This year, FOSDEM didn't completely kill me like last year. Cleanup still turned me into a living corpse (despite the availability of Club Mate -- thanks to the Hackerspace Brussels crowd) but at least I'm back among the living a day after the event instead of a week.
I was very impressed with the network this year. Thanks to AY, Jerome and Peter from Cisco, and of course the FOSDEM networking team. We had to tell people to use more bandwidth. People even came to the infodesk asking us when the network would break because it didn't feel like FOSDEM to them. Yeah...
Taking it a little bit easier over the weekend, I was able to keep an eye on the noise on IRC. This little graph is highly amusing:
Back to work today. Very few days remain in my current contract, but that doesn't mean the work doesn't need finishing. :-)
The video recordings should be online in approximately one week. They will be released in an adequate Creative Commons license.
The above persons can email aburet@fosdem.org to know the details on how to get the books.
Luca was present this Sunday, so he has already received his new phone ... Alex and Michael will be contacted by email.
The FOSDEM 2010 keysigning party is now taking place outside. If you were
in room Ferrer on time, you would have been able to read the master hashes from the projector. If not, find them on https://fosdem.org/2010/keysigning.
If you can't be there, it is always possible to feel the FOSDEM ambiance by having a look at our live sessions in Jansson. Using VLC, you can connect to http://streaming.onsite.fosdem.net:10000
During lunch time, the Minix3 session is played back.
FOSDEM lives thanks to its visitors. Please tell us what you think about it and help us make it better.
(Marks: 5 means excellent, 0 means it was awful)
If you want to have live updates of FOSDEM, make sure you follow us on twitter.
The network is up and running. Enjoy the internet over IPv4 and IPv6
As every year, there will be a FOSDEM beer event on Friday night before FOSDEM (February 5th 2010).
As in 2009, this year's event will take place at the Delirium Café, in a beautiful alley near the Grand'Place in Brussels. In addition to the enormous variety in beers, the location also has enough room to accommodate the vast crowd of geeks we tend to be.
There are people preparing to boycott the beer event just because Google sponsors the free beers.
The boycott would be by refusing free beer. If people do not want free beer that is their own choice.
However (and I'm very clear about this) I will not tolerate flyers to be handed out or any lobbying at the event. If I see people doing this I will remove them and refuse entry.
Google is our sponsor and we are happy they are! If you really want to boycott stay away from FOSDEM as Google also sponsors the event itself!
The event is a private event and supposed to be free, as stated before FOSDEM has no political nor religious goals and will always refuse to be a part of that.
So In case you are still wondering: People actively pursuing a boycott will be removed!
update: I got contacted by Jan saying he will not continue and I'm happy we can resolve this!
To finish our collection of informative interviews with the FOSDEM 2010 main track speakers, we proudly present:
See you at FOSDEM this weekend!
A printable schedule (PDF) is now available. We will also print it out and make it available on boards around the venue, and it will also be available (in more verbose form) in the booklet you can get for free at the Infodesk. But if you prefer to have your own copy around, feel free to download and print. It is also quite handy to have an overview of the 300+ talks scheduled for FOSDEM 2010 !
I'll be going and on Saturday I'm going to do a talk about Djagios!
I'm pretty happy about it and can hardly wait....
afk now, just wanted to let you guys know!
At FOSDEM, we've been trying to accommodate open-source projects of all sizes and maturity to the best of our possibilities. As our devroom capacity is both limited and very well-used, we've introduced new ways for projects to participate: the many stands, the lightning talks and the crossdistro room.
This year, we're adding yet another opportunity: a Birds of a Feather room.
The concept is simple: any project can reserve a timeslot (15, 30 or max. 45 minutes), during which they have the room just for them.
The idea is to hold ad-hoc discussions, meet-ups or brainstorms. It is not meant for talks, so there will deliberately not be a projector.
The BoF room is available on Saturday from 12:00 till 19:00, and is located in the AW building, room 117. It is a cosy and small room with 31 seats.
We will hang an empty schedule on the door on Saturday morning. Reservation is done by writing your details in the timeslot(s) you want to occupy. Maximum 3*15 minutes per project.
One more reason to get up early on Saturday : )
This is the fourth batch of interviews with our main track speakers:
Next week we'll publish the last interviews. Only 9 days until FOSDEM kicks off!
Yesterday night our veterinarian operated Muffin. She had malformed teeth and when we started noticing something was wrong, we went straight to Stefan Haustraete.
He called us this morning at 00:30 to tell us the operation went fine and that I could pick her up this morning.
As operating on chinchilla's is not without risks we were now hoping she would start eating again.
This morning I tried to feed her every hour but she wouldn't swallow.
At 12:15 Muffin stopped fighting and choose to go to Mulan. Her friend that left us a few years ago.
I buried Muffin around 13:00, tears in my eyes and while writing this I have difficulties holding back.
Muffin, I hope you'll find all the raisins you want now. Don't worry we'll miss you and will never forget you. Thanks for letting me be a part of your life!

With six days to go before the key submission deadline, 128 keys have been received by the keyserver. While this is a nice round number, surely we can do better than that. There is still time to submit your key to take part in the keysigning. Why wait? Do it now.
Please remember that the submission deadline is Monday 1 February 2010.
For more information, see http://fosdem.org/2010/keysigning.
Looking through my calendar (yes, I have one) for 2010 this morning, I discovered that I will be proctoring quite a number of BSD Certification sessions this year. Plenty of opportunity for people (you?) to sign up!
Chances are there will be other opportunities throughout the year too.
The way FOSDEM works is a little different from other conferences:
There are a lot more things to see during the conference like keysigning, LPI exams, food, drinks, free transportation,... check out the links in the left menu.
Like previous edition we are proud to announce companies will be able to inform you (our visitors) about job opportunities in Free or open source software. The job corner will be located at the end of the main hallway (H building).
There are some rules on what is or isn't allowed, but the most important is to use your common sense.
Keeping up the appearance that planet grep is a collection of drunks, I accepted Elise's invitation to join a whisky tasting with a group of people able to compress their thoughts into 140 bytes or less.
First of all, I was impressed at the decompressed presence of all participants. They failed to depict even a single stereotype! Except maybe taking pictures of bottles, but I think that can be forgiven. ;-)
I was particularly impressed by the Caol Ila and perhaps even more by the Black Bush. The Sazerac Rye was also highly tasty, but I felt it was no match for the Templeton Rye Brooks introduced me to a while back.
In addition to whisky, the tasting session also included an amazing stilton and cheddar (not of the radioactive orange variety). I found these went very well with whisky.
In the end, I bought a bottle of Laphroaig 19 year old tastiness. Yum!
I don't think this will be my last whisky tasting session.
Onze nieuwe TV ondersteunt rechtstreekse digitale ontvangst via DVB-T en DVB-C. Waardoor je dus met een gewoon analoog kabel-abonnement veel zenders kunt ontvangen (kabel) én de VRT-zenders digitaal kunt bekijken (DVB-T via de antenne).
Pretbederver hier is echter de TV zelf; met slechts 1 coax aansluiting ben je verplicht te kiezen kiezen tussen ofwel kabel ofwel antenne.
Digitaal ‘combinatiekijken’ lukt dus niet zonder extra abonnementskosten en een digibox/digicorder toestel (en bijhorende zapper) van Telenet. Zou je denken…
Het lijkt een goed bewaard geheim, maar Telenet verstuurt de digitale VRT zenders (één+, canvas+, één HD en Canvas HD) over de kabel in onversleuteld DVB-C formaat. Dus geen digibox of digicorder voor nodig op TV’s met een DVB-C decoder.
Bovendien zijn ook de onlangs ‘verdwenen’ analoge zenders beschikbaar als digitale ‘open kanalen’ (CNN, BBC World, CNBC, Arte, Actua, France 3, TV5, TVE).
Ik moest op ons Philips toestel wel een trucje uithalen om één en ander aan de praat te krijgen; eenmaal het toestel overtuigd is dat het geen Belgische maar Zweedse signalen ontvangt, ging het quasi vlekkeloos.
Meer info:
Today we publish the third batch of interviews with our main track speakers. Here is some interesting reading material to make you curious about the main track talks
On my fedora install I enabled compiz, which works correctly. The only problem were the keybindings that weren't responding, no matter to what I set it.
