Fading Memories

Yesterday, Irina, Jos van den Oever and I went to the Software Freedom Day in Amsterdam. I think there were about fifty to sixty attendants, and a nicely balanced schedule of talks in two tracks. Very interesting was the presentation about Soleus: community driven virtual private servers. We did enjoy ourselves a lot, but since it has been ages since Irina and I have been in Amsterdam without the kids, we left around four o' clock to go on a book buying spree the like of which we haven't committed for over four years. And then we rounded off with an excellent Indonesian dinner for two.

And our kids are wonderful: when we came home they had done all the dishwashing for us:-)

And then I'll be able go into a restaurant again and enjoy my meal. Or go to the pub for a beer, without first flying out to hospitable Montreal, where I for the first time discovered how much fun a smoke-free pub could be. Dutch restaurants and cafes will be smoke-free from July 1st. Of course, restaurant and cafe owners are complaining that they "used to be hospitable, but now they have to tell guests they cannot do something". I've never found them hospitable.

Every time I had to eat out the past few years -- for work, for instance, or at a KOffice hack sprint I had to leave early or go home really sick. Whenever we had something to celebrate with the family, we'd go as early as possible to a restaurant, so we could have finished our dinner before the smoking customers started arriving. Sometimes that wouldn't work out, and I'd be sick again.

Through Mark Rosenfelder's Zompist website, which I've been reading since my conlang days, I came across Eric Janszen's article The Next Bubble: Priming the markets for tomorrow's big crash. Well worth a read -- and now I am pretty certain that, no, there won't be a stop to burning food is fuel, no matter how many scarce food becomes. No way anyone can fight the might of $20.000.000.000.000...

Which reminds me of another article I've read but lost the URL of that explained how the corn lobby in the USA was ultimately responsible for the Volstead act (because corn was too bulky to move, it was converted into something smaller and more valuable, namely Bourbon, which caused massive alcoholism, which caused the anti-alcohol campaigns because factories needed sober people to work the machines, etc.), and later the corn-syrup-in-everything phenomenon. I really should have saved that URL.

Of course, if the corn that used to be converted into corn syrup now gets converted into fuel, maybe ubiquitous obesity will be a thing of the past very soon... But so many other foodstuffs get caught up in the food-for-fuel bubble, too.

I doubt anyone but myself has noticed, but I've been blogging less and less lately. Partly because I've been really busy, but also because everytime I was writing an entry for Fading Memories I was thinking of whether it would help or detract from the KDE publicity machine that Planet KDE has become.

I have always maintained that since I never asked for syndication on any planet, I didn't care whether what I wrote fit in or not. If I blog about Easter, and it gets syndicated and the Gnome games maintainer complains in the comments section about me bringing religion in the public realm, I couldn't care less. After all, he has blogged about his religion and got his blog syndicated on Planet Gnome, too.

But on the topic of KDE, KOffice I feel the curious urge to constrain myself end exercise restraint unless I've got another gosh-wow-bang-zip innovation to report.

And that may well be counter-productive: when I started working on Krita in 2003 nothing worked and the project was nearly dead. A powerful stimulant. Bart Coppens recently said on IRC how the fact that even the line tool was broken gave him the courage to try and hack on Krita. Adrian Page got sucked into hacking on Krita because I was too dim-witted to make free-hand painting work.

Admitting that there are problems, that things are broken and need fixing can be a powerful inducement for people to start helping out. When Bart Coppens told the audience at Fosdem that it seems likely that only a tiny fraction of the KOffice applications might make it for 2.0 release of KOffice, we noticed quite a few people dropping by on irc and asking us what they could do to help.

So: people, there is plenty left to fix in KOffice. There are plenty of interesting but not too hard things that you can pick up. There are quite a few quite patient people around on the mailing lists and on irc who are prepared to spend an evening helping you get started. And -- we're still committed to making something that's fun to work on, fun to with and that will really boost your capabilities as a coder.

Kant, or some other famous German philosopher, or maybe it was Voltaire (or all of them) has famously said that everything happens fifty years late in the Netherlands, making our little delta a safe haven during the Second Coming.

And you know what? He (or they) was (or were) right: Firefox share up over 20% in Europe, mostly at expense of IE. In the Netherlands, uptake of Firefox is lowest of all Europe, at a measly 14.7%.

For shame! (And it's not because we're all using Konqueror.) For instance, i cannot get at my salary specification without IE -- the webapp only works with IE.

And so are the three stooges. I have been wondering what Microsoft would try after having failed buying a fast-track standardization of OfficeOpen XML (and I've been wondering why nobody has sued Microsoft for break of trademark for that name). It's getting clearer: in the past few days all over the it-related web stories have started sprouting that spread the meme that ODF supporters are leaving the sinking ship, that ODF isn't a good enough standard for all document needs now and in the future and that since we'll need to interoperate with OOXML anyway, why not have it standardized. All backed up by statements from siome ODF Foundation spokesperson. But while ODF Foundation has a very grand sounding name, it's just two or three crackpots who failed to make money out of ODF and are now trying to make money out of something else.

But even though I'm not a conspiracy nut, I do think I'm detecting a pattern here. If you cannot convince people your standard is good enough, try to convince them other standard sucks, too.

And for anyone wondering what exactly is wrong with OOXML (apart from the problem that even Microsoft doesn't implement it in its own office applications), please look at the Eooxml Objections Clearinghouse.

As long as I've had the right to vote, I've always been able to say "I didn't vote for these idiots" whenever a cabinet minister did something silly or evil. Being a natural born conservative about social issues -- I want everything to stay the way it was in the seventies -- for the first ten years of my life as a voter I voted Green Left. Then, about nine years ago when I got fed-up with some of Green Left's sillier shibboleths I switched allegiance to a party with about as little chance of ever getting into the cabinet. Or so I thought.

Well, the easy times are over. No longer for me the old cop-out "who voted for these idiots? Not me!"

"I have nothing to hide" - or the Sainsbury's Lesson. It explains why Irina and I canceled our library cards when the library started keeping track of not just which of their books we had at home, but also of the books we ever borrowed.

David Wheeler (who I very much respect -- see his work on OpenFormula) has written a nice article on what the well-dressed hacker should wear when going for success.

Read more ...

There are such wonderful new opportunities these days, up for grabs for any self-respecting intelligence agency eager to get on in the world. For instance, the public transport companies in the Netherlands have decided that paper tickets are so past tense -- chip cards are where it is. And unless you pay extra, your chipcard will be personalized and you need to swipe it at the begin and at the end of every journey. And those details will be recorded. And kept, into the ages of ages.

Which we, happy customers, won't mind at all. Dutch Rail knows its customers, said their boss recently, and he just knows we won't mind. And of course we will be delighted if this information is used for commercial purposes -- and we don't like it, we'll just be glad to pay a little more. And, of course, we're fiercely patriotic enough to really love it when all this lovely data is commandeered by the Dutch intelligence agency, the AIVD. It's for our safety and protection! We must unite to safeguard our democracy.

And do we believe the more expensive cards are really anonymous? Do we believe we won't be suspect if we want one of those? Of course! We believe! All hail the wisdom of our government. They know what's good for us, and we cannot but bow our heads in admiration for them.

Read: Bits Of Freedom Niewsbrief, 29 maart 2006.

And don't think you will escape by driving a car: your itinerary will be registered. It is your car, it's you who is driving it. And just like your car won't be stolen by terrorists and criminals, so whatever happens is your fault, your OV Card won't be stolen. And you are your mobile phone. Do not deny it. Be happy, and obey.