Safe as Milk

Maemo community council elections: results in!

The Maemo community council election is over, and the results are in.

166 people voted to elect the incoming council, and when the dust settled, the new council will be made up of:

• Andrew Flegg
• Ryan Abel
• Tim Samoff
• Kees Jongenburger
• Alan Bruce (better known as qole)

For those interested in that kind of thing, you can download all of the ballots from the election in .blt format (the format used by OpenSTV) and replay the election with different counting systems and options for transferring votes. You can also browse the votes online, and verify that your vote was recorded correctly.

Congratulations to the elected council members, and thank you to all of the candidates for running!

Libre Graphics Meeting fundraiser update

With little fanfare, this year’s Libre Graphics Meeting fundraiser has been progressing nicely.

In the three weeks since the announcement of the launch of the campaign, we have raised almost $3,000 in community donation – mostly smaller than $50 – from 71 individual donors. Much of the credit for the campaign this year has to go to Jon Phillips of Creative Commons, Inkscape and OpenClipart fame.

The campaign has started earlier this year than last year, when we were really caught unawares by our difficulties in getting sponsors, and has lacked some of the frenzy of the last campaign, but Jon has been doing stellar work keeping the fire burning, and ensuring a regular stream of donations from supporters of projects related to Libre graphics.

It is hard to overstate the importance this conference has to the communities working on projects like Inkscape, GIMP and Scribus, among others, and to overstate the progress we have made because of these conferences in the past few years in the realm of graphics applications on Linux.

It’s useful to point out that in the Linux Foundation desktop linux surveys, the most popular applications which companies and individuals want for Linux are graphics applications – Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Premier, Autodesk AutoCAD, Adobe Dreamweaver and Microsoft Visio are the top 6 applications which people are missing on Linux. This conference is all about encouraging the development of applications destined to fulfil those needs. Also worth noting, when asked whether they wanted the applications above ported to Linux, or they wanted to use equivalent Linux applications where possible, a large majority want to use native equivalents, rather than ported commercial applications.

For any of you looking for a good cause which will go directly to supporting high quality applications that you use, I’d encourage you to contribute to the Libre Graphics Meeting. The conference is only as worthwhile as the people attending it, let’s ensure that we get a critical mass once again and provide energy and momentum to all of the participating projects for the coming year.

Maemo Community Council elections: The story so far

More than half way through the Maemo community council Spring 2009 elections, I thought it would be interesting to get a sneak peek at turn-out figures, to let people know how things have been going so far.

The results are slightly disappointing so far – but I know that there are a lot of last-minute voters, so I’m not exactly worried yet.

Out of 717 ballots issued, as of Tuesday at 15h UTC, we have registered 138 votes so far, or about 20% of the electorate. This tallies roughly with the participation rate that we had in the first council election with people who had more than 25 karma (roughly 35%).

The election will end at midnight UTC on Thursday evening, at which time anyone will be able to download the anonymous ballots and calculate the results of the election using OpenSTV or any other program that handles .blt format files. I will calculate the results using the pre-defined settings for the election (random transfer STV, static Droop threshold, with no lower limit for batch elimination) and publish them on Friday morning, European time.

All of you who have been waiting to vote, vote now! And all of you who have trouble voting, or who haven’t received the voting token you should have, contact me.

FFmpeg release – congrats!

Never one to hold a grudge, I’d like to congratulate the FFmpeg developers on their recent release of FFmpeg 0.5.

I’ve been pretty hard on FFmpeg in the past for their lack of releases and their API policy – it’s made packaging their software hard for distributions, and developing using their libraries hard for third party developers. A release is great news, and I hope it is the first of many.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc

Today’s xkcd made my inner mathematician giggle.

Parse error

Coworker (n): Person who orks cows.

Suggestions for running in San Francisco

I’ll be in San Francisco later this month, from March 22nd until the 29th, for OSBC, and I’ll be looking to get in a few training runs to get ready for a marathon I hope to run in May while I’m there.

I am staying in a hotel on Market Street, near the Civic Center, and I have a few runs in the training plan for that period:

• A 28km long run on the 22nd (which I’ll probably be doing to stay awake early evening to get over jet lag)
• A 16km run on Tuesday – 5km warm-up plus 2x4500m marathon pace, plus a few kms warm-down – it’d be nice to have a known distance around 3 miles for this one
• Some speed work (500m splits) on Thursday that I’ll probably skip or swap out for an early morning jog
• Another 28km long run on Saturday 28th, before flying out on the 29th.

Does anyone have any suggestions for good places to run? I would like to run around Crissy Field and across the Golden Gate bridge while there, if possible, and I notice there are some nice looking hills the other side of it in the Golden Gate park.

Anyone want to join me for one or more of the runs? I’m arriving early and leaving late so I’ll be all on my lonesome for a few days if anyone feels like going for a 2.5h jog together on weekend and show off the city for me. Drop me a line, we’ll work something out.

Update: Another idea which looks like it’d be great, having looked at a map of Marin County, would be to rent a bike for the day and go for a 3 or 4 hour ride. Anyone game?

39:04

Improved on my 10K personal best today. Happy, but not delighted. 38:59 would have looked so much better. Especially disappointed to have been under 3:50 for 4 kms, and over 4:00 for 4 others (not consecutive). Regular is better.

Also, I couldn’t resist having a couple of beers yesterday to celebrate Ireland unconvincingly beating England (and I never thought I’d see the day I got to say that) yesterday in Croke Park, 14-13. That probably played a role too.

Libre Graphics Meeting 2009: community fundraising campaign

After the successful community fundraising campaign last year, the Libre Graphics Meeting will be back in Montreal again this year, and once again the organisers need your help to make the event a success.

In fact, this year we need your help more than ever. With the crisis/recession/slow-down/depression upon us, companies are puckering up tighter than a snare drum (to borrow a quote from the Shawshank Redemption) when asked for sponsorship this year.

Support the Libre Graphics Meeting 2009

It’s true, the Libre Graphics Meeting lives on the margins of the business cases people can make right now. There are not millions to be made in appealing to graphic designers working on Linux. And yet, as a community event driving co-operation and development of creative applications on Linux, the Libre Graphics Meeting is valuable, and unique to the free software community.

We need the help of the people to whom it’s valuable to make it happen. And that’s why we’re asking the community to give what they can to support the conference. To allow us to bring people together to share ideas and hack on code. To make better Free graphics software for everyone.

List of Free Software non-profits

Michael Dexter of Linux Fund spent some time last week putting together a list of non-profit corporations which exist to support free software, free software projects, or free culture worldwide. It’s an impressive list of 68 non-profits from around the world, with varied goals and focuses, but with the common theme of wanting to improve the world through the sharing of information. He published the list on the FLOSS Foundations site, which is appropriate, since that group brings together representatives of almost all of these organisations, sharing information useful to everyone.

Some of them have, in my opinion, a more tenuous link than others to projects – such as regional satellites of the FSF for example, or the organisers of SCALE – but the list does show the breadth & depth of the domains where free software has made an impact in the past couple of decades.