Free Software Linux

As on special request (thanks for the hint Bart!) I decided to organize a small party for the last Apricoters (Chris & Pablo & Brecht). Just intimous, for those who were involved and dropping in regular anyway! But nevertheless, it was awesome and give the team the right incentive and drive to make the final presentation a perfect premiere! In the vimeo clip you can see a complete 6 minute walktrhough the main  game levels. This, plus more goodies is going to be finalized on the DVD. Hopefully in 2 weeks it’s ready for print. End of september we then can ship it to everyone!

Last week at Gnomedex, the folks at Ma.gnolia announced the launch of their Ma.gnolia 2 (M2) effort, which is an ambitious effort to rethink and rebuild ma.gnolia, with a focus on embracing the open web. In the Project Charter (curiously only available as a PDF), they lay out these business goals:

WPBook, the WordPress for Facebook plugin which Dave Lester and others at Scholarpress originally created and which I’ve contributed some to, has been updated again. Version 0.7.4, which I just tagged in subversion (so it should be showing up in the Wordpress plugins directory by the time I post this) includes the following:

Last week, while I was on vacation meeting my new nieces and attending my 20th year high school reunion, the Panel Picker for SXSW 09 went live.

Although voting by prospective attendees is only “about 30%” of the decision making process, I figured I should promote my submissions here, and hope that readers of this blog might be interested in commenting on them or voting for them in the panel picker. (Although they call it the panel picker - no one can resist alliteration - it includes sessions which are solo speakers or dual speakers as well as more tradition 4-5 person panels).

So.. the project is coming to an end. Today is 10th, Chris’ flight is August 30th, and mine is 31th, that makes 20 days of work from now, we made a daily schedule till the very last day. With the time we have from now, we managed to split it in a way we could continue wrapping up the game, and still have enough time to invest in the most important aspect of the Apricot Open Game Project, Documentation!

Just came across yet another excellent post from Alex Russell of the Dojo project (and foundation): “The Price of Anonymity: Our Principles?” Russell uses the occasion of some nasty comments in Digg on a Caryl Shaw article for PC gamer (and a series of presentations at OSCON a few weeks back) to reflect on the issue of sexism in free and open source software communities. Ultimately, the issue is really about what kinds of communities we want to be building. As he notes:

Guess the negotiations with Hasbro and Electronic Arts didn’t go so well. It was really my primary reason for actually logging in to Facebook.

Last weekend I’ve been out of the Blender Institute, spending it in what would be a presentation of Yo Frankie! on the Game Development Campus 2008, in the University of Aalborg, Denmark. The goal of the Camp was to share ideas about games, get to know each other, make groups, and then each group (7 groups in total, with 6 people each) will have to develop a game for the end of the week, using Blender as the Game Engine where all the games will run. It ended up being lot more than that!  met a lot of people and made very good friends over there.

If you’ve tried to leave comments here recently, bless you, and I’m sorry. First, the WP-OpenID plugin for one specific version (2.2.0) had a bug which ate comments containing double quotes, which means all comments with links in them. 2.2.1 fixes the problem. Then, Luis Villa told me in email that the Captcha on my site was unusable. So I tried it, and he’s right. A while back I installed a plugin for Mollom, which catches comments which are thought to be suspicious in one way or another, and then asks users to solve a captcha. Problem is that they were all unsolvable.

This morning David Recordon formally announced the Open Web Foundation in a morning keynote at OSCON. (The shorter url openweb.org will come at somepoint). The OWF tagline / elevator statement is “The Open Web Foundation is an independent non-profit dedicated to the development and protection of open, non-proprietary specifications for web technologies.” The OWF goals, from their home page: Following the open source model similar to the Apache Software Foundation, the foundation is aimed at building a lightweight framework to help communities deal with the legal requirements necessary to create successful and widely adopted specification.

One danger of reviewing a book is the reality that the reviews ultimately say more about the reviewer, and the book he or she wishes had been written, than they do about the book which actually was written. It’s in that context that I offer this review of Groundswell, by Forrester Research analysts Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, published by Harvard Business Press (note: disclaimers at the end of the post).

Via Jake McKee I just discovered this video of Chris Heuer interviewing Clay Shirky: Clay’s long been a favorite speaker of mine - Perl as an act of love and the cognitive surplus being two other videos featured here - and Chris does a great interview here.

(Update, 2pm ET: Scott Hintz from TripIt replied in the comments on the original post apologizing for the employee’s behavior - thanks Scott.) One of the famous cartoons of the first internet craze was this one from the New Yorker: On the Internet Nobody Knows You're a Dog

An oldie but a goodie. The folks at ROFLCON just announced that Miss Teen USA South Carolina will be the emcee at the upcoming SF-ROFL thing (August 29th). Unfortunately I don’t think I will be able to get to this one - and not because I can’t find San Francisco on my map. Unlike many U.S. Americans I believe in building up our future for our children and that our education here should help the Iraq and the Asian countries.

One of the more popular posts on this blog is the one which describes how to import trips from TripIt into Dopplr, in order to avoid the re-entry tax. After all, as I wrote in my comparison of the two services last October, TripIt’s email import was the critical factor in my decision of how to manage this information: