Preparing for OpenExpo I was looking for a solution to connect a beamer video projector to our Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook S7010D presentation laptop. Since I had troubles with an external monitor for this machine with Ubuntu Feisty Fawn before (the screen is either flimmering or only on the external or internal monitor) I mailed some Linux friends for support. Luckily Sven Herzberg of GNOME had spent some days of googling before and found the solution. Thanks a lot for your great help!

Section "Device"
    Identifier "Intel Corporation 82852/855GM Integrated Graphics Device"
    Driver "i810"
    Option "MonitorLayout" "CRT,LFP"
    Option "Clone" "true"
    BusID "PCI:0:2:0"
EndSection

The complete xorg.conf file

2008 will be a quite busy year here in litte Switzerland: We do not only host the European World Cup next year, but will also conduct the Year of Computer Science 2008, informatica08. Our association /ch/open is part of the initiating organzations since we believe freedom and openness in ICT is an important issue and needs more awareness in the Swiss public. Therefore we launch the Call for Open Concepts which invites creative individuals as well as innovative firms, educational entities and other organizations to invent ideas, draft projects and develop concepts on how to support open source software, open content and open standards in Switzerland. We try to coordinate the different initiatives, consolidate and improve the ideas as well as support the particularly promising ones with sponsoring money. Have a look at the complete call in the PDF (German only) and submit your concepts until October 1st, 2007.

Today Lionel danced for the first time through the fountains on the federal square. You can see the temperature of the water by looking at his face…

PS: For me it was the opportunity to finally activate my YouTube account and upload my first movie. After trying several tools in order to convert the movie from our JVC camcorder to a smaller uploadable file I finally got the hint from Emanuel to use ffmpeg. This sleek command line tool allowed me to reduce the 140MB file to only 8MB directly from the cam’s hard disk and even cropping the 16:9 format to a 4:3 by using the following command (other options such as cutting the MPEG movie using -t and -ss I’ll use next time):

ffmpeg -i MOV07C.MOD -cropleft 128 -cropright 128 -s 480x360 -aspect 4:3 /tmp/out.mpeg

This week, the Alternative has released the new official ETH www.tux.ethz.ch website informing about Free and Open Source Software and providing various sources of knowledge on how to install Ubuntu, configure Linux laptops for the ETH network etc.

Today I finally finished layouting the OpenExpo booklet with Scribus 1.3.4. Although this newest version still crashed a lot it was really a great experience layouting a high resolution 16p brochure (34MB) with a professional open source DTP software. In the end I had some troubles creating Evince-readable PDFs. Finally with the help of Riku Leino, developer of Scribus, through their IRC channel #scribus I exchanged the OTF with TTF fonts and everything worked fine. Nevertheless, one error I had to report into the bug tracking system. Now let’s hope the printers don’t screw up - an edition of 20′000 copies is quite a tree massacre. If you’d like to receive a copy of the booklet sign up in the new OpenExpo newsletter before Aug. 8th, 2007.

Today was quite a lucky hacking day. First I wanted to analyze 370′000 newsgroup messages for our research project on Eclipse. So after learning from Hannes the easyness of PEAR using the Mail_Mime class to parse my mail box, I tried today Net_NNTP in order to spider all the Eclipse newsgroups and download their message headers. Well, as I projected my super inefficient algorithm takes approximately 30h for all messages, so still about 20h left…

———————————————————–
require_once ‘Net/NNTP.php’;
$nntp = new Net_NNTP;
$ret = $nntp->connectAuthenticated(”USERNAME”,”PASSWORD”,”news.eclipse.org”);

//Go through all groups
$groups = $nntp->getGroups();
foreach($groups as $group) {

  //Select one group and iterate through all message IDs
  $data = $nntp->selectGroup($group[’group’]);
  $msgs = $nntp->getOverview($data[’first’], $data[’last’]);
  foreach($msgs as $msg) {
    //Print out raw message headers
    echo $nntp->getHeaderRaw($msg[’number’]);
  }
}
———————————————————–

Then later tonight I had a problem with a damaged video DVD including recordings from Lionel. Creating an ISO image and then trying to burn didn’t succeed since only 1/4 of the DVD got copied. Luckely on Gentoo Wiki I found the hint to ddrescue, a nice little GNU tool which copies all available data and ignores the errors. Thus I finally succeeded to copy the 2.7GB, excluding only 262kB of missing data due to reading problems.

