As some of you already know the planet has been updated - if you notice any troubles please drop me a note somewhere (e-mail, jabber, snail mail, whatever...)
Oh, and don't forget to head over to carstein - this time it's Acting under fire, crisis management in a nutshell ;)
Nirvana - Heart Shaped Box
...nearly (I don't have the paper work done yet..). I'm a Bachelor of Engineering in Information Technology! At last, I thought it would never end, now I can get back to some real work especially that my life is getting better, at least I think...
TODO for the next month?
So many things seem to have happened around me in the last few months, but I'm still standing still and can't move... But this time I hope to change it...
Your office is on fire - are you prepared? What do you leave behind and how fast can you recover from a disaster? If you don't posses a plan for such situation then you shoud rush over to Carstein's blog and read Part 4 of the "So you want to be a CSO" series!
Hmm, BTW maybe it's time to translate the series into English? If your interested just drop me a note, if Carstein won't do it I'll do (if he allows me to ;)
There's an open letter over at list.7thguard.net regarding the implementation of DRM in Polish law. I'll try to provide an ęnglish translation for you, although it'll be very rough, blame my poor English skills for that (as a sidenote - I must do something with it if I want to relocate somewhere else...)
We, the undersigned, oppose the implementation of such restrictive regulations regarding Digital Right Management.
The proposed changes in copyright law presented by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage fully legalize systems which allow content publishers freely restrict access to works in digital form. The circumvention of such restrictions are proposed to be penalized with up to 3 years in prison. Those changes will have negative impact on Polish culture, they will hinder or even prevent access to its treasures, lower the position of content creators and harm consumers.
Freedom of knowledge and information is world's biggest achievement - the right to use works in libraries, museums, universities and together with friends. All that because the Fair Use rule. But the proposed changes legalize DRM will eradicate this. Existing today laws which permit the usage of various works for peronal use or which allow sharing them with friends, for educational use, for academical purposes will, free access for libraries, using different works in your own and even accessing them by disabled persons will become empty words. This is also dangerous for the future of Polish culture, because fair use is essential to creativity.
A world, which is proposed to us by the new law project, is a world where you can listen to a song only on one audio player, the movie you have bought will erase itself in a few months, where you can't record a TV show on video and where lending a book will be a crime for which you can be sent to jail.
We don't want such a world. When implementing legislation regulating the usage of DRM systems one should try to keep proper balance between the interests of publishers, creators rights for proper payment and the constitutional rights of society to participate in the cultural life of the nation.
The legislation regarding DRM systems is implemented because that's a required directive of the European Union. But this law doesn't remove fair use, it does even require that member states protect competition and consumer rights. In the EU member states, especially in France and Germany, European law respects those aspect. We should make use of their experience.
The Office of Competition and Consumer Protection, Internet Society Poland, Stowarzyszenie Przyjaciół Integracji and the Polish Librarians Association have publicated their proposals in this matter. We call the Polish government and Parliament to consider their positions
Over at Carstein's blog there's another part of the So you want to be a CSO? saga. This time about internal procedures - how to write them to be efficient and where to use them. I think you'll find it an interesting lecture...
Of course I don't need to tell you that they are needed, but handle them with care. You don't want to learn them all by heart like some companies require, they should be there to reach for them whenever it's needed, so just the generel guidelines should be clear - exceptions can (and in my opinion even should, but opinions on that differ) be included in the text of the procedure. Like Carstein said - a diagram is worth a million words, but only if it's good. I could tell some stupid examples where diagrams said absolutely nothing about the workflow, like when a process was beggining at the controler (on the diagram, and even some places in the text!) when the normal workflow in such environment was that the operator received the document first. After a couple of such procedures most people end up just ignoring them and doing it the way it's best, which in turn can possibly wreck havoc in the system. OK, enough of my ranting - head over to carstein before he finishes part 4 of it, which should be real soon...(in Polish only sorry, maybe he'll translate it sometime for us or I'll do it when I'll finally have my bachelor degree...)
Your Geek Purity Test Results
You answered "yes" to 38 of 129 questions, making you 70.5% geek pure; that is, you are 70.5% pure in the geek domain (you have 29.5% geek in you).
Your Weirdness Factor (AKA Uniqueness Factor) is 19%, based on a comparison of your test results with 191614 other submissions for this test.The average purity for this test is 80.1%.
The first submission for this test was received December 30, 1995.
Return to The Armory's Purity Test Page
Go to the Armory Home Page
Like the topic says — I'm using PLD Ac again, although it resembles Ra more and more, but hey - at last Mono and Windows.Forms seem to work now :D (they didn't in Th, even when wolf said SOA #1)
Anyway - I hope to install Th somewhere after my engineering degree, when I should have some more spare time. What I would like to see by that time is a working NetworkManager, Sabayon and Peselus ;>
Just joking, I know - SOD #1 :/
I wonder why didn't I do this before. You know, playing Counter Strike. It's and old game, propably older than my grandmother, but hey - it still rocks! Especially in a LAN environment. OK, they kicked my ass seriously yesterday (and today, some sleep deprivation is always good :P)
Hmm, today is Saint Valentine's Day, but I won't celebrate it as usuall. Not that I had someone to celebrate with... But still, we should show our love everyday not just at this one day. What's the difference between today (2. of February 2006) and any other day? OK, maybe one - it's usually colder now than on most other days... So, just behave as it is a "normal" day and give your love some flowers, like everyday - I suppose you give her flowers everyday? :)
On the other front - I was asked to hold a talk or workshop about Scribus in March, I'm not much of a speaker and I have absolutely no idea if I could handle it. Besides, I'm not a DTP professional, nor a semi-pro just a guy who does some work in it for the ACTUS Association. I must think about that, maybe Maciej (from Linux Forum) could help me out a bit. We'll see...
Libjingle 0.2.0 is out. I must say I'm impressed by Google, an free (as in freedom :P) library, open API's like those for Google Maps and Google Reader (soon to "published").
Hmm, maybe they get the Web 2.0 thing right in some time, where apps from multiple vendors could work together. This could be the real power there - no limit for the users, you want to use our feed reader on your site? No problem, the API is already there for you to use! But for now, just to many services are on their own with no proper means of using their content ("social" or not) on my site...
UPDATE: The moment this post hit the blog, Google enabled Google Talk inside my GMail account, and I must say - it rocks!
Like the topic says - Scribus 1.3.2 is finally out together with the long awaited Windows version (with a little help from Trolltech AS, and I must say it works like a charm on my Win XP.
Oh, RPM packages for the PLD Linux distribution (i686, AC) should be availible somewhere on the main Scribus site as soon as it gets up. If there's anyone out there with a AMD-64 machine willing to let me build it there for some testing (I think the _ulibdir stuff is obsolete for some time, but sadly I cannot test that at home) just drop me a note here.
According to Jajcus and Ralph Meijer Google Talk has opened it's gates for other Jabber servers to federate with, a quick test showed it's really true:
[19:30] lukasz.jernas@gmail.com accepted your presence subscription request
[19:30] lukasz.jernas@gmail.com/Talk.v82751FB013 () is online:
WOW, at last. Now if only Google Talk could make use of all the transports out there...
UPDATE: You can find an official confirmation here.
Some time ago there was an idea to use BitTorrent together with poldek to distribute PLD package files. And today I saw this. Maybe I will have to look into this issue after my exams, could be interesting. Generating .torrent files for new packages would be easy, seting up the tracker also, the problem is - how to keep seeders for thousands of packages on one machine? Poldek supports various download managers so downloading will be no problem on this side I think. Of course this could speed up download for the bigger packages, for the small one the advantege wouldn't be so good but it's worth a try...
It seems like Trac has won the "competition". Easy tu use even for newbies (like some other devs on this project), lightweight, works from scratch - even in Lighttpd, supports Postgresql and other database engines and is just looking great with those nifty command line tool. Right now I don't need some of it's features like the wiki engine but it might become handy sometime. As time passes we'll see how useful it is...
Oh, BTW sorry for some outage on Planet PLD, typos in the config file suck :/
