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Monthly Archives: June 2007
Check out the new interactive comedy, Where Are the Joneses?. Very funny and CC-BY-SA licensed!
I’ve been away for the last week: firstly to go to Wimbledon; then I moved on to Norfolk to stay with family for a few days; then I dropped back to London for a day/evening for the first CC-Salon there, before heading back to Cornwall on the sleeper train. Needless to say it was tiring, but a huge amount of fun! [NB: Follow the read more link below to discover more (mundane?) details about my trip]
CC-Salon itself was awesome too. Such a nice change to be able to hang out and talk about Free Culture with people who are hugely knowledgeable and enthusiastic about the subject, all of whom were incredibly friendly too! I got to meet Tom Reynolds, author of Blood, Sweat & Tea and hear his talk/interview; gave my own talk which was really well received, and even got a few laughs (and a huge number of offers to help get Free Me finished – thanks for restoring my enthusiasm!); discovered Where Are The Joneses? and listened to an interesting talk/conversation between Elizabeth Stark and everybody. There are some pictures on Flickr, including one of me. Just want to finish by saying a huge thanks to Tim for putting it together and asking me to talk; it was a great excuse for me to go to something like this and meet everyone.
The Salon is going to be a monthly do and the next one sounds cool, so if you’re in London look it up!
I’ve just spent the last few hours reworking this design from scratch (it’s amazing how little time it took, now I know more about WordPress), and have fixed several of the worst issues with Internet Explorer. Version 7 looks almost identical to Firefox 2 on Fedora 7 – except for fonts, which look way better on GNU/Linux; version 6 hasn’t pushed the content to the right hand side of the page as I intended, but this is only a minor problem; version 5 hasn’t been considered yet, but I expect it’s similar to version 6.
I’ve also made it possible to add a page navigation bar to the top, but the design doesn’t look quite right yet and this is going to need some more thought.
I’ll investigate licensing/uploads soon, and hopefully release it for anybody to use or modify later on today. Oh, and if anybody’s interested, the theme is called Simple – for my simple mind.
Oh, I really have to share the Barenaked Ladies’ Bathroom Sessions. They’re on YouTube, and if you haven’t seen them yet you should!
Not sure if this is my favourite but there’s so many to choose from and I had to pick one:
Today I finished reading Deschooling Society, and although I haven’t quite managed to understand all of it, I understood enough to realise that it’s something I want to read again. I also realised that I was right: the parallels with free software/culture are enormous, so much so that I wonder if RMS has read it? I hope so, because I think he would like it, and take great pride that in many ways what Illich dreamed of is now a growing reality thanks to the free software movement.
There are of course threats to this growing reality, and I hope somebody will write a piece setting Web 2.0/free culture in the context of Deschooling Society (the good and the bad); maybe I will even do this, once I feel confident I have a better grasp of the entire book! One point I will quickly mention now: reading this book has put me off Facebook – in fact, I’m thinking of disabling (because they won’t let me delete!) my account, but will wait until I’m sure I’m not just over reacting.
A few unrelated things:
- I did some work on the Fedora docs yesterday, should be ready to hit the user guide soon
- Realised that Jamendo now insists on Bittorrent/emule for downloads, which don’t work for me because my ISP throttles
At least I can still embed a playable widget.
- Off to London tomorrow for Wimbledon (hope the weather is OK!) and then CC-Salon on Thursday – still need to figure out what I’m going to say…
A new category – reading It’s a simple one: I’ll post whatever I’m currently reading, and maybe what I thought of it once I’ve finished!
Today I started Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich, thanks to a post on openDemocracy. It’s quite heavy going so far, but I think that’s just getting used to a new author/context etc. From all I’ve read about the book from various sources it should be a great read, with many parallels to the free culture community.
It’s quite common for me to be reading more than one book at a time, and right now that’s true. I’m also reading Christian Theology: An Introduction by Alistair McGrath and Code V2 by Lawrence Lessig; these two seem to have taken a back seat lately.
JR: Hey Matthew, to start if you could introduce yourself and tell us a bit about OpenedHand.
MA: Hi. I’m a 32 year old father, husband, free software hacker and boss man of OpenedHand. I live in London, UK. Beyond making Linux better on devices my other interests include modern design, comics (a big fan of the likes of Ed Brubaker, Alan Moore, etc.) and table tennis (current office champion—first rule of OpenedHand: let the boss win at ping-pong). I’m the author of various pieces of free software, including Matchbox, Xephyr and most recently Clutter.
On my to do list was test this design in Internet Explorer; I’ve finally managed to do this, thanks to a useful web site that I can’t remember the name of for now, and discovered that my design doesn’t render correctly in any version of Internet Explorer.
IE 6 or earlier is simply ugly. IE7 isn’t too bad, the only problem being that all the content in the sidebar has been shifted up, and the sidebar narrowed, forcing some categories and post headings on to two lines. I might, in fact I probably will try and fix this, but I have a piece of advise for any body who happens to stumble upon this page: use Firefox! It’s quite likely you’ll have success with Konqueror/Safari and Opera as well but I haven’t tested these yet.
Not going to get around to thinking about this for a while though. Any solutions people have are welcome
Jon: Hey Havoc, to start if you could introduce yourself to our readers and tell us a bit about your past work?
Havoc I got into free software after reading the GNU Manifesto, which I found inside Emacs on the school servers in college. I worked on Debian documentation for a while (my computer at the time was too underpowered to compile software).
As I learned to program I wrote a variety of useless and not-really-working applications, and contributed some of the more misguided bits of the original GNOME 1.0 libraries. After a couple years of messing around I had some kind of clue and Red Hat hired me to work on GNOME.