This June was quite full of talks about open source related issues. The day after LinuxTag Jacqueline Peter of SVIA and I organized a conference for teachers and invited 6 speakers (including one Ubuntu enthusiast ;) to talk about open source tools related to education. We took the chance and started again another platform for open source software at schools called OSS an Schulen. It includes a support mailing list for teachers with questions e.g. related to experiments with open source in their classes. A next presentation on the advantages of open source for schools will take place in September in Bern for ICT coordinators organized by the PH Bern. The next second full-day conference will probably be in May next year regarding the feedback of the participants.
My second presentation was quite spontanious the week after. I was invited by Grégoire Hernan to talk about community building for the open source task force of the Swiss computer science committee of the Cantons (Schweizerische Informatikkonferenz SIK). He told me the federal administration is interested in creating an own voluntary action-based community of the IT departments of the 26 Cantons - which makes absolutely sense for a country like Switzerland with highly dispersed regional governments. So I redesigned some slides of my master thesis topic and explained the main issues relevant to create a productive open source community. By chance Kurt Bader, the head of IT of the canton Solothurn, attended the meeting as well so I could invite him as speaker of the next OpenExpo.
Finally, DIGICOMP organized a so-called OpenDay which gave me the chance present the Nokia case of open source community building. Well, this talk teached me to really address the interests of an conference’s audience: While our scientific research project is of quite high relevance in academia, with only 4 participants in my presentation it showed the low interest of Swiss practitioners in this topic. Nevertheless we had interesting conversations in our little workshop ;)

While The Economist is usually focussing on political or economical issues, this week’s Technology Quarterly is really worth reading every article. My favorite is of course the two-pager Brain Scan of Mark Shuttleworth, creater of Ubuntu ;) Another two great texts are about Apple and its to-be-released iPhone, pointed out by Joel West as well. While he and his colleague, Michael Mace, strongly believe in the success of the iPhone, this time I rather stick with the Economist’s view that “the iPhone’s success is not guaranteed.” Just by extrapolating the iPod’s triumph on a device which hasn’t been released and tested yet by its users, I wouldn’t rely only on Apple’s marketing. In effect I doubt if the overall strategy in the ICT industry of hiding knowledge and excluding third party contributions works on the long run at all. Other experienced manufacturers pursue a completely different approach. Mobile devices such as Nokia’s Internet Tablet or the OpenMoko base their development on knowledge revealing and follow a strategy applying user innovation and community building - while not being bad in business as the transition of the Nokia 770 towards the N-series located N800 this January proved.

Well, although I don’t like Apple’s strategy providing mostly proprietary software coupled closely to its own hardware, the Economist’s article about the success, failure and resurrection of Steve Jobs is really amazing. I remember very well 1996 being in high school, all enthusiastic about Macs, and receiving the news our hero is coming back to his brain child - this was really a relieve! Nevertheless, many years followed until Apple is today again such a highly respected brand as it was in the 80’s. I recall many disputes with my Windows friends in school laughing at my juicy computers… Well, let’s see if in some years the same happens to Ubuntu. When people realize fast food electronics isn’t that great after all, digital freedom is necessary to counter lock-in mechanisms of large firms and that knowledge revealing is essential in the long run to conduct real open innovation (the last point being the main idea of our current research paper on Maemo).

Last week was busy but extremely cool. Visiting LinuxTag 2007 in Berlin on Thursday was great since basically every large open source project was present at the exposition with a booth (except for TYPO3 - where are the marketing guys of the most popular CMS in Europe??) Particularly holding one of the developer OpenMoko’s in my hand (it’s quite heavy, more than I expected) and meeting the creators of this revolutionary device was a nice experience. Of course I invited them immediately for OpenExpo this fall in Zürich - as I did with many other project representatives and speakers bothering them with our soon finished Call for Participation. Although there hasn’t been much collaboration next to some flyer, the Open Events Foundation aims to bring all European OSS events together so I’m interested if in future there will be some contacts-sharing among the organizers of LinuxTag, FrOSCon, Chemnitzer LinuxTage etc.

On Friday, Martin Michlmayer’s track on “Building and Management of Communities” started. His speech about release management in OSS projects (the topic of his recently finished dissertation) clearly favored time-based releases since it gives more continuity into the process. My own presentation about “Crowding Effects: How Money Influences Open Source Projects and its Contributors” went well and was attended by quite a large number of people despite the early time it was scheduled. Afterwards several project coordinators as well as individual OSS programmers came to speak to me about their personal experience of motivation and extrinsic incentives. Particularly the contact to Axel Hecht, translation manager of the Mozilla project, was interesting since he forwarded me to Seth Bindernagel, community coordinator of Mozilla.

One presentation important for our current research project on Nokia’s open source involvement was the one of Quim Gil about the Maemo project. Next to already public stuff he revealed some news about the future of the Internet Tablet operating system. From now on, the Forum Nokia will manage users of the devices where as Maemo will become again more R&D focussed. They plan to do some application certification process in the future, improve the update mechanism of the operating system and make the API management more transparent. Concerning community building an interesting move is to spin-out the Hildon framework into a more community-managed project. So it will be highly interesting to follow the next generation software platform of Nokia getting even more open as it was the previous 2 years.

On June 2nd, 2007, there will be an open source conference for teachers at PH Zürich. So far we have only about 20 participants, so I hope there will be more until next week when registration closes!

Update 2007-05-07: Several good news concerning our upcoming event: First of all, congratulations to Dell choosing Ubuntu as option for the computers! Second, Philipp Tobler just pointed out a Slashdot post on educational open source software. And third, this morning Futura.tv recorded a short interview for Swiss televison about our teacher training. I don’t know yet when they’ll broadcast the report but I’ll update this post as soon as I know.

Update 2007-05-22: Now the short video clip about our upcoming OSS educational event will be shown on Swiss televisions.