SFD Kiel / Schleswig-Holstein

I will be in the Bay Area at the end of this month, to attend a summit of the IOUC (International Oracle Users Group Community), to talk about MySQL and to meet with the organizers of Oracle User Groups worldwide. MySQL is a big topic for many members of their groups, I am looking forward to learn more about their activities and how we can better collaborate in the future. My recent experiences at the DOAG Conference in Nuremberg and the UKOUG Conference in Birmingham were quite positive — I was very pleased by the number of attendees at the MySQL sessions.

Since I'm so close to San Francisco, I gladly accepted the invitation to speak at the San Francisco MySQL Meetup Group on Wednesday, 26th of January. The topic of my talk will be "MySQL High Availability Solutions" where I will try to give a broad overview about the technologies and concepts involved.

Last time I checked, they already had 74 confirmations, the venue can host a maximum of 150 people. So if you'd like to attend and meet, hurry up and sign up soon!

People are saying RSS is dying/dead. Dave Winer believes in the Open Web, and does not like corporate blogging silos. This started of as a reply to his post, but became too lengthy so it has become a blog post. I posit geeks/news junkies love RSS, but the average user does not care. After all RSS and HTML are different delivery mechanisms with different consumption patterns.

I dig RSS. I’ve been using it for years. I converted my HTML only journal to a blog some seven years ago because it provided a RSS feed. I’ve consumed RSS for probably longer than that, switching between many clients over the years (some on Linux, some on Mac OS X, some on the web, some on the iPad – the winner really is Google Reader for me). I have participated in making some Planets, and using RSS in various other ways.

I am also a geek. I cannot fathom a better way to consume news, blogs, etc. I can read several hundred sites a day by skimming through things – I would physically never do this in a browser. I cringe when people only expose partial RSS feeds, because the click-through ensures people get a view in a browser and the ads start showing up. Google solved this problem a tad bit by providing AdSense for Feeds, but that assumes the content creator is not a lifestyle blogger.

Earlier today afternoon, while I was ending on a conference call and just about to get back into the groove of getting some work done, I noticed Dave Winer’s Twitter feed, in what seemed to be him going all defensive about RSS and baiting several folk. He then wrote this piece: What I mean by “the open web”.

Now, when people state “RSS is dying/dead”, they are not taking a potshot at Dave Winer. Technologies come and go, some evolve, and some die. As much as a group of people like something, if it lacks critical mass, it does not keep going on.

A few days back, I read: RSS is Dying Being Ignored, and You Should Be Very Worried. The author points to the Firefox Heatmap, which show that less than 7% of the people that use Firefox, use the built-in RSS reader. In fact, in Firefox 4.0, there will be no RSS button by default. Chrome already has no RSS reader. Heck, I never click on the RSS button in Firefox, because I have my own RSS reader of choice (Google Reader).

I digress. How many normal users know RSS? How many normal users use RSS?

We are a consumption economy. It seems people rather bookmark sites and visit them on a daily basis, than read RSS feeds. Heck, I would not be surprised that people have forgotten how to bookmark – they just use the location toolbar to find things (AwesomeBar, etc. help in this respect). Besides, how many people need to visit a hundred sites to get their daily news fix? Not everyone is a news junkie.

In 2010, Facebook overtook Google in terms of traffic (in North America at least). People are getting their information via their friends. I see more and more people post links on Facebook, pictures on Facebook, and more. Twitter seems to have overtaken blogging – how many events do you see get live-blogged any longer? They get live tweets which you can follow via a hashtag.

Do I like this? Hell no. The dependance on silos is terrible because these services may not be around forever. In 2010 alone, we saw the demise of drop.io (Facebook acquisition). We probably saw the demise of delicious (Yahoo! claims its alive but is ready for acquisition). What will be next? Bit.ly? Flickr? Worse, live-tweeting an event is useless in the following year – Twitter’s archives don’t go far back, and a blog (HTML) is a lot more permanent.

TechCrunch is a publication, Dave. They are not going to keep all their content on Facebook, Twitter and Quora. They make money through advertising dollars, and none of these silos is going to help them make money. I do not know how much TechCrunch earns via RSS advertising, but they sure as heck earn a lot more from advertising on their website. And for their niche (tech news reporting, some may say), their stats don’t lie. Even the geeks are finding TechCrunch articles via Hacker News or Reddit (for example). Of course, Google News and TechMeme both in TechCrunch’s Top 10 referrer list, probably get articles via RSS :)

Since RSS is dead, according to them, the web must also be dead. I just don’t see how RSS could be dead and HTML would be thriving. They’re really different faces of the same thing.

RSS and HTML are not the same thing Dave. HTML is read in a web-browser, something most Internet-capable devices come pre-loaded with. RSS is useful for geeks who “pipe” things, or people that consume a lot of information. It is however not usually done in a web browser, but another client or piece of software (that is not pre-installed).

Understand that RSS and HTML are different delivery mechanisms with different consumption patterns.

This blog, in December 2010, had a 8:1 ratio of serving HTML:RSS. This month, when I published nothing yet (first post for the new year – Happy New Year folk!), we’re looking at a 13:1 ratio.

Will RSS die? I doubt it. It does not cost a publisher anything to publish a feed. It might be stifled by “excerpt” feeds (partial RSS feeds), and that could eventually kill it, but I doubt its going to be gone anytime soon. Will people consume information via different sources? Definitely. They already are. Flipboard does scraping, and thats a good workaround from partial feeds. Safari has a Reader option.

Follow the user. Follow how they are consuming things. Tablets are becoming more popular. How will that change user behaviour?

Related posts:

1. Chrome Web Store – AppStore for Web?
2. Feed reading – Liferea, Google Reader
3. Safari 5: Quick Impressions

Several people have asked if they can use “the Mimi & Eunice font” for translations. It happens I don’t use a font – I actually hand-letter these suckers, trying to be messy. Apparently I haven’t succeeded, because even my messy hand-lettering looks a lot like my cleaner lettering from the late 1990′s, which I do have a font of. It’s called “Nina,” and I made it with Fontographer on my very first Mac – in fact it was my first Mac project ever. At long last I’m sharing it freely with everyone:

“Nina” Fonts on the Internet Archive

It’s a zipped file containing 3 versions: light, medium, and bold. Light and bold are probably sufficient; you can dispense with the medium for most uses. The format is old Mac “suitcase” (.suit) and may need to be converted into other, newer font formats. If you convert it, please upload your conversions back to archive.org (or send them to me to upload on the same page) so they can be shared too. Here’s an example of a Mimi & Eunice translated into Brazilian Portugese by Rafael Monteiro:

Original (English) comic here.

cross-posted from mimiandeunice.com

Share/Bookmark

First of all: Happy New Year to everyone!

2010r is over and it’s time to make a little recap of what has happened this year in tech, life, and otherwise.

Being a father and a man!

I have a daughter and I am, as of now at least, a single father living on my own. This last year she started primary school and that has been a great experience! I can truly say that I love being with my daughter and spending quality time with her. This year has been awesome in that regard!

As many parents in my situation (50/50 split) I have a very different life one week at a time. In 2011 I am looking forward to have a more normal life whether I am a father or a single man. Last year I met a fantastic woman that has been a heaven sent gift to my life. I have the feeling that this will be the year in which my two lifes get aligned – And yes I am a Gemini

Working

I work with sales. Sales of Free and Open Source software products and services (yes, still at Varnish Software, the company delivering professional support and consultancy services for your beloved and fast Varnish Cache) – I am very lucky to do what I do and I love my job! This year has been an awesome experience in my professional career and I am looking forward to 2011 – The year of the rabbit! (Yes, the rabbit is the Varnish Cache mascot)

Travelling and CouchSurfing

I was born in Southern Europe, raised in South America and moved to Northern Europe when I was a teenager. I am writing this while on vacation in Spain. Basically, I am used to travel a lot. Really! 2010 has broken any previous travelling records I’ve had. Both work and private journeys here and there have opened up many doors for meeting others working with Free Open Source Software around the world as well as alternative travelling communities such as CouchSurfing. I joined the CouchSurfing project last year and I have been a host, been a guest many times as well and even travelled and met with other CouchSurfers around. I totally recommend the experience. It’s full of amazing and great people and a great door to worlds beyond your own.

2011 will mean a lot of private and work related travelling as well. I am already looking forward to travel to new places, develop more business, experience other cultures and meet new people and see their ways of thinking and living.

FLOSS and the Ubuntu Community

For the coming year I have three goals:

1. Be sort of a “human bridge” between the Debian and Ubuntu communities. This year I will be active in Ubuntu Marketing, SpreadUbuntu, the Norwegian LoCo, FRISK and SkoleLinux/DebianEdu.
2. Find ways of cross-pollination of ideas, best practices and general collaboration between LoCos and also other FLOSS communities by engaging local advocates into cooperating with others around the world. We stand stronger together.
3. Work to increase the activity level of the Ubuntu Norwegian team.

2010 has been a great year in my life. I am receiving this new year with great passion and look forward to work with and meet, new and old, engaged and inspiring people this year too.

Thanks for all the fish in 2010. Let’s go get some fish now in 2011!

Their mission is to bring Free Software into schools and universities. Their new task is to gather information about their stakeholders, and create targeted leaflets. And I am sure the favourite colour of the coordinators Thomas Jensch and Guido Arnold is Fellowship green. That's our education team.

This post continues where I left off with Jigdo-Jigsaw Downloader for downloading large image files (read ISO9660 DVDs or BD) as well as freshen it with a changing source. First order of the day, A very Happy New Year to all of you. I hope you are at peace and may prosperity shine in whatever [...]

I’m reposting this (originally posted July 2009) for a third time, because misinformation continues to spread all over the interwebs. I should post it more often.

Dear Journalists Dear Journalists, bloggers, commenters, etc.,

Some of you are writing that I was forced to choose the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license because the film is violating copyright. That is completely untrue, but has become the dominant motif of stories I read about the project. The confusion is understandable, so I attempt to sort it out below.

Sita Sings the Blues is 100% legal. I am free to release it commercially, which is why the film is gaining a number of commercial distributors in addition to its free sharing/audience distribution, which is also legal, and wonderful.

Sita Sings the Blues is in complete compliance with copyright regulations. I was forced to pay $50,000 in license fees and another $20,000 in legal costs to make it so. That is why I am in debt.  My compliance with copyright law is by no means an endorsement of it. Being $70,000 in the hole reminds me daily what an ass the law is. The film is legal, and that legality gives me a higher moral ground to stamp my feet upon as I denounce the failure that is copyright.

Having paid these extortionate fees, I could have gone with conventional distribution, and was invited to. I chose to free the film because I could see that would be most beneficial to me, my film, and culture at large. A CC-SA license does not absolve a creator of compliance with copyright law. The law could have sent me to prison for non-commercial copyright infringement. I was forced to borrow $70,000 to decriminalize my film, regardless of how I chose to release it.

Note that in some ways the film is not, and never will be free. For each disc sold, distributors must pay $1.65 to these faceless money sinks.  Transaction costs raise that amount to about $2.00 per disc. That is why my own Artist’s Edition is limited to 4,999 copies. I’ve already bled $50,000 into their vampiric maws; I have no intention of paying more.

Thank you for your attention.

Love,

–Nina

Share/Bookmark

2011 is going to be a year of sharing. Here are my predictions for 2011.

1. Life will continue to be interesting and I will continue to be very busy working on MakerBots and the community of more than 3000 MakerBot Operators will do something on a global scale. I'm not sure what, but I feel it coming.

2. Wikileaks is just the beginning of an immense amount of sharing. I predict there will be a lot more sharing of things that in a pre-internet world, couldn't have been shared.

3. Gold will continue to do well as the dollar declines and other currencies rise.

4. The internet infrastructure will go down for 2 days in 2011 and cause an immense amount of frustration and an emergance of local off grid networks and physical data storage will emerge. Also neighborhood networks will happen... finally!

5. I'll play the banjo more.

6. Someone will upload a digital design to Thingiverse that will have an impact on lives in places where there isn't a daily postal service. Not sure what, but got a feeling about this one too.

-like-fb

Web Hosting Manila has provided reliable and fast internet hosting for the past 4 years. We work with our clients to strive to create excellent and affordable website hosting solutions. We provide web hosting in one of the most secure datacenters in the country. Our servers are monitored 24/365/ 7

Our packages come with 1-click installations of popular free cms, blog, forum, e-commerce, gallery tools such as Joomla, Wordpress, phpBB, osCommerce, Coppermine that will make the set-up of your website as easy as a breeze. Three versions of PHP (PHP 4/5/6) and the latest stable versions of MySQL and PostgreSQL are supported as well.

You dont need a credit card to get your account , pick the plan you want place your order for the plan and domain, on our payment page just pick western union or bank transfer…. Once your account is set up we will email you instructions on how and where to make payments in the Philippines. Its that easy pay at any Banco De Oro. Remember these are special prices for customers in the Philippines

If you’re placing an order you can type the promotional code: RJIAN for 10% discount

Visit: http://www.webhostingmanila.net/

Every year we read about "the year of Linux on Desktop", but those articles always seem to fail to explain how do they measure it. What does have to happen for us to definitively say "this is the year of Linux"?

Here's some data...

Market share growth from November 2009 to November 2010:
Micrsoft OS's: -02.77%
Apple OS's: +30.86%
Linux: +53.00%
(using this statistics as a data source)

I don't know what "Year Of Linux On Desktop" means, but I, for one, see a winner in 2010: Linux.

Just want to share this FREE tool I use on resizing my partition without formatting your windows or affecting your Operating System. It works on my Window7 Starter 32 bit.  But  before using it try to backup your files just in case…

As Partition Magic alternative, EASEUS Partition Master freeware is an ALL-IN-ONE partition software and the most convenient hard disk partition manager toolkit including Partition Manager, Disk & Partition Copy Wizard and Partition Recovery Wizard on MBR and GUID partition table (GPT) disk under Windows 2000/XP/Vista/Windows 7 and Windows Server 2000/2003/2008 (32 bit and 64 bit).

It allows users to do the following:

• Resize/Move Partition
• Extend System Drive
• Copy Disk & Partition
• Merge Partition
• Split Partition
• Redistribute Free Space
• Convert Dynamic Disk
• Partition Recovery

Visit this download link:  http://www.partition-tool.com/personal.htm

Google recently launched a Chrome Web Store. The web browser has always had an “appstore” model, considering you could have extensions and plugins. Firefox popularised this.

What the Firefox add-on‘s appstore does not have yet, is paid apps. You can donate to applications, but you can’t buy applications. The Chrome Web Store allows purchasing applications, as evidenced by their top paid apps page. We’re generally already used to buying desktop apps (I write this using MarsEdit which I purchased, and on my toolbar I can already see OmniOutliner and TextMate). If the future is living in your web browser, you will end up buying apps within your web browser. Google is pushing this lifestyle with their ChromeOS Cr-48 notebook.

You get everything you need for the Chrome browser in the web store. Apps (extension of web pages), Extensions (your add-ons), Themes and they also have curated collections (holidays, students, et al).

In other news, go download WOT. You don’t even have to restart Chrome to have it working. This is a bonus over installing stuff on Firefox (though I hear, Firefox 4 will allow you to install extensions without restarting the browser too). I also installed Chrome for a Cause during the one week where the more tabs you opened up, the more you could donate for a cause.

Do you have a favourite Chrome extension/app? Anything I must try?

Related posts:

1. Selenium for your web application testing
2. Apple opens up Podcasts, iTunes U in Malaysia
3. On the requirements of an Apple store

Hi all, This would be a longish post about jigsaw and probably be broken in two or three parts. While there are many many different methods to download files, barring rsync all of them i.e. bittorrent, http:// and segmented downloading don’t fulfill an important criteria. Downloading the image and keeping it up-to-date when the source [...]

I’d like to mention to all the students potentially reading my blog that I am mentoring one task of the many GNOME tasks that GNOME has submitted this year. Google Code-In for those not aware, is something similar to Google Summer of Code except it’s happening now and targeting pre-university students (13-18 years old). Tasks are also supposed to be completable within 3-5 days maximum. So if you’re interested just drop by at the task website and apply for the task you’re interested in. You can find further information here specific to GNOME and Google Code-In. You can also leave me a comment here or find me on IRC (BLUG_Fred).

My hair grows and eventually I get all scruffy and I am forced to get a haircut.

Haircuts are expensive and require appointments and time. I cut my hair myself every few months. Here's my procedure so you can do it too.

1. Acquire scissors. Sharp ones if possible. I've used safety scissors before and scissors meant to cut clothes off someone who has been in a wreck. Those scissors are great. They are serated.
2. Lay down a sheet of newspaper. This helps with clean up.
3. Cut your hair. I personally just grab some, pull it out from my head and snip it leaving it about 1-2 inches long. Repeat!
4. Trim. I have a beard trimmer that was like $10 and I use it to clean up the back of my neck and tidy up the chops. It's a bit of a trick doing this without eyes on the back of your head, but you get the hang of it and it grows out if you screw it up. Note: I once got help on this part and got a reverse mohawk and had to start from scratch by shaving my head.
5. Throw the hair away and take a shower.

That's it! Go forth and cut your own hair and be free of the cost of having someone else do it for you!

Fedora maintainer Alex discusses working with Free technology at Nokia, the threat of diluting Free Software principles, and how he uses computing for emotional development.

I loves me a good local cinema that plays arty independent animation. When I lived in San Francisco, I loved the Red Vic, and I still love them all the way from New York.  Like most small art institutions, they need help paying the rent, which is why I and Shadow Distribution are donating all our proceeds from these Sita Sings the Blues screenings to the Red Vic.

Thursday December 23 at 7:15p & 9:15pm
Sunday December 26 at 2:00, 4:00, 7:15 & 9:15 pm

There’s nothing like seeing a movie on real film, in a real theater with other people. If you’re in San Francisco this week, go!

Share/Bookmark

Today I brought a MakerBot home. I spent a good part of the day getting bots ready for CES (more of that to come) and then found this great object on Thingiverse. Set it up to print automatically and it's just chugging along printing full puzzle at the rate of about 2 per hour while I cruise the internet and take care of emails.

It's a satisfying thing to have it be all automatic. I literally came home, cued up the prints from SD and sat down and it's just doing it's thing.

We've grown a lot at MakerBot. A year ago, it was the founders and Marisol making it all happen and now we have 27 employees including part time and temp workers. We're all redlined too! Things are busy!

 

Above are the Feedburner stats for Mimi & Eunice. The green line represents subscribers; the blue represents “reach” (“the total number of people who have taken action — viewed or clicked — on the content in your feed”). The lines represent an overall trend of linear growth. Not exponential growth. Which is fine, but makes me wonder: is “viral” (exponential) sharing becoming a thing of the past, as quality content on the internet becomes more ubiquitous?

A few years ago, if you put anything halfway decent online it would spread like a virus. The online memosphere was less colonized than it is today. Of course there will still be “viral” content, but it has a lot more to compete with today: all the other viral content. Imagine if you released something of today’s quality online 10 years ago. It would have spread further and faster back then, because attention wasn’t already consumed by vast amounts of other quality content. On the other hand, the internet itself was much smaller 10 years ago – fewer people had access to it – so overall reach of a viral success could have been lower in absolute terms.

I’ve noticed the linear trend in most of my works now (sitasingstheblues.com, having enjoyed exponential growth followed by a plateau, is now on a linear decline). Maybe this means my work sucks, but I don’t think so. I’m happy with linear growth. But I am revising my ideas about “viral content,” and I wonder if others are, too. Twitter’s “Trending: Worldwide” lists indicate some things spread virally – suddenly they’re everywhere – but then they’re gone the next day, and forgotten in a week.

What does this all mean? Does it mean anything? As an artist, should I care?

Share/Bookmark

Finally, a cause I can get behind.

If anyone wants to make magnets, let me know.

High Res here.

♡ Copying is an act of love. Please copy and share.

Share/Bookmark