On today’s afternoon event of Swisscontact and economiesuisse various speakers talked about the current state of the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDG). As the half-day conference was organized by organisations close to the Swiss economy the issues brought up concerned also aspects of the economical side of the MDGs. Thomas Preiswerk of Novartis for example explained the buzzword “Corporate Citizenship” and why it’s not just supposed to be a marketing-like lips-thing - unfortunately he couldn’t convince me… On the other hand, Peter Niggli of Alliance Sud provocated in a healthy way on what efforts the international community still needs to undertake to archieve the MDGs by 2015 - to summarize it: it’s huge! The third speaker, director of the Swiss Development Corporation (SDC) Walter Fust, took a look at what his agency is doing to support the millennium goals. Last but not least Rudolf Walser of economiesuisse tried to explain why globalization isn’t all bad for development - I actually don’t know why he chose this issue, the speech seemed a little bit off-topic… Anyway, the presentations were still a very interesting input in my current decision process of defining my future area of research of my PhD. Digital Divide and ICT for development, I discovered just this week, are actually some of the key topics of the SCD and are even pushed by the director himself – so my shyness barrier of asking Mr. Fust personally about further information and contacts in his organization concerning these topics was quite low…

As I’m kind of leading an event-oriented way of life I start now publishing all the mayor public events I go to or which I’m helping to organize. So you’ll always find a list of the upcoming events on the left side of the blog - and thus being able to track me down even if I’m not answering my phone. One intention doing this agenda stripping is also to get in contact with other people attending the same events, so let me know when this is the case!

25. April 2006: IVCG Sinnbörse mit Melba Maggay (Bern)
29. April 2006: Forum i (Aarau)
6. Mai 2006: OpenSource@School (Bern)
9. Mai 2006: Ubuntu User Meeting (Bern)
10. Mai 2006: StopArmut Regionalgruppen-Treffen (Bern)
13. Mai 2006: Grand-Prix (Bern)
18. Mai 2006: Recht auf adäquaten Lebensstandard? (Zürich)
1. Juni 2006: HP Linux und Open Source Day (Zürich)
2. Juni 2006: IVCG Jahreskongress 2006 (Erfurt)
8. Juni 2006: International Conference on Open Source Systems (Como)

Sometimes when I started my Brother HL 1650 little later than booting Ubuntu the USB connection wasn’t recognized. Today I googled around and finally found the solution for the error “Unable to open USB device ‘USB://Brother/HL-1650%20series’: No such device” in the printing panel: Had to change rights of /dev/usb/lp0, zB. like typing

sudo chown matthias /dev/usb/lp0
sudo /etc/init.d/cupsys restart #in case it doesn’t work yet, restart CUPS

Yesterday night at the city hall of Bern we had several reasons to cheer:

1. Bernhard Pulver (whom I invited about 7 years ago to our high school for a discussion meeting) and three politicians of the social democratic party form the majority of the Bernese government for the next four years
2. My political party, the EVP, is one of the major winners in the parliament and gains (virtually) 4 seats
3. The live skype video chat directly from the city hall with Heinz Dätwyler and Ruedi Löffel talking to their home town worked well (foto below)
4. Anita’s and my results aren’t that bad either ;)

And as special feature of this blog entry here a backstage video clip of the announcement of the results (65 MB AVI movie).

Just read on Pro-Linux about the Global Desktop Project and why it’s important for developing countries to move to open source software:

Technological selfdetermination in developing countries is key to their future prosperity and is contingent on harnessing the power of this high-tech phenomenon,” says Dr. Reed.

Last Sunday some friends and I organized a StopArmut booth during the three cermons at Vineyard Bern. Read my summary if you’re interested about how it went and to see more pictures.

Just found a pretty new open source video editing software called Diva, written by Michael Dominic:

Diva is a project to build an easy to use, scalable, open-source video editing software for the Gnome desktop. Our goal is to provide users with a complete and tightly integrated set of tools that can be used to import, edit, enhance and export digital video material. The aim of the project is to chart the unexplored areas of video editing for the open-source platform. Diva is written in mono on the top of the gstreamer multimedia library. It currently runs only on Linux.

Sounds promising and the screenshots look - as always - very hot! Would be really great if some working beta version comes out soon so Lionel’s first stunts may be edited with open source software ;)