible with this type of mapping information.

It was interesting to learn of how detailed and high quality the information provided by volunteers really is. I think it will be interesting to see, how the project keeps traction after "everything is mapped" - how it remains interesting to stay involved, to keep the information up to date over a longer period of time.

This year for the 11th time the "Linux Tage" were organized at the university of Chemnitz. Each year in March this means two days devoted to the topic of open and free software. It means an event that is very well organized by a pretty professional team of volunteers.

For the third time the FSFE had its booth at the event - this time run by Rainer Kersten, Uwe Zemisch and me. Recurring questions at the booth were

• "What the hack is FSFE and in which ways do you actually support free software?"
  
• "I am already fellow, you keep telling me there are these great fellowship meetups. Do you know whether there is one near my town? How do these events start? How are they organized?"
  

It was interesting to see that FSFE is one of the few organizations that try to fill the gap between those writing open source software and those actually making decisions that are relevant to the developers but know nothing of writing software whatsoever.

Besides running the booth there was some time left for a few talks. I decided to go to the OpenMP talk. The idea is to develop a highlevel API for marking code passages for parallel execution. It is not designed for parallel programming on clusters but on multi core machines. Somewhat related to the Java concurrency package but far more high level.

The second talk I went to was on personal data protection laws in Germany. One funny piece of information: Even the ministry of justice was sued sucessfully for storing to much information on the visitors of its webpage.

Last talk I went to was on Google Android. To me it looks like a nice mix of completly open source (like Open Moko) and completely closed source. If you need a phone you can use for making phone calls but still want to play with it and be root on the phone (399$ for the dev phone, sim unlocked, only available for registered developers, registration is 25,-$), Android G1 propably is the way to go. The phone is highly integrated with Google applications. The assumption when building it seems to have been, that people are online all the time with that phone.

For coding: Only a Java API is available, no C or C++. SDK is available for Lin/Mac/Win. The emulator does work, only thing it does not reflect is the real speed of the device itself. Each app gets its own VM, Dalvik supports process memory sharing that makes that less expensive. In case of memory shortage apps are killed in order of user impact (empty/precreated, background, service (mp3 player), visible apps, foreground apps). Idea is to kill those apps that are least visible to the user. The programmer needs to take care that apps constantly store state so restarting them gets them up in the same state they were in when killed.

More information online: http://www.htc.com; adoid.git.kernel.org;

All in all: Really nice weekend. Looking forwared to return next year.