On the compiz irc channel (irc://irc.freenode.net/#compiz) soreau told me to edit the /usr/bin/compiz-gtk file.
You will see in the line where it launches compiz "glib gconf" ond must replace that with ccp. Then it will recognize your settings which need to be configured again!
Now Super+# does switch the desktop! w00t
Certification exam sessions will again be offered at FOSDEM 2010.
The Linux Professional Institute, the BSD Certification Group and TYPO3 will organize exam sessions during FOSDEM 2010. Interested candidates can now register for exams with the respective certification groups.
The schedule for the exam sessions is also available now.
In an effort to make FOSDEM even more paperless, there are now Smartphone applications with the FOSDEM schedule. The features of the application depend on the platform, but they have a few features that make it nicer to use than the paper booklet, such as being able to download the latest schedule, read the descriptions of all the talks or view a map for each event. And best of all, it's not paper!
Banc Card Company / Card Stop schrijft:
Betreft: uw kaartnummer [VISA-kredietkaartnummer]
Beste klant, Onze diensten werden ervan verwittigd dat uw klantgegevens gecomprommitteerd werden door een database hacking in het buitenland.
Teneinde fraude te vermijden vragen wij u (…) om u kaart te blokkeren (…).
(…)
Ondertussen doen de gerechtelijke instanties al het nodige om het onderzoek verder te zetten en de daders te identificeren. In het belang van het onderzoek kunnen wij echter geen verdere details melden.
OK, leuk dat jullie preventief optreden. Maar welke gegevens zijn er precies gelekt? Kennen de ‘hackers’ nu ook mijn aankopen en mijn privé-adres?
Ik neem aan dat “verdere details” zullen meegedeeld worden zodra het onderzoek afgelopen is? Ik had namelijk graag geweten welk bedrijf (al dan niet uit onzorgvuldigheid) mijn gegevens heeft laten stelen.
Alvast bedankt
My trusty x60s is "written off" this year, so it was time to get a new machine. Blatant consumerism and all that.
Unless you drink the Apple kool-aid and are able to put up with their programmer-unfriendly keyboards (though that's gotten better of late), ThinkPads are still the only reasonable choice for a laptop. The logical successor to x60s was the x200s.
While I'm generally very happy with the machine (it's even lighter than the previous one and the nine-cell battery lasts even longer - about 10 hours, PXE just works, suspend/resume just works, it still has a proper nipple instead of a silly touchpad -- basically, it's still a ThinkPad) Lenovo made some really strange design decisions this time round.
I have basically come to terms with the idea of "wide screen", even though it's unnatural and crazy. I find myself using :vsplit more than split, but I still think it's nuts.
This particular model comes with an Ericsson F3507g Mobile Broadband Minicard, which is a very fancy gadget. I haven't tried it yet, because I don't have a spare SIM, but it brings an amazing collection of radios with it. It also adds a privacy concern: "theft deterrents" in the BIOS. I don't particularly want my laptop reporting my location (there's a GPS radio in it) to anyone who listens at all times.
Presumably, these things need operating system support and I can turn them off in the BIOS, but how do I know they're really off? Time to spend some more quality time with the bootloader to make really sure.
Overall, I'm very happy with the new gadget. It does what I need it to do and will presumably do it until it's written off.
I'm still trying to decide what to do with the x60s now. Other than the keyboard, which is predictably beaten up, it's in fairly good shape. Probably donate it to a school or a geek in the larval stages.
For our 10th edition we multiply by 10.
Last week, Blaine Cook congratulated me on Idavoll being in Apple Max OS 10.6 Server, as its Notification Server. I did have contact with Apple's server team ages ago, about them using Idavoll and having added some customizatons, but never knew where it ended up. The list of Open Source projects used in Apple's products confirms the use of Idavoll, and Wokkel, too, as a dependency of Idavoll. Cool!
Idavoll, and thus Notification Server, is a generic XMPP publish-subscribe service, in Python with Twisted. Upon inspection of the code and the differences against the mentioned versions, most of the customizations match those I was already aware of: an SQLite backend, the whitelist node access model and associated member affiliations. The link to Notification Server at the open source list goes nowhere (yet), so I am unsure about the actual license of their additions. I contacted the server team, and will write again if I have more news on this.
At the nice post by Jack Moffitt on Apple's use of XMPP, Kael mentions the presence of more Publish-Subscribe goodness in Calendar Server. This is actually the stuff that uses Notification Server for push notification in iCal. As Jack says, it is truly great to see large corporations like Apple to embrace XMPP like this. I really wish Google Calendar had a similar feature. Now I only get meeting invites through e-mail. Apple's particular use of Publish-Subscribe reminds me of Joe Hildebrand's effort on WebDAV notifications, and I think that there are a lot of applications that could benefit from such push features.
As I touched upon earlier, at Mediamatic Lab, we use XMPP Publish-Subscribe for exchanging things for federation. But we've also built a bunch of interactive installations, most of them dealing with RFID tags we call ikTags. To name two examples, the ikCam takes a (group) picture, uploads it and friends the depicted persons by reading their tags. The ikPoll is a polling station where people can 'vote' on questions with the tag. Typically, there are also publish-subscribe notifications coming out of those interactions, so you can create a live stream of things happening at an event like PICNIC. Combined with the Twitter Streaming API and our own status messages, this creates an entertaining back channel, coincidently powered by Idavoll.
FOSDEM 2010: nearly there... And you can help us make it a success again. Visitors of previous editions will probably have noticed our enthusiastic team of weekend volunteers who help us bend the chaos into order. Feel like helping out this year? Here's your chance: don't be shy and just sign up!
Here is the second batch of interviews with our main track speakers.
We hope this will make you hungry for more...
The stands have been decided since a long time, but we had not yet published the list on our website.
In total 31 projects were selected, you can find a list of them in schedule.
Update: we forgot to list RepRap!
The keynote talks are already in the schedule too, as well as most of the main track talks. We are still making final arrangements, so the timing is missing for some of them. In the coming days and weeks, the schedule will grow to include the devroom and lightning talks.
I am currently working on an small application that needs to load kernel modules at the startup of the Android phone. I could eventually start up an Activity or Service using a trigger on the BOOT_COMPLETED_ACTION, (howto), but this creates some complexity as I need to load compcache kernel modules requiring lots of free memory.
Using a boot script is much better.
(Un)fortunately an application cannot change things in the /system partition as it is mounted in read only.
# mount rootfs on / type rootfs (ro) tmpfs on /dev type tmpfs (rw,mode=755) devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,mode=600) proc on /proc type proc (rw) sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw) tmpfs on /sqlite_stmt_journals type tmpfs (rw,size=4096k) /dev/block/mtdblock3 on /system type yaffs2 (ro) /dev/block/mtdblock5 on /data type yaffs2 (rw,nosuid,nodev) /dev/block/mtdblock4 on /cache type yaffs2 (rw,nosuid,nodev) /dev/block/mmcblk0p2 on /system/sd type ext2 (rw,noatime,nodiratime,errors=continue) /dev/block//vold/179:1 on /sdcard type vfat (rw,dirsync,nosuid,nodev,noexec,uid=1000,gid=1000,fmask=0000,dmask=0000,allow_utime=0022,codepage=cp437,iocharset=iso8859-1,shortname=mixed,utf8)
Fortunately, as I have root support on my phone, I can simply remount the /system partition as rw, do my change and then remount it back to ro.
Here is how you do this in java code:
public static void saveCommandsToBootFile(String script, String filename) {
// first remount filesystem in rw
// save the file
// remount the filesystem back to ro
String command =
"mount -o remount,rw /system \n" +
"echo '" + script.replace("'", "\\'") + "' > " + filename + " \n" +
"mount -o remount,ro /system \n";
executeCommand(command);
}
public static void executeCommand(String command) {
Log.d(MainActivity.LOG_TAG, "Executing the following commands: \n" + command);
Process process;
try {
process = Runtime.getRuntime().exec("su -c sh");
DataOutputStream os = new DataOutputStream(process.getOutputStream());
//DataInputStream osRes = new DataInputStream(process.getInputStream());
os.writeBytes(command); os.flush();
// and finally close the shell
os.writeBytes("exit\n"); os.flush();
process.waitFor();
} catch (IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
} catch (InterruptedException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
Some remarks you could have:
rw. I would need to write the file temporary somewhere else, to then move it back to the final location. This looks a little to complex.script to prevent my echo foo > bar failing.For Inuits I installed a redmine. At first it ran with fcgi and apache but Karl Vogel stated that it would run better on Phusion Passenger.
The Passenger install is pretty basic and explained (all the way at the bottom of the page) on the redmine Howto configure Apache to run Redmine, but they forgot to mention that you need to remove the .htaccess file!
Otherwise you get weird errors like this:
Processing ApplicationController#index (for 84.192.162.68 at 2010-01-08 11:19:21) [GET]
ActionController::RoutingError (No route matches "/index.html" with {:method=>:get}):
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/rack/request_handler.rb:92:in `process_request'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/abstract_request_handler.rb:207:in `main_loop'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/railz/application_spawner.rb:385:in `start_request_handler'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/railz/application_spawner.rb:343:in `handle_spawn_application'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/utils.rb:184:in `safe_fork'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/railz/application_spawner.rb:341:in `handle_spawn_application'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/abstract_server.rb:352:in `__send__'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/abstract_server.rb:352:in `main_loop'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/abstract_server.rb:196:in `start_synchronously'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/abstract_server.rb:163:in `start'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/railz/application_spawner.rb:209:in `start'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/spawn_manager.rb:262:in `spawn_rails_application'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/abstract_server_collection.rb:126:in `lookup_or_add'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/spawn_manager.rb:256:in `spawn_rails_application'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/abstract_server_collection.rb:80:in `synchronize'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/abstract_server_collection.rb:79:in `synchronize'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/spawn_manager.rb:255:in `spawn_rails_application'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/spawn_manager.rb:154:in `spawn_application'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/spawn_manager.rb:287:in `handle_spawn_application'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/abstract_server.rb:352:in `__send__'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/abstract_server.rb:352:in `main_loop'
/usr/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/phusion_passenger/abstract_server.rb:196:in `start_synchronously'
/usr/lib/phusion_passenger/passenger-spawn-server:61
Recently I had to use 3 AD's for the login on one application. The only solution I could think of was to proxy the requests from a local openldap towards the correct AD. Problem lied in that those 3 AD's were on different networks and not linked to each other. Luckily there were no duplicate users on the 3 different AD's
As I had a bit more issues to get it setup here are the steps:
1) create a schema that defines sAmAccountName and add it to slapd.conf:
attributetype ( 1.2.840.113556.1.4.221 NAME 'sAMAccountName' EQUALITY caseExactMatch SYNTAX '1.3.6.1.4.1.1466.115.121.1.15' SINGLE-VALUE )
2) Add following config (change for your needs) to slapd.conf
# settings for AD3
database meta
suffix "dc=ad3,dc=grouped,dc=all"
subordinate
uri "ldap://ip3/dc=ad3,dc=grouped,dc=all"
suffixmassage "dc=ad3,dc=grouped,dc=all" "ou=users,ou=bleh,dc=blah,dc=be"
rewriteEngine on
RewriteRule "sAmAccountName=(.*),dc=ad3,dc=grouped,dc=all$" "%1ou=users,ou=bleh,dc=blah,dc=be" ":"
idassert-bind bindmethod=simple
binddn="dn3"
credentials="pw3"
# settings for AD2
database meta
suffix "dc=ad2,dc=grouped,dc=all"
subordinate
uri "ldap://ip2/dc=ad2,dc=grouped,dc=all"
suffixmassage "dc=ad2,dc=grouped,dc=all" "ou=users,ou=foo,dc=bar,dc=be"
rewriteEngine on
RewriteRule "sAmAccountName=(.*)dc=ad2,dc=grouped,dc=all$" "%1ou=users,ou=foo,dc=bar,dc=be" ":"
idassert-bind bindmethod=simple
binddn="dn2"
credentials="pw2"
#settings for AD1
database meta
suffix "dc=grouped,dc=all"
rootdn "cn=user,dc=grouped,dc=all"
rootpw "userpw"
uri "ldap://ip1/dc=grouped,dc=all"
suffixmassage "dc=grouped,dc=all" "ou=users,ou=fuu,dc=bal"
rewriteEngine on
RewriteRule "sAmAccountName=(.*)dc=grouped,dc=all$" "%1ou=users,ou=fu,dc=bal" ":"
idassert-bind bindmethod=simple
binddn="dn1"
credentials="pw1"
How does this work? Well the last entry (must be the last!!!) is the basedn that you will search with your application and it user the "user" as login.
This will be tho top level and underneath the 2 subordinates will reside (dc=ad2|3,dc=grouped,dc=all). If you do not use the subordinate it will not search users in the ad2|3.
The rest should be pretty obvious and basic...
llap!
Of course there will be a Friday Beer Event at FOSDEM this year. Only this year, it won't be me organizing it. I felt it was time to do something different and it looks like Jochen has a very firm grip on things. I'm looking forward to attending the beer event as a participant.
What to do with the so-called free time now though?
It seems I've inherited the keysigning bits.
Setting up a very basic key submission server required a mere couple of hours of remembering why Perl is a write-only language. The results of that exercise can be admired at http://ksp.fosdem.org/kspd.pl.txt. Announcing the existence of this service to the world was rather more involved.
The ordeal reminded me -- again -- of primitive cavemen.
Every time someone wanted to paint a woolly mammoth on a cave wall, they'd have to draw it from scratch, either with reference to a previous drawing, or from memory. It was impossible to reuse previous mammoths.
One glorious day, a bright caveman discovered that certain rocks can be rubbed against thin sheets of skin to leave an impression, and the impression can then be used to draw new woolly mammoths. Even more (haha) impressive was that the impression could be used to make a new, slightly modified (longer tusks, who knows?) mammoth-template. Previous impressions could be saved for future generations, to teach them what woolly mammoth looked like in grandpa Thag's youth.
And thus version control was born.
Fast-forward many centuries. People no longer live in caves. Mammoths are now stored in "the cloud". Someone comes up with the wonderful idea of "content management".
One day, someone creates a mammoth and pastes it on the proverbial cave wall. A couple of days later, the mammoth needs changing a bit. In these modern days of the cloud, where mammoths fit in 140 characters or less, this can now be accomplished without going through the pesky process of archiving previous mammoths. Of course, the cave wall could be "configured" to keep old mammoths around, but why bother? In ten minutes time, there will be a new mammoth, and no one could possibly care about the previous one.
And thus version control died.
And mammoths are drawn from scratch again.
As technology advances, humans regress to compensate.
The keysigning announcement is now online. Being the caveman I am, I've also put it in a version control system, far away from any clouds. Just on the off chance that it may come in handy. You know, in a year or so?
PGP public key and CAcert certificate identification are based on multiple (the more the better) people doing an identification check against official identity documents such as driving permits, passports, national identity cards, etc.: the Web of Trustworthy. The Web of Trust is a reciprocal process: people identify themselves to each other.
The "keysigning party" is essential to strengthen the Web of Trust and keep the security technique open and freely available.
Like previous years, there will be a PGP key signing and CAcert assurance party at FOSDEM 2010.
Google is celebrating Newton's birthday today. Better late than never, but in the interest of historical accuracy, I feel it should be celebrated on 25 December and not on 4 January.
I am aware of the fact that the calendar was fiddled with around the time of Newton's birth, but I think the key defining element of a "birthday" is the day one is born (or birthed, depending on perspective). I'm sure Sir Isaac's mother thought it was 25 December.
If Newton was born in the 21st century, his mother would have had to fight her way through a forest of "christmas" trees to get to the delivery room.
The list of Main Track speakers for FOSDEM 2010 is almost complete and officially announced today, even though the website does not contain all the speaker bios and abstracts yet.
The keynotes will be highly interesting and entertaining, as always:
Check out the almost full Main Tracks Program here.
Just like previous editions we have collected a list of interesting interviews with our main track speakers.
To get up to speed with the various topics discussed in the main track talks, you can start with the following articles:
Stay tuned for more interviews in the next weeks...
Since 2009, FOSDEM hires professional guides to offer a free guided tours of Brussels for the spouses/partners.If he/she would like to accompany you, and is not interested in the FOSDEM conference, this will make the stay worthwhile. Brussels is a city with a rich historical past, and a cosmopolitan present.
The snowy weather is slowing down pretty much everything here in Belgium. And just like that, it covered the lightningtalk proposal deadline in snow, which means proposal submission will only be frozen after christmas (25 december).
Because of the deadline extention, the notification date is also extended to January 2
The deadlines of the call-for-talks of the individual devrooms are also nearing. See the list of devrooms for an overview and contact information.
I just released a new version of TunnelDroid adding support for traffic statistics. Go to the Market to update...
Two exciting projects I've been recently working on at Mediamatic Lab are two highly connected sites around the Jewish Community in the Netherlands during World War Ⅱ. The first is one of the oldest sites we have made, the Digital Monument. This site contains verified information on all of the Dutch jews that have died during WWⅡ along with their households, documented posessions and known documents and pictures. It is maintained by a team of editors of the Jewish Historical Museum.
The second is a brand new community site, to complement the Monument by allowing anyone to add new information, pictures and stories on people at the Monument.
The Monument is very impressive, as I learned back at the first BarCamp Amsterdam, hosted by Mediamatic. You will know what I mean if you spend a little as five minutes paging through the site. Today, however, I want to talk about the technology behind both sites.
The data in the Monument is highly semantic in nature. People are part of households, as head-of-family, spouse, son or daughter. Or some other relation. Households have a location and lists of possessions. Tied to all of these are supporting documents and pictures. In anyMeta, all of these are modeled as things with edges between them with a certain predicate. A typical household would be modelled like this:
For the community site, however, we wanted to have more direct relationships between people: parent-child relations, sibling relations, partner relations and a more generic (extended) family relationship. As the community also has most things of the monument imported, this meant a change in the data model and a subsequent conversion in the monument.
In anyMeta, (almost) everything is a thing. As such, the predicate on an edge between two things is also represented by a thing. This has traditionally been named role. Like all things in an anyMeta site have a resource URI, the resource URI of a role is the predicate's URI. We try to use existing (RDF) vocabularies as much as possible for this.
For relationships between people, we've used the
knowsOf and friendOf properties
from RELATIONSHIP,
used in FOAF. So this was the first place to look for the desired new
predicates. However, this vocabulary does not have a property for
expressing a generic extended family relationship. Fortunately,
XFN has the
kin relationship type, along with
child, parent,
spouse and sibling.
Richard Cyganiak described how to express XFN relations in
RDF, so we used that to base our predicates on.
Like RELATIONSHIP, most of the XFN properties are subproperties
of the foaf:knows property, and have some
hierarchy themselves, too. In anyMeta, we didn't have the concept of
subproperties, yet, so we added a new role for expressing subproperty
relationships between roles, and introduced the concept of
implicit edges. These are edges with a
superpredicate of the explicit edge that is being created. For
example, the xfn:child property is a subproperty
of foaf:knows. Whenever an edge between two people
gets created with the child role, another implicit one with the knows
role is added, too.
After conversion and with the implicit edges present, the new data model of the example above looks like this:
The blue arrows are the new, derived edges. A spouse edge is made between those people that respectively have a head-of-family and partner relation to the same household (this can be assumed to be correct for this dataset). For person that have a son or daugther edge to a household, a child edge is made from the head-of-family and partner persons (if any) in that household to this person. We haven't (yet) added derived sibling edges, as this relation depends on the parents of both persons, too.
You can also see gray, dashed edges. These are the implicit edges that follow from the property hierarchy. Another thing to notice, is that the biographies are gone. We put the texts in there directly on the persons and households, instead.
Besides the regular pages of all people, households and other things, you can also use our semantic browser to look at the relationships between things. For example, Mozes and his family can be browsed from here.
Been playing with exherbo and first thing I needed to fix was to have a kvm image with a dvorak keymap layout...
You can find it here: http://sejo.be/exherbo_amd64_dvorak_120909.xz
Abuse at you will, no support will be given!
The artwork for FOSDEM 2010 is now available. Please use those banners, web badges and flyers to promote the event.
From now on you will be able to find me on Twitter using my short name: @cvandeplas. Feel free to follow me.
Planned subjects are